Horror Film Review: The Frighteners (dir. by Peter Jackson)

Posted on October 27, 2026 by Arleigh

“Give it up, Frank! Death ain’t no way to make a living!” — The Judge

The best thing about The Frighteners is that its ghosts seem easier to live with than most of its people. Peter Jackson’s 1996 horror comedy builds a lively supernatural world around that idea, filling it with deadbeat spirits, suspicious neighbors, damaged investigators, and a paranormal con man who would rather make a quick buck than save anybody. It’s a funny, nasty, occasionally uneven movie that keeps finding something entertaining beneath its clutter. Even when the comedy and horror pull in different directions, Jackson’s enthusiasm makes the whole thing feel like an invitation to enjoy the chaos rather than question its manners.

At the center is Frank Bannister, played by Michael J. Fox with a mixture of nervous charm and emotional exhaustion. Following the accident that killed his wife, Frank can see and communicate with ghosts. Naturally, he turns this extraordinary ability into a questionable business opportunity. His dead associates haunt local homes, and he conveniently arrives to clear them out for a fee. It’s a wonderfully crooked arrangement because Frank really can do what he advertises; he just happens to be responsible for creating the problem. Things become considerably less manageable when unexplained deaths suggest that another supernatural presence is operating without his relatively harmless motives.

Fox gives the movie the grounding it needs. Frank has the quick wit and comic frustration associated with many of his performances, but the character feels more withdrawn and defeated. His scams aren’t simply evidence of greed. They’re part of a life that has stalled, leaving him more comfortable dealing with the dead than maintaining relationships with the living. Fox allows that grief to emerge without making every scene announce it. Consequently, Frank’s eventual willingness to risk himself for someone else feels like a genuine change rather than an obligation imposed by the screenplay. The wisecracks work because there’s somebody hurting underneath them.

His ghostly partners make the fraudulent haunting business look like a workplace comedy with unusually flexible rules about physical boundaries. Chi McBride’s Cyrus and Jim Fyfe’s Stuart bicker, complain, and carry out their assignments with personalities that death apparently did nothing to improve. John Astin’s deteriorating Judge pushes the humor into more grotesque territory, while R. Lee Ermey brings familiar drill-sergeant hostility to his cemetery patrol. These characters make the supernatural seem oddly mundane. Passing into the next world hasn’t erased anyone’s ego or annoying habits; it has merely removed some practical limitations on how those habits can bother everybody else.

Jackson clearly enjoys that comic freedom, sometimes a little too much. Certain jokes linger past their natural stopping point, and the supporting cast occasionally competes to see who can make the biggest impression. Still, the early silliness establishes an important distinction between Frank’s ghostly companions and the hooded killer moving through town. One group treats haunting as a hustle; the other turns death into a terrifying certainty. When that figure begins bending surfaces and pursuing victims, the movie briefly makes its own playful supernatural rules feel dangerous. Suddenly, walking through walls isn’t a funny trick. It means there may be nowhere safe to hide.

The transition from ghost comedy to serial-killer mystery gives The Frighteners its edge, although it also creates its biggest problems. Jackson and co-writer Fran Walsh gradually connect the present-day deaths to an earlier killing spree, introducing a nastier atmosphere than the opening antics suggest. That darkness gives the stakes weight, but the shifts can be abrupt. A cartoonish gag might sit beside an ugly revelation, with neither getting enough room to establish its intended mood. Sometimes the collision is exciting because the film becomes difficult to predict. Other times, it feels as though Jackson is enjoying every possibility too much to choose between them.

The performances embrace that excess. Jeffrey Combs makes FBI agent Milton Dammers a spectacular collection of twitches, strained reactions, and barely contained dysfunction. He’s entertainingly bizarre, although his scenes sometimes seem to belong to a separate, even stranger movie. Jake Busey brings an obnoxious, grinning confidence to Johnny Bartlett that makes the character’s cruelty especially unpleasant. Dee Wallace adds a more unsettling human dimension to the darker material, helping prevent the horror from becoming nothing more than an effects demonstration. These aren’t restrained performances, but restraint would probably look out of place in a film this committed to pushing its characters toward the grotesque.

Trini Alvarado provides a useful contrast as Lucy Lynskey. Her comparatively grounded presence gives Frank someone to connect with outside his circle of supernatural accomplices and hostile acquaintances. Their developing relationship isn’t the movie’s most fully realized element, but it supports his emotional recovery without overwhelming the story. Visually, meanwhile, Jackson rarely slows down. Ghosts slide through objects, bodies distort, and ordinary rooms become unstable territory. Some digital effects show their age, particularly when translucent figures interact with physical surroundings. Yet the imagery remains expressive, using exaggeration to sell jokes and scares rather than relying entirely on realism. The effects have personality, which helps them survive their technical limitations.

That ambition also makes The Frighteners an important bridge in Jackson’s career. His mostly low-budget New Zealand splatter-comedy roots in Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead remain visible in its grotesque humor and cheerful bad taste. Heavenly Creatures had already demonstrated his dramatic range, but this Robert Zemeckis-backed production gave him a larger Hollywood canvas while allowing him to keep working in New Zealand. Its extensive effects demands helped expand Wētā’s capabilities, building toward the filmmaking infrastructure that would become essential to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The scale changed, but the filmmaker’s mischievous instincts clearly came along for the ride.

For all its importance as a stepping stone, the movie works best when appreciated as its own unruly creation. The plotting gets crowded, the climax occasionally substitutes activity for suspense, and the tonal balancing act never becomes effortless. But Fox gives the spectacle a heart, and Jackson gives it enough imagination to make its imperfections forgivable. There’s genuine affection for the misfits underneath the grotesque imagery, even as the story finds ugliness among people who should know better. By the end, The Frighteners makes a convincing case that being dead is less of a character flaw than being a jerk.

Horror Film Review: The Silence of the Lambs (dir. by Jonathan Demme)

Posted on October 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“Believe me, you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” — Jack Crawford

Some thrillers get louder as they become more frightening. The Silence of the Lambs often goes the other way, drawing its power from a lowered voice, a held stare, or the uncomfortable silence before someone answers a question. Jonathan Demme understands that an audience will lean into a scene when the actors give them something worth watching. His 1991 film has plenty of gruesome material, but its finest effects come from the precision of the performances and the intimacy of the camera. It is a horror movie that can make two people talking feel more dangerous than an outright attack.

Adapted by Ted Tally from Thomas Harris’s novel, the story follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she helps investigate Buffalo Bill, a serial killer targeting women. She seeks information from imprisoned psychiatrist and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, who demands personal disclosures in exchange for his insight. That premise creates an ideal setting for actors: professional conversations keep slipping into confrontations neither participant experiences in quite the same way. Clarice needs answers, while Lecter wants access to the person asking the questions. Demme builds the film around that imbalance without letting the investigation overwhelm the people involved.

Jodie Foster gives Clarice a mixture of determination and discomfort that makes her compelling well before the danger becomes immediate. Her performance is carefully modulated, especially in the contrast between her formal speech and the emotions passing across her face. She wants to project competence, but Foster lets us notice when that projection requires work. A tightened expression or a slight hesitation suggests someone evaluating how much of herself she can safely reveal. Those details make Clarice feel inexperienced without making her seem incapable. She has the intelligence for the job; what she lacks is the luxury of feeling secure in it.

