- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on February 18, 2026

The House Was Not Hungry Then – But It Is Now

Dawn Keetley

The House Was Not Hungry Then (2025) is the directorial debut of filmmaker Harry Aspinwall. It is filmed almost entirely within and from the perspective of a single house (located in Angus, Scotland); only the last scenes take us out of the house, although our perspective remains with it. The film is shot by means of static cameras located in several rooms in the house: the cameras don’t move and we get no alternating shots that give us any additional information than what we get in those fixed shots. Aspinwall describes the philosophy and composition of the film on his website:

“I wanted to do something different. I love the dry comedies of Ruben Ostlund and Roy Anderson, and the tongue in cheek morbidity of Edward Gorey. I started to think whether I could make a horror film following the same principles, of distance, of sparsity, of withholding, of brutal objectivity. No inserts, no reaction shots, nothing to tell the audience what to feel, just one single locked off wide for each room. What would that feel like, to be so still, so removed from the human life that wanders in, unsuspecting?”

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.

Posted on December 3, 2025

A Must-Watch for the Holiday Season: Kier-La Janisse’s The Occupant of the Room

Dawn Keetley

It’s the holiday season – and Severin Films has released a new episode of The Haunted Season entitled The Occupant of the Room (an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s 1909 story of the same name), now streaming on Shudder.[1] It’s a wonderful film, a perfect eerie ghost story – better, to be honest, than most of the recent fare in BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. My review, below, includes a brief interview with director and writer, Kier-La Janisse.

Algernon Blackwood’s “The Occupant of the Room” is about a school teacher who arrives late at night at an inn in the Alps, the “Dent de Midi,” only to find there are no rooms available.[2] He is eventually offered a room that is not quite unoccupied – that is to say, it is possibly occupied. The porter tells the teacher that “the real occupant of the room” is an English woman who had insisted on venturing out alone into the Alps two days ago. She hadn’t returned (yet), but may do so at any moment. She may be the “real” occupant of the room, but she’s not the actual occupant of the room – hence its uncertain status as part occupied, part unoccupied. That the room is a liminal space defines the story, which takes place only within its confines, as one occupant, the school teacher, deals with the lingering presence of the other, his possible predecessor but also possibly successor. As Blackwood writes, in a crucial sentence, “One moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a ‘just left’ feeling – the next it was a queer awareness of ‘still here’ that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him.”

Posted on November 29, 2025

M3GAN 2.0: One of the Most Interesting Horror Films of 2025

Dawn Keetley

Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 (2025) has mostly not been identified as a horror film. On IMDb, it’s labeled “thriller,” “action” and “sci-fi.” On Wikipedia, it’s “science fiction action.” This is after the first film in the franchise, Johnstone’s M3GAN (2022), was widely dubbed a “science fiction horror” film. Stephen Parthimos’s review on Everything Movie Reviews seems representative of the reaction to M3GAN 2.0 when he writes that there is “not a single second of horror in sight” and that watching the film, and “gradually realising they’ve abandoned any and all sense of horror is utterly baffling.” Ahead of the film’s release, Johnstone promised fans that his sequel would include horror: “Even though we are in action-comedy territory, the horror DNA is absolutely still there.” Upon release, however, it became clear that most viewers didn’t see it, though debate ensued on Reddit.

Posted on November 25, 2025

Listening to Sensitive Characters in Horror Movies

Guest Post

Kati Aakkonen

Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!

Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.

Alice: Like what?!

Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.

Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)

This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.