horror

Dooba Dooba (2026)

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As often as it is reclaimed by the very people it others as monstrous villains, horror has always been a largely reactionary genre. You don’t have to scratch too hard at the surface of any classic horror title to find kneejerk fears of people with bodily, mental, gender, or sexual difference being expressed through metaphor. It’s a genre built on societal disgust with facial disfigurement, discomfort with ambiguous gender presentation, and paranoia over escaped mental patients, but it’s also one that’s routinely championed by the real-life targets of those societal phobias. Usually, it takes a couple decades for fans to reclaim blatantly homophobic films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as Queer, Actually but, given enough time, every major horror title eventually gets its due as a transgressive, funhouse mirror version of Representation. What’s funny about the new found-footage horror Dooba Dooba is that it encourages that reclamation to happen in real time. Textually, the film very directly preys on people’s suspicions that modern teens diagnosed with severe anxiety and other social disorders are just faking it to torture the rest of us. Subtextually, its flippant construction leaves room for younger audiences to celebrate that torture. It functions as a kind of power fantasy for socially anxious Zoomers to get their revenge on the Millennials & Gen-Xers who doubt the severity of their mental disabilities. From either perspective, it’s an act of generational warfare — a perversely amusing one.

If Dooba Dooba openly participates in any other long-running horror traditions, it’s in its modern interpretation of the classic babysitter slasher. A 20something aspiring singer takes on a babysitting gig to make ends meet, and the extent of her desperation for rent money is immediately tested. The child is 16 years old but too anxious to stay by herself because she once witnessed the murder of her young brother in the family home. Her overly horny, socially awkward parents explain that to alleviate the teen’s anxieties, the babysitter must sleep in the same bedroom as her, must constantly repeat the nonsense phrase “dooba dooba” whenever making noise elsewhere in the house, and must remain under constant surveillance via closed-circuit security cameras, stationed in every room. Although the story is set in 2022, the cameras are much older & lower-quality than modern tech, giving the entire film the feeling of a crime scene documented via stationary camcorder. Whenever the edit switches to a tight-zoom-in, you can practically count the grains on the screen. You never forget that you’re watching a contemporary story, though, because the way the Zoomer teen in the babysitter’s care weaponizes her social anxieties as a form of low-level torture is distinctly of-the-now. For instance, she mocks the poor babysitter’s Soundcloud tracks as facile novelties, then passes off the faux pas as an inability to read social cues. Then, the torture gets more literal & physical, once her malevolence is clearly established as intentional.

Where the film steps away from othering & mocking teens who struggle with anxiety or Autistic social disfunction is in handing its young villain the keys to the editing room. We are not watching raw security-camera footage of this babysitter’s torment, but rather a PowerPoint-style presentation of the night’s events as interpreted through a prankster teen’s online-troll sensibilities. The horrors documented in this suburban home are flippantly narrated in the lower-case, goofy-font text of a teen fucking around in an AIM chatroom, mocking the victim instead of her tormentor. They’re also frequently interrupted by stock footage of and “fun” factoids about past American presidents (such as their history as slave owners), as if the film were half snuff tape, half high school term paper assignment. All suburban-set horror tends to function as a stand-in for the horrors of America at large, but Dooba Dooba is smart to make that thematic connection explicit, so it’s clear that it isn’t only punching down at awkward teens on the spectrum. Our socially maladjusted villain, her gig-economy victim, and her alcoholic swinger parents all come together to represent something insidious about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the modern American suburban home, protected by the red-white-and-blue flags that wave above. Of course, some public domain horror clips and documents of surgical gore are also included in the mix, just to keep the genre exercise clearly defined.