Foster is particularly impressive when Clarice encounters something painful and has to continue functioning. She allows the reaction to register, then shows the effort of turning it into concentration. It is a subtle distinction, but an important one: Clarice’s professionalism does not depend on suppressing every trace of feeling. Her compassion often seems to make her more attentive. Foster also avoids the opposite trap of constantly advertising sensitivity. She can be brisk, guarded, or visibly irritated. The result is a character whose emotional responses feel specific to each encounter rather than arranged to remind us that she is sympathetic.

Anthony Hopkins approaches Lecter with a much more conspicuous sense of presentation. His speech is precise, his gaze sustained, and his pauses carefully placed. The performance has theatrical flair, but Lecter himself is theatrical, enjoying the opportunity to arrange an encounter around his preferences. Hopkins makes restraint the source of his menace. Because he gives so little away physically, the smallest change becomes noticeable. A slight movement forward can feel like an intrusion. Even his courtesy has an aggressive quality, as though good manners are another standard by which everyone around him is certain to disappoint.

What makes Foster and Hopkins so effective together is the difference in how they occupy a scene. Hopkins invites us to study the performance Lecter is giving, while Foster draws us toward the reactions Clarice would prefer to conceal. Their exchanges develop through that contrast. She does not merely receive his provocations; she assesses them, resists them, and sometimes challenges his assumptions. His interest in her can look like respect, but neither actor lets that resemblance become comforting. There is an unsettling intimacy in the attention they give each other, with Foster continually reminding us that attention can also be a form of pressure.

Demme photographs those exchanges with an intimacy that makes the viewer feel implicated. Faces often turn almost directly toward the lens, putting us close to the position of the person being addressed. The effect is especially uncomfortable when Clarice is being examined, patronized, or challenged. Rather than watching someone endure scrutiny from a convenient distance, we experience something of its force ourselves. Demme also gives reactions time to develop. He understands that a face listening can be as expressive as a face speaking, and he rarely seems impatient to interrupt an actor’s thought with unnecessary visual decoration.

Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography gives that approach a strong physical foundation. Close-ups matter partly because the surrounding spaces are so clearly established: offices, corridors, examination rooms, and cells all have their own arrangements of authority and confinement. Clarice frequently appears exposed within environments that supposedly represent order. The compositions make us aware of who occupies the space comfortably and who must negotiate a place within it. Fujimoto does not need to make every room look sinister. The ordinary institutional surfaces are convincing enough that an intrusive face or an ominous stretch of corridor can disturb their apparent neutrality.

The supporting performances help maintain that tension without duplicating the central pairing. Scott Glenn gives Jack Crawford a subdued authority that can feel supportive and calculating at once. Anthony Heald makes Dr. Chilton’s vanity unpleasantly recognizable, finding irritation in the way he presents himself as indispensable. Brooke Smith gives Catherine Martin a forceful combination of fear, anger, and practical determination. Ted Levine takes Buffalo Bill in a more volatile direction, creating a disturbing contrast with Lecter’s composed self-display. Together, these actors give the film different social temperatures; Clarice cannot approach every person with the same defenses.

The film’s treatment of Bill remains its most troubling element. Although the dialogue distinguishes him from transgender people, its imagery still associates gender nonconformity with disgust and danger. The qualification cannot entirely undo the visual impression, especially in a film this skilled at making images stick. Elsewhere, the craftsmanship is remarkably cohesive. Howard Shore’s score supplies a mournful undertow, while the editing allows conversations to breathe before tightening our experience of danger. In the climactic passages, restricted visibility becomes frightening because Demme has already taught us how much depends on looking, reading expressions, and understanding the space around a person.

The lasting achievement of The Silence of the Lambs is how completely its style serves its actors. Demme and Fujimoto bring us close enough to catch Foster’s fleeting uncertainty and Hopkins’s smallest calculated gesture, then trust those details to do the work. The film can be shocking, but it is rarely more gripping than when someone is simply deciding what to say next. That is what keeps it from becoming a museum of familiar lines and notorious images. Beneath all the cultural baggage, the performances still feel alive, and the camera still knows how to make us uneasy about watching them.

Horror Icarus File No. 35: Millennium (by Chris Carter)

Posted on October 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“If I see in the darkness it’s because there is light.” — Frank Black

The most unsettling thing about Millennium is how rarely catching the killer feels like a victory. Someone may be stopped, a case may be closed, but the damage remains—and another investigation is already waiting. Created by Chris Carter, who also created The X-Files, the series takes a familiar crime-show structure and drains away much of its reassurance. Its real subject is the strain of repeatedly confronting the worst people can do without accepting that cruelty defines everyone. That makes it a difficult show to spend time with, but also a more humane one than its grim reputation suggests.

Much of that humanity comes from Lance Henriksen as Frank Black, a former FBI profiler whose insight into violent minds borders on the supernatural. The show renders his understanding through sudden flashes of disturbing imagery, making each breakthrough feel like an intrusion rather than an achievement. Henriksen plays Frank with restraint, suggesting exhaustion without reducing him to a permanently tortured expression. His measured voice and weathered features carry authority, but the gentleness underneath matters more. Frank is compelling because he understands terrible people without treating everyone else as a potential monster.

The first season establishes that distinction through its story-of-the-week format. Working with the Millennium Group, initially presented as a network of experienced investigative specialists, Frank encounters crimes driven by obsession, resentment, and distorted belief. The investigations offer procedural momentum, but the show cares as much about the emotional aftermath as the solution. An arrest cannot undo what happened or remove the images lodged in Frank’s head. That approach produces powerful television, although it can become repetitive when another grotesque crime seems designed merely to confirm that the world is a terrible place.

What gives those cases a larger purpose is the suggestion that they are symptoms of something spreading. Religious imagery, social alienation, and anxiety about the approaching millennium connect seemingly separate acts of violence. Again and again, people turn private grievances into fantasies of judgment or purification. Long before the Group’s secrets dominate the narrative, the weekly stories establish the mythology’s central concerns: who claims to recognize evil, what authority that recognition grants them, and how easily conviction becomes an excuse for cruelty. The serialized story is strongest when it develops those questions rather than simply adding more secrets.

Frank’s home life provides the necessary counterweight. Catherine and Jordan are not just vulnerable loved ones waiting to motivate the next investigation. They represent a life that requires his attention and emotional availability, things his work steadily consumes. His determination to protect them can make him distant, and his awareness of danger does not necessarily help him recognize what they need. Henriksen’s warmth gives these scenes their weight. The show may surround Frank with reasons to despair, but it also gives him tangible reasons not to. Without that balance, the darkness would become empty provocation.

Season two, guided by Glen Morgan and James Wong, makes the relationship between the cases and the mythology more ambitious. The Millennium Group stops being a dependable source of professional support and becomes an organization whose beliefs, divisions, and hidden intentions require investigation themselves. Frank now has to question not only the evidence but the people directing his attention toward it. That shift makes the weekly stories more unstable in an interesting way. A case can reveal something about a criminal while also exposing the priorities of an institution that may be manipulating Frank’s understanding.

This is where Millennium becomes most adventurous—and occasionally most frustrating. Religious conspiracy and apocalyptic horror give the second season momentum, while black humor and unusual detours loosen its oppressive atmosphere. But expanding the mythology does not always clarify what is at stake. Sometimes the show mistakes cryptic information for depth, allowing uncertainty to become muddle. What keeps the escalation meaningful is its connection to Frank’s family and fragile sense of purpose. The threat of catastrophe works because it might destroy something the series has taught us to value, not simply because the mythology announces another approaching disaster.

