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Insidious (2010) Review: The One James Wan Film I Actually Believe
I watched The Shining alone in my college apartment in Austin, 2007, at two in the morning, on a cheap laptop with the sound too low and the room too dark. When it ended I left the light on. I never told anyone that. There wasn’t a reason to — nothing had happened, nobody had…
Is The Exorcist (1973) Still Scary in 2026? A Full Review
Is The Exorcist Still Scary in 2026? Is The Exorcist still scary in 2026? Yes — William Friedkin’s 1973 film, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, remains overwhelmingly effective more than fifty years after release. It is, technically, a possession horror movie — and it spends most of its runtime refusing…
Beau Is Afraid (2023) Review — Three Hours You Will Not Get Back, and I Mean That as a Compliment
Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster’s 2023 surrealist odyssey starring Joaquin Phoenix, runs 179 minutes, cost roughly $35 million, and made about $12 million back — numbers that answer the question a lot of people type into a search bar before they’ve even finished watching it: is Beau Is Afraid too long. The short answer is…
Backrooms Review: A Mystery Built for Free, Then Handed a Corporate Org Chart
This Backrooms review is going to tell you plainly what I told myself walking out of the theater: Kane Parsons’ 2026 film for A24, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, gets the dread exactly right for an hour, then explains it to death. Here’s where that argument actually started, and it wasn’t in a theater.…
The Nun (2018) Review — Valak’s Origin, Stunning Craft, Hollow Horror
The Nun (2018) Review — Valak’s Origin, Stunning Craft, Hollow Horror There is a moment in The Conjuring 2 that works better than anything in The Nun (2018). It lasts four seconds. Lorraine Warren, seated in her living room, notices something in the background of a painting she has lived with for years — a…
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) Review — The Franchise Machine at Full Speed
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) Review — The Franchise Machine at Full Speed The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It opens with an exorcism that leaves no room for interpretation. David Glatzel, eleven years old, convulses in a rented Connecticut house while Ed Warren narrates what’s happening in…
Annabelle (2014) Review: The Most Profitable Empty Room in Horror
Annabelle (2014) Review: The Most Profitable Empty Room in Horror Years ago I spent an afternoon in interior Texas with a Catholic priest who was doing the work a psychiatrist would have done, in a town that had no psychiatrist. He was clear-eyed about the arrangement — clear about the people he hadn’t been able…
The Conjuring: Last Rites Is Exactly What You’d Expect, and That’s the Problem
The Conjuring: Last Rites Is Exactly What You’d Expect, and That’s the Problem There’s a moment in The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) that almost made me forgive the franchise. It happens in 1964, before the title card, before any of the Smurl family machinery starts grinding. Lorraine Warren is alone in a dark room with…
Get Out (2017) Review: Nobody Believes the Man Who Sees It Coming
Get Out (2017) opens with a man walking alone at night, clocking danger from the posture before he can say why — and it never lets that feeling go. I once shared a journalism-school apartment in Austin with a guy named Peter — the kind who walked into a bar and left with three new…
The Conjuring 2 Review: James Wan Built a Beautiful Lie, and I Believed It Anyway
There’s a scene in The Conjuring 2 where Ed Warren picks up a guitar in a freezing council house in Enfield, north London, and sings Elvis to a family that has not slept properly in months. The children, who have spent the film being terrorized, start to smile. Lorraine watches her husband from across the…
