- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

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 28, 2026

Loner review – excellent found-footage folk horror

Dawn Keetley

Written by Charlie Robb and co-directed by Robb and Douglas Tawn, the 2025 Loner is a found-footage folk horror film about a man called Angus (played by Robb) who heads out into the Northumbrian woods to vlog about “living off the land” – totally cut off from the modern world (no wi-fi, for instance). It should be noted, though, that the cabin he’s renting, advertised as an “Anonymous Retreat,” has plenty of mod cons, and he’s not exactly roughing it. That’s probably a good thing, as Angus’s efforts to film himself “living off the land” turn out to be rather comically incompetent, such as when he attempts to instruct his viewers on how to build a wilderness shelter (which isn’t a shelter) and in which he then gets hopelessly trapped.

Nature isn’t the worst of Angus’s problems, however, as he encounters increasingly strange and disturbing things. On his way into the woods, he runs across what seems to be a buried Celtic marker and a strange white rock. But then later, while he’s recording ambient forest sound, he hears a grunting and someone sobbing and whimpering. That night, a woman whom he had passed in the forest on his trek in bangs on the door of his cabin begging to be let in, screaming that she’s in danger. Angus won’t let her in – too terrified to help her, even though the woman – Eve (Kat Johns-Burke) – does not seem at all threatening. This isn’t a choice you usually see characters make in films, but Angus’s character has been developed enough at this point in the film that the choice seems believable, true to him.

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 August 23, 2026

The Monsters Are Here on Oak Street: David Robert Mitchell’s Throwback Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (2026) is a glorious throwback. While it may seem a bit of a swerve from Mitchell’s previous films, both The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) are actually also suffused with nostalgia: indeed, a key scene early in It Follows involves Jay (Maika Monroe) and Hugh (Jake Weary) at a classic art-house cinema preparing to watch 1963’s Charade, with Hugh talking wistfully about how he wants to be little again. The End of Oak Street evokes – in just about every way it can – a time that is past. I loved it for that, and for all its echoes of mid-twentieth-century film and television. There’s also inevitably a profound regressiveness to it all, too, though.

The End of Oak Street tracks a family (husband, wife, two children) as their neighborhood appears to travel through some kind of portal – transplanted to a prehistorical era when dinosaurs rampaged. Chaos ensues, as the family and their neighbors seek to evade, fight off, and outrun the gigantic predators with whom they now share Oak Street. There’s a sense that everyone’s in shock (not surprisingly) – not thinking clearly. There’s a lot of carnage.

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.