The third season struggles to maintain that connection. Frank’s return to the FBI and partnership with Emma Hollis restore a clearer investigative framework, while his opposition to the Group preserves the serialized conflict. There are worthwhile tensions between institutional loyalty and personal experience, but the procedural and conspiracy elements do not always reinforce each other. Across three seasons, the series repeatedly changes its approach, creating both memorable experiments and visible seams. Its willingness to evolve deserves credit, though the larger narrative never feels entirely under control.

That instability was one obstacle to broader success; the sustained bleakness was another. The X-Files could be frightening, but humor, adventure, and Mulder and Scully’s chemistry made its darkness easier to revisit. Millenniumventured further into territory its sibling series generally stopped short of inhabiting for long. It lingered over cruelty and its consequences, often refusing the escape hatch of a joke or an exhilarating discovery. That uncompromising approach probably contributed to its demise. What distinguished it creatively also made it harder to turn into a pop-cultural phenomenon: audiences were not always eager to return to such an emotionally punishing world.

Seen now, however, that commercial disappointment looks less like proof of a dead end than evidence of an early arrival. Criminal Minds, Dexter, Hannibal, and Mindhunter would explore related territory through murderous psychology, damaged investigators, and the uncomfortable intimacy between hunters and their targets. Those shows have their own creative roots, so direct influence should not be assumed, but Millennium helped sketch the possibilities of psychologically punishing crime television. It also challenged the idea that television horror needed sanitizing, anticipating a landscape where American Horror Story and The Walking Dead could flourish in the 2010s. Its once-alienating qualities became increasingly acceptable television fare.

Millennium deserves appreciation without having its shortcomings explained away. Its mythology can wander, its solemnity can wear thin, and its darkness sometimes overwhelms the people meant to give it meaning. Yet the weekly investigations, the Group’s grand designs, and Frank’s threatened family all return to a struggle worth watching: how to remain compassionate when fear keeps offering easier alternatives. Like Icarus, the series soared too high and burned before it could be fully appreciated. But its lasting achievement is quieter than its apocalyptic ambitions. It made one exhausted man’s refusal to stop caring feel as consequential as the end of the world.

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Horror Film Review: Resurrection (dir. by Russell Mulcahy)

Posted on October 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men.” — Ecclesiastes 6:1

There is a fine line between a serial-killer thriller that gets under your skin and one that simply throws enough severed limbs at you to make an impression. Resurrection (1999) spends most of its running time somewhere between the two. Russell Mulcahy’s film has the haunted detective, the religiously obsessed murderer, and the crime scenes that look like nobody has paid the electricity bill in years. None of that is particularly original, but originality is not necessarily the deciding factor with a movie like this. What matters is whether the atmosphere, performances, and central mystery make you willing to follow it into another dark room. More often than not, they do.

Christopher Lambert plays John Prudhomme, a Chicago detective still struggling with the accidental death of his young son. His latest assignment involves a series of murders in which the victims have been left with body parts missing. Working alongside his partner, Andrew Hollinsworth, played by Leland Orser, Prudhomme discovers that the mutilations follow a biblical pattern. The killer believes he can reconstruct the body of Christ, with Easter serving as his deadline. It is an outrageous premise, but an effective one for a horror thriller: every murder advances a larger project, and every breakthrough brings the detectives closer to understanding just how far their suspect intends to go.

The obvious comparison is Se7en, and pretending otherwise would be giving Resurrection more credit for individuality than it earns. The oppressive city, elaborate murders, and collision of religious language with human depravity all feel familiar. Where Mulcahy’s film establishes some identity is in its willingness to push the material toward gruesome pulp. It is less interested in carefully cultivating philosophical dread than in making the killer’s obsession physically revolting. That does not make it the better movie, but it gives it something to work with beyond imitation. The mystery is not just about catching a murderer; it is about interrupting a grotesque act of construction.

That distinction makes the crime scenes more effective than their shock value alone would suggest. The missing limbs are not random embellishments designed to make an already unpleasant murder look worse. They are the reason the murders happen. Each victim has been reduced to a useful piece of somebody else’s fantasy, and that cold practicality is genuinely disturbing. The religious angle sometimes becomes heavy-handed, particularly when the screenplay spells out connections that already seem clear. Still, the central idea holds together well enough to give the investigation momentum. Knowing what the killer wants does not immediately tell the detectives how to stop him.

Mulcahy gives that investigation a suitably miserable visual landscape. Rooms feel cramped and contaminated, shadows seem to swallow whatever light reaches them, and the city offers very little relief from the ugliness indoors. At its best, the direction makes an ordinary doorway or hallway feel like the entrance to something nobody should discover. At its worst, the stylization starts competing with the material. Restless camerawork and aggressive visual flourishes occasionally announce the film’s anxiety rather than allowing the viewer to feel it. There are scenes where a steadier approach might have been more unsettling. Even so, the atmosphere remains one of the movie’s strongest selling points.

Lambert helps because he approaches Prudhomme without any apparent embarrassment about the material. His performance has rough edges, and some of the more emotional dialogue does not land with complete ease, but his tired expression and gravelly voice suit a man who is barely keeping himself together. He looks worn down before the investigation really gets moving, which gives the case somewhere to push him. More importantly, he does not treat the grisly premise like an invitation to ham it up. His sincerity gives the film a degree of emotional weight, even when the writing leans on familiar shorthand for a grieving father.

Orser makes a useful partner, bringing a different energy without turning Hollinsworth into comic relief. Their exchanges help establish the practical business of working a case, something the movie needs whenever the religious symbolism threatens to take over. They are more convincing as colleagues trying to make sense of horrible evidence than as pieces in an elaborate thematic puzzle. That distinction matters because the screenplay is not always as persuasive as its actors. Clues sometimes arrive with suspicious convenience, and certain complications feel less like believable obstacles than devices intended to keep the chase going for another stretch.

The same problem affects Prudhomme’s personal story. Connecting his grief to a case built around resurrection gives the film an obvious emotional framework, but it does not always develop that connection with much delicacy. The ideas are there: the desire to reverse death, the damage caused by loss, and the difference between faith and obsession. Too often, though, the movie states those concerns more clearly than it dramatizes them. Once the investigation shifts into its later confrontations, the balance tips further toward thriller mechanics. The tension survives, but some of the unsettling possibilities raised by the premise get left behind.

What ultimately makes Resurrection worth watching is not that it transcends its influences, but that it gets enough of the fundamentals right. The murders are disturbing, the central obsession is memorable, and Lambert gives the ugliness a battered human presence to work against. Mulcahy occasionally pushes too hard, while the screenplay occasionally asks for too much patience, but neither problem completely drains the experience. This is not the serial-killer thriller you recommend for airtight plotting or subtle insights into belief. It is the one you put on when you want something dark, lurid, and committed to making its familiar nightmare unpleasant again.

Horror Film Review: Night of the Creeps (dir. by Fred Dekker)

Posted on October 25, 2026 by Arleigh

“Zombies, exploding heads, creepy-crawlies… and a date for the formal. This is classic, Spanky.” — Detective Ray Cameron

College is supposed to be a time for making questionable choices, but accidentally helping alien parasites invade campus probably falls outside the usual learning experience. That’s the basic joke behind Night of the Creeps, and Fred Dekker gets an impressive amount of mileage out of it. His 1986 horror comedy mixes the social embarrassment of a campus movie with the bodily violations of a creature feature, then throws in a detective who looks like he hasn’t enjoyed either company or daylight in years. The ingredients are familiar, but the combination has real personality. It’s messy, funny, occasionally touching, and much more interested in entertaining you than looking respectable.

