horror

The Doll (Vaxdockan, 1962)

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Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: A lanky loner who works late nights and has uneasy relationships with women lives alone in an upstairs attic with an empty rocking chair, muttering increasingly disconcerting, violent things to an imagined woman who isn’t really there. Psycho was on my mind during the entire runtime of Arne Mattsson’s The Doll, which was produced in Sweden just two years after Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining masterwork. And yet, none of the film’s prominent critical commentary mentions Hitchcock by name, instead likening The Doll to the more sophisticated national cinema of Ingmar Bergman. Personally, I can’t read The Doll as anything other than an attempt to class up Psycho for an international arthouse crowd. It’s less of a direct photocopy than it is a cross-cultural echo, altered enough through translation that it gradually becomes its own distinct art piece. If nothing else, in the process of swapping out Norman Bates’s maternal corpse for a sexy department store mannequin it pushes past Hitchcock knockoff territory to explore new psychosexual genre textures, accidentally inventing Peter Strickland’s fetish-horror cinema in the process.

Our troubled antihero is a self-pitying sad sack who moans & groans about the loneliness of everyday city life. He spends countless hours staring at the water stains on his apartment ceiling, daydreaming about his ideal romantic partner instead of actually, you know, talking & relating to the women around him. The incel loser then strikes gold while working a shift at his nightwatchman job, discovering a department store mannequin that looks exactly like the ideal woman he’s been picturing in his head: a near-featureless object with a blunt brunette bob. He steals her away from his post, blames her absence on a robbery, and relocates her to the squeaky mattress in his bachelor pad. There, he keeps the plastic woman as a kind of domestic prisoner, pouring his heart out to her as the first woman to ever fully understand his peculiar persona . . . since she’s an inanimate object he can control through his own imagination. The longer he spends time alone with the mannequin, however, the more of her own self-determined personality & autonomy starts to emerge, and her captor once again struggles to reckon with the idea that women are people with their own wants & needs, not possessions to dress up & neatly store like dolls.

Once The Doll finds its unlikely man & mannequin couple locked away in a single-room attic apartment, it becomes a kind of volatile stage play about gendered domestic squabbles. Although the incel nightwatchman does commit violent acts as these one-sided arguments escalate, it’s less a horror of action than it is a horror of the uncanny. As he starts to fully believe in the personhood of the mannequin, she subtly comes to life; she laughs, she cries, she dances, she writhes. At first, she lays still while Mattsson’s camera handles all the movement, indicating her emotional state through a sweeping pan around her prison bed. Then, her mannequin body is periodically replaced by the real-life flesh of actress Gio Petré, who’s outfitted with the same bob wig and feature-flattening makeup. The mannequin figure alternates seamlessly between Petre’s body and its artificial surrogate, so that many shots leave the audience questioning which is which. This dynamic gives actor Per Oscarsson a fellow onscreen player to bounce the protagonist’s misogynist ideology off of, so that he’s not entirely acting opposite a doll, but it also provides the majority of the film’s horror-cinema chills.

Despite its potential framing as a rushed-to-market Psycho knockoff, The Doll is a beautiful art object in its own right. Mattsson lights his players with the harsh low-angle flashlight spotlight of a crime scene, establishing an Old Dark House vibe in what’s otherwise a fairly mundane apartment building. He also frequently finds aesthetically beautiful ways to accentuate the uncanny nature of the titular doll’s body, such as the Buñuelian image of her severed hand resting on the apartment’s basement stairs, or a rose gently resting on that same upturned palm once it’s reattached to the mannequin’s arm. Petre consistently contorts her hands to match the mannequin’s pose in her scenes, and she finds a way to appear distant & glassy eyed even in her fiercest arguments with Oscarsson’s disturbed lead. For a sexually sordid horror picture with a creepy children’s theme song about “a grown man who plays with dolls,” it’s a remarkably classy affair, one that earns its Bergman comparisons in its lengthy, vicious war-of-the-sexes dialogue exchanges. If you want the trashier, campier version of this movie, check out Peter Strickland’s In Fabric or the German whatsit The Berlin Bride. This one’s for the artsy-fartsy horror crowd, the elite pervert aesthetes.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch Me (2026)

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Touch Me had its Shudder premiere this week, and I went into it completely blind, which I recommend for anyone who is interested. This is a color-soaked fever dream of a movie, an erotic thriller wrapped in a science fiction plot that doesn’t shy away from turning a titillating moment into one of pure body horror, then following that up with a joke that underlines the tone without undercutting it. It’s fresh, fun, and something decidedly new, although it’s obviously not going to be for everyone. 

The film opens on a therapy session with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) detailing an experience she had with a charismatic man five years earlier. She ran into him at two separate events wearing an out-of-place track suit, and mockingly (and correctly) dismissed him as an alien. When he revealed that this was true and that he came from another world devastated by climate change to save the earth from falling victim to the same fate, she allowed him to share his psychic touch with her, which had a euphoric effect that effectively combatted her psychological issues. She hasn’t seen him since a sexual encounter between the two of them turned into an assault when he wouldn’t stop despite her asking him to, running straight to the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she has remained ever since. For reasons that are revealed later, the two are able to live comfortably in Craig’s home, despite neither having a job, but when an unexpected and costly plumbing emergency occurs, Joey starts looking for work. This brings her back into contact with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), her alien ex, and she ultimately accepts his invitation for her and Craig to spend some time in his modern mansion in the hills. There’s some friction between the two and Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte), but after a few sessions of alien group therapy, things are going well, until they suddenly aren’t. 

