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Posted on May 23, 2026

“And the Wisdom to Know the Difference”: Intimacies in Obsession (2026)

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Jered Mabaquiao

Obsession (2026) directed by Curry Barker breaks new ground for horror cinema. In its own ways, it fondly reminds me of It’s What’s Inside (2024), Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), or even Y2K (2024) with its strong attention to dialogue, soundtracks, and an atmosphere that speaks directly to older Gen Z sensibilities. I think it’s clear that a new generation of directors and writers are here to reshape fear in refreshing ways. Barker is amongst a new line of YouTuber-to-filmmaker directors, along with Danny and Michael Philippiou (Talk to Me and Bring Her Back), Mark Fischbach, aka, Markiplier (Iron Lung), Chris Stuckmann (Shelby Oaks), and Kane Parsons (Backrooms). With an approximate budget of around $750k to $1 million, Obsession’s domestic opening weekend brought in $17.2 million with a total global opening of $27 million. (Obsession is, apparently, the cheapest film to top the box office in 17 years – a record held till now by Paranormal Activity.)

Posted on May 16, 2026

Reliquary (2026) by Hannah Whitten – a Review

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Jered Mabaquiao

I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. It was common to hear things like, “your body is a temple” or “the Holy Spirit lives in you.” This language shaped a lot of my thinking—ideas about what sort of vessel I was (or becoming) sometimes flooded my mind. Surrounded by congregants, even family members, that deliberately or implicitly, reminded me of my shortcomings, I wondered how would my soul ever be saved? While a lot of time and space has appropriately put distance between myself and these thoughts, Hannah Whitten’s Reliquary (2026) resurrects an important question for me: “What would you do to save your soul?”

A reliquary is a special container meant to hold and display holy or divine relics, often from saints or other significant religious historical figures. Whitten’s Reliquary reframes this object by asking what it means for a body to be a vessel for something divine and what happens to our “original soul” when it is replaced by something else. Whitten transforms the idea of the reliquary into something intimate and unsettling: an exploration of a body asked to house a divine terror; a relinquishing of one’s agency to a higher power. The novel’s exploration reanimates my own long-standing question of how a person learns to distinguish salvation from surrender.

Posted on May 7, 2026

Reproductive Rights in Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow

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Brandon West

Reproductive rights are human rights, says Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s 2019 thriller film Swallow. This easily-overlooked English language film uses body horror to explore the myriad fetters with which modern American society aims to constrain the female body. The film follows a young woman, protagonist Hunter (Haley Bennett), who finds herself encircled on all sides. Since Hunter is the product of rape, her “right-wing, religious right” mother views her as a burden. Meanwhile, her wealthy husband views her as a baby incubator, a means to carry on his family name. Thus isolated, Hunter seeks bodily autonomy in one of the few avenues open to her: consumption. And so, she develops an acute case of pica, consuming such materials as a marble, a thumb tack, and a battery. Yet, even in this arena, Hunter’s control proves inadequate, subject to male supervision. When Hunter’s pica causes complications with her pregnancy, her husband scolds her and hires another man to supervise her at home.

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.