Before the college kids get their chance to make everything worse, Dekker establishes that trouble has been brewing for decades. An opening aboard an alien spacecraft leads into a black-and-white stretch set in 1959, where young love runs into both an escaped axe murderer and an extraterrestrial experiment. It’s a wonderfully excessive introduction, almost daring you to question whether one movie needs all these threats. Somehow, the pieces fit. The opening establishes a history that will eventually catch up with the present, making the later outbreak feel like the continuation of a very bad night rather than a completely random disaster.

In 1986, Chris Romero, played by Jason Lively, has more ordinary concerns. He’s interested in Cynthia Cronenberg, played by Jill Whitlow, and figures pledging a fraternity might improve his romantic prospects. His best friend J.C., played by Steve Marshall, accompanies him on an initiation assignment to steal a corpse. This is, unsurprisingly, not a great plan. Their search brings them to a preserved body, and disturbing it helps unleash the alien slugs that drive the rest of the story. Dekker makes the escalation amusingly direct: Chris wants a more exciting social life, and the universe supplies one with considerably more decomposing flesh than he probably imagined.

The campus setting gives the movie an enjoyable contrast between petty problems and catastrophic ones. Fraternity status and romantic competition seem important until people start becoming breeding grounds for something from outer space. Still, the college-comedy material is also where the film feels most routine. The fraternity antagonists are obnoxious in predictable ways, and Chris spends a fair amount of time being the awkward underdog you’ve seen before. Lively keeps him sympathetic, but the character could use more spark. Cynthia is similarly likable without being especially developed. Whitlow gives her warmth, though the romance never becomes as engaging as the friendships surrounding it.

J.C. is a big reason those friendships work. Marshall brings a loose, teasing energy that makes his exchanges with Chris feel comfortable rather than written purely to deliver information. He can recognize that his friend is being ridiculous without making his affection seem conditional. That gives their relationship some substance beneath the jokes. In a lesser version of this movie, J.C. would exist only to encourage the romance and provide sarcastic commentary. Here, he becomes its emotional anchor. When the danger reaches him, the film briefly stops feeling like a harmless parade of genre references, and that change carries a genuine sting.

Tom Atkins gives the movie a different kind of personality as Detective Ray Cameron. He’s gruff, sarcastic, and seemingly irritated that another day has required his participation. Atkins knows exactly how to sell the dialogue, making “Thrill me” sound like the natural greeting of someone who expects disappointment and would appreciate being surprised. But Cameron isn’t just a collection of quotable lines. His connection to the events of 1959 gives his bitterness a history. Atkins lets that sadness sit beneath the swagger, which makes the character entertaining without reducing him to a tough-guy impersonation. He’s easily the strongest presence whenever he enters a scene.

Dekker deserves credit for allowing those feelings to coexist with the ridiculousness. Night of the Creeps has an obvious sense of humor about itself, but it doesn’t treat caring about its characters as another joke. The actors generally play the danger straight, leaving the comedy to emerge from their reactions and the increasingly unreasonable situation. That approach gives the darker moments room to land. The movie has heart, not because it pauses to insist on its importance, but because friendship and regret remain meaningful even when someone’s head might become a delivery system for space slugs.

The practical effects make that threat suitably unpleasant. There’s something especially nasty about creatures that don’t need to overpower you so much as find an opening, and the slugs turn an exposed mouth into a source of tension. The walking corpses have a grubby physicality that suits the film’s scrappy atmosphere. You can enjoy the craftsmanship while still appreciating how disgusting the result looks. The pacing isn’t quite as dependable: a few stretches of campus business delay the monster action, and the shifts between broad comedy and distress occasionally feel abrupt. Once the outbreak builds toward the formal dance, though, the movie finds the momentum it needs.

What ultimately makes Night of the Creeps work is that its foolish decisions have consequences worth caring about. Chris’s attempt to improve his college experience opens the door to a grotesque disaster, but Dekker doesn’t leave the story at “look what these idiots did.” He gives the characters reasons to stand by one another when their ordinary concerns become irrelevant. That makes the finale more satisfying than a simple procession of creature effects. The movie delivers its share of slime, corpses, and deadpan jokes, then leaves behind a surprisingly warm impression. For a story about things crawling inside people, it’s remarkably good company.

Horror Guilty Pleasure No. 135: Critters (dir. by Stephen Herek)

Posted on October 25, 2026 by Arleigh

Some movie monsters want to conquer the planet. The creatures in Stephen Herek’s Critters seem perfectly happy eating their way through whatever happens to be standing on it. There is something refreshing about villains with such uncomplicated priorities, especially when they look like the contents of a clogged vacuum cleaner fitted with shark teeth. This is the sort of movie where the appeal is right there in the premise: nasty little aliens descend on rural America, and a perfectly ordinary family has to survive the visit. As an ’80s genre guilty pleasure, it delivers the goods with an appealing lack of pretension.

The story gets moving when a group of carnivorous aliens escapes from an extraterrestrial prison facility and makes its way to Earth. Their arrival puts the Brown family’s Kansas farm directly in the path of a feeding frenzy, while two shape-shifting bounty hunters follow close behind. Unfortunately, these heavily armed visitors are not especially concerned about keeping the peace or leaving buildings intact. Between the hungry fugitives and their destructive pursuers, an otherwise quiet community gets more excitement than it could possibly need. The setup is ridiculous, but Herek understands that explaining it too much would only spoil the fun.

What gives Critters some substance beneath the silliness is its interest in the people whose evening gets ruined. The Browns are not especially complicated characters, but their everyday disagreements and familiar household routines make them feel like a family rather than a collection of future victims. Spending time with them before the attack also gives the farmhouse a sense of normality worth protecting. The monsters are not simply invading a convenient horror-movie location; they are barging into somebody’s home. That modest distinction helps the film generate more audience investment than its toothy little troublemakers might initially suggest.

Scott Grimes makes Brad an easy young hero to root for. He has enough mischievous energy to seem capable of causing problems before the aliens ever arrive, but he never becomes so obnoxious that his survival feels like an obligation. His resourcefulness grows naturally out of that personality, giving the movie a kid protagonist who can participate in the action without seeming completely detached from his surroundings. There is a pleasing wish-fulfillment element to watching an underestimated youngster step up when things go wrong. Grimes sells that without turning Brad into an impossibly polished miniature action star.

Dee Wallace provides another important source of credibility as Brad’s mother, Helen. She brings warmth and urgency to situations that, described out loud, sound almost impossible to play straight. That commitment helps establish the film’s balance: the audience can laugh at the monsters without feeling that the characters are merely participating in a comedy routine. The family’s fear and concern remain sincere even when the surrounding action gets goofy. Critters does not require powerhouse dramatic performances, but it benefits enormously from actors willing to treat an attack by murderous furballs as an actual emergency.

Naturally, the furballs themselves are the main attraction. They look like what would happen if the Tribbles from Star Trek suddenly decided to stop being cute and start being mean and really, really hungry. Their dark hair, glowing eyes, enormous mouths, and projectile quills turn an otherwise cuddly shape into something you would desperately want off your lap. The fun comes from their rotten personalities as much as their physical design. These are greedy, bad-tempered little creatures whose curiosity usually leads directly to destruction. Their appetite drives the action, but their attitude gives it flavor, making them entertaining even when they are doing little more than looking for their next meal.