One of the barriers that I think some viewers will have with this one will come down to its playful zaniness. Touch Me isn’t trying to be taken at face value and as such calls attention to its filmic and fictional nature constantly. After Joey witnesses video evidence that there’s something more sinister going on than she’s been led to believe, the film shows us the backstory of the person she’s just seen die in a black and white segment; the victim was lured in via hookup app, with the telltale sounds of Grindr notifications going off but those messages appearing on screen like silent picture intertitles. It’s quirky, but not overly so. When Joey considers applying to work at the coffee shop she frequents, the “help wanted” sign on the counter appears and reappears in multiple floating bubbles that frame her face. It’s cartoonish, and the tone of the film supports it, but I can see a lot of the film-going audience growing frustrated with Touch Me because of this visual playfulness in a film that spends much of its time dealing with sexual assault and its psychological impacts. Those scenes are never played for laughs and are treated with appropriate weight, and we’re never subjected to it and only witness the victims recount them in therapeutic sessions, both legitimate and manipulative. That tonal whiplash is part of what makes the film special, however, and I don’t think that I would have it any other way.

Brian turns out to want “cross-species intercourse” with both of his hot young houseguests (and as many others as possible), and the film is very good at capturing what makes him both desirable and uncannily, repulsively inhuman. Pucci is an attractive man who has clearly put a lot of work into maintaining his physique, but he also has very impressive control over his facial muscles in a way that, in combination with his unnatural dark hair, allows him to look eerie and not entirely trustworthy. When characters are aroused by him, either through psychic manipulation or basic human lust, the film communicates this through erotic, almost pornographic close ups of his bouncing pectoral muscles or undulating abs, but then intersplices this with off-putting close-ups that feature his creepy stare and libido-shriveling Gary-Oldman-in-Bram Stoker’s Dracula grooming. It’s very effective at being both arousing and off-putting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that captures that line so well. Both Taylor Dudley and Gavaris are familiar to me as a viewer who soaked up a lot of 2010s Vancouver-based genre television; the former portrayed divisive character Alice in The Magicians and the latter was the universally beloved Felix on Orphan Black. I was delighted to see both of them in this film, and they not only have great chemistry with one another but are also putting in performances that are so distinct that, despite having spent dozens of hours with them as their familiar-to-me characters, I never found myself slipping into thinking about Alice or Felix at all. Joey’s grief is completely different from Alice’s, as is her expression thereof; Craig is easier to differentiate from Felix since he doesn’t share that character’s accent, but Craig also lacks Felix’s motivation, integrity, and unrelenting self-love. When it comes to Gavaris, his dedication to picking up the weights as he aged out of his Orphan Black era twinkiness was a cause of some concern for me; I started following him on social media some years ago when he led a short-lived comedy series called The Lake in which Julia Stiles played his conniving step-sister, and the way that he would post about his workouts and the way he felt about his body was troubling. One hopes that he’s come to terms with that since then, and that Craig’s body dysmorphia here is him taking some agency over Gavaris’s own, since Craig calls himself “fat” and “hideous” despite being neither. 

Of course, it’s also an equally valid interpretation that Craig doesn’t actually think that he’s either of those things, and that it is instead his way of fishing for compliments from Joey. It’s a sign of their co-dependency; we eventually learn that they were both victims of childhood sexual assault, but that Joey has kept this from Craig, which has allowed for him to weaponize his victimhood against her in a way that she feels she can’t counter without either being forced to relitigate her trauma or risk her living situation. It’s not ideal for either of them, and demonstrates how this betrayal during their vulnerable years has led them to dismiss those traumas flippantly, through dismissive humor, or through total suppression, and this makes them easy prey for Brian. It’s good stuff, and although the film draws attention to its artificiality through overt stylism, it doesn’t feel the need to broadcast that it’s tackling “elevated” horror themes. 

I’ve had mixed feelings about a lot of the horror that’s come out this year. I was personally underwhelmed by Obsession because of the familiarity of its narrative structure, but I was also quite taken with Leviticus despite the fact that it traffics in images and ideas that are not necessarily novel either, just viewed through a new lens. Touch Me is fresh, irreverent, exciting, and sexy, despite also owing major debts in its visual inspiration to Neon Demon, Ex Machina, and Mandy. It won’t be for everyone, but will be thoroughly enjoyed by those for whom it does work. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scary Movie (2026)

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Of all the various legacy sequels that are propping up the Hollywood economy right now, the overwhelming majority have very little reason to exist beyond desperately trying to milk the cow one last time before the entire industry is put out to pasture. The new Scary Movie, to its credit, is the one among them with the most justification to be made in the current moment. After all, the last time that one of these shallow parody films was released was nearly 15 years ago, and the last time that they really had anything to do with parodying horror movies was in 2006. Franchise originators Shawn and Marlon Wayans departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, all the way back in 2001. In the interim, a half-dozen horror trends have come and gone, so there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. We’ve seen the rise and fall of torture porn in Hostel and the Saw franchise, the glut of mid-aughts remakes that saw (among other things) Jackie Earle Haley take a turn as Freddy Krueger, a resurgence of zombie movies, an abundance of horror legacy sequels like David Gordon Green’s Halloween films and the Radio Silence-produced Scream sequels, MCU-ified horror like The Conjuring, and, of course, the much-vaunted rise of “elevated” horror. For 2026, though, the Scary Movie franchise returns to what it does … well, not “best,” exactly, since—despite the decline in quality over the series’ repeated returns to the well—none of these movies are particularly great, but it’s back to what it does adequately. 