Overall, Dooba Dooba may not be as ambitious nor as accomplished as other recent “analog” horrors like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters, or Skinamarink, but it’s got a real wicked streak to it, and it makes some impressively distinct visual & editing choices for something so obviously cheap. The cast is limited in both size and skill, but their awkwardness on camera only adds to the real-life social discomforts they’re supposed to evoke. The cathode-ray CCTV imagery is also limited in its texture & movement, but the sequencing of the edit maintains a perverse sense of humor & momentum throughout. Not for nothing, the film is also under 80 minutes long, making for a perfect January horror B-picture experience. Between Primate, The Bone Temple, and Dooba Dooba, the year’s off to a great trashy start. Just be careful not to play a drinking game with this particular one’s title, since it’s repeated often enough to send you to the hospital.

-Brandon Ledet

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

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In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Host (2006)

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When we discussed our conflicting feelings about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Brandon likened it to how Spanish critics have had to explain to English-speaking audiences that Pedro Almodóvar’s work in his native language has always been purposefully arch & overly theatrical. Specifically, the discourse revolved around allegations that English speakers perceive Almodóvar’s Spanish language works through a kind of veil of European exoticism while accurately identifying the more over-the-top and camp sensibilities in his recent films for audiences in the Western Hemisphere, which may also be the case with del Toro’s filmography. I’ve occasionally wondered about this in relation to last year’s Mickey 17, which was an overall disappointment to me as a Bong Joon-Ho fan, and which I dismissed as an example of his tendency to talk down to Western audiences that didn’t work for me this time, as it had in Snowpiercer. Was it possible that I was viewing Bong’s works in his native tongue through some kind of reverential veil and that Memories of Murder and Parasite were also over the top (outside of the moments of levity that were obvious across cultures) and I wasn’t picking up on it because I don’t speak Korean? Luckily, a viewing of Bong’s 2006 film The Host assuaged these doubts; when he’s going over the top, there’s no way to miss it. 

Half a decade after an American pathologist orders his Korean assistant to circumvent safety regulations about the disposal of toxic chemicals by directing him to pour (hundreds of bottles of) formaldehyde into a drain that eventually empties into the Han River, a mutant river beast emerges, killing dozens of people and abducting others. One of the abducted (and presumed deceased) is Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), the daughter of single father Gang-du (frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho), a lazy manchild with bleached hair. Gang-du assists his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) in the operation of a riverside snack bar that they occupy as well, but his “assistance” is hampered by his apparent laziness and frequent napping, and his overall flaws are further communicated by his ill-advised choice to give his daughter a beer. The two of them are excited to watch Nam-joo (Bae Doona), Gang-du’s sister and Hyun-seo’s aunt, in the Olympic archery competition, but her primary character traits of being extremely proficient but hesitant and timid are telegraphed by her receipt of “only” the bronze medal as she allowed her time clock to run out. Hee-bong’s third child, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is the only one to have gone to college, but his academic achievement has not netted him a job offer, and he’s taken refuge in the bottle. 

When the monster first emerges from the river, Gang-du manages to put up a pretty good effort, assisting a nearby American soldier who charges into the fray. He grabs Hyun-seo by the hand to flee and makes it some distance before falling, grabbing her again, and continuing to run, only to look down and see that he’s grabbed the wrong child in the fracas and is forced to watch helplessly as the monster brings her to the other side of the river and disappears. The Park family comes together in the wake of this tragedy, but during a mass memorial for the victims, a disease control team arrives in hazmat suits and advises that American scientists have theorized that some of the wounds left behind on survivors may indicate that the animal is a carrier for an unknown virus, and all present are shuttled off to a hospital for quarantine. Gang-du gets a call from Hyun-seo that indicates she’s still alive, and the Parks have to escape quarantine and work together to try and find the beast’s lair in the sewers before it’s too late. 

