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.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

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 Film Review: Raw (dir. by Julia Ducournau)

Posted on October 22, 2026 by Arleigh

“I am hungry though. My stomach always feels empty.” — Justine

Leaving home for college is supposed to be the start of figuring yourself out, but Raw asks a nastier question: what happens if you don’t like the person you discover? Julia Ducournau’s 2016 coming-of-age horror film takes the familiar experience of a sheltered young woman entering an intimidating new environment and gives it teeth. Literally. Beneath the flesh-eating and bodily distress is a recognizable story about wanting independence without understanding what to do with it. Its horror comes not simply from discovering an appetite for human flesh, but from realizing that the identity you brought from home might not survive contact with the outside world.

Justine, played by Garance Marillier, arrives at veterinary school with a clearly established identity. She is academically gifted, inexperienced, and a committed vegetarian, following the professional path already taken by her parents and older sister, Alexia. Everything about her suggests someone whose life has been mapped out before she has had much opportunity to question it. Then a hazing ritual forces her to eat a raw rabbit kidney, awakening a hunger that develops into cannibalistic desire. It is an outrageous premise, but Ducournau grounds it in an ordinary anxiety: being pressured into doing something uncomfortable because refusing would mean making yourself an outsider.

The college setting is essential because it makes that pressure feel inescapable. Justine hasn’t simply left her parents; she has entered another institution with its own rules about obedience and belonging. The older students humiliate newcomers while presenting participation as a necessary introduction to campus life. From Justine’s perspective, becoming independent initially seems to mean accepting whatever this new crowd demands. There is a nasty contradiction here: she is supposedly learning to become her own person by surrendering control over her body. Raw makes that contradiction central to its version of growing up, where the invitation to loosen up carries an uncomfortable threat.

Cannibalism becomes such an effective metaphor because it turns the vague instruction to discover yourself into something physical and frightening. Justine’s appetite belongs to her, yet it feels alien. She cannot simply decide not to experience it, and recognizing it doesn’t tell her how to live with it. That captures something unsettling about adolescence and early adulthood: your body, desires, and emotions can move ahead of your understanding. Leaving childhood behind means confronting changes you didn’t necessarily ask for and cannot easily reverse. Here, that process isn’t a graceful unveiling of an authentic self. It is messy, embarrassing, and potentially destructive.

What keeps the metaphor interesting is that eating flesh never stands for just one thing. It suggests sexual awakening, rebellion, aggression, intimacy, and the desire to experience something forbidden. Those meanings overlap without settling into a tidy explanation. Justine wants closeness, but her hunger threatens to turn closeness into consumption. She wants freedom, but acting on every impulse would make her dangerous rather than liberated. The film finds its emotional complexity in the uncomfortable space between having a desire and deciding whether to satisfy it. Growing up means encountering impulses that don’t arrive neatly labeled as healthy, shameful, loving, or cruel.

The treatment of female sexuality is particularly strong because Justine isn’t reduced to either an innocent victim or a newly empowered seductress. Her awakening is awkward and contradictory. Wanting something doesn’t automatically make her confident about it, and discovering desire doesn’t mean she understands its consequences. The film allows a young woman to be hungry, confused, physically uncomfortable, and occasionally frightening without treating those qualities as mutually exclusive. Rather than presenting sexual experience itself as a threat, it explores how difficult desire can be to navigate when you barely understand yourself. The problem isn’t that Justine has desires; it is that she must decide how to act on them.

Marillier gives that struggle a vulnerable center. Justine needs to remain someone we recognize even as her behavior becomes harder to watch, and the performance holds those extremes together. Her uncertainty matters as much as her hunger. She often seems to be studying the people around her for instructions on how to behave, only to discover that their confidence isn’t evidence of wisdom. That makes the transformation affecting rather than merely grotesque. We aren’t watching an ordinary girl disappear beneath a monster. We are watching someone struggle to incorporate a frightening discovery into her understanding of herself.

Alexia makes that process even more complicated. Played by Ella Rumpf, she offers the apparent reassurance of a familiar face, but being someone’s older sister doesn’t necessarily make you a safe guide. She understands the environment Justine has entered while also participating in its cruelty. Their relationship mixes affection with competition and the uncomfortable business of establishing separate identities. Alexia also embodies one possible response to their shared appetite: surrendering to it. That makes their bond more than a contrast between innocence and experience. She represents a future Justine has to consider—and potentially reject—even while craving her sister’s acceptance.

The veterinary-school setting sharpens all of this. These students are training to care for animals while inhabiting an environment where bodies are routinely handled and examined. The idea that humans are somehow above animals starts to look less convincing when the distinction between them becomes a matter of appetite and restraint. The setting keeps that uneasy relationship visible without requiring constant explanation. Justine’s education therefore operates on two levels: she is learning about animal bodies while confronting the animal impulses within her own. The question isn’t whether she can eliminate those impulses, but whether she can acknowledge them without allowing them to dictate everything she does.

If there is a limitation to Raw, it is that the extremity of its premise can briefly overwhelm the quieter emotional story. Some viewers will understandably spend more time bracing for the next bodily violation than considering Justine’s loneliness. Still, the excess has a purpose. Raw is another great example of the boundary-pushing spirit of New French Extremity, using graphic bodily horror and taboo subject matter to explore experiences that a more conventional coming-of-age film might soften or avoid. Its willingness to get under your skin matters because the ugliness never feels disconnected from Justine’s struggle.

