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Posted on July 13, 2026

Backrooms, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dinner Scenes, and Discarded Workers

Dawn Keetley

The new power duo of Gen Z directors, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, both seem to be influenced by an iconic horror film: Tobe Hooper’s 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Director of the record-shattering Obsession (2026), Barker is directing a reboot of the film for A24, which he plans to make “grounded, brutal, raw.” Kane Parsons, director of the similarly record-shattering Backrooms (2026), does not appear to name Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an influence (see this article in GQ for the list of the influences he’s claimed), yet he incorporated an extended homage to Hooper’s film into his own, in one of the most interesting scenes of the film.

Posted on July 11, 2026

Widow’s Bay and the Cassandra Problem in Horror

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Valentina Ciarrocca

Gifted by Apollo and cursed when she refused him, to never be believed, Cassandra spent the fall of Troy delivering true warnings to people who looked at her the way Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) looks at Wyck Crawford (Stephen Root) in Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay (Katie Dippold, 2026): as a lunatic. The town crank is horror’s Cassandra by another name—the grizzled fisherman or grumpy elder who warns everyone that something evil is coming and people are going to die. This archetype is usually there to be ignored, to be proven right too late, and to die mid-sentence, delivering the exposition that could have saved everyone. We already know this, and after many cliché films, the horror genre has trained us to expect it. Widow’s Bay lets you settle into that expectation, and then does something the genre seldom does. It believes him.

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.