This is an unusual turn for Song Kang-ho as this is the first time I found it difficult to like him (at least in Bong’s filmography; he’s had a few effective villainous turns when working with Park Chan-Wook). It’s not his fault that his entire generation of the Park clan seems to be afflicted with narcolepsy, but his frequent sleepiness aside, he still does a lot of things that make him seem like a goofy old stoner in an American film about a guy who’s refused to grow up, even after having a child. That did not endear him to me as a character, especially when he later tries to explain to the authorities that he received a phone call from his presumed dead daughter and can’t hold it together long enough to explain this clearly. Instead he simply insists that “She’s deceased, but she’s not dead,” which doesn’t do him any favors, and not even the presence of his famous Olympian sister is enough to get anyone to listen to him. It’s in all of this that Bong is going very broad with the comedy, if it wasn’t already clear from the awkwardly long sequence in which Gang-du causes such a scene at the memorial that the rest of the Park family get involved in the bawl/brawl and security has to step in. It’s as campy as his movies for a Western audience, which comes through at the end when a forced lobotomy seems to suddenly make him hypercompetent. It’s not subtle, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and rest assured I’m not simply elevating his Korean language films out of ignorance. 

There are other hallmarks of Bong’s work here, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bong Joon-Ho feature without some political commentary; it’s no surprise that American interference is the initial cause of the problem. On the cover of the DVD for the film is a pull-quote that says The Host “is on par with Jaws!” and while that’s a decent point of comparison, the film is much more like the original Godzilla in that it’s about an amphibious kaiju awakened (or in this case mutated) by American negligence, with tragic consequences for the respective coastal/island Asian nation states. Here, American interventionism continues throughout as a narrative thread, from the appearance of U.S. soldier Donald White at the first emergence of the beast from the river, to the American C.D.C. getting involved in quarantine and containment, eventually taking over the assault on the creature with a chemical weapon called Agent Yellow. That this deployment does virtually no long term damage to the creature (it’s up to Nam-il dousing it in gasoline, Nam-joo setting it ablaze with a burning arrow, and Gang-du stabbing it with a broken traffic post to bring it down) while harming if not killing the dozens of protestors who are opposed to the release of dangerous chemicals is, as always, a fun insight into Bong’s politics. Even when he’s doing a silly one, he’s still unmistakably at the helm. It’s worth noting as well that Gang-du’s aforementioned lobotomy was performed when he understood enough English to overhear a conversation in which an American scientist admits that there’s been no additional evidence of a virus and that they’re all in over their heads. 

In 2006 when the film was released, it was undoubtedly a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of his other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Primate (2026)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the first major theatrical release of the year: Johannes Roberts’s killer-chimp horror pic Primate (2026).

00:00 Welcome
03:06 The Islands of Yann Gonzalez (2006 – 2017)
07:51 The Wild Boys (2017)
12:10 Café Flesh (1982)
17:26 Star Trek – Section 31 (2025)
19:59 Rachel Getting Married (2008)
26:00 The Housemaid (2025)
32:00 Paris, Texas (1984)
36:10 The Host (2006)
42:04 Soul Survivors (2001)
47:46 The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003)
53:46 Looper (2012)
57:54 Bean (1997)
1:00:43 Eve’s Bayou (1997)
1:05:48 Peeping Tom (1960)
1:09:38 Sleeping Beauty (1959)
1:14:52 The Age of Innocence (1993)
1:18:46 Breakdown (1997)
1:20:38 Shakedown (1988)
1:24:35 Dressed to Kill (1980)
1:28:55 Priscilla (2023)
1:31:07 Megadoc (2025)
1:34:20 Holes (2003)
1:38:29 THX-1138 (1971)
1:43:41 The Lighthouse (2019)

1:46:00 Primate (2026)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Soul Survivors (2001)

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I was a nü-metal shithead in the early aughts, which means I’ve seen almost every teen-targeted horror film produced in that era. From the blissful highs of Ginger Snaps & The Faculty to the tepid depths of Idle Hands & Urban Legend, I dutifully watched every Hollywood studio horror marketed to my teenage sensibilities like a soldier taking marching orders. And yet, I had somehow not heard of the ghostly 2001 psych thriller Soul Survivors until I recently stumbled across it on the shelves of my neighborhood Goodwill. Soul Survivors so clearly  belongs in that post-Scream horror canon that its DVD includes a Behind the Music parody promoting the alt-rock band Harvey Danger, whose hit single “Flagpole Sitta” was made famous by the trailers for fellow teen-horror relic Disturbing Behavior several years earlier. There was no question that I had to close this personal knowledge gap by purchasing the used disc, but the lingering question that still remains is why, exactly, was this title lost in the shuffle and forgotten to time? It certainly has more going on conceptually than most of its tie-in-CD-soundtrack contemporaries, so why had I never heard of it but I know everything about, say, 2000’s The Skulls?