The practical effects contribute plenty of charm, although they do not always maintain the illusion. Some movements are stiff, and certain shots make the creatures look exactly like the puppets they are. Still, their physical presence gives the mayhem a satisfying texture. They seem to belong in the same messy environment as the furniture, debris, and frightened actors around them. The movie also benefits from not making them too adorable. They can be funny without losing that unpleasant suggestion of something that might bite straight through your hand. Their limitations are visible, but so is the craftsmanship behind their grotesque little faces.

The bounty hunters bring a broader, more cartoonish kind of entertainment. Terrence Mann plays Ug, who adopts the appearance of rock star Johnny Steele, while his partner Lee cycles through human identities played by Ethan Phillips, Jeremy Lawrence, and Don Keith Opper. Mann does most of the pair’s comedic heavy lifting, giving Ug a wonderfully straight-faced intensity that makes his rock-star appearance and excessive firepower even funnier. Their destructive pursuit suggests that Earth’s rescuers might require almost as much cleanup as its invaders. These scenes provide some welcome absurdity, although they also contribute to uneven pacing. Whenever the film moves away from the farmhouse, the pressure surrounding the Browns tends to ease. The hunters are amusing, particularly Mann, but their antics are not always as engaging as the central siege.

The resemblance to Gremlins is difficult to ignore, but Critters works best when it is not treated as a contest. It offers a smaller, scrappier variation on miniature-monster chaos, with a straightforward survival story holding everything together. The scares are limited, the plotting is thin, and the effects occasionally wobble, yet the movie remains likable because it commits to its own ridiculous appeal. There is no need to pretend it is a neglected masterpiece to appreciate its pleasures. Sometimes a decent creature feature only needs an appealing cast, a little suspense, and some ugly space pests making a spectacular nuisance of themselves. Critters understands the assignment.

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When the Familiar Turns Savage: Siege Horror and the Fragility of Civilization

Posted on October 25, 2026 by Arleigh

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Survival becomes a moral problem when staying alive threatens to destroy the reasons for living together. That dilemma gives siege horror its enduring power. Characters must confront not only an external threat but also the possibility that fear will turn protection into exclusion, cooperation into domination, and necessary violence into cruelty. James Herbert’s The Fog, Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night, Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night, and Brian Keene’s The Complex explore this pressure through outbreaks of human brutality. Their attackers are disturbing because they retain recognizable bodies while violating the expectations that make human contact possible.

A siege need not confine its victims to one building or require them to defend a fixed position. Its boundaries can encompass a town, a city, or an entire country where danger lurks around every corner. Characters may remain free to move while having nowhere reliably safe to go. Streets become hazardous corridors, shelters offer uncertain protection, and escaping one confrontation exposes them to another. The defining condition is entrapment: the inability to leave the field of danger behind.

Across these novels, that condition tests civilization as much as physical endurance. Social order can restrain violence, conceal it, or help manufacture it. Catastrophe likewise produces more than selfishness: it can create obligations between people who previously felt little responsibility for one another. The question is not simply whether humanity becomes primal under pressure, but which human capacities the struggle to survive encourages—and which it threatens to extinguish.

James Herbert’s The Fog: A Siege Without a Secure Perimeter

In The Fog, an earthquake opens a fissure beneath an English village, releasing a substance that drives exposed people into destructive madness. Environmental investigator John Holman survives the initial catastrophe and becomes central to efforts to stop the spreading threat. Herbert alternates his continuing narrative with episodes depicting the fog’s effects elsewhere, expanding the disaster beyond any single survivor or refuge.

This structure makes survival a problem individual toughness cannot solve. The threat moves through the atmosphere, turning the environment itself into an unstable boundary between safety and exposure. Characters can travel, but movement does not necessarily mean escape. The siege follows the spreading contamination rather than remaining organized around one defensible location.

Herbert’s scattered episodes transform ordinary life into a succession of violated expectations. Familiar people occupy recognizable settings while abandoning the behavior that previously made those settings intelligible. The world remains physically familiar while ceasing to operate according to recognizable social rules.

The fog’s man-made origins sharpen the contradiction. Its connection to military experimentation implicates organized authority in the destruction of the society it supposedly protects. Technical sophistication does not stand apart from barbarism; it creates the means through which barbarism spreads. Civilization becomes dangerous because its capabilities have become detached from responsibility.

Nevertheless, contamination is not straightforward proof of an authentic savage self. The exposed have been altered against their will. They become perpetrators while remaining victims, and their conduct cannot establish what they secretly desired beforehand. Holman’s recovery makes that uncertainty central: the defender has crossed the boundary separating ordinary humanity from destructive madness.

Survival consequently requires understanding as well as resistance. Eliminating dangerous individuals cannot resolve the catastrophe. Herbert exposes institutional failure while preserving the necessity of coordinated action, suggesting that civilization must answer for its abuses without becoming something humanity can simply discard.

Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night: Intimacy as Enemy Territory

Ladies’ Night concentrates its crisis within relationships. A chemical spill causes exposed women to become violently predatory, turning the antagonism suggested by the phrase “battle of the sexes” into a grotesquely literal nightmare.

Where Herbert destabilizes the wider environment, Ketchum attacks the assumptions permitting physical closeness. Familiarity and attraction ordinarily encourage people to lower their defenses. Here, that access becomes dangerous. The siege is intimate as much as architectural: its boundaries run through trust, desire, and bodily proximity.

Its scattered encounters also make clear why leaving one location cannot necessarily end a siege. When danger is distributed throughout the surrounding community, the next street or doorway may offer another confrontation rather than refuge. Movement becomes a negotiation with uncertainty.

Defending oneself may require recoiling from someone previously associated with affection or pleasure. The transformed person remains recognizable, yet recognition no longer reassures. Ketchum makes the destruction of intimacy inseparable from the threat of bodily injury.

The premise is forceful but ethically troubling. Men become vulnerable to people they may have underestimated or treated carelessly. The attention to insensitive and unfaithful husbands gives some attacks an uncomfortable connection to existing grievances. Yet chemical compulsion prevents the violence from functioning as freely chosen resistance or coherent justice. The women’s agency has been destroyed, not liberated.

Like Herbert, Ketchum complicates the claim that contamination reveals an underlying truth. Imposed murderous behavior does not prove the earlier personality was fraudulent. His gendered division also exposes a danger in survival thinking: immediate threats encourage rapid judgments that can harden into collective suspicion.

Compared with Keene’s improvised solidarity, Ketchum makes mutual recognition painfully difficult. His novel’s power lies in turning intimacy against its characters; its limitation lies in the risk that women become interchangeable embodiments of male fear. That tension belongs at the center of its moral examination.

Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night: A Town Already Compromised

In One Rainy Night, black rain falls on Bixby, California, turning those it touches into violent attackers. Laymon follows several threatened groups, including a babysitter protecting a child, adults trapped in a restaurant, and a police officer attempting to safeguard others. The immediate objective is clear: remain dry and prevent the transformed population from entering shelter.

Laymon combines localized defenses with a town-wide siege. Roofs, doors, windows, and exposed ground acquire urgent significance, but individual shelters exist within a larger hostile environment. Leaving a threatened building may mean exchanging one danger for another. The town becomes a network of temporary refuges separated by hazardous spaces.

The attackers’ ability to cooperate increases that pressure. They are not simply an obstacle to be avoided; they can actively threaten the structures protecting those who remain unaffected. Shelter postpones confrontation without necessarily resolving it.

