Posted on October 18, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival Review: Jordan Downey’s The Cycle

Dawn Keetley

I watched The Cycle as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its east coast premiere on October 16, 2026.

Directed by Jordan Downey, and written by Downey and Kevin Stewart, The Cycle (2026) is a distinctive blend of forensic crime / police procedural and supernatural horror. (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, released in 2016 and directed by André Øvredal comes to mind as a similar kind of endeavor.) It’s filmed in Astoria, Oregon, and it has the grey landscapes, the rain and the mist, that evoke Nordic Noir, heightening its links to crime narrative.

The Cycle centers on Meg Garland (Deborah Ann Woll), a forensic anthropologist who studies bodies in all stages of decomposition: she listens to the dead, reconstructing their lives from their dead bodies. In a sense, The Cycle is all about understanding dead bodies, although, for Meg, while the bodies she studies may be dead, they are fully animate – teeming with life – in the way they speak to her.

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Posted on October 17, 2026

Chronovisor (2026): On the Affects of Academic Anxiety and Techno-Animism

Guest Post

Jered Mabaquiao

Anyone who has been swept away in a current of intellectual pursuit can identify with Chronovisor’s appeal. At least for me, I intimately recognize the kind of frightening intellectual work and mindful interiority that Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor illustrates. Chronovisor begins with the professional, and oftentimes rare, virtue of attention—with the conviction that one more source, one more language, one more archival detour, or at least one more listening ear at a dinner table might finally cohere an argument.

Between our own passions and our own attention spans, Chronovisor’s horror infuses a hubris of intellect with an occult machine that can replay and access the past. In this way, I read the film’s most unsettling discovery that “scholarship” can become a feverish, even deeply spiritually possessive narrative arc. Chronovisor frames this fever in the research professor whose funding will have been cut off if they cannot miraculously conjure a mythological machine whose sole function is to capture and bridge anyone’s consciousness and to project it as an image onto its screen.

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Posted on October 15, 2026

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below – Gory, Uncomfortable and Enthralling Body Horror

Guest Post

Jenna LaBollita

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below is thrilling, imaginative, and absolutely disgusting. I mean that last part as a compliment. Its horror is gory, detailed, and deeply uncomfortable, yet despite the strangeness of its premise and the extremity of some of its imagery, the novel never feels inaccessible. Schlote-Bonne gives readers a narrator whose voice feels familiar enough to ground an extraordinary world, making its horrors feel uncomfortably close.

Petra is an orphan approaching the age when she will have to leave the orphanage that has been her home. Her plan for what comes next is ambitious: she wants to open a clinic using medicinal plants, and doing so requires money. Petra earns that money by diving into the Void, a dangerous environment composed of different levels, each inhabited by its own species of plants and creatures. Some plants are medicinal, while others are carnivorous, venomous, or poisonous. The deeper Petra goes, the greater the danger – and the greater the potential reward.

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Posted on October 12, 2026

Who Keeps the Miracle Running? ‘Twas the Night and the Machinery of Christmas

Guest Post

Luna Gray

Kevin Johnson’s debut imagines a world where Santa is real, almost everyone agrees he’s good, and the cost of all that joy gets paid by somebody else.

Most Christmas horror starts by taking something comforting and corrupting it. Kevin Johnson’s ‘Twas the Night, out October 13 from William Morrow, does something stranger. He builds a world where Santa Claus is real, almost everybody knows it, and Christmas works exactly as advertised.

Then he asks who has to suffer to keep the miracle running.

A World That Already Agrees

The prologue doesn’t treat Santa as folklore up for debate. He’s a fact. He delivers presents to children all over the world, and only children. His existence is tied to peace, kindness, low crime and an end to war between nations.

That’s a lot of power to hand one being. The prologue also makes room for a fringe of skeptics who call Santa a conspiracy, propaganda, a form of population control. Nobody has definitive physical proof of him. The presents keep showing up anyway. The narrator closes by warning that doubting Santa is dangerous.

Johnson doesn’t have to invent a surveillance state. He just reads the song literally. Santa sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. In this world that isn’t a nursery rhyme. It’s policy.

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Posted on October 11, 2026

Casey Walker’s Ithaqua – Historically-grounded Wendigo Horror

Dawn Keetley

Ithaqua has been a long-term passion project for its Canadian director and writer, Casey Walker. In interviews, he has described his struggle to see his conception to the screen, including securing the funding – something that finally came from John Gore, who (as of 2023) has acquired Hammer Films