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Posted on October 17, 2026

Chronovisor (2026): On the Affects of Academic Anxiety and Techno-Animism

Guest Post

Jered Mabaquiao

Anyone who has been swept away in a current of intellectual pursuit can identify with Chronovisor’s appeal. At least for me, I intimately recognize the kind of frightening intellectual work and mindful interiority that Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor illustrates. Chronovisor begins with the professional, and oftentimes rare, virtue of attention—with the conviction that one more source, one more language, one more archival detour, or at least one more listening ear at a dinner table might finally cohere an argument.

Between our own passions and our own attention spans, Chronovisor’s horror infuses a hubris of intellect with an occult machine that can replay and access the past. In this way, I read the film’s most unsettling discovery that “scholarship” can become a feverish, even deeply spiritually possessive narrative arc. Chronovisor frames this fever in the research professor whose funding will have been cut off if they cannot miraculously conjure a mythological machine whose sole function is to capture and bridge anyone’s consciousness and to project it as an image onto its screen.

Posted on September 30, 2026

When Being Good Isn’t Enough: Capitalism, BioPower, and Monstrosity in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil

Guest Post

Diana Cedeño, PhD

I’ve always thought that what makes a good horror movie is the feeling it leaves you with after it ends. That feeling doesn’t have to be fear; what matters is that something stays with you. But that response also depends on your connection to the film and the expectations you bring to it. Those expectations were especially relevant when I watched Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (2026). As a fan of the games, I came with an open mind. I knew Leon S. Kennedy, Ada Wong, or even Alice weren’t in it, so I was prepared for a different story. By the end, though, I found myself drawn to its protagonist’s ordinary concerns: earning extra money (and in this economy?), getting the job done, and trying to help. That connection made his eventual transformation particularly unsettling. Before his transformation, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier trying to get through a difficult assignment. His circumstances become increasingly grotesque, but there is something familiar about his initial predicament: he has work to finish and personal concerns that cannot simply be put aside.

Posted on September 12, 2026

We Turn Gruesome at Night Review: Confinement, Change, and Cycles of Cruelty

Guest Post

D.S. Burton

We Turn Gruesome at Night is the second installment of Eric LaRocca’s Burnt Sparrow Trilogy following 2025’s transgressive small-town horror We Are Always Tender with Our Dead. Here the horror returns to the body; not the dead, but the living body’s place in the world and with others, and what we do to satiate our need to occupy that place.

We return to Rupert and Gladys after a decade of imprisonment in End House, no longer only degraded by their warped families and community, but also themselves. End House doesn’t just feel lived in, it feels used and exhausted itself, from its too-thin walls to the familiar yet often foreign feel of worn leather and well-trod hallways. The claustrophobic atmosphere leeches into the narrative, sucking threads and characters into the house, not outward, and physicalizing the increasingly internal struggles of the series protagonists.

Posted on July 22, 2026

Review: Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker

Dawn Keetley

Marcus Kliewer’s 2026 novel, The Caretaker, in true horror fashion, begins with a prologue. A man (David) is trying desperately to follow “the Rites” in order to ward off a “Visitor” who looks just like his dead son but isn’t. He fails. Then we cut to Macy Mullins, our twenty-something protagonist – and the story becomes hers. Indeed, one of the very many good things about The Caretaker is Macy Mullins, a character expertly drawn whom we can’t help but care about, despite her own conviction that nobody will.

Macy is looking after not only herself but her teenage sister, Gemma, in the wake of their father’s death in a car accident. Three years later, his daughters are struggling to come to terms with their grief – and, indeed, to get by at all. Without a job, with no money, and accumulating eviction notices, Macy answers a strange ad for a caretaker for an elderly man – only three days of work. She takes the job even after a still stranger interview where she discovers the elderly man in question is apparently dead and what she is really being asked to do is stay by herself in the house and follow a bizarre sequence of “routines.” Desperate, she agrees. (And who wouldn’t take $9000 for three days’ work?) The novel follows Macy over those three days.

Posted on July 20, 2026

Obsession and the Patriarchy

Guest Post

James Staynings

When my partner joked on our car ride home from the cinema about how Curry Barker’s Obsession (2026) is a metaphor for the patriarchy, the statement became a… fascination.

We stumbled and analysed our way through the woods on a Bear hunt. We read, listened and discussed others’ observations. I noticed something in much of the discussion around the ironically named protagonist who evokes the 2024 TikTok Phenomenon. Being so focused on the bear, what about the man-made willow forest that’s made the predator deadly?

There’s plenty of valid discussion of Obsession as a new entry in the category of “incel horror.” There are valid points of comparison with Bear and the insecure male protagonists of films like Passengers, Ex Machina, Don’t Worry, Darling and Bugonia. A lonely, flawed, insecure male protagonist takes a female character/s autonomy.