Yet Bixby’s violence does not begin with the storm. Maxwell Chidi, a Black teenager, has already been murdered, his tortured body burned on a school football field. This atrocity prevents the town’s earlier normality from becoming an image of innocence. Extreme cruelty exists before the rain makes brutality pervasive.

Laymon thus challenges the idea that civilization reliably suppresses primal behavior. The community possesses institutions and routines, but these have not prevented racist murder. The storm does not introduce savagery into a humane environment. It magnifies a capacity already present.

Survival cannot therefore mean restoring the previous order and declaring victory. Bixby’s earlier condition already demands scrutiny. Preserving a community is not the same as proving everything about it deserves preservation.

The protective relationships nevertheless resist universal cynicism. Caring for a child or accepting responsibility for another person makes compassion an active survival practice. Laymon’s extreme physicality distinguishes violence as domination from violence as protection. Both can be brutal, but their purposes differ. Bodies are not merely opportunities for spectacular injury; they are vulnerable lives someone may choose to defend.

Brian Keene’s The Complex: Surviving Through Other People

The Complex gives the siege its most concentrated residential setting. Naked, armed killers descend on the Pine Village Apartment Complex, forcing neighbors who barely know one another into collective resistance. Its ensemble includes a depressed writer, a Vietnam veteran, an elderly woman, a young trans woman, a mother and child, and a serial killer known as The Exit. Initially unexplained violence leaves little time for understanding before action becomes necessary.

The apartment setting distinguishes proximity from community. Its residents share space, but that does not mean they share trust or obligation. The attack forces them to discover whether neighbors can become more than strangers separated by walls.

Keene also complicates the apparent security of familiar geography. The complex contains separate residences and spaces through which the characters must navigate. Knowing the setting does not mean controlling it. A familiar route can become dangerous, and a private refuge can prove inadequate.

Where contamination destroys established bonds in the other novels, Keene’s siege creates relationships that previously did not exist. People understood through superficial impressions become potential rescuers. Survival depends partly on revising assumptions through which the residents have judged one another.

Social respectability does not reliably predict competence or compassion, while marginalization does not determine weakness. Yet emergency does not make everyone good. Cooperation requires incomplete knowledge, dangerous compromises, and dependence on people whose motives remain uncertain.

The Exit embodies that discomfort. A serial killer’s abilities may become useful during an assault, but usefulness does not establish virtue. His presence separates the capacity for violence from the purposes giving violence its ethical meaning. Necessary cooperation does not make its participants morally equivalent.

Compared with Herbert’s institutional catastrophe, Ketchum’s destroyed intimacy, and Laymon’s compromised town, Keene emphasizes civilization as something actively constructed. It exists through shared danger, mutual recognition, and the refusal to regard vulnerability as expendability. Survival requires other people without making trust easy or uncomplicated.

Shared Foundations and a Continuing Legacy

These novels share siege and survival DNA with other forms of horror. Romero’s Dead films make external attack and internal disagreement inseparable, while Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 forces unlikely allies to defend an isolated refuge. Slasher series such as Friday the 13th and Scream concentrate similar pressure in pursuing killers. Different threats create narrowing options: escape becomes difficult, assistance unreliable, and resistance unavoidable.

Their relationship to later extreme horror involves thematic kinship as well as contribution, rather than a simple chain of direct influence. Keene’s The Rising contributed to the modern literary zombie resurgence through intelligent, possessed undead capable of turning human knowledge against survivors. The Complex concentrates related anxieties within a smaller setting.

Comparable concerns animate the Rage-infected of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later and their return to that world in 28 Years Later. These films extend entrapment across a national landscape: the ability to travel does not guarantee an exit from danger. Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness, influenced by Garth Ennis’s controversial comic Crossed, pushes recognizable humanity toward deliberate sadism.

Such connections underline the continuing relevance of the four novels. Extreme horror becomes most unsettling not simply through graphic injury, but through the separation of intelligence, intimacy, and imagination from compassion. Those capacities can sustain solidarity—or make cruelty more inventive.

What Survival Preserves

The four novels offer different accounts of what threatens coexistence. Herbert exposes protective institutions producing catastrophe. Ketchum makes intimacy inaccessible. Laymon reveals atrocity beneath communal normality. Keene examines solidarity among people who lack reassuring reasons to trust one another.

Whether the enclosure is an apartment building, a town, or an expanding contaminated landscape, survival does not settle the moral argument. Remaining unaffected does not guarantee goodness, and resisting an attacker does not justify every action taken in self-defense.

The deepest question is what staying alive preserves. If survival requires treating every vulnerable person as a burden and every stranger as expendable, the survivors risk reproducing the world their attackers embody. Civilization endures when they resist that logic—when protecting life still includes recognizing why another person’s life matters.

Horror Film Review: Clayface (dir. by James Watkins)

Posted on October 24, 2026 by Arleigh

“Even if it kills me, I’ll be better off than I am now.” — Matt Hagen

The most unsettling thing about Clayface isn’t watching a man lose his face; it’s realizing how much of his life was built around having the right one. James Watkins’ take on the DC villain turns that insecurity into a nasty little body-horror tragedy, following someone who has confused being desirable with being worth something. Beneath the collapsing features and increasingly grotesque transformations is a recognizable fear: that losing the thing people admire about you means losing their interest altogether. The film doesn’t explore that idea as deeply as it could, but it gives the horror a compelling emotional foundation beyond the spectacle of a comic-book monster taking shape.

At the center is Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, an actor whose rising career is derailed by a disfiguring attack. His appearance has opened doors for him, and losing it threatens more than his next role. It destroys the version of himself he thought he could count on. Desperate for a way back, he turns to Dr. Caitlyn Corr, played by Naomi Ackie, whose experimental treatment promises to repair the damage. Naturally, the results come with complications. The interesting question isn’t whether the miracle will turn into a nightmare, but how much Matt is willing to overlook once he starts recognizing himself in the mirror again.

That desperation makes Matt more compelling than a character who simply gets powers and becomes dangerous. His problem begins before his body starts changing: he already depends on other people to tell him what he’s worth. That insecurity connects naturally to his profession. An actor who can physically become someone else sounds like a wish fulfilled, until transformation stops being a choice. There’s a cruel logic to giving someone obsessed with recovering his identity a body that won’t hold one. The screenplay occasionally spells things out too neatly, but the central idea gives the nastiness something to work with beyond its shock value.

Harries does a lot to keep that idea grounded. He makes Matt’s appeal believable without turning him into someone whose suffering automatically excuses everything he does. His desperation is understandable even when his choices become selfish or disturbing, and the performance handles that balance well. His humiliation doesn’t immediately become theatrical rage. It lingers, making him defensive, needy, and increasingly willing to justify himself. Even when the movie pushes him toward more recognizable villain territory, Harries preserves traces of the frightened person underneath. Matt doesn’t have to remain likable to remain interesting, and the performance understands the difference between earning sympathy and demanding it.

Ackie gives the film another human connection that it needs. Corr could have been little more than the scientist who introduces the treatment and explains why everybody should be worried. Instead, her warmth complicates a relationship already shaped by unequal needs. Matt wants his life back; she wants her work to succeed. Those desires overlap without being identical, making their connection more engaging than the mechanics of the experiment. The romantic element also gives their scenes a tragic-monster quality. Not every emotional beat lands with equal force, but the performances keep their relationship from feeling like a mandatory break between transformations.