The best answer I can come up with is that Soul Survivors is more of a supernatural teen melodrama than a proper horror film, which may have been a letdown for the nü-metal shithead audience it panders to. It shares some sappy tonal territory with I Know What You Did Last Summer & Valentine in that respect, but those movies at least boasted recognizable masked villains to chase the teens around their soap opera sets. In Soul Survivors, the only identifiable villain is confusion. Melissa Sagemiller stars as a college freshman who parties one final night away with her high school crew before the friend group splits up for good. After some sweaty dancing with her bi-curious bestie (Eliza Dushku) at a Satanic rave at the edge of town, she flips her car in a reckless driving accident, losing her high school sweetheart (Casey Affleck) in the wreck. Only, once she attempts to move on with her life in the months after the accident, it becomes unclear whether she actually was the one who survived. She & her boyfriend are communicating from opposite sides of this mortal plane, but she gradually comes to realize that her soul is the one in transition, and her new freshman campus life is really just an operating-table hallucination that she can’t snap out of.

In short, Soul Survivors is Jacob’s Ladder for concussed teenagers. Sagemiller is stalked by scary-looking metalheads (one wearing a see-through plastic mask under a beanie, the other costumed like Danzig); Dushku is tempted by a demonic lesbian upperclassman (Angela Featherstone); and Affleck frequently pops in to whisper ghostly words of hoarse encouragement; but none of its action is as literal or physical as the similar, better-remembered supernatural shenanigans of the Final Destination series. Sagemiller’s liminal, fraught campus life is a medically induced nightmare, which lowers the immediate stakes of its stalking scenes but also frees the movie up for more abstract thinking and lyrical editing than the by-the-numbers slashers it most closely resembles. I don’t know that its big-picture observation that, “Even a dream of life is better than facing death,” makes much philosophical sense out of context, but by the time it’s crosscutting the cosmic connections & divisions between Sagemiller’s dream persona and her real-life circumstances at the go-for-broke climax, there’s a strangely compelling poetry to it. It’s poetry for dummies, but it’s poetry nonetheless.

As soon as I pressed play, I immediately got the sense that the fine folks at Artisan Entertainment knew they had purchased a box-office bomb. Scenes of Sagemiller saying tearful goodbyes to her parents before driving off to college are hastily shoehorned into the opening credits to rush the prologue along so we can get to the sweaty Satanic dance party ASAP. That expediency cuts the film down to a brisk 85-minute runtime, as if the producers were eager to get the whole thing over with posthaste. Maybe it was just too difficult to market a supernatural weepie with ironic lines of dialogue like, “We have our whole lives ahead of us,” as opposed to a rote slasher with built-in Halloween mask merchandise. Whatever the case, the condensed runtime means that we rush through headier ideas in a shorter span of time than what’s afforded to its comparatively empty-headed contemporaries. Scares are scarce here, but its sincere exploration of the fuzzy border between the worlds of the living and the dead is convincingly eerie, more so than in fellow aughts-era spookshows like The Mothman Prophecies and The Butterfly Effect (which both have a half-hour’s bonus runtime to play with, unused).

