2026

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 made 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: Olivia Newman

2026

Just to avoid any confusion, or any amped up expectations, let me just admit outright that this is not a great flick. That’s right, the flick about octopuses probably ‘inspired’ by the success of covid-era documentary My Octopus Teacher is not a great flick.

It is cheesy. It is dorky. It is clumsy. It is obvious. It is so contrived that it deserves to be mocked. It is something that would have been ‘released’ on the Lifetime or Hallmark cable channels in the years gone by instead of Netflix.

And yet I still enjoyed it. I’m not going to say “I enjoyed it immensely”, but I laughed (very) occasionally, teared up a few times and did cry at the end, so that counts for something, hopefully, in this sometimes cold and brutal world(?)

Sally Field. She is probably one of the main reasons why I enjoyed the flick or at least had tender / forgiving feelings towards it. Who doesn’t love Sally Field? What kind of hollowed out husk of a jerk doesn’t adore this glorious woman?

I haven’t seen her in anything since the sweet Hello, My Name is Doris which surely was like a decade ago. But of course most people remember her as, I dunno, what do people remember her from the most? Playing Forrest’s momma in Forrest Gump? If you’re an Old, then you’d seen reruns of Gidget and The Flying Nun when you were a kiddlywink. Mrs Doubtfire? Not Without My Daughter? Soap? Aunt May in the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies? Mrs Lincoln in Lincoln?

If you’re a Young then you don’t know or care who Sally Field is and consider whole, entire movies to be a dead artform from the olden days, and you would rather watch 60 two minute TikToks or Reels in a row rather that one whole movie that goes for 2 hours.

And likely you don’t care about giant Pacific octopuses either, since by the time you read this they’ve probably gone extinct or something, and yes it was somehow your fault.

Even though usually constant voiceover drives me up the wall I did not in fact dislike the constant voiceover here. Mostly that’s because the voiceover is delivered by one of the greats, being Alfred Molina, with that amazing voice of his. Of course, famously he played the dastardly Dr Otto Octavius in a couple of Spider-Man movies, though not the ones Sally Field was in.

Even better here he is vocalising, entirely for our benefit, the thoughts of a giant Pacific octopus that the humans call Marcellus. I don’t know that he associates the name with himself, as in, I don’t know that he thinks of himself as a Marcellus, but that’s what they call him. Those thoughts are mostly of his loathing for humans.

It’s true, we’re a pretty loathsome bunch. We haven’t done wonders with the oceans, that’s for sure. And a number of humans, thinking they were helping him out, ‘rescued’ him and put him in an aquarium after he lost a limb to some vicious eel.

dir: David Lowery

2026

It’s hard to feel bad for mega wealthy pop diva superstars, but this flick tries damn hard to make us feel that way.

Mother Mary is a strange flick. When it starts, right from the start, we are put in a certain position because of the words we keep hearing uttered by a very angry fashion designer, being Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), who, due to the sheer magnitude of the hate she has for the star, can feel that she is travelling towards her.

Sam’s hatred is pure, and she wants some kind of revenge, and, initially, we are somewhat convinced that she is entitled to her feelings, if not her revenge. Her main beef is that she helped create this pop persona that Hathaway’s character rode to global success, and yet she was never credited for it and was cut off by the pop starlet when she made it big.

As it goes on a bit, though, I started thinking “is it reasonable for someone to feel entitled to a life long commitment from a Madonna / Kylie / Beyoncé / Taylor Swift type?” I mean, pop stars probably go through fashion designers the way that someone with a cold goes through boxes of tissues. I’m not discounting the work they would do: the iconic looks crafted for these divas that make them global icons have to be created by someone. And ‘created’ doesn’t mean being yelled at by a star until you somehow get it right: one has to craft the vision both of them see.

Sam’s business has flourished in the years that have passed since their estrangement, but from Sam’s telling she felt compelled to make her business succeed solely out of spite. Spite is a decent motivator for creative endeavours, no doubt. Such is her malice towards, uh, Mother Mary, that she intends to relish the fuck out of this opportunity to berate and humiliate this star, who has literally come crawling back. “You’ll come crawling back” is a thing someone yells as an ex departs, but they rarely, if ever, do.

But back she has come, and she is somewhat crawling.

David Lowery, famous for a bunch of weird but great looking films, seems a bit perplexed as to what the point of this flick is, I feel. He is trying to capture that feel of a top of the world performer, or like a melodramatic two hander where two actors are going at it hammer and tongs, but neither really succeeds. For all of Sam’s venom, and the relish with which Michaela Coel delivers her lines, this isn’t a flick where the banter between two characters is like a tense tennis match. Mostly it’s Sam spitting fire, and Mother Mary responding with wet newspaper.

dir: Meredith Alloway

2026

I don’t know what I was expecting when I sat down on a Thursday night to watch something trashy, but it wasn’t this. I had read reviews or seen the flick mentioned in the same breath as certain classics like Heathers, The Craft, Jawbreaker, the non-musical Mean Girls, and, come on, surely they were taking the piss?

This flick is… about a group of young women who work at a clothing store at a mall, and they are held in awe or at least their leader is feared by all. They have names related to fruits, hence they are the Forbidden Fruits of the title. Their leader is, of course, Apple (Lili Reinhart). They work in Free Eden. Apple, Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) are the in group.

If you’ve worked in a mall, or been to a mall, immediately you can see how implausible this scenario is. The histrionics of a redhead and her hangers on wouldn’t even register three shops down, let alone throughout the place. Malls have hundreds of employees. Thousands, tens of thousands of people can come through on given days. Who has time to care?

However, you work with the premise you have, not the premise someone else came up with after the fact. A new devotee calling herself Pumpkin (Lola Tung) insinuates her way into the group in order to get close to Apple.

Pumpkin are fruits. I’ve never thought of it before, but they are. Wikipedia confirms it. Apple seems excited to have a new devotee/slave, and inducts her into their witchy coven through a fairly gross ritual.

As you can probably imagine without wanting to watch any of it or a trailer, Apple is Regina George / Nancy, and is really mean to the others and they’re all terrified of earning her disfavour. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. The extension of this dynamic / template beyond school doesn’t feel like it makes a lot of sense. You don’t have to tell me about how people’s insecurities and group dynamics in a workplace could end up leading to a group of idiots being coerced into doing something incredibly stupid (like voting for One Nation), but I could never figure out whilst watching why any of them would put up with Apple’s bullshit. Fig is a college graduate (in astrophysics no less) so why is she even there?

Cherry is perhaps not as gifted intellectually (okay she’s the straight Gretchen analogue who keeps trying to make fetch happen), but why is she putting up with all this abuse regardless? Her feelings of loss and loneliness upon losing her family in a fire couldn’t possibly be assuaged by being continuously abused and controlled by this horrible person.