Scary Movie (2026) bases most of its “plot” around 5cream, although its opening sequence most closely parodies Scream VI and cribs the NYC subway scene from the later sequel as well. The opening features a cameo from Carmen Electra and sees Teyana Taylor reenacting the opening sequence of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving was lured into an alley in New York City. Here, however, she summons a crew of burly men to assist her in kicking Ghostface’s ass. As part of the movie-within-the-movie series Horror Movie, Teyana’s would-be date/killer calls her directly after a couple of back-and-forth text exchanges, and they break the fourth wall by noting that an audible phone call provides better exposition for the presumed audience than on-screen text messages, citing that most people who would turn out for a Wayans Bros. movie “are probably illiterate.” It’s supposed to be self-aware mockery of the audience but it mostly belittles the filmmakers themselves, demonstrating just how little regard the script has for its audience. Make no mistake; I laughed myself silly during this movie (under the influence of an edible, admittedly), but there’s not a single joke in here that doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point. One of the best bits arrives near the end when Brenda (Regina Hall) pretends to have been shot so that she doesn’t have to go back into the killer’s house with Cindy (Anna Faris), and we see that she’s faked her injury with ketchup packets. It’s funny stuff, but then Brenda overexplains the joke, and it makes the whole thing less comic than if the film wasn’t (over)narrating itself. There’s a potential cut of Scary Movie that’s twenty minutes shorter, cuts several of the dead-on-arrival “comedy” bits, is less dialogue heavy, and would be twice as funny. 

It’s been some amount of time since the last time Ghostface showed up to harass Brenda, Cindy, Brenda’s closeted partner Ray (Shawn Wayans), and her brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans). In the intervening time, Cindy has had two daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday, who essentially play the parts of Sam and Tara Carpenter from the recent Scream sequels — because Jenna Ortega also played Wednesday Addams, get it? Brenda has had two kids of her own, the Chad and Mindy equivalents Brad (Gregg Wayans, who is thirty-seven years old) and non-binary Dei (get it?). With the return of Ghostface and an attack on Tuesday, Sara returns home alongside her clearly-the-killer boyfriend “Jack” to find her mother, who now has Jamie Lee Curtis’s frazzled white hair from the aforementioned Green-helmed Halloween films. This leads to Cindy’s reunion with Brenda, who has turned into a Ma-like figure for the local high school kids, including Shorty, who is in his third decade of attempting to graduate. Ghostface comes back to town, stirs up some interpersonal conflict between Sara and her mother (whose insistence that the return of Ghostface is all about her drives her daughter insane), some people die in wacky ways, and the film frequently finds itself sidetracked into various shallow references to contemporary flash-in-the-pan pop culture. That’s all that these movies have ever been; when they manage to parody something that stood the test of time, like The Matrix, it’s more of an accident than it is an insight into cultural longevity (and, like, everyone was parodying The Matrix). 

Last year’s rebootquel of The Naked Gun proved that there is a place for parody films in the market. It was so much fun that it led me to rewatch the original and its sequels, and I’ve also long been a proponent of Top Secret! and recently rewatched both Hot Shots films. The thing about those ZAZ parodies is that the jokes are so layered and come so quickly that even if one of them lands with a resounding thud, the movie moves along quickly enough that you’re laughing again moments later. In Scary Movie, every bit is 1.5-4 times as long as it should be, which means that even the jokes that do land can wear out their welcome quickly, and when there’s a swing and a miss, one still has to sit there for an interminable amount of time before we move on to the next bit. The first real clunker is when Cindy tries to remind Sara of the good times from her childhood, which is illustrated by taking her to see a mall Santa who’s actually the Terrifier; it goes on just shy of forever and isn’t funny at all. Other particularly unfunny sequences include full recreations of non-horror pop culture as well. After the memorably surreal image of Ghostface taking the place of Catherine Keener across from Shorty as Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, the film segues into Shorty’s Sunken Place, which he calls a k-hole before Ghostface corrects him that he’s in a K-Pop hole. This leads to a fully animated sequence that sees Shorty hooking up with the three leads of KPop Demon Hunters while spoofing the song “Golden” with a chorus that includes the refrain “Gonna be gonna be smokin’.” It’s peak “Remember this?” style parody, and although that film’s widespread success may mean that this “joke” makes sense in twenty years (we’ll see if the references to Smile and cameo from Kai Cenat do the same), there’s no amount of time that will pass for it to ever be funny. (That having been said, the choice to do a parody of the marketing campaign for Michael with “Tubi original” Jermaine, featuring Kenan Thompson as Jermaine Jackson, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But why is it here, in Scary Movie? That’s an orphaned SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.)

Ultimately, Scary Movie leaves one with too much time to linger on and ponder the bits that aren’t landing. I was one of a group of five who went to see this movie, and only two of us laughed enough for it to have been worth the price of admission (one of whom was me), one person seemed to enjoy parts of it, and two people utterly hated it. One of the haters was a surprise to me, given that this is a longtime friend with whom I’ve spent no small time over the years chatting about our fondness for the first two Scary Movie films; we recognize that they’re not very good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a certain nostalgia for movies that were airing virtually every week on Comedy Central during our formative years. He was the person I expected to enjoy this the most, since its comedy is really no different from the earlier Wayans Brothers-produced films. He was actively miserable the entire time, and I think that if you’re trying to decide whether this is worth your time, this is worth considering. It’s exactly as good as Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, and if you didn’t like those, you probably won’t like this. If you do have positive memories associated with those, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the humor of this one will land. All I can say is that, if you’re going to see it, you should try to get as high as Shorty beforehand (and for legal reasons, I remind you all to toke responsibly).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekins: Ramekin II (2021)

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It was my friend Jeb who recommended we watch the horror comedy Ramekin on Tubi, which he had been reading about recently. He noted that it was a no-budget movie, and that despite this, most of the reviews were positive, although almost all of them mentioned that the viewer had issues with the sound. I ended up loving Ramekin, with my only quibble, as noted in my review, being that I felt that the “all just a dream” ending was an unfortunate addition given that the film had been so strong up to that point. Little did I imagine that this would be far from the last time that these nitpicks would be relevant to this film series. 

