Horror

dir: Natalie Erika James

2026

Food itself is horrifying to some people.

I get it: so many people have eating disorders, I appreciate that and I’m not making light of it. People in my family, dear friends, so many people I know have been touched by the spectre of eating disorders that have impacted terribly upon their lives at some stages. Thankfully, most of them are still alive.

It’s an interesting place to start from for the premise of a horror flick, because in tandem with that is also society’s obsession with being thin as both a beauty ideal and a moral manifestation of what is “right” or good or proper. People who are thin are intelligent, disciplined, capable of self-restraint and delaying gratification, and are therefore good and reasonable people. Fat people lack moral fibre, can’t control themselves, and are therefore weak and bad people, under this logic. Our fear of varying, of not fitting in is universal, and we’re constantly being told what we should look like if we want people to think of us in particular ways, which is almost always unattainable for most of us, and how we’re worthless pieces of shit for not achieving that.

And all the endless scrolling on our phones doesn’t make a goddamn thing better, not for a second. So, eventually, that external ‘voice’ becomes an internal one.

Yes, this is a long-arse preamble – I can see that there’s a section of viewers, or a sub-section, for whom watching a person eat food enthusiastically would be inherently horrifying / disgusting.

I am not one of them. I was keenly aware of this as I watched the main character eating food with a bottomless, insatiable hunger, that I wasn’t the target audience. And yes this flick might be disturbing, but then I find a lot of romantic comedies disturbing too, mostly about how they still treat gender roles.

I never really found it scary, frightening, horrifying or other words a thesaurus would be happy to supply given how little it impacted me in that way, which is unusual for a horror film. But I was generally always interested in it, curious as to where it was going.

It’s still an interesting flick, is what I’m saying, even if it’s not particularly successful as a horror flick. Maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong genre perspective / lens. There are a heap of people, women, those identifying as women or non-binary, who would probably get a lot out of this flick who will never hear of it or ever see it because it’s a horror flick, and that’s a damn shame, I reckons.

dir: Ian Tuason

2026

There might not be anything scarier than the thought of looking after your parents as they lay dying.

Based on a dedication at the end of the credits, this director spent around three years looking after both of his parents as they slowly declined, in the house the movie is entirely set within, and, yes, it can take a lot out of you, and affect your mind in ways you couldn’t have imagined.

Years after the fact, I sometimes still hear my dad cry out for help in my sleep, and wake up terrified that I’ve let him down again.

So, it would be counterproductive and awfully precious to claim that this film undertone is targeting those members of the audience who’ve had this experience of looking after a parent or loved one as the sands ever so slowly, then abruptly, and then slowly again, run out of their hourglass. The movie takes that as its basis, as in, the experience of going nuts as you’re providing that level of care for someone, too afraid to leave the house in case something happens, desperate to get away to breath, painstakingly doing all the things you can to keep them alive, while wondering how much longer it can possibly take, and smushes it together with a podcast / audio experience from Hell weaving in contemporary ‘true crime’ type tropes and ancient myths.

As if it wasn’t horrifying enough already.

dir: Kane Parsons

2026

This is, thus far at least, one of the best and most successful horror flicks of the year, springing as it does from what I would have thought was one of the less likeliest places to arise from, being a series of Youtube videos that have been watched tens if not hundreds of millions of times.

Though of course there are cute cat videos that have billions of views, so let’s hope they don’t get their own franchise.

Why this all seems so unlikely is that around 4 years ago a sixteen year old kid started making these creepy videos, a mixture of ‘found footage’ stuff filmed with video cameras and 3D stuff made with Blender and Adobe After Effects (and a lot of heavy breathing and someone saying “what the fuck?” every few seconds), and a legend was reborn. I say ‘reborn’ because all of this is dredged from the depths of the internet itself, iterations of iterations, copies of copies, but this version really got a lot of eyeballs and fans, regardless or because of its creepypasta origins.

In what I regard as a curious trajectory, the success of The Backrooms online meant that a studio, being A24, offered this 19-year-old (he’s now 20) ten million dollars to turn this concept into a feature length movie, and a certain percentage of the people who viewed and loved his stuff on Youtube turned out and made this flick a tremendous success.

And the baffling thing (for us oldies) is that all the film references we would make or would think must have been relevant for this director and this production, are not. We are going to mention Kubrick and David Lynch and maybe Tarkovsky or movies like Skinamarink or The Blair Witch Project, or Severance and if Kane Parsons was listening to us, he’d probably tilt his head to the side quizzically as to the references, never having seen or heard of them.

He’s coming from a different place. It resonates with the youngs because it comes from a different place.

You know that I can’t avoid pretentious blather when it seems relevant. So the phrase I’m going to repeat, that has also been used in a million videos, is “liminal spaces”, or a “the fear or the horror of liminal spaces”. In between places. Open plan office spaces. Office spaces in general. Office spaces specifically. Places that seem unnatural even when nothing specifically or obviously creepy is happening.

Spaces painted in colours and patterns no one should ever have agreed to. Hallways and doorways, wherever there is a recess in shadow, meaning there is something always lurking potentially somewhere. And there is, something, somewhere, but even seeing glimpses of things is not as unsettling as these spaces.

dir: Kirill Sokolov

2026

The title sounds like either a threat or a warning, but it’s in no way accurate in terms of the movie it exists as the title for. A more accurate and less comprehensible at first title would be You Will Have to Kill Them Over and Over Again. Because that’s literally what happens.

And yet I still wouldn’t have advised that, because if there’s one thing I hate in film titles, and there are lots of things I hate about film titles, it’s excessive literalism.

Although Plane still amuses me to this day. That film was about a plane, don’t you know?

No, They Will Kill You is pretty much the same film as either of the Ready Or Nots, either one, but released at the same time as the sequel, so there could be some spite involved. Never underestimate the power of spite. It’s a powerful motivator.

It gets shit done. Both flicks are about a bunch of devil worshippers trying to kill one person, and then two persons, who happen to be sisters. Both have estranged sisters as their main characters, who have to resolve their longstanding resentments / guilt in order to survive long enough to reconcile. Both flicks have siblings protagonists at the mercy of the supernatural, but who manipulate their dire circumstances in order to survive (and thrive) at the end, damning their enemies.

Both have lots of violence, but They Will Kill You has the better action sequences, and by ‘better’ I mean it has action sequences that are so violent that they’re cartoonish. If you’re of a certain age you’d watch something like this and see all the influences, but try and keep it currentish by saying the makers have definitely watched and taken notes from Kill Bill, as if any of that wasn’t ripped off from other HK and Japanese flicks, but also the Sam Raimi Evil Dead movies.

This flick leans more into the horror genre, seeing as there are lots of opportunities to do terrible things to people’s bodies when magic makes them reform and reconstruct (so you can do it all again).

Zazie Beetz plays the lead role here, and it’s nice to see someone playing this kind of role who’s not a 90-lb dyed blonde waif with dark eyebrows for once. The other difference is that her character of Asia Reaves isn’t ‘here’ against her will: she wants to be here, she wants to kill these fuckers, in order to find her sister Maria (Myha’la).