Those transformations are where Watkins delivers the movie’s most immediate pleasures, assuming “pleasures” is the right word for watching somebody’s anatomy stop cooperating. The real discomfort comes from the instability. A face should stay recognizable even when everything else changes, and Clayface makes that familiarity feel temporary. The makeup and prosthetic work give Matt’s deterioration an unpleasant physical texture, encouraging a queasy fascination with damage that’s difficult to look at and harder to ignore. At its best, the body horror feels wet, awkward, and difficult to contain rather than polished into something comfortably spectacular. There’s enough physical nastiness here to give Matt’s desperation a genuinely disturbing shape.

Even without the DC Comics pedigree or the connection to Batman, Clayface would still be a compelling body-horror film. The recognizable name might get people interested, but Matt’s desperation, the disturbing effects, and the tragedy of losing control over his identity are what make it work. There’s no need to know where he fits into Gotham or who he might eventually fight. His story has enough emotional weight and gruesome imagination to stand on its own. The comic-book background adds another layer, but it isn’t holding the movie together. That independence makes it feel like an actual horror story rather than franchise homework dressed up with gore.

For an R-rated body-horror film, though, Clayface plays it surprisingly safe. That might sound odd given the grotesque imagery, but graphic violence and genuinely unsettling ideas aren’t the same thing. There are moments when Matt’s transformation seems ready to take the movie somewhere stranger, only for it to retreat toward familiar revenge-thriller territory. The issue isn’t simply that it needs more blood or more elaborate effects. A more Cronenbergian approach could have pushed further into how his changing body alters his desires, his relationships, and his understanding of himself. The film is willing to make Matt look monstrous, but more hesitant to explore what becoming something other than human might actually feel like.

That restraint becomes especially noticeable as Matt gains control over his abilities. Early on, his body feels like a threat he can’t escape. Later, it increasingly becomes a weapon. The shift makes sense for the story, but it changes the experience from watching someone endure a nightmare to watching him inflict one. There’s nasty fun in that, especially when the film embraces its lurid side, but his inability to trust his own body generates more unease than his ability to make other people afraid of it. As the confrontations become more conventional, the movie sacrifices some of the uncertainty that makes its earlier stretches so effective.

The comparisons with The Fly and Darkman are hard to avoid, from scientific possibility curdling into catastrophe to the disfigured man pursuing revenge. The relationship between appearance and personal value also invites comparisons with The Substance. Those connections help explain the film’s appeal, but they highlight what feels underdeveloped, too. Clayface has an industry full of people who judge surfaces and a protagonist whose surface becomes impossible to maintain. That’s fertile ground. Sometimes the movie digs into it; sometimes it settles for a familiar revenge beat with a more disgusting visual payoff. The latter can be entertaining without being quite as satisfying.

Even with those reservations, Clayface succeeds because enough humanity survives beneath the grotesquerie. Harries gives the film a wounded center, while Ackie helps keep its emotional stakes from disappearing into the effects work. Watkins delivers the gruesome spectacle, but the sadness underneath gives it staying power. The film doesn’t fully realize its strongest ideas, and its reluctance to follow them into truly uncomfortable territory keeps it from becoming something exceptional. Still, its best moments make physical transformation feel painfully personal. Matt can change his appearance, but finding a face he can live with turns out to be the harder problem.

Horror Book Review: The Complex (by Brian Keene)

Posted on October 24, 2026 by Arleigh

“The only thing they have in common is the unstoppable horde that wants to kill them.” — The Complex

Brian Keene’s The Complex takes a simple horror premise and gets a lot of bloody mileage out of it: a group of apartment residents suddenly find themselves under attack by naked, homicidal strangers, and surviving means trusting people they barely know. There’s no comfortable adjustment period, no time to assemble the perfect team, and certainly no guarantee that being decent will keep anyone alive. It’s a nasty, fast-moving siege novel whose biggest strength isn’t just its willingness to get vicious. It’s the way Keene turns an ordinary collection of neighbors into people worth worrying about before putting them through absolute hell.

The setting is Pine Village, an apartment complex in rural Pennsylvania. It’s the kind of place where people live close together without necessarily sharing much of their lives. Everyone has private problems, personal baggage, and assumptions about whoever lives nearby. Then a mob of crazed attackers arrives, and those everyday boundaries become meaningless. Suddenly, the person on the other side of the wall isn’t just background noise or an occasional annoyance. They might be your only chance of making it through the next few minutes. That shift gives the book a strong foundation beneath all the violence.

What makes the setup effective is how little preparation the characters receive. Keene introduces the residents as the situation starts unraveling, moving between apartments rather than spending ages establishing a normal world we already know is about to collapse. The present-tense narration adds to that feeling of being trapped inside an unfolding emergency. There’s a useful bluntness to the approach: people notice something wrong, try to understand it, and discover that understanding is a luxury they don’t have. The novel is at its strongest when it keeps that gap between recognizing danger and reacting to it painfully narrow.

The attackers are particularly unsettling because they occupy an uncomfortable space between recognizable human beings and something much harder to process. They have the relentless aggression associated with zombies, but describing them that way doesn’t quite capture their menace. Their nakedness removes the ordinary visual clues that help people categorize strangers, while their weapons and savage behavior turn the familiar human body into something threatening. Keene doesn’t need elaborate creature designs to make the situation grotesque. The horror comes from people behaving in ways that make ordinary social expectations completely useless. There’s nothing to negotiate with and very little time to hesitate.

Then there’s the Tick Tock Man, a hulking attacker whose mechanical head movements and incongruous Hello Kitty tattoo make him stand out from the surrounding chaos. He’s the sort of horror image that works because the details don’t comfortably belong together. The tattoo is almost absurd, but that absurdity makes the violence more disturbing rather than less. Amid a largely collective threat, he gives the terror a memorable individual presence. A murderous crowd can become anonymous after a while; one bizarre, recognizable figure gives both the characters and the reader something specific to dread.

Still, the residents are what keep The Complex from becoming an extended exercise in creative dismemberment. The ensemble includes a suicidal horror writer, a single mother, an aging veteran, an elderly woman, a transgender woman named Stephanie, and a serial killer known as the Exit. That’s a potentially overstuffed lineup, but the shared emergency gives these very different people a reason to occupy the same story. Their usefulness to one another doesn’t necessarily correspond to how respectable, stable, or approachable they might appear beforehand. Keene gets considerable tension out of that mismatch between someone’s social identity and what they can actually contribute under pressure.

The Exit deserves particular attention because he isn’t just another colorful addition to the cast. He’s a recurring figure in Keene’s fiction, appearing in the connected stories “I Am an Exit” and “This Is Not an Exit,” collected in Jack’s Magic Beans. His presence connects The Complex to Keene’s wider body of work, but you don’t need that background to appreciate what he brings to this nightmare. Having a serial killer among the survivors changes the usual siege dynamics: someone who would ordinarily be the threat becomes a potentially invaluable ally against something even worse. His familiarity with violence gives the residents an advantage while making their dependence on him deeply uncomfortable. They aren’t simply cooperating with neighbors they’ve overlooked; they’re benefiting from the abilities of someone they would otherwise have every reason to fear. It adds a nasty moral wrinkle to their survival without turning him into a conventional hero.

Stephanie also gives the novel room to explore the difference between how someone understands herself and how other people see her. In a story built around strangers becoming unwilling allies, that distinction matters. Survival requires the residents to recognize one another as people rather than settle for whatever category seems easiest. The book’s human element isn’t separate from its horror machinery; it’s part of what makes that machinery work. Violence forces everyone into proximity, but cooperation requires something more. That’s a more interesting emotional basis for a siege story than simply dividing the cast into obvious heroes and disposable victims.