Ramekins: Ramekin II opens with our lead from last time, Emily (Jamie Saunders), living in her late grandmother’s apartment with her elderly great-uncle Jared (Bill Weeden). She gets an unexpected phone call from a director named Cody (Cody Clarke, who is the actual director of the film), who saw her headshot in a casting magazine and claims that the idea for his next low-budget movie came to him all at once when he locked eyes with her photograph. That movie is, of course, the original Ramekin. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Ramekins: Ramekin II (Cody reminds us that it’s important to remember the subtitle in the actual text of the film itself), but I certainly didn’t expect the series to go full-on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare straight out of the gate in the first sequel. Emily gets her friend Mark (Chaim Samuels) to audition for the role of Mark, but Cody eventually decides to play the character himself, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend and collaborator Chloe (Chloe Pelletier). Emily’s best frenemy Jane (Piper Verbrick) also auditions for Jane, and gets the part, whose flirtatious relationship with Cody and clear desire to be recast in the lead role gets under Emily’s skin. 

The initial plan is to shoot in Emily and Uncle Jared’s apartment, and Jared uses this opportunity to go on a little vacation, but not before showing Emily that they do, in fact, have a ramekin, just like the one in the script. Cody drops off a box of identical ramekins at the apartment the day before filming is to begin, and when Emily gets up the next morning, she finds that the ramekins have arranged themselves in a way that indicates that whatever malicious entity haunts (or is) the ramekin has spread to the others. Emily’s fainting spell at this revelation leaves the film crew in the hallway for much of the morning, which raises the ire of a Karen-y neighbor, and shooting is moved to Cody and Chloe’s apartment. It isn’t long before the newly evil ramekins start to drive Emily insane again, with murderous results. 

The filming of Ramekins is great stuff. Clarke directly addresses the ending of the first film by saying that people simply didn’t get it, and that when Emily is “taken out” by the ramekin at the end of the film and “wakes up,” it’s not meant to mean that Emily dreamed the whole thing. I missed this detail, but the grandmother who is mentioned by name in the “you were there, and you were there” ending has a different name than the grandmother within the “alternate reality” that Emily has been ejected/taken out of. I don’t know if this is meant to be a joke about people’s reactions to the pat ending or if this is what Clarke actually intended in the original text, but it’s funny stuff, especially when Cody and Chloe talk about not using microphones for dialogue because it’s Cody’s artistic style to overdub everything in post. At the end of this explanation, Cody’s dialogue and his lips are clearly not even saying the same dialogue, and it’s a good bit, especially if you’re a fan of giallo films that used to do this exact thing. We get to see how the ramekin is made to move (with string, which is actually much more logical than my assumption that it was done with magnets), and certain scenes from the original play out in their entirety as the line between reality and fiction start to blur for Emily. 

The cast expansion is also a welcome update, as in addition to Chloe and Cody, we get to meet the effervescent Rachael (Molly Siskin), quiet cutie Jason (Mason Carter), and delightfully eccentric Troy (Jack Gordon). Rachael is given the least to do, but Troy is fantastic from beginning to end, as he’s the first to realize that there may be something happening with the ramekins when one of them goes missing. Rachael gets a fun comedic bit where, after first complaining that the impromptu green room smells like “big black garbage bags” (since Jane is dead and wrapped up in some underneath the bed), Emily puts the ramekin to her ear to convince her that there’s no such smell. Rachael immediately complies and grows more and more frustrated when others claim that the smell is lingering. Jason is perhaps the funniest, however, as he immediately notices the growing romance between Emily and Cody, which he wholeheartedly supports. When he takes on the role of Mark, Emily at first disbelieves that he’s ready to go off-book, but he admits that he has read the script over and over while in the bathroom, leading Emily to spout the ludicrous line that she “hopes they were number twos,” at which I cackled. When Cody and Emily finally confess their feelings for one another, Jason is first excited and then confused when Chloe calls Cody her boyfriend, as he always assumed they were brother and sister, since “Cody and Chloe are, you know, sibling names.” 

Ramekins: Ramekin II doesn’t have quite the same spirit of creepiness that the first one did, at least until the finale, where Uncle Jared returns and reveals that he’s known about the ramekin all along, and things get appropriately eerie. What it does traffic in is a very strong sense of comedic dialogue, which made this longer film pass even more effortlessly and breezily than the first. As of the time of this writing, it’s also available on Tubi, and well worth checking out. I’ll be patiently waiting for Ramekin in the Third Dimension.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Relic (2020)

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Relic was recommended to me by a dear friend, who texted that it felt “similar to how watching The Babadook for the first time with [me] felt.” I immediately put a hold on my local library’s DVD copy, and although it took me a while to get around to it, I can now report that this was an excellent recommendation. It’s indeed in the same vein of elevated metaphorical horror as The Babadook. In this case, dementia is represented as a haunted house, although the early stages of the haunting present very similarly to demonic possession, which also gives this 2020 picture the feeling of being a more sensitive, more expensively shot Taking of Deborah Logan. It excises Deborah Logan’s found footage elements and is instead shot more traditionally, which makes for a more sumptuous viewing experience and, one might argue, a better movie. 

Kay (Emily Mortimer) visits her family home in rural Australia, some distance from Melbourne, with daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) in tow. Kay’s mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin) has been missing for a few days, and Kay’s concern is compounded by the fact that the last time they saw one another, at Christmas, Edna was already starting to show advanced signs of dementia, including flooding the house with an overflowing bathtub. Although the house is locked from the outside, Kay and Sam fail to find evidence of Edna within. As they search the house, Sam discovers a closet upstairs with a newly installed lock, behind which is a moldy wall, which seems like evidence that Edna may be continuing to accidentally flood the place. In the evening, Sam is visited by Edna’s neighbor, a teenager with Downs Syndrome named Jamie (Chris Bunton), who tells her that he no longer visits Edna. Jamie’s father later reveals that this is because of an incident in which the two were playing hide and seek in the house, and Edna locked Jamie in the moldy closet and, despite the boy’s audible screams, forgot he was there. 

