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Posted on August 29, 2025

Empty Empires: A Review of Alma Katsu’s Fiend

Guest Post

Kyle Brett

Despite its cultural ties and flashy prose, Alma Katsu’s forthcoming Fiend falls short. When I finished Fiend, I felt like I read a story filled with tissue paper dolls instead of characters. And like tissue paper, this cast of characters was only worth a single use.

For a while, I thought maybe that was the point. That there had to be a reason for such a stunning lack of depth and motivation. Is this a critique of the billionaire class — a book where blind ambition, generational trauma, and power vacuums collide to show readers that dynastic families like the Berishas are impossible to relate to? Is this Katsu at her most political? Or is this about horror being able to barely stand on its own next to the atrocities of capitalism’s corrupting reach?

Posted on August 8, 2025

Yes, Zach Creggers’ Weapons is (almost) that good

Dawn Keetley

Weapons is Zach Cregger’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2022 hit, Barbarian. Preceded by a series of brilliant and enigmatic teasers and trailers, it tells the story of the strange disappearance of seventeen children from the small town of Mayfield, Pennsylvania: at exactly 2:17, they all simply run out of their front doors. All of the children are in the third-grade class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) – and she walks into her classroom the morning after to find only one student at his desk, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Needless to say, Mayfield erupts in grief, anger, and suspicion, much of it directed at the only person left whom it seems possible to blame – the teacher who taught all of the missing students. Unable to go out without being accosted, and driving around in her car on which a furious father has spray-painted ‘Witch’, Justine decides she has to try to get answers herself as the police are getting nowhere. Justine’s search serves as a through-line for the film.

Posted on October 27, 2024

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice: Murder and the Occult in ‘That Green and Pleasant Land’

Dawn Keetley

Rupert Russell’s new documentary, The Last Sacrifice (2024), explores the infamous murder on February 14, 1945, of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire, England. The Last Sacrifice is about so much more than that, however, as Russell brilliantly embeds the still-unsolved murder of Walton within the explosion of the occult, paganism, and witchcraft conspiracies in mid twentieth-century England.

The Last Sacrifice is not only about who killed Charles Walton and why, then, but about how this baffling murder case became entangled in some of the profound changes occurring in mid-century Britain. As one of the key commentators in the documentary, film historian Jonathan Rigby, puts it, the enigma of who killed Charles and Walton is also “the enigma of Britain itself.” Was Britain’s “pagan past,” he asks, “secretly alive in the present?” Check out the trailer.

Posted on December 22, 2022

Medusa: A Failed Feminist Look at Evangelical Extremism

Guest Post

What’s scary about Anita Rocha da Silveira’s second feature is neither its monstrous metaphors for the Evangelical extremism on the rise in her native Brazil, nor its Argento-esque aesthetic of hallucinogenic hues and contrast colors. It’s how the ignorant ideology which the sprawling story overtly criticizes asserts itself in the subtext of this supposedly feminist fairytale. Like many fairytales, it revolves around a haughty heroine humbled by losing her beauty and being thrown off her privileged pedestal. Excluded by her previous peers and having of necessity to engage in lowly work, her character becomes reformed so that when she regains her physical charms they are matched by spiritual perfection.

Despite openly parodying duplicitous definitions of physical attractiveness, the director-writer relies on archaic concepts of beauty, disfigurement and ugliness. Young, conventionally beautiful protagonist Mari (Mariana Oliveira) and her girl gang of radical Evangelicals pursue an immaculate appearance as one of women’s prime duties to Jesus and to men while at the same time condemning the attractiveness of “sinful“ young women. At night, Mari and the others hunt for “Jezebels“ and “Messalinas“ – epithets evoking the age-old history of slut-shaming women – beating them into renouncing their “depraved“ lifestyle to embrace religious piety. The forced confessions and conversions are instantly posted online where they draw likes and supportive comments. Read more

Posted on September 2, 2022

Return of the Zombie Salesman: A Review of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse

Guest Post

Picture this: you are playing a video game about a zombie outbreak. Perhaps your avatar is struggling to survive as undead enemies hunt them in claustrophobia-inducing environments, like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine in Resident Evil (1996). Then again, maybe your avatar is the one doing the hunting, slaughtering hordes of zombies with relative ease as Frank West and Juliet Starling can in Dead Rising (2006) and Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), respectively. Either way, you are likely imagining the following scenario for your hypothetical video game: a zombie outbreak has occurred, and the living must escape from, or do battle with, the undead to survive.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, which originally released for the Xbox in 2005 and was re-released on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a zombie video game. Yet, in a subversion of the above-mentioned scenario, Stubbs the Zombie has players take on the role of a zombie: an undead salesman by the name of Edward “Stubbs” Stubblefield to be precise. In Stubbs the Zombie, the goal of the playable character is a wholesome one; Stubbs must find a way of reuniting with his love interest, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike named Maggie Monday. Yet, despite his wholesome quest, as an undead monstrosity Stubbs is a harbinger of death.