-Brandon Ledet

Rabbit Trap (2025)

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“Listen,” speak-sings Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) into her microphone over ambient nature sounds that she and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have been recording. “Noise … the oldest of gods. Before language, before flesh, before name, she was here.” It’s 1976, and the two of them have moved from London to the Welsh countryside with reel to reel recorders and state of the art microphones, which they traipse around the forest with, capturing the sounds of squelching marshes, nightbirds chirping as they move through the air in bloblike flocks, skittering feet of bugs across leaves, and the distant song of unseen fauna, or at least one hopes it’s something so natural. Later, the couple meets a mysterious androgynous child (actress Jade Croot, although The Child is only ever referred to as “he”), and when the boy asks if he can sing Daphne a lullaby that his mother used to sing him as a child, she records him as well. Listening back to it later, Darcy says it “sounds like a spell.” Rabbit Trap traffics in this idea, of sound as song, noise as god, voice as spellcraft, in a beautiful little folk horror from director Bryn Chainey, who has heretofore mostly worked in short film. 

There are points of comparison that it would be easy to go to when describing the film’s atmosphere. The sudden presence of a creepy child who brings with him portents of folkloric truth calls The Killing of a Sacred Deer to mind, and although this is set in Wales rather than on the Cornish coast, the atmosphere of isolation, hallucination, and lost time invokes Enys Men. There’s a sequence in which The Child leads Daphne to a series of tunnels and trenches that seem neither manmade nor natural and lures her through them by whistling a tune that she whistles back to him, and for a moment I felt I was watching Jessie Buckley harmonize with her own echo in Men. Despite these intentional homages or simple similarities, Rabbit Trap feels fresh despite being familiar. Even the way that this film goes to horror media’s most frequently visited well of late (grief and trauma are the real monsters) doesn’t feel like the cliché that it is. For one thing, the film never feels the need to dwell on what’s causing Darcy’s sleep paralysis. We see him experiencing strange dreams of the windows of the house being covered in goop and a spectral figure that may represent his father, with Daphne being quick to record his sleeptalking in the hopes that it might help him remember something when he wakes. Later, those dreams recur after he has broken a fairy circle, and in the end of the film, we find him standing in a beautiful vista recording his truth so that he can play it for Daphne later, since it’s too hard for him to say to her face. We can really only speculate what it is that’s caused Darcy to see himself as the source of an emotional “rot,” because it’s important only in its implications, not in its specifics. 

The plot kicks off when Darcy accidentally wanders into a ring of mushrooms, which folklore calls a “fairy ring,” and to break one invites the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg, fae from another world. Shortly thereafter, The Child appears outside of their cabin. Playing off Darcy’s concerns that he might be a burglar, he instead calls himself a hunter, taking Darcy to see the traps that he lays out for rabbits, taking special care to note that the bait has to be offered with honest and meaningful intention in order for the trap to work. The Child grows closer to both of them, taking an active interest in Daphne’s previous musical work (he asks if she’s famous, to which Darcy replies “You can’t really be famous with her kind of music. She’s more… influential”) and enjoying his and Darcy’s excursions into the marshes to record nature noise. As he becomes more and more of a surrogate child to the couple, his affection for Daphne grows to the point that he asks her to pretend to be his mother, as he claims his died long ago. Darcy, with his unspoken and only vaguely defined issues surrounding fatherhood, starts to get a little creeped out by this, and The Child’s behavior becomes more invasive and presumptuous. What little we do know about Darcy’s past is revealed to us not explicitly but in the way that he talks about sound—that god, that ghost, calling it a “Vibration of an event, an energy shadow, memory carved into the air, a scared lost creature desperate for somewhere to hide before it fades away. When you hear a sound,” he says, “you become its home, and your body is the house it haunts.” Darcy’s body is keeping an unknown score, and The Child has come to find a new family, one way or another. 