Edna suddenly reappears, dirtied and unaware that she has been missing. A doctor pays her a house call, and confirms that, other than a bruise on her chest that resembles the black mold in the house, Edna is of reasonable sound mind and body. Kay reveals to Sam that she plans to put Edna into assisted living, over Sam’s protests that either Edna could move in with Kay, or Sam could move in with Edna; Kay stresses that Edna needs the kind of care that her family can’t provide. Upon visiting a “retirement community” that promises enrichment and “ocean views” but is in actuality sad and impersonal, Kay reconsiders that course of action. Sam and Edna have some bonding time in Kay’s absence, which involves Edna giving her granddaughter an heirloom ring. Later, Edna’s personality changes completely, and she almost breaks Sam’s finger trying to reclaim the ring from her, accusing her of stealing it. Edna’s switches back and forth between her two different personalities become more frequent and unsettling, while Kay begins to have dreams about her great-grandfather, who died alone in a cabin that once stood on the same property and was undiscovered for so long that his body had begun to rot. The octagonal stained glass window, depicting an image of trees and mountains, was saved from that cabin before it was torn down and installed in Edna’s front door, and it features prominently in Kay’s nightmares as things get worse and worse. 

Relic is a film that, like mother!, is (to borrow a phrase from Lindsay Ellis) “Oops, all metaphor.” In the climax, Sam finds herself lost in a “Backrooms but an old house” liminal space behind the walls of the closet in which Edna earlier trapped Jamie. The black mold itself is hereditary dementia, something that can never be completely cleaned away and which is inevitably waiting for Kay down the road, and Sam in her time as well. The past, represented by the now long-demolished cabin and the window carried over from it, can never be completely destroyed. There are things in our genes and our DNA that we can never fully rid ourselves of, no matter how much we try to lock them in closets or nursing homes, and which we will forget, no matter how many post-it notes we write to ourselves or how many photo albums we try to protect. But that only has to be a horror show if we allow it to be. Whatever Edna is becoming is something that may not be able to be tamed with love, but which can be managed by it, and Kay’s haunted dreams are only a premonition of her own future lonely death if she creates that future herself by refusing to give and receive help (and love) when it’s available. It’s somewhat pat as a conclusion, but it must be by the very nature of existence as a story; it can’t possibly contend with all the variables that we’ll face in the real world or apply as a metaphor for people whose family structures are more dysfunctional and broken than this one is. But it’s also nevertheless rather sweet, and although the final images out of context might elicit horror, this is as happy an ending as can be expected, and I liked that about it. 

One of the things that I found most fascinating is the way that the liminal space in Edna’s house is used differently than the aforementioned Backrooms. When we discussed the film after we had both seen it, Brandon elaborated on what those spaces mean to Gen Z, how they represent a failure of the previous generation to build a world that had a future for them within it, or a future at all. The endlessly repeating “back area of a mall” location is an eldritch horror because it’s a representation of a space that has no place for them, a future filled with nothing but a vague and unknowable force endlessly replicating its own recreations of the past as its occupants toil in an infinite retail hellscape. In Relic, we see that same idea (albeit earlier) transposed to a home, one that’s too composed of the past, so full of boxes of old report cards, photographs, and dry-rotted seasonal decorations to do anyone any good. The sudden appearance of this space that Sam can’t escape, with the hallways and corridors beginning to loop back on themselves, genuinely changes our perception of what we’ve been watching so far, which has been a relatively down-to-earth parable about dementia and its similarities to the supposed hallmarks of demonic possession, into a movie that contains an evil crawlspace in which space is warped and time is bendable, representing the way that our minds can become spaces that we can no longer navigate or even comprehend. It’s a bold move, and I liked it. 

There are some who might find the “trauma is the monster” style of elevated horror played out and trite, and I understand that. As a movement within the horror genre, audiences went from flying high on quality, well-crafted, considered fare like Get Out and Hereditary in 2017 and 2018 respectively to an absolute into-the-gutter nosedive of artistic merit by 2022’s release of Smile. We’re still getting decent-to-great films in that subgenre, of course, but for every Weapons or Together, there’s a Him or a Lamb. Relic pulls it off, not least of all because this is an all-timer performance from Mortimer. I don’t normally think of her as an actress with his much gravitas or range; when she comes to mind, I mostly think “Careful, my bones!” or “Oh, yeah, she was in Scream 3.” She’s excellent here, and I’d offer major kudos to both of her co-leads. Nevin pulls off the transition from confused but kind to nasty and spiteful perfectly, and Heathcote is much more than just a pretty face. It’s stellar casting and performances all around. I’m not sure if this is streaming anywhere, but if you get the chance, it’s well worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

David Bradley’s Silent Monsters

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The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.

The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.

The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.

1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.

Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.

All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Demonwarp (1988)

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Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though, is that the initial novelty can wear off in the first or second act, around the time when they’re done establishing a world or mood and have to start telling a compelling story within it, or else fall flat. In contrast, the 1988 creature feature Demonwarp flips that trajectory around, starting with a going-through-the-motions plot trudge in its first hour before attempting to wow its audience with over-the-top, go-for-broke novelty in its final act. It’s a major risk to operate that way, since most of the audience might doze off or wander away before they get to the goods, but for those too stoned to get off the couch and swap out the VHS tape for something more exciting, the movie leaves you on a high note. I guess in some ways it’s better to finish strong than to start strong, if it’s going to be an either/or choice.

