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The Wailing Review: Four Explanations, No Answers
The Wailing review, in one sentence: Na Hong-jin’s 2016 Korean horror film gives you four separate, internally consistent explanations for a wave of family massacres in a rural village and then refuses, permanently, to confirm which one is true — and it deserves every bit of the acclaim it got at Cannes for doing exactly…
The Babadook Grief Metaphor Explained: The Real Meaning Behind Jennifer Kent’s Horror Masterpiece
The Babadook grief metaphor, in Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film, works like this: the top-hatted creature terrorizing single mother Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) is grief itself, given a body, after years of being denied release. Kent has confirmed that reading herself, more than once, in interviews about the film. Somewhere between December 2016 and the summer…
Us (2019) Review: Jordan Peele’s Sophomore Horror, Explained
Us (2019) Review: Jordan Peele’s Sophomore Horror, Explained Us (2019) review, short version: Jordan Peele’s sophomore horror film is ambitious, formally daring, and carried by a Lupita Nyong’o performance that ranks among the best physical acting horror cinema has produced this decade. It’s held back by exactly one decision — a third-act monologue that…
The Witch (2015) Historical Accuracy: A Review of Robert Eggers’ Puritan Debut
The Witch (2015) historical accuracy is the reason this Robert Eggers debut still works a decade after a Sundance crowd first saw it, in January 2015, and didn’t know what to make of it. Eggers didn’t invent a Puritan family and dress them in scary language. He built the family, the farm, and most of…
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…