Much is left up to interpretation here. My personal reading is that the story The Child tells early in the story, about a baby brother that wandered into the Tylwyth Teg circle and disappeared, is actually about him, and that he grew up parentless in the fae realm, or that he was otherwise a kind of inverse changeling. Now that the ring has been disturbed again, he has the opportunity to go back out into our world and try to reestablish some kind of family, which would explain his quiet (and later loud) desperation on this front. This would also make his introduction of himself as a “hunter,” rather than the more accurate descriptor of “trapper,” a bit of foreshadowing despite the metaphorical, psychedelic rabbit trap that Daphne and Darcy must pass through at the end. Of course, this is a film that leaves a great deal up to your imagination, one that is more a visual and sonic experience than it is a narrative one. Its brisk runtime, coming in at under 90 minutes, means that this tone over text ethos never wears out its welcome. It’s unlikely that, at this late date, many people are still considering new entries onto their end of the year lists, and although this one was stellar, it’s one that will be waiting for you when you’re ready for it, but it’s an inexpensive rental if you’re still doing your 2025 end of the year cramming. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Sister Midnight (2025)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the deadpan arranged-marriage horror comedy Sister Midnight (2025).

00:00 New Orleans Bookfair
02:40 Star Trek
06:06 Went the Day Well? (1942)
09:00 Black Angel (1946)
11:04 Angel’s Egg (1985)
15:00 Universal Language (2025)
23:00 Wicked: For Good (2025)
29:45 Friendship (2025)
34:11 The Running Man (2025)
40:30 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
46:06 Die My Love (2025)
50:35 Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
58:17 No Other Choice (2025)
1:08:22 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025)
1:10:51 Keeper (2025)
1:15:27 Sentimental Value (2025)
1:19:10 Alpha (2025)
1:24:46 Dracula (2025)
1:28:20 Arco (2025)
1:32:07 Lurker (2025)
1:38:48 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

1:44:22 Sister Midnight (2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Podcast #252: Hellblazers (2022) & Tubi Originals

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Welcome to Episode #252 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee test the murky waters of made-for-Tubi movies, starting with the star-packed cult horror Hellblazers (2022).

0:00 Welcome
02:27 Basket Case (1982)
04:36 Materialists (2025)
06:47 28 Years Later (2025)
08:18 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
10:14 Demon Pond (1979)

16:18 Hellblazers (2022)
38:16 Love and Penguins (2022)
53:02 Unborn (2022)
1:01:07 Match (2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Keeper (2025)

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Osgood Perkins has become a contentious figure of late, as he’s really only become a figure of theatrical release interest in recent years. His first directorial features, The Blackcoat’s Daughter & I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, premiered after their festival screenings to streaming on DirecTV and Netflix respectively (although Blackcoat’s Daughter got a limited theatrical release after its streaming premiere, presumably for award nomination qualification purposes). Gretel & Hansel got dumped into theaters in the January wastelands and was on streaming within nine weeks. Then came Longlegs, which was boosted by a far-reaching and powerful advertising campaign that none of his previous work had. Longlegs garnered a fair amount of praise and attention, but with the greater visibility that a wider audience provided also came backlash from viewers who didn’t connect with (or outright rejected) his nontraditional narrative & stylistic choices and eccentricities. I loved Longlegs, but I really didn’t care for The Monkey, and for at least some portion of the general movie-going public, those two movies constitute the entirety of Perkins’s body of work because that’s all that’s gotten any widespread attention. Although out of Perkins’s catalog this one is most similar to Gretel & Hansel—a film that I was fairly lukewarm about—Keeper managed to work for me, although I don’t expect it to win back over anyone who’s already disinterested in his work. 

Liz (Tatiana Maslany!), after a lifetime as a “subway dwelling city-rat” for whom a relationship that lasts a whole year is a record, is taking an anniversary trip to the countryside cabin of her beau, Dr. Malcolm Westbridge (Rossif Sutherland). It’s a beautiful, secluded place, and although she seems happy to be going on the trip when talking about it with her friend Maggie, the vibes aren’t all that she had hoped they would be once they get there. There’s not a door in the place other than the one to the bathroom, and it’s all giant windows with no blinds or shades, so although there are gorgeous views of verdant forest available from every vantage point, Liz feels exposed. As Malcolm hangs one of Liz’s paintings in the house, she discovers a cake that was supposedly left behind by the property caretaker, the box containing it having smudged in a way that renders it off-putting. Their peaceful, serene dinner is interrupted by Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Kett Turton), who lives in the neighboring “cabin,” and his date for the weekend, a model named Minka (Eden Weiss) he claims doesn’t speak English, although when she and Liz are alone, she ominously tells Liz that the cake “tastes like shit.” 