Keene’s handling of action is another major selling point. The novel has a cinematic quality, but not merely because it’s easy to imagine the blood on a screen. Its central situation produces immediate, understandable objectives: get away from danger, find shelter, stay together, and figure out whether escape is possible. The apartment setting keeps those goals close and urgent. There isn’t much room for the characters—or the narrative—to wander off. For readers who enjoy horror that keeps applying pressure rather than pausing for extensive explanation, that concentration is a considerable advantage.

The downside is that the same stripped-down approach can leave parts of the experience feeling underdeveloped. The dialogue sometimes has the efficiency of movie dialogue, delivering what a scene needs without always sounding entirely natural. Likewise, an ensemble this varied invites curiosity that a relentless survival plot can’t always satisfy. The character concepts are compelling, but the book’s commitment to forward motion limits how long it can sit with them. Whether that feels like a flaw depends on what you want from it: a sustained nightmare benefits from momentum, while a richer character study would need more breathing room.

The ending is likely to be the biggest dividing line. Keene doesn’t provide a tidy explanation for the outbreak, and the conclusion leaves substantial questions unanswered. Its abruptness recalls the ending of his zombie novel The Rising, which similarly split readers between those who appreciated being left hanging and those who felt the story stopped just when it needed to deliver a payoff. The comparison isn’t exact—The Rising received a direct continuation in City of the Dead—but the potential frustration is familiar: after becoming invested in the characters’ struggle, some readers will want more closure than Keene gives them here. There’s still a strong argument for leaving things uncertain. People caught in a catastrophe wouldn’t automatically discover its cause, and withholding answers preserves the sense that the world has become incomprehensible. But uncertainty and satisfaction aren’t interchangeable. The book works better as an immediate survival experience than as a mystery promising a fully worked-out solution.

For all its bloodshed and relentless action, The Complex works best when it makes you care about the people caught in the middle. Its viciousness matters because Keene gives the endangered residents enough individuality to make their situation more than a body-count exercise. The gore is plentiful, the central threat is unnerving, and the unlikely alliances provide an emotional thread through the carnage. Some dialogue could be smoother, and the unresolved ending won’t satisfy everyone, but those limitations don’t erase the effectiveness of the ride. This is lean, mean survival horror with a human center: an ugly night shared by people who never expected to need one another quite so badly.

Horror Series Review: Below (by Jesse McKeown)

Posted on October 23, 2026 by Arleigh

“I can’t just roll over, I need to see this thing through.” — Calvin Penney

The scariest thing in Netflix’s Below might be the possibility that the place you call home no longer has a future. Sure, there’s a monster lurking offshore, and the series isn’t shy about putting its characters through some nasty situations. But beneath the creature-feature setup is a more personal story about people struggling to recognize when holding on becomes its own kind of danger. Created by Jesse McKeown, this six-episode series mixes coastal horror, family baggage, and small-town stubbornness into something engaging, even when its storytelling gets a little tangled. It works best when those elements feel like different parts of the same problem.

Set in the Newfoundland community of Snook’s Arm, Below follows Calvin Penney, a widower played by Josh Hartnett whose attachment to the town runs deep. A childhood tragedy involving relocation and the death of his father has left him with understandable reasons to distrust the idea of starting over. Now he makes ends meet alongside his son Wade, harvesting iceberg ice and renting out a room. With his other children coming home for a visit, there’s an opportunity for the family to reconnect. Naturally, this being a monster series, the reunion comes with some unpleasant complications waiting in the water.

That setup gives the show something more substantial than the usual group of strangers stumbling into danger. Calvin already has things to lose before the creature becomes a threat, and not all of them can be protected by simply surviving. His family’s relationship with Snook’s Arm isn’t necessarily the same as his own, which creates tension without requiring anyone to behave like an obvious villain. For Calvin, leaving means surrendering something essential. For others, staying might mean sacrificing a chance at a different life. The monster doesn’t create those disagreements so much as make them impossible to keep putting off.

Hartnett gives the series a reliable emotional anchor. Calvin is warm enough to make his devotion appealing, but he’s also capable of turning that devotion into a burden for everyone around him. Hartnett understands that balance, playing him as someone whose good intentions don’t automatically make his decisions reasonable. You can sympathize with his fear of losing another home while still wanting him to listen when someone challenges him. His Newfoundland accent occasionally becomes a distraction, but the performance underneath it feels grounded. Calvin’s grief matters because it influences how he behaves, not just because the script tells us he has a painful past.

Charlie Heaton adds a useful edge as Wade, whose relationship with his father carries both affection and frustration. Their shared routine suggests closeness, but it also raises questions about how much room either has to move forward. The family material is strongest when it lets those mixed feelings sit without immediately explaining them away. Mackenzie Davis brings a different energy as marine researcher Fonda Howander, giving the mystery an investigative thread beyond Calvin’s personal concerns. She helps connect the disturbing events to something the characters can begin to understand, while the family drama keeps the consequences from becoming purely theoretical.

Snook’s Arm itself is one of the show’s biggest assets. The coastal scenery has an appealing harshness, making it easy to understand both why someone would love living there and why someone else would want out. The town feels isolated before the horror really gets going, and that isolation becomes more oppressive as familiar surroundings turn threatening. There’s a difference between being somewhere quiet and realizing help might be a long way off. Below makes good use of that distinction. Its setting isn’t just attractive background scenery; it shapes the characters’ options and gives their reluctance to leave a believable emotional foundation.

The horror is especially effective when it grows out of ordinary details becoming wrong. Foul-smelling ice, disappearances, and unsettling changes create the sense that something has worked its way into the community before anyone understands its scale. The ocean has always been unpredictable, but now that uncertainty feels actively hostile. Mark Korven’s score helps sustain the unease, while the more grisly material supplies the creature-feature payoff. When the water becomes dangerous, it doesn’t just interrupt the characters’ plans. It undermines the relationship that makes the town possible. Later, the creature side of the story takes some interesting turns that complicate the initial setup without abandoning its sense of danger.

That’s why resettlement is such an effective idea to build the drama around. Residents are considering whether to accept money to leave, and the series gives that decision emotional weight rather than treating it as a simple question of common sense. Calvin’s resistance comes from experience, but experience can also trap someone in an old way of understanding a new crisis. The ecological themes fit naturally alongside that conflict. This is a story about a community facing the possibility that its surroundings can no longer support the life it knows, with a monster giving that anxiety a much more immediate form.

The danger also grows as it becomes clear that certain characters have agendas they aren’t sharing. Without giving away who wants what, those competing interests make an already desperate situation worse for the people still stuck on Snook’s Arm. Surviving isn’t simply a matter of figuring out what’s in the water; it also means navigating people whose priorities may not line up with everyone else’s safety. That adds welcome tension, although the accumulation of secrets and revelations sometimes crowds the storytelling. The later episodes reach for bigger emotional and thematic payoffs, and a little more breathing room would have helped some of those developments land more naturally.

Even with those weaknesses, Below offers more than a disposable run through familiar monster-movie territory. Hartnett holds the emotional center, the coastal atmosphere gives the horror texture, and the town’s uncertain future makes survival mean something beyond escaping the next attack. Its late turns give the creature story another dimension, while the human conflicts keep the threat from feeling comfortably predictable. The strongest material remains the people trying to protect a home while disagreeing about what protecting it actually requires. The creature gives that struggle teeth, but the harder question remains human: how do you know when staying is an act of love, and when it’s just fear of letting go?