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Posted on August 5, 2026

The Unknown’s (2026) Horror of Depersonalization and the Metamorphosis of Schizophrenia

Guest Post

Kit Neikirk

The anticipated next film from Anatomy of a Fall (2023) co-writer Arthur Harari, The Unknown (French: L’Inconnue, 2026), bills itself as a body-swap horror. In it, after a brief sexual encounter beneath a subdued club light, a lonely and slightly off-putting Parisian street photographer, David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), swaps bodies with an unknown woman (Léa Seydoux) he sleeps with. This concept has been thoroughly explored – from the body horror characteristic of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) to the racial allegory of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). In this genre, the concept of body swapping is generally contextualized as desirable and steeped in class politics; in Possessor, the bodies of the poor are colonized by the wealthy, used as corporate property that undergoes swapping. Get Out, meanwhile, uses body swapping to embody the simultaneous White fetishization and otherization of the Black body. This is not to mention the long-standing comedic potential of this genre, spanning from 2003’s family comedy Freaky Friday to the explicitly Scream-inspired comedy-horror Freaky (2020). Meanwhile, contemporary reimagining of the body-swap genre is ripe with trans-gender interpretations, best exemplified by Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), wherein the body swap is intertwined with the transposing of oneself onto fandoms and alternative realities as an escape from gender dysphoria.

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 4, 2026

The Horrors of Wellness Culture in Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty

Guest Post

Henriikka Koivisto

Ling Ling Huang’s satirical horror novel Natural Beauty (2023) tells the story of a young, unnamed narrator who gives up a promising career as a classical pianist after her parents are injured in a car accident. One day, an extraordinarily beautiful woman shows up at the restaurant where the narrator works and offers her a job at a high-end wellness and beauty company called Holistik. What at first seems like a dream job for many young women—with better pay, an endless supply of free skincare products and treatments, and a boost of social status—soon turns dangerous. Huang leads her readers into the deeply disturbing world of invasive and risky beauty procedures, unapologetic cultural appropriation, abuses of power culminating in sexual violence, all behind a façade of wellness and self-care.

Posted on June 16, 2026

Secrets and Mean Girls: What Happened to Those Girls Review

Elizabeth Erwin

Early on in the novel What Happened to Those Girls, a character remarks, “There’s a point in horror movies when characters realize they’ve left their reality where nothing bad ever happens, when suddenly they’re no longer a complex human being but a delicate sack of meat.” This succinct summation of horror’s essential terror drives Carlyn Greenwald’s latest propulsive thriller while also hinting at an emotional toll similarly themed stories frequently fail to acknowledge. With its surprisingly brutal moments of body horror and its refusal to paint character motivations as binary, the story resists sanitizing death or the complicated emotions that can follow and is a very welcome addition to the YA thriller catalog. Read more

Posted on May 23, 2026

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

Guest Post

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.)