Strange things are already afoot. While taking a relaxing bath, Liz begins to have visions of women in period dress from across a couple of centuries, as if they are spirits of the dead come to warn her away from the house. Behind her and out of her sight, something unseen mimics her by drawing a heart in the condensation on the window, as she had mere hours before. In the night, she finds herself drawn to the remainder of the suspicious cake and finishes the whole thing, despite finding what appear to be bloody fingers inside of it, and she is drawn to the nearby babbling brook, where she finds a locket that she begins wearing. There’s something about the way that Malcolm hangs her painting that, intentional or not, signaled a kind of “My Last Duchess” element, which felt like it was being borne out by the Bluebeard-y vibes that Malcolm puts out, especially when he leaves her alone in the house, but we also witness (even if we do not clearly see) Minka meet her death outside in the woods at the hands of an unseen force that doesn’t appear to have any human attributes at all. Liz begins to lose time, waking up with her clothes on backwards despite being alone in the house while Malcolm is supposedly attending to his medical practice back in the city (lending further circumstantial evidence to Maggie’s belief that Liz, despite her protests to the contrary, is being used as Malcolm’s unwitting mistress). But is he? Whatever is happening to Liz is clearly outside of the realm of natural and the real, and the unflattering portrait we get of Darren makes it clear that he may be a real scumbag, but he’s definitely human, and so must Malcolm presumably be. What is happening in these woods? 

Perkins’s work is overwhelmingly fabular, whether he’s adapting an actual fairy tale, as he did with Gretel, or when he’s telling a story that merely has those overtones of spooky campfire stories, or of the pre-sanitization, pre-Disneyfication of older, darker folk stories. That’s what The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels most like to me, a kind of warped “Cinderella” with the all girls boarding school where our first main character is bullied by upperclassmen instead of wicked stepsisters, until she is visited by the darkest version of a fairy godmother one could imagine, with tragic consequences. Setting Longlegs in the 1990s does some of the work that an opening line of, “Once upon a time …” would bring, and the fact that one of the narrative threads revolves around a woman promising her firstborn to an intercessor for spiritual evil bears similarities to several fairy tales. One could even imagine it as a postmodernist take on “What if Rumplestiltskin never really went away?” in the vein of reimaginings like the ones found in the Kate Bernheimer-edited My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me anthology. Ultimately, Keeper is “Bluebeard;” even if Malcolm never warns Liz not to go looking in the basement, we do learn that, if she had, she would have found evidence that she was not the first “keeper” he had brought home, even if her ultimate fate would have been unchanged. 

A couple things of note … We can add Tatiana Maslany to the list of performers in dual roles this year that was first mentioned in our Predator: Badlands review, as one of the women in her visions is an 18th Century witch who looked exactly like her. Why this is the case is never revealed; we never get to learn if, perhaps, she is this same woman reincarnated or if this apparent identicality is a trick of perception or degraded memory over time, and while it is important to some characters’ motivations and the overall narrative, it’s not something that needed to be answered in order to enjoy this one, if you’re going to be someone who does enjoy it. It’s worth noting that Perkins only directed this one, from a script by Nick Lepard, whose sole other credit to date was this year’s sharksploitation survival horror Dangerous Animals. The only other instance to date of Perkins directing a film that he didn’t pen was Gretel & Hansel, which was written by Rob Hayes. That might explain why this script doesn’t quite feel like him, as despite its frequent usage of tranquil nature shots to establish the tranquility of the setting as a counterbalance to the film’s unsettling, trepidatious feeling. It’s still full to the brim with slow burns, but it still feels like it’s moving at a pretty good clip, which I appreciated. I hate to reveal too much, but there are some creature designs at the end of this film that are so good, I was disgusted. Nice work, everyone. Let’s hope this one wins some people back over, even if I doubt it will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond