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Posted on October 29, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Josh Tanner’s Posthumous

Dawn Keetley

I watched Posthumous as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its East Coast premiere on October 21, 2026.

Posthumous is Australian writer-director Josh Tanner’s debut feature (co-written with Jade van der Lei). It starts out really strong and offers a lot to like.

The film centers on Zoe (Sophie Lowe), who has just turned thirty and who has returned to her childhood home where her estranged father, Neil (David Roberts) still lives. Zoe’s birthday is anything but happy for both herself and her father, as it’s the day Zoe’s mother died (of cancer) right after giving birth to Zoe. Seemingly at something of a crossroads in her life, a listless and grief-stricken Zoe discovers a VHS cassette on which her mother recorded birthday messages every year until she (Zoe) turned twenty-one. The viewer only gradually realizes that Zoe’s mother is not aging in these messages – and that her pregnancy is slowly growing larger. These messages aren’t recorded over a long period of time; they were recorded over nine months. Zoe aged but her mother remains frozen on tape, getting only sicker, not older.

Posted on October 21, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Alison-Eve Hammersley’s Erie

Dawn Keetley

I watched Erie as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its East Coast premiere on October 20, 2026.

Directed by Alison-Eve Hammersley and co-written by Hammersley and J. Batzli, Erie is a found-footage horror film that does something new with a genre that’s been going strong for over twenty-five years. We’re reminded of this because the film is set in 1999 – a date that obviously has significance for any fan of found-footage: it’s the year that the ground-breaking The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez) was released. With that choice, we’re back in the era when cameras, not phones, are used to record everything, archival materials consist of newspapers not websites, and anything resembling social media was in its infancy (the film’s protagonist does do some research via a very clunky online chat room).

Posted on September 28, 2026

Loner review – excellent found-footage folk horror

Dawn Keetley

Written by Charlie Robb and co-directed by Robb and Douglas Tawn, the 2025 Loner is a found-footage folk horror film about a man called Angus (played by Robb) who heads out into the Northumbrian woods to vlog about “living off the land” – totally cut off from the modern world (no wi-fi, for instance). It should be noted, though, that the cabin he’s renting, advertised as an “Anonymous Retreat,” has plenty of mod cons, and he’s not exactly roughing it. That’s probably a good thing, as Angus’s efforts to film himself “living off the land” turn out to be rather comically incompetent, such as when he attempts to instruct his viewers on how to build a wilderness shelter (which isn’t a shelter) and in which he then gets hopelessly trapped.

Nature isn’t the worst of Angus’s problems, however, as he encounters increasingly strange and disturbing things. On his way into the woods, he runs across what seems to be a buried Celtic marker and a strange white rock. But then later, while he’s recording ambient forest sound, he hears a grunting and someone sobbing and whimpering. That night, a woman whom he had passed in the forest on his trek in bangs on the door of his cabin begging to be let in, screaming that she’s in danger. Angus won’t let her in – too terrified to help her, even though the woman – Eve (Kat Johns-Burke) – does not seem at all threatening. This isn’t a choice you usually see characters make in films, but Angus’s character has been developed enough at this point in the film that the choice seems believable, true to him.

Posted on August 26, 2026

Exploitation Horror: Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust

Guest Post

Spencer Stoller

In 1980, Ruggero Deodato released Cannibal Holocaust, a film that represents the height of Italian cannibal exploitation cinema. The movie became notorious for showcasing real animal deaths and graphic physical and sexual violence, and for its documentary and found footage aesthetics, which fueled rumors that the actors had been murdered. The film was confiscated by Italian authorities upon release and Deodato was subsequently put on trial for obscenity. It was banned from distribution in several countries, lumped in with “video nasties,” a term formerly used in the UK to describe lowbrow horror, typically distributed on VHS. Despite its notoriety, the film contains a structurally complex critique of colonialism and the consumption of violence in film and television. It asks its viewers to reconsider the trope of the civilized versus savage dichotomy as fictional Western filmmakers manufacture atrocities and abuse Indigenous people to produce sensationalized footage: Deodato’s production involved a great deal of exploitation, including the killing of animals and unsafe treatment of cast members, particularly the unpaid Indigenous extras. Cannibal Holocaust must be understood simultaneously, then, as a product of Italian exploitation cinema and of the demand for brutality onscreen, a critique of Western media and colonial violence, an experiment in documentary realism and audience manipulation, and an ethically compromised production that replicates the violence it condemns.

Posted on February 1, 2026

Dooba Dooba – creepy found footage horror

Dawn Keetley

Dooba Dooba is written and directed by Ehrland Hollingsworth and is shot almost entirely on surveillance cameras with intercut analog scenes. It follows a babysitter, Amna (Amna Vegha), who is plunged into the strange and awkward from the moment she arrives at the home of Wilson (Winston Haynes), Taylor (Erin O’Meara) and their sixteen-year old daughter, Monroe (Betsy Sligh) – and things only get more weird from there, eventually becoming downright offensive and violent. Wilson, for instance, seems incapable of managing Amna’s name; “It’s these ethnic names . . . .” he offers in explanation, following that up with an attempt to give Amna money for what he calls “retributions” (presumably reparations). It very soon becomes clear that Amna is way too nice for her own good, constantly reassuring everyone else (and, we suspect, herself), that “It’s okay.” She should instead be asserting that, actually, it isn’t okay and she’s leaving. She doesn’t.