Demonwarp is a bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie. A mysterious space egg crashes in the American woodlands in the opening scene, setting expectations for a far-out mutant creature feature. Instead, that opening leads to a lazy procession of sasquatch attacks, mostly thinning out the ranks of a college-age Reaganite polycule. Those young dolts have no discernible chemistry to speak of, as if they all just met minutes before camera arrived, despite the scripts’ insistence that they’re all longtime friends & lovers. The only saving grace in the cast is the movie star charisma of Academy Award winner (and Naked Gun alum) George Kennedy, who babysits the dopey duds as they’re all throttled to death one sasquatch attack after another. Then, the dwindling group of survivors arrive at the sasquatch’s hidden cave lair, and the movie suddenly decides to get interesting, throwing everything it can at the screen at the last minute to pass itself off as a latent cult classic: zombies, occultists, scorpion-tailed alien beasts, bare breasts, you name it. It’s your reward for putting up with the boring, going-through-the-motions presentation that precedes it, like sitting through a timeshare sales pitch for the “free” gift.

Before Demonwarp finally gets interesting in its final minutes, it at least has the decency to be laughably incoherent. It treats its woodland setting as a boundaryless otherworld with no spatial rules or logic. The edit constantly alternates between different factions of sasquatch victims fearfully running in arbitrary directions, with no clear sense of which group the monster is actively hunting. Occasionally, they’ll stop to trade half-hearted quips or take their tops off (with those duties rigidly assigned along gender lines), but for the most part they run and yell and ineffectually point guns in the sasquatch’s general direction. The only memorable paragraph of dialogue in the entire picture is a brief monologue in which George Kennedy explains the backstory of why he’s wearing a yellow hat. It’s all just barely entertaining enough to drain beers to with your closest buddies until it shifts gears in the final minutes, to the point where entering the sasquatch’s cave feels like entering an entirely different film. I almost feel bad for ruining the surprise that the sasquatch’s space-alien antics extend beyond the opening crash, but I also suspect most audiences wouldn’t make it to the end credits without dangling that proverbial carrot.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

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There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

Backrooms (2026)

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At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is The Monster horror; the other two are YouTube pranks for the children.” At long last, Backrooms feels like an appropriate synthesis of the two; it clearly takes inspiration from the recent horror trend of using monsters as metaphors but isn’t completely preoccupied with that conceit, while its use of jumpscares, muffled voices from distant rooms, and eerie imagery taken straight from internet creepypasta means it has an appeal for viewers of a younger generation. 

It’s June of 1990, and failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is living in his struggling furniture store after being kicked out of his house by his wife following a nasty, drunken argument. He’s seeing Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a therapist, about his drinking problems and his belief that he’s “wired” to be confrontational and unpleasant. In one session, they role play the night of the marriage-threatening argument, which reveals that Clark is resentful of having to manage Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire while his wife fumbles her way through law school. When an electrician is unable to find the source of issues that are causing the store’s bills to skyrocket, he and Clark discover a couple of extra switches haphazardly added to the store’s breaker box. Investigating the box again late one night, he finds an invisible portal through the wall of the store’s basement into a seemingly infinite series of fluorescent-lit, white-walled, beige-carpeted rooms. When he tries to tell Mary about this discovery, he can tell that she doesn’t believe him, so he sets out to get proof, enlisting store employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has access to recording equipment via his college. They enter the titular backrooms to document their discovery, only to find that they’re not alone down there. 

While having coffee with a friend recently, the topic of the upcoming X-Files reboot came up. We each agreed that it’s hard to imagine a functional version of that franchise in a post-9/11 world, specifically that the concept of mostly-for-fun conspiracy theories is difficult to play with in a world where fringe lunatics run our government. There already is a functional post-9/11 X-Files, and it’s called Fringe, and we briefly discussed what that meant on a level beyond the textual. Specifically, the strange and paranormal encounters that the various innocents on The X-Files always occur in remote areas: deep in the woods, out in the desert, or in vast fields of crops that seem to have no end. On Fringe, the horrible things that happen to people mostly occur in urban environments: diners, downtown Boston, and, fairly often, on airplanes. The safety of a metropolis is not a given after 9/11, and Fringe took that to a logical end. I thought about that a lot during Backrooms, specifically in how it managed to feel as fresh and new to me as The Blair Witch Project must have seemed in 1999, and that with time and distance, we no longer need to send Heather and her crew out to the woods to find something spooky. The backrooms are already here, in urban environments that contain them and camouflage them to the naked eye. You can make sure you never encounter the Blair Witch by making sure that you avoid her forest; but you might wander into the backrooms completely unaware, which is more immediate and spookier. 

I’m not really that into the current state of creepypasta. Jenny Nicholson made a Patreon video last year in which she effectively delineated something that had occurred to me conceptually but hadn’t put into words: things are usually creepier the less defined they are, and because creepypasta and SCP appeal to a very specific kind of online nerd, what used to be a story about some evil, inexplicable stairs in a state park or a basketball that caused psychic nosebleeds started to get more and more lore, to the point that the premise of the object or place becomes more important than the mystery. The concept of liminal spaces has become a matter of no small niche internet interest in recent years, as the prevalence of computer imagery rendering software has given rise to the ability to easily make creepy, Escherian office spaces for internet consumption. (I also think that there’s an argument to be made that omnipresent GPS mapping has made people generally less able to orient themselves without outside assistance, which makes labyrinthine spaces more frightening to people who have poor directional sense.)That influence has already leaked into the film world at large, as it inspired the creator of the game on which Exit 8 was based, and that’s what director Kane Parsons has been up to online. The film’s opening sequence appears to have been made entirely in Blender, and even though that means that some of the seams show through (there’s an audiocassette on a desk that’s as thin as a 3.5 inch floppy disk), it’s still effective. 