At its heart, Raw works so well because its cannibalism makes the confusion of growing up feel frighteningly tangible. Leaving home, finding your place, and discovering desire become parts of the same uncomfortable process: realizing that neither your family nor your new surroundings can tell you exactly who to be. Ducournau refuses to confuse adulthood with either perfect self-control or unrestricted freedom, and she doesn’t pretend that independence arrives without consequences. Justine’s real education is learning that discovering what she wants is only the beginning. Cannibalism becomes a disturbing metaphor for her coming-of-age, turning the transition from a sheltered child into a young woman facing the unknowns of the outside world into something painfully physical.

Horror Film Review: We Are What We Are (dir. by Jim Mickle)

Posted on October 21, 2026 by Arleigh

“It’s what we do, Rose. We continue.” — Frank Parker

The scariest thing about the Parker family is how much of their cruelty falls under the heading of being a good parent. That’s the ugly little truth running through Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are, a horror movie where providing for your children and destroying their lives have become practically the same thing. Released in 2013, this loose remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 Mexican film builds its nightmare around a household that treats cannibalism as an inherited obligation. The premise sounds outrageous, but Mickle approaches it with enough seriousness to make the family’s beliefs feel disturbingly entrenched. The result is less about the shock of what these people eat than the damage done by teaching children that love requires unquestioning obedience.

The Parkers’ carefully insulated existence begins to unravel when their mother suddenly dies, leaving teenage daughters Iris and Rose to take over her responsibilities. Unfortunately, those responsibilities include preparing the family’s annual ritual meal. Their father, Frank, considers maintaining that tradition nonnegotiable, regardless of what his daughters might think or feel. Meanwhile, relentless rain starts bringing evidence of the family’s activities into the open, attracting the attention of local physician Doctor Barrow. It’s a straightforward setup, but the competing pressures work well together: the world outside is getting closer just as life inside the house becomes increasingly unbearable.

What makes the family unsettling is that their behavior follows a recognizable domestic logic. Frank expects his daughters to help around the house, care for their younger brother, Rory, and preserve the values he believes hold them together. Those expectations aren’t inherently sinister. The horror comes from what he has attached to them. Murder and cannibalism have become extensions of household duty, protected from scrutiny by the idea that previous generations knew best. Mickle doesn’t need to make every conversation openly threatening. Once that arrangement becomes clear, even an ordinary instruction carries the possibility of something awful.

Bill Sage makes Frank a convincingly suffocating presence. He isn’t an entertaining monster whose outrageous behavior gives the audience permission to enjoy him. He’s a miserable, controlling father whose certainty leaves almost no room for anyone else. Sage understands how frightening it can be when someone treats his authority as a fact of nature. Frank doesn’t think he needs to win an argument because he barely recognizes that an argument could exist. His grief complicates the performance without excusing him. He has lost his wife, but his response is to force his daughters deeper into the system that shaped her life.

Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner provide the emotional weight as Iris and Rose. Childers gives Iris the worn-down composure of someone being pushed into adulthood before she has had much opportunity to understand herself. Garner makes Rose’s resistance feel less like easy rebelliousness than a growing inability to tolerate what everyone else insists is necessary. Their performances work especially well together because the sisters don’t respond to their circumstances identically. Love keeps them connected, but it doesn’t erase their differences. They’re trying to protect each other while navigating a household that has taught them to confuse protection with participation.

That ambiguity is one of the film’s strongest qualities. Iris and Rose are victims of their upbringing, but they’re also being drawn into perpetuating its violence. Mickle doesn’t flatten that situation into a simple division between innocent children and an evil adult. Instead, he lets the discomfort linger. Understanding why the sisters struggle to resist doesn’t make the consequences disappear. Their affection for Rory adds another painful layer, since caring for him means deciding whether to preserve the only family structure they know or recognize how dangerous that structure has become. The stakes are emotional long before they become physical.

The atmosphere reinforces that feeling of a household slowly poisoning itself. Rain hangs over everything, and the woods surrounding the Parker home offer little sense of freedom. Cinematographer Ryan Samul gives the film a muted, damp beauty that makes the setting feel both natural and faintly diseased. Inside, the worn rooms suggest generations of people living under the same expectations. Nothing needs to announce itself as sinister because the whole place feels burdened by repetition. The house isn’t frightening because it looks unfamiliar. It’s frightening because its familiar domestic spaces have been organized around something nobody is allowed to question.

Mickle’s slow pacing generally suits that approach. He lets silence, routine, and uncomfortable proximity do much of the work, saving explicit violence for moments when it can actually break through the film’s restraint. That patience makes the horror feel embedded in everyday life rather than dropped into it for a quick reaction. Still, there’s a difference between letting tension develop and simply holding a mood, and the movie occasionally drifts toward the latter. A few stretches repeat the same emotional information without finding a fresh angle. The oppressive atmosphere remains effective, but the storytelling doesn’t always move with equal confidence.

The outside investigation is the clearest example of that limitation. Michael Parks brings welcome sadness and gravity to Doctor Barrow, but his search sometimes feels more mechanically plotted than the family drama. We’re waiting for him to establish what the movie has already made clear, which takes some urgency out of his discoveries. The historical flashbacks have a similar drawback. They give the ritual a background, but the explanation is less compelling than watching its influence play out between living people. The film is strongest when it stays close to the sisters and lets inherited belief reveal itself through behavior rather than additional exposition.

When the ending finally tears through that restraint, the violence feels like a release of everything the family has kept buried. It’s messy, startling, and open to debate as a culmination of the sisters’ psychological journey, but it certainly refuses an easy resolution. We Are What We Are has its slow patches and occasionally spells out ideas that are already clear. Even so, its performances and oppressive sense of place make it a strong, deeply unpleasant family horror film. What stays with you isn’t simply the cannibalism. It’s Frank’s conviction that passing his damage on to his children is the most loving thing he can do.

Horror Film Review: Martyrs (dir. by Pascal Laugier)

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Arleigh

“It’s so easy to create a victim, young lady, so easy.” — Mademoiselle

The scariest thing in Martyrs isn’t how much pain people can inflict, but how calmly they can explain why they’re doing it. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 French horror film begins with violence that feels desperate and chaotic, then gradually reveals something colder behind it. Anger gives way to procedure, and cruelty acquires the language of a higher purpose. That progression makes the film more disturbing than its reputation as an endurance test might suggest. The graphic brutality is impossible to ignore, but what lingers is the ease with which human suffering becomes somebody else’s project.

That makes Martyrs a particularly bleak entry in the New French Extremity, even though Laugier resisted the association. Emerging around the turn of the century, this loosely connected wave of filmmaking challenged audiences through confrontational violence, sexuality, and bodily vulnerability. Films like Trouble Every Day, Irréversible, High Tension, and Inside helped establish a cinema in which physical safety could disappear without warning. Martyrs shares that willingness to push past comfortable boundaries, but its most unsettling quality isn’t simply excess. It’s the suggestion that the people crossing those boundaries might regard themselves as thoughtful, disciplined, and entirely justified.

The tradition is still going strong today, although its influence is easier to trace than any fixed membership. Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance demonstrate the continuing appetite for French filmmaking that uses bodily destruction and transformation to explore larger anxieties. Neither is doing exactly what Laugier does, and their differences matter. Where those films find room for provocative humor or unexpected tenderness, Martyrs offers very little breathing space. Its approach is brutally direct: before asking what suffering might mean, it makes you confront the person who has to endure it.

The story initially centers on Lucie, who escapes horrific captivity as a child and grows into an adult still trapped by what happened to her. Played by Mylène Jampanoï, she believes she has located the people responsible, now living an apparently ordinary family life. Her friend Anna, played by Morjana Alaoui, becomes involved in the aftermath of Lucie’s attempt to confront them. At first, the setup suggests a revenge thriller, with the possibility that identifying and punishing the guilty might bring some kind of closure. Laugier quickly makes that expectation feel inadequate. The past isn’t something Lucie can simply shoot her way out of.

Jampanoï gives Lucie a frightening volatility without reducing her to a spectacle of instability. Her anger feels inseparable from terror, and every apparent assertion of control seems dangerously temporary. There’s nothing slick or triumphant about her. Even when she acts decisively, she looks like someone fighting an emergency that nobody else can fully see. That performance keeps the early violence from becoming satisfying payback. Lucie’s actions may have a target, but her suffering doesn’t have a clear endpoint. The film understands the difference between stopping an abuser and undoing what the abuse has already done.

Anna provides the emotional connection that keeps all this from becoming an abstract exercise in misery. Alaoui makes her loyalty feel affectionate, frightened, and occasionally overwhelmed rather than conveniently heroic. She wants to help Lucie, even when she can’t fully understand her or accept what she’s done. Their relationship gives the film something worth caring about before its larger machinery reveals itself. Anna’s instinct is to stay with someone in pain, not turn that pain into an explanation. That distinction becomes increasingly important as the film introduces people whose interest in suffering has nothing to do with compassion.

Laugier’s control of the changing narrative is one of the film’s biggest strengths. Each discovery reshapes what came before, moving the story from personal retaliation toward organized cruelty. These shifts could have felt like disconnected attempts to top the previous shock, but they follow a disturbing emotional logic. The further we move from Lucie’s frantic perspective, the more controlled the surrounding world becomes. Unfortunately, control doesn’t mean safety. The ordinary house becomes especially unsettling because its domestic spaces and hidden horrors belong to the same functioning environment. Nothing about comfort or respectability guarantees innocence.

The violence changes along with that perspective. Early attacks are abrupt and messy, shaped by panic, confusion, and immediate danger. Later, brutality becomes repetitive and procedural, stripped of anything resembling excitement. That’s where Martyrs becomes hardest to watch. Laugier doesn’t always offer the relief of a new development or a plausible escape route; sometimes he forces the audience to sit with the awful predictability of what comes next. The horror lies as much in routine as in injury. Someone’s worst imaginable experience can be another person’s ordinary assignment, carried out without any visible emotional investment.

Catherine Bégin’s Mademoiselle embodies that detachment. Her composure is more upsetting than a theatrical display of sadism would have been, because she treats the film’s atrocities as reasonable steps toward an important goal. Still, this is also where Martyrs becomes open to criticism. Its philosophical explanation can feel like an attempt to lend profundity to prolonged images of women being brutalized. Whether that framework deepens the experience or merely rationalizes it is a fair question. For me, the film works best when Mademoiselle’s reasoning exposes her moral emptiness, not when it seems to invite admiration for the supposed grandeur of her inquiry.

The ending leaves that inquiry unresolved, refusing to turn everything we’ve witnessed into a clear answer. Its ambiguity is effective because certainty has become such a destructive obsession throughout the film. Some viewers may find that withholding frustrating, especially after such an exhausting ordeal, but a tidy revelation would risk validating the people who engineered it. Martyrs remains an exceptional horror film precisely because its ideas don’t make its violence comfortable. Beneath the blood and philosophical speculation is a much simpler moral horror: people can become so convinced of the importance of their questions that they stop seeing the humanity of whoever they force to answer them.

Horror Film Review: The Funhouse (dir. by Tobe Hooper)

Posted on October 18, 2026 by Arleigh

“Who will dare to face the challenge of the Funhouse? Who is mad enough to enter that world of darkness?” — Funhouse Barker

There’s something wonderfully sleazy about a horror movie that makes you feel like you need a shower before anyone has even been murdered. Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse (1981) gets that feeling just right, turning a traveling carnival into a place where the entertainment seems questionable and whatever happens behind the scenes looks considerably worse. It’s not Hooper’s most relentless film, and its straightforward story sometimes struggles to justify the leisurely buildup. Still, there’s enough grime, menace, and visual imagination here to make a familiar teenagers-in-trouble premise feel like more than another ride around the slasher circuit.

The teenagers are Amy Harper, played by Elizabeth Berridge, her date Buzz, and their friends Liz and Richie. Their evening starts with the usual carnival activities: wandering around, checking out attractions, and looking for ways to entertain themselves. Eventually, they decide to hide inside the funhouse overnight. It’s the kind of bad idea that becomes irresistible when nobody wants to be the boring one who objects. After witnessing a murder involving a worker wearing a Frankenstein mask, they find themselves trapped inside with people who have a very good reason to make sure they never leave.

Before any of that, Hooper introduces a playful awareness of horror movies through Amy’s younger brother. He’s a horror fan whose enthusiasm spills into an elaborate prank, approaching Amy in the shower while wearing a mask. The sequence borrows from Halloween and Psycho, turning familiar suspense techniques into a kid’s obnoxious attempt to stage his own scary movie. It’s a neat little meta touch because horror already exists as entertainment within these characters’ lives. They recognize its costumes and enjoy its tricks. The trouble begins when that familiarity encourages them to treat danger as something they can safely play around with.

The carnival extends that idea on a larger scale. Its business depends on selling fear without consequences, and the teenagers arrive expecting every unsettling sight to be part of the experience. Hooper makes that expectation increasingly difficult to maintain. There’s a sourness underneath the attractions, a sense that the smiles and sales pitches barely cover the irritation of the people working there. The movie’s sleaze isn’t just a matter of dirty surroundings. It comes from the uneasy relationship between the customers looking for cheap thrills and the workers who seem to regard them with boredom, contempt, or something less easily identified.

Hooper spends a substantial amount of time letting us absorb that atmosphere. Depending on your patience, this either gives the movie its personality or makes the first half feel like an extended wait for something to happen. There are stretches where the teenagers’ wandering could have been tightened without losing much. On the other hand, rushing directly to the murders would sacrifice the sense that this place has an existence beyond the plot. By the time the group becomes trapped, the carnival feels less like a collection of convenient horror props than a shabby little world with its own unpleasant routines.

Once inside the funhouse, the visual design takes over. Mechanical figures, grotesque faces, and cluttered passageways make it difficult to separate an actual threat from another piece of scenery. Hooper gets suspense out of that uncertainty, giving your eyes plenty to investigate without always rewarding the effort with an immediate scare. The machinery keeps moving regardless of what happens around it, which becomes increasingly unnerving. Something designed to provide a few minutes of harmless excitement turns into an obstacle course whose mechanisms have no interest in whether anyone gets hurt. The attraction doesn’t become evil; its normal operation simply becomes dangerous.

The characters are less distinctive than their surroundings. Berridge gives Amy a believable vulnerability, and her discomfort never feels like an excuse for smugly announcing that everyone else should have known better. She’s simply a young woman whose evening gets horribly out of hand. Buzz, Liz, and Richie have enough personality to establish the group, but not enough to make their individual fates especially affecting. That’s the main limitation of the screenplay: the situation generates more investment than the people caught in it. You’re anxious about what might happen without necessarily feeling that you know these kids very well.

Kevin Conway adds a stronger dose of personality as three different carnival barkers, especially in his role as the masked killer’s father. His combination of aggression and warped protectiveness gives the horror an ugly domestic undercurrent. The creature is frightening, but his vulnerability makes the relationship more disturbing than a simple partnership between villains. The Frankenstein mask also pays off the movie’s interest in familiar horror imagery: a recognizable monster face initially offers something almost reassuring, until its removal destroys that comfort. The makeup is memorable, although the film’s use of physical difference as a source of monstrous terror remains an uncomfortable shortcut.

When the chase finally takes over, The Funhouse delivers tense, claustrophobic suspense without becoming an endless procession of elaborate kills. Its cramped spaces and unreliable hiding places make escape feel frustratingly difficult. The thin characterization and occasional sluggishness keep it from matching Hooper’s strongest work, but the setting remains potent enough to carry the film. From the brother playing horror director to the carnival packaging fear for paying customers, the movie keeps showing people enjoying pretend terror before confronting something they can’t control. It’s an effective, grimy little nightmare that makes the midway’s cheap pleasures look a lot less inviting.

Horror Film Review: The Barn (dir. by Justin M. Seaman)

Posted on October 18, 2026 by Arleigh

“Never trick the treat. You never break a deal in Halloween because it’s the one night the devil can come for you.” — Sam Daniels

Horror fans who grew up renting VHS tapes from the local video store will find a lot to love in The Barn, a 2016 indie horror film that wears its ’80s influences on its sleeve with pride. Directed by Justin M. Seaman, this scrappy, affectionate throwback to the VHS-era Halloween slasher is built from rural legends, practical monsters, teenage misadventures, and a small-town setting soaked in October. It is not flawless, but it is sincere, energetic, and far more fun than its rough production values might initially suggest.

The story begins long before the main events of the film, in the small town of Wheary Falls, where a local tragedy involving children and a church sets the stage for an evil that has been waiting in an old barn. Decades later, it is Halloween 1989, and high school seniors Sam and Josh are determined to make the most of their final Devil’s Night before graduation. Their plan involves a road trip to a rock concert, but as often happens in horror movies, the night takes a turn. They and their friends encounter the forbidden barn, ignore the obvious danger, and awaken three supernatural killers: a scarecrow, a pumpkin-headed creature, and a miner boogeyman. What follows is a night of stalking, chasing, and bloodletting as the group realizes that the local legend is very real.

The premise is intentionally simple, and that simplicity is both a strength and a limitation. On one hand, it gives the movie a clear, classic horror structure: teenagers venture somewhere they should not, ancient evil awakens, and survival becomes the only goal. On the other hand, the plot does not offer many surprises. You can probably guess who will die, when the monsters will strike, and how the final confrontation will unfold. But The Barn does not seem especially interested in subverting expectations. It wants to deliver a familiar kind of Halloween fun, and in that respect, it succeeds more often than not.

The film’s greatest asset is its atmosphere. Seaman clearly understands that Halloween horror is about more than just a masked killer or a bloody kill scene. It is about the feeling of the season: dead leaves, cold nights, cornfields, porch decorations, costumes, campfires, and the sense that the world becomes a little stranger after dark. The Barn captures that feeling with impressive commitment. The rural Pennsylvania setting gives the movie a natural autumnal texture, while the period details help establish its late-’80s identity. The film does not have a huge budget, but it uses its resources well, creating a world that feels handmade and lived-in rather than sterile or overly polished.

The monsters are another major highlight. The three creatures at the center of the film are not especially complex, but they are memorable. The scarecrow has the classic rural-horror menace of a figure that should be harmless but is anything but. The pumpkin man is goofy in the best possible way, with a design that feels like it came straight from an old horror poster or a particularly ambitious haunted attraction. The miner is perhaps the most unsettling of the three, bringing a grimy, folkloric quality to the group. Together, they form a fun monster squad that gives the movie its personality. They are not trying to be terrifying in a modern, realistic sense; they are trying to be the kind of creatures you would rent a VHS tape to see, and they absolutely achieve that.

The practical effects and makeup work add a lot to their appeal. The blood and gore are not especially sophisticated, but they are tangible, messy, and playful. There is a physicality to the kills that modern horror often loses when it relies too heavily on digital effects. You can tell that people built these costumes, applied this makeup, and staged these effects with limited money but plenty of enthusiasm. That handmade quality gives The Barn a charm that bigger productions often lack. Even when a gag does not fully work, it feels like it was made by people who care about what they are doing.

The soundtrack also deserves praise. Rocky Gray’s score blends synth-driven horror music with a rock and metal edge that fits both the film’s setting and its tone. The music gives the movie momentum, especially during the early stretches when the group is heading toward the barn and the sense of danger is still building. It also reinforces the retro feel, echoing the kind of pulsing, atmospheric scores that defined so much of 1980s horror. The soundtrack helps The Barn feel less like a modern movie set in the past and more like an actual artifact from the era it is imitating.

The cast also gives the film some genuine ’80s horror credibility, most notably through the appearance of Linnea Quigley. As one of the definitive scream queens of the era, thanks to roles in films like The Return of the Living Dead and Night of the Demons, Quigley brings an instant connection to the kind of horror The Barn is trying to honor. Her presence may be brief, but it gives the movie real genre bona fides and makes the retro homage feel more authentic. Ari Lehman, the original Jason from Friday the 13th, adds another layer of fan-friendly horror history to the proceedings. These appearances do not transform the film, but they reinforce the sense that Seaman knows exactly whose legacy he is celebrating.

The acting is where the film’s limitations become most apparent. Mitchell Musolino and Will Stout, as Sam and Josh, have a likable enough friendship, but the performances around them vary in quality. Some lines are delivered awkwardly, some characters feel more like archetypes than people, and the dialogue occasionally lands with a thud. However, this is not necessarily a dealbreaker for a movie like this. The Barn is not aiming for naturalistic drama. It is aiming for the heightened, slightly wooden energy of low-budget ’80s horror, where teenagers often speak in a way that feels more like a movie version of teenagers than real people. If you accept that style, the acting becomes part of the movie’s charm rather than a distraction.

The screenplay is similarly uneven. Seaman gives the characters more personality and backstory than many microbudget horror films bother with, which is admirable. Sam and Josh are not just anonymous victims; they have goals, frustrations, and a sense of history with each other. The supporting characters also get enough definition to make their fates matter, at least a little. However, the movie sometimes tries to do too much. The road trip to a metal concert and the subplot involving a church food drive add texture and opportunities for cameos, but they also slow the pacing and make the story feel a little loose. The film is strongest when it focuses on the group, the barn, and the monsters. When it spreads its attention across too many threads, it loses some of its momentum.

The first two acts are where The Barn really comes alive. The buildup is fun, the atmosphere is strong, and the movie has a playful sense of discovery as the teens stumble deeper into danger. There is genuine excitement when the creatures begin appearing, and the film does a good job of making the barn and surrounding countryside feel like a place where bad things have always happened. The kills are inventive enough to keep things lively, and the movie’s sense of humor prevents it from becoming too grim. It is not trying to frighten you on a deep psychological level. It is trying to entertain you with spooky monsters, Halloween chaos, and a healthy dose of nostalgia, and for most of its runtime, it does exactly that.

The final act is where the movie loses some of its steam. The last half hour feels longer than it should, partly because the film keeps teasing an ending before gearing up for another confrontation. The methods the characters use to fight back are not as creative or satisfying as the buildup promised. Instead of escalating into a truly wild climax, the movie becomes more straightforward, and some of the fun drains out of it. The pacing issues are noticeable, especially after such an energetic first hour. It is not a disastrous ending, but it is the weakest part of the film, and it keeps The Barn from reaching the level of the best Halloween-themed horror movies.

Still, it is hard to stay mad at a movie this sincere. The Barn was made on a very small budget, and you can see the limitations in the production values, sound, and acting. But you can also see the passion in every frame. Seaman is not cynically imitating the ’80s to cash in on nostalgia; he is building the kind of movie he clearly wishes had existed on his shelf growing up. That enthusiasm matters. It gives the film a warmth that many more technically competent horror movies lack. The flaws feel like the flaws of a friend’s homemade haunted house: crooked signs, questionable acting, cheap props, but undeniable fun.

Comparisons to Trick ’r Treat are inevitable because both films treat Halloween as a night governed by rules, legends, and supernatural consequences. But The Barn is smaller, rougher, and more rooted in the slasher tradition. It is less polished than Michael Dougherty’s film, but it has its own scrappy personality. It is also more focused on monsters and practical effects than on anthology-style storytelling. If Trick ’r Treat is the polished Halloween party, The Barn is the slightly chaotic neighborhood haunt run by someone who really loves scaring people.

By the time the credits roll, The Barn has proven that a horror movie does not need a huge budget or a flawless script to leave a lasting impression; it just needs heart, atmosphere, and a clear sense of what it loves about the genre. Seaman’s film delivers all three, wrapping its flaws in enough retro charm, practical effects, and Linnea Quigley-powered ’80s credibility to make them feel like part of the package rather than detractions. It is a movie that knows what it wants to be and delivers it with a grin, even when the acting or pacing stumbles. The Barn may not replace the classics in your annual rotation, but it earns a place alongside them as a fun, scrappy Halloween treat.

Horror Film Review: The Babysitter (dir. by McG)

Posted on October 16, 2026 by Arleigh

“Well, I like weird, all of the time.” — Bee

The Babysitter is, above all else, Samara Weaving’s coming-out party—a wildly entertaining showcase that proves she can carry a horror movie with charm, menace, and complete comedic fearlessness. McG’s 2017 Netflix film, written by Brian Duffield, is built around a simple, absurd premise: a lonely kid discovers his beautiful babysitter is part of a Satanic cult. The movie lives and dies on Weaving’s performance as Bee, and she delivers enough star power, humor, and danger to turn a thin genre premise into a fast, colorful, gleefully violent horror comedy.

The story follows Cole, played by Judah Lewis, a nervous twelve-year-old who is still young enough to need a babysitter but old enough to hate that fact. His parents leave for the weekend, leaving him in the care of Bee. Cole has a massive crush on her, which makes the movie’s central betrayal sting even more. After staying up past bedtime to spy on the adults, he sees Bee and her friends murder someone as part of an occult ritual. Suddenly, the cozy suburban house becomes a battlefield, and Cole has to survive a night of Satanic murder, increasingly absurd violence, and the horrifying realization that the person he trusted most is trying to kill him.

Without Weaving, this premise could easily collapse into forgettable direct-to-streaming filler. Bee could have been nothing more than a one-dimensional “hot evil babysitter,” but Weaving gives her real charisma. She is funny, flirtatious, warm, and completely unhinged, often within the same scene. The film understands that Bee works best when she is both genuinely likable and genuinely dangerous. Cole trusts her because she treats him kindly, and that makes the reveal hurt. Weaving also gets most of the movie’s best lines and biggest moments, and she plays them with the kind of gleeful theatricality the material demands. This is the performance that announced her as a major modern horror presence, and it is easy to see why filmmakers and audiences took notice.

What makes The Babysitter work beyond Weaving is its total commitment to the bit. The film is essentially Home Alone filtered through a Satanic slasher and a teenage sex comedy. Cole fights back with household objects, improvisation, and pure panic, while Bee and her friends keep getting killed in ways that are gruesome, creative, and often funny. The movie never takes its mythology seriously enough for the ritual stuff to become dull. The cult’s plan is mostly an excuse for carnage, but the carnage is lively enough that the thin plot barely matters. This is a movie where a kitchen can become a weapon, a pool can become a crime scene, and a teenage cultist can be defeated by the kind of slapstick logic usually reserved for cartoons.

The supporting cult members are broad, ridiculous characters, but they fit the movie’s tone. Robbie Amell plays Max, a jock who clearly believes he is the coolest person in any room. Bella Thorne’s Allison is glamorous, vain, and increasingly undone as the night falls apart. Hana Mae Lee’s Sonya is the quiet, strange one, while Andrew Bachelor’s John is the guy who thinks he is more essential to the group than anyone else believes. None of them are deeply developed, but they do not need to be. They are archetypes, and the actors lean into that. Their banter is often juvenile, sometimes forced, but it matches the movie’s hyperactive, self-aware energy.

McG’s direction is both part of the film’s appeal and one of its biggest problems. He directs it like an extended music video: saturated colors, quick cuts, pop songs, pop-culture references, and a camera that rarely wants to sit still. When the style clicks, The Babysitter feels punchy and alive, with the energy of a comic book come to life. But McG leans so heavily into the comedy side that the movie often loses its horror footing. The jokes, quips, and broad performances are constantly pushed to the front, and when the film tries to shift into an actual horror beat, the moment frequently lands flat. The cult members are too goofy, the kills too cartoonish, and the tone too jokey for the movie to build much dread. Some jokes land with a thud, some references feel dated already, and the constant visual busy-ness can overwhelm the simpler pleasures of the premise. The film succeeds despite McG’s excesses, not entirely because of them.

The horror is more splattery than scary. Anyone expecting real dread, slow-building tension, or a genuinely unsettling villain will likely be disappointed. The movie’s comedy comes from the collision of childhood anxieties with extreme genre nonsense. Cole is afraid of bullies, girls, being alone, and growing up; the film literalizes those fears by putting him in a house full of murderous adults who want to sacrifice him. Beneath the blood and jokes, there is a surprisingly sincere coming-of-age story. But because the comedy is so relentless, the horror rarely gets room to breathe, and the movie’s scarier moments feel more like brief interruptions than genuine escalations.

Cole’s arc gives the chaos a little heart. At the beginning, he is passive, scared, and constantly humiliated. By the end, he has been forced to confront every fear he has, usually while covered in gore and running for his life. Judah Lewis is not giving a nuanced performance, but he is likable and believable as a terrified kid pushed past his limits. His friendship with Melanie, played by Emily Alyn Lind, adds another layer of warmth. Melanie encourages him to stand up for himself, and their awkward middle-school dynamic gives the movie a sweet emotional center beneath all the occult murder.

The film’s biggest weakness is its willingness to sacrifice logic for a joke. Characters make choices that only make sense because the plot needs them to. The cult’s plan is not especially well thought out. Adults and neighbors are conveniently unaware of gunfire, explosions, and general mayhem. The movie also sometimes views its female characters through Cole’s adolescent gaze, especially early on, which can make Bee and Allison feel more like fantasy objects than full people. The film gives them more agency as it goes, but the perspective remains very much that of a horny, terrified twelve-year-old boy. Whether that works for you depends on how much patience you have for that kind of teenage-male fantasy.

Still, The Babysitter has personality to spare. It is bright, brash, mean in a playful way, and unapologetically silly. It does not have the atmosphere of a prestige horror film or the emotional weight of the genre’s best work. It is not trying to be The Babadook or Hereditary. Instead, it is trying to be a bloody, funny, high-energy midnight movie, and it mostly succeeds. It is the kind of film best watched late at night, with low expectations and a high tolerance for cartoonish violence.

By the time the credits roll, The Babysitter has done exactly what it set out to do: deliver a loud, bloody, ridiculous good time while making Samara Weaving impossible to ignore. McG’s direction can be excessive, the comedy often crowds out the horror, and the scares are mild, but the film has enough energy, humor, and personality to make up for its flaws. Weaving turns Bee into one of the most entertaining horror villains of the Netflix era and uses the role as a true coming-out party for her career. Cole’s survival story gives the mayhem a surprisingly sweet coming-of-age core, but Weaving is the true engine of the film. It may not be a horror classic, but it is a very enjoyable piece of genre junk food: loud, colorful, violent, ridiculous, and much more fun than it has any right to be.

Horror Film Review: Other Mommy (dir. Rob Savage)

Posted on October 15, 2026 by Arleigh

“Sometimes I think about when you and I were one person, and it makes me so happy, I cry. Do you remember that?” — Other Mommy

Jessica Chastain is the only reason Other Mommy works at all, and even she cannot quite save a horror movie that turns a genuinely strong premise into something silly through its own adaptation. Rob Savage’s 2026 film is based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, and the source material’s central idea—a young girl discovers that the entity haunting her house looks exactly like her mother—is legitimately creepy and emotionally rich. The novel understands that a child’s fear of losing her mother, and a mother’s fear of being replaced, can carry an entire horror story. The movie takes that same foundation and rushes through it, leans into chaotic scares, and never finds a consistent tone, until the premise starts to feel ridiculous rather than frightening. What keeps it from being a total loss is Chastain’s double performance as both the struggling mother Ursula and the grotesque creature impersonating her. Without her, this would be an easy movie to forget. With her, it becomes a frustrating watch—good enough to keep you interested, bad enough to make you wish it had been better.

The story follows Bela, an eight-year-old girl played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who lives with her parents Ursula and Russ, played by Chastain and Jay Duplass. Their home is already unstable. The marriage is strained, the parents are distracted, and Bela is left to make sense of it all on her own. Into that environment comes Other Mommy, an entity that emerges from the closet wearing Ursula’s face. She does not simply attack Bela. Instead, she asks to be let into her heart, promising love and closeness while making it clear that refusal will have consequences. In Malerman’s novel, that setup works because the book takes its time exploring the psychological weight of it: a child caught between a mother who cannot fully show up for her and a monster who will happily pretend to. The film has the same ingredients but treats them more like a starting point for increasingly ridiculous scares than something it actually wants to sit with, and that is where the adaptation starts to lose the plot.

Chastain is the reason any of it works at all. Playing Ursula and Other Mommy gives her a chance to show two very different sides of the same face, and she makes the contrast convincing. As Ursula, she is tired, brittle, and emotionally unavailable in a way that feels believable even when the plot around her falls apart. She loves her daughter, but she is too overwhelmed and angry to show it consistently, and Chastain plays that failure without turning Ursula into a villain. As Other Mommy, she gets to go full nightmare fuel. The creature performs motherhood like someone who has studied it from the outside, smiling too widely, speaking in a warm but slightly off register, and moving with an unnatural confidence that makes every interaction feel wrong. Chastain understands that the scariest version of the monster is not the one that growls or lunges, but the one that almost gets the role right. She knows the words. She does not understand the feeling behind them.

That performance is what gives the film its few genuinely effective moments. When Other Mommy pleads with Bela to accept her, the scene works because the creature is both terrifying and pitiful. She wants to be loved, believed, and chosen, and she cannot comprehend why Bela would resist. There is something sad about that, and Chastain finds it without softening the character’s menace. She makes the entity feel like a desperate, needy thing wearing a mother’s face, and that is a much more interesting horror idea than the movie’s actual plot delivery system. If the film had leaned harder into that emotional contradiction and given it room to breathe, it might have come closer to capturing what makes the novel’s premise so effective. Instead, it keeps rushing past the interesting parts to get to the next loud, chaotic set piece.

That pacing is one of the movie’s biggest problems. At 93 minutes, Other Mommy moves fast, and not in a good way. It introduces the family’s problems, brings in the monster, and starts escalating the scares before the audience has had much time to connect with anyone. We understand that Ursula and Russ are unhappy, but we do not feel the specific weight of that unhappiness. We know Bela is lonely, but the film does not give her enough quiet moments to show what that loneliness looks like day to day. The result is a movie full of confrontations with the entity but very little emotional buildup between them. The family feels more like pieces in a horror machine than people whose survival actually matters, and that makes it hard to care when things go wrong. The novel earns its scares by making you care about the people first; the film skips that step and wonders why the scares do not hit as hard.

Savage’s direction does not help. He clearly likes big visual ideas, sudden movements, and scares that come out of nowhere, but the execution often feels more frantic than frightening. The creature design has some inventive moments—Other Mommy can stretch, contort, and squeeze herself into spaces no human body should fit—but the film rarely trusts quiet dread. It piles on noise, fast editing, and chaotic CGI effects until the tension flattens out. A scare that might have landed with a little patience becomes one more startle in a long line of startles. When the entity lingers at the edge of the frame, half-seen through a doorway or reflected somewhere she should not be, the movie creates real unease. Those moments are too rare. Most of the time, the film would rather show you everything immediately and hope volume substitutes for atmosphere, which is exactly the kind of choice that turns a creepy premise into a silly one.

The tonal swings make things worse. Other Mommy wants to be sad, scary, funny, and ridiculous all at once, and it does not know when to switch gears. There are sequences where the creature’s behavior becomes so exaggerated that it tips into camp, including a ball-pit scene that pushes the film into full-on absurdity. That campiness might work in a movie that fully embraces it, but this one keeps trying to have it both ways. It wants you to laugh at the monster’s physical comedy one minute and feel genuine dread the next, and the shifts are jarring rather than effective. The result is a film that never settles into a consistent identity. It is too silly to be truly scary and too serious to be fun camp, and that in-between space is where it lost me—and where it drifts furthest from the novel’s more controlled, unsettling tone.

The supporting cast does not do much to help. Duplass gives Russ a believable sense of helplessness, but the character is thinly written and mostly reactive. Karen Allen, Arian Moayed, and Dichen Lachman show up in roles that serve the plot rather than add dimension. Clark is better than the material deserves, bringing a real vulnerability to Bela that makes her more than just a screaming kid. She holds her own opposite Chastain, which is no small feat given how much the older actress is doing in every scene. But even a good child performance cannot fix a screenplay that does not know what it wants to say about the family at the center of the story.

In the end, Other Mommy is a movie with one great performance and an adaptation that takes a strong, genuinely unsettling premise and makes it feel silly through rushed pacing, chaotic direction, and tonal confusion. The idea of a mother-shaped entity trying to replace a child’s real mother is not the problem—Malerman’s novel proves it can be genuinely frightening. The problem is that Savage’s film does not know how to translate that idea to the screen without turning it into a series of loud, inconsistent set pieces. Chastain plays both sides of the dynamic with total commitment, and she is the only reason the movie stays watchable. It is not the worst horror movie of the year, but it is a disappointing one, because you can see the better version of this story trying to get out. If you watch it, watch it for her. Just do not expect the movie around her to hold up the way the book’s premise deserves.