For a film set in the nineties, the fact that this was made by a director who’s only just barely able to legally drink means that it eschews a lot of the nostalgia factor that one would expect to be a huge part of a film set decades earlier. Artifacts of the time period are limited to the use of a camcorder for the documentation of the backrooms themselves, inexpensively produced local commercials, and self-help audiocassettes, and the only direct nostalgia bait is that we find a mysterious researcher at home with his family watching The Neverending Story on TV (the finale also features audio lifted directly from Star Trek IV, but I don’t think that will be noticed by many). The VHS camcorder quality of the found footage style segments of the film is extremely well done and effective at creating a feeling of the nineties without needing to rely on cheap “I remember that!” moments. After several years of nostalgia-poisoned period pieces like Stranger Things, this is a welcome relief. 

The performances here are very strong as well. One would think that a young director would take an easier route and focus his storytelling on characters closer to his own age, but either he or screenwriter Will Soodik made the wise choice to instead focus the film on characters of a more mature age. Ejiofor and Reinsve are two extremely competent performers, with multiple Oscar and BAFTA nominations between them, and there are several powerful scenes between the two of them that have no bearing on the eldritch location in Clark’s store at all. Reinsve’s Mary is haunted by a childhood raised by a mother who slowly lost her battle with schizophrenia, and Ejiofor’s Clark is a man whose psychology leads him to deflect all blame for his life and circumstances onto others. The latter of these two is a little weaker than the other; we only get Clark’s side of the story, but if he gave up his career for something more stable in order to support his wife through an extended education, and she really did quit for no real reason and still isn’t working, his resentment isn’t entirely unfounded. Still, whether one feels that Clark is an awful man before the backrooms start to exert their influence over him or if it’s only their evil that pushes him to a point where we can no longer sympathize, Ejiofor manages to play it well. Still, neither of these past griefs is so predominant in the film’s narrative that this feels like a retread of similar elevated horrors of recent years. The backrooms recreate things that it “remembers,” with each recreation becoming less and less like the thing that it’s supposed to represent, and in that way it’s like the imperfection of memory, but this works perfectly well as a variation on a haunted house as conceived in a digital age without needing to use “the apparition is a metaphor” as a crutch. 

This is probably the best straightforward horror that I’ve seen so far this year. It’s creepy, effective, disorienting, well-directed, and nicely acted. Finally!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scream 7 (2026)

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I was recently in Illinois, and the flights to and from O’Hare gave me the opportunity to catch up on some new releases I had missed. I had intentionally avoided (read: boycotted) seeing Scream 7 in theaters because of what happened to Melissa Barrera and the utter cowardice with which her morally correct opposition to the Palestinian genocide resulted in her being let go from the franchise. I must offer thanks to United Airlines for offering the chance to legally and ethically see the film; now having watched it, I can confirm: it fucking sucks. 

After sitting out Scream VI, Neve Campbell returns in this one as Sidney Prescott, now living in Pine Grove, IN and running a cafe called The Little Latte. This means that she’s hundreds of miles away from Woodsboro when a new Ghostface murders a couple who have rented out Stu Macher’s old house, which has been turned into an AirBnB experience themed after the real-life Woodsboro murders and the Stab film franchise that mythologized them. Ghostface torches the place, symbolically burning down the old. In Indiana, Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May), named for her best friend who was killed all the way back in Scream, is dating a boy named Ben, who recreates the “Billy sneaks into Sidney’s window” scene from that film, although Sidney isn’t fooled for a moment. Despite what we all inferred (and the previous production teams confirmed) about Sidney’s husband being the Mark from Scream 3, we learn here that she’s married to Pine Grove police chief Mark Evans (Joel McHale). 

In addition to Tatum’s boyfriend Ben, we also meet the rest of her friend group: Hanna (Mckenna Grace), Chloe (Celeste O’Connor, who hasn’t aged or changed their hair style since Madame Web), and creepy next door neighbor Lucas, whose mother Jessica (Anna Camp) is Sidney’s only real adult friend that we meet. Sidney begins to get FaceTime calls from none other than the presumed long-dead Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) just as a new Ghostface appears in Pine Grove to terrorize Sidney, her daughter, and her daughter’s friends. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) appears on the scene, with more recent franchise additions Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) in tow; her show has been cancelled, and she’s trying to climb her way back into relevance with the twins as her crew. Campbell’s fellow nineties mainstream teen actor Ethan Embry also appears as an employee of the mental institution where Stu has apparently spent the past three decades as an amnesiac John Doe before being released, just a couple of weeks prior to the events of the film. 

Scream is my favorite horror franchise, but it’s been well established that my favorite overall media empire is Star Trek, and there’s a quote from one of the producers of the ill-fated 2001 series Star Trek: Enterprise that I couldn’t stop thinking about all throughout Scream 7. I’ve been unable to relocate it, but I think it was Brannon Braga who said, in essence, that Enterprise failed because the shepherds of the franchise failed to consider that they needed a better reason to produce the series than “it’s time to go back to the well again.” The reason that Scream 4 and the two more recent sequels work so well is because they let the ground lie fallow for a while. Scream 3 (which was the worst of the franchise until this one, and even then was not without its inspired moments) ran everything into the ground, and by the time of Scream 4, there were all new elements of the horror genre to deconstruct. 5cream and Scream VI, likewise, justified their existence by playing with the relationship between legacy sequels, toxic fandom, and copycat killings. The franchise’s central conceit—that Ghostface is a mask anyone can wear and attracts people who are obsessed with horror media—is barely paid lip service here. Mindy mentions that this time, the killer is all about nostalgia, and Chad immediately shuts her down by saying that they’re not doing “the rules” this time because the idea is played out, which is the perfect microcosm of just how little care, thought, or effort mattered in the creation of Scream 7. This exists solely because it was time to go back to the well again, and boy, does it show, and it also does little to assuage accusations that this was an attempt to launder the franchise’s image in the wake of the Barrera controversy. 

The characters here are half-baked at best, and the performances are nothing to write home about, either. Isabel May is, as politely as I can put this, not a very good performer, and learning that Mckenna Grace was cast as early victim Hanna after auditioning for Tatum means that the producers passed on having Grace, who gives consistently strong performances, as Sidney’s daughter. That’s inconceivable! An unjustifiable whiff if ever there was one. When Mindy and Chad gather Tatum’s friend group to tell them that, statistically, one of them is likely a party to the killings, every person present is so thinly drawn that the audience knows they must all be red herrings (ironic, given that the actual killers are somehow even less developed, to the point that one of the actors portraying them had to beg for a couple more scenes of character development). Ben is a computer guy, so he might be able to pull off the potential deep-faking of Stu Macher; Lucas is deep in the “true crime lexicon” and is overly invested in the Woodsboro murders; and Chloe, um, has a crush on Lucas. That’s it! In 1996, Scream up-ended what had become the de facto slasher formula of having a bunch of interchangeable teenagers dying at the hands of an implacable killer; in 2026, Scream 7’s teenaged characters are those interchangeable kids. The most memorable new character here is Jimmy Tatro’s ill-fated AirBnB guest who’s dead by the title card. 

It’s impossible to say where the overreliance on nostalgia in this franchise first entered as the series’ original sin. Scream VI could be argued to have started this, given that the killers in that film were recreating kills from the previous movies using actual collected murder weapons. 5cream addressed nostalgia and its effect on toxic fan culture in its text with relation to the in-universe Stab franchise, but the first Stab film was referenced all the way back in Scream 2, so it’s been a part of this narrative for a long time. Scream 3 may have been the first to take it too far, with the narrative revolving around the shooting of a Stab film. A case can be made for any of them, even the original film, but it is undeniable that there is now a clear winner for the film in which this is the most poisonous. Scream 7 has a moment in which Tatum comes downstairs wearing Sidney’s leather jacket from Scream 2, and the music swells in a way that makes it apparent that we’re supposed to have some kind of emotional investment in this piece of apparel. Not even the biggest Screamhead could make a rational argument that this was a look that needed to be inscribed alongside the actual iconic outfits from the franchise (which are, in order, Rose McGowan’s Tatum’s bosomy sweater, Drew Barrymore’s blonde bob and cozy fleece, and Courteney Cox’s horrible bangs in Scream 3). We have dug through the bottom of the barrel for things to reference. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the killer’s deepfake of Stu isn’t the only one that we see of a prior Ghostface. It makes sense that the AI Stu would be made to look as if he had continued to age since 1996, because he’s supposed to be Stu, or close enough to convince Sidney. Why the hell they didn’t bother to de-age Laurie Metcalf or Scott Foley for their cameos at the end would be a riddle for the ages, were it not for the fact that we know the answer: the film-makers were lazy, and they just didn’t care. 

Every interpersonal conflict here is contrived and unrealistic. The idea that Sidney would try to shield her teenage daughter from all of the horrors she faced at the same age, it absolutely holds no water that this would mean that she’d fail to protect her daughter from the reality that their family will never not be in potential danger from various legacy Ghostfaces. Tatum should be strong, fierce, and self-sufficient, not whining to her mother about her over-protectiveness. This might have worked had Grace been in the Tatum role, but May doesn’t have the chops for it, although she’s not alone in the crop of teen actors when it comes to having talent that fails to pass muster. Original Tatum showed more character and imagination in the garage scene alone than new Tatum does in this entire film. Gale and Sidney go live on TV at one point to try and draw “Stu” out, and Gale gets a rise out of Sidney by asking questions about her offspring, which causes Sidney to get defensive and rip off her microphone. This scene doesn’t feel like the culmination of a long-awaited reunion between characters we’ve known for decades, and instead feels like forced conflict, one that’s immediately dismissed when Sidney gets a call from an under-attack Tatum. Chad and Mindy barely even have a reason to be present, and Mindy’s sudden desire to be the new Gale Weathers is baffling. 

Scream 7 has precisely three good ideas. The first is the opening sequence; that the Macher house has become a bit of a shrine that is of interest to true crime obsessives is a fresh concept, and having a new Ghostface murder a couple of them on the spot is such a good opening that I’m surprised it wasn’t already used before. The second good idea is that the film features the death of one of the Ghostfaces in the middle of the second act, catching the characters and the audience off guard. It was such a refreshing change that I was pleased with it, until I remembered that this was just a variation on the opening from Scream VI. Even one of its few good ideas is just a rehash. Finally, what this return to the well brings to the table is the discussion of AI and deepfakes. Having Stu Macher return and there be a question as to whether it’s really him or someone using his likeness to torment Sidney is perhaps the only bold choice that Scream 7 makes, although it ultimately amounts to little more than the nostalgia bait equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby. There were countless different ways that this could have been incorporated, and better fit the Scream concept. Why not have the lead Ghostface pose as Stu Macher online to indoctrinate other would-be Ghostfaces, with the question of whether or not Stu remaining alive is the same? If you’re going to go to all the trouble of bringing Lillard back, why not have a plot point about members of the younger generation finding something that he pre-recorded, “movie rules for killers” on some VHS that a true crime collector discovers? It’s as bad a fumble as casting the lead of The Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight as Sidney Prescott’s daughter instead of Mckenna Grace. 

As a Scream fan, my nomination is that we all agree that the series ended with Scream VI. Sidney was safe and far away, there was a decent capstone of using all of the previous films without retroactively making them “connected” in an unbelievable way, and Kirby got her redemption. Gale was never going to be able to get direct vengeance for Dewey’s death since “Ghostface” is only an idea and not a being, but she got the closest she was ever going to. Sam and her sister put an end to their family’s killer legacy and walked off into the sunset. That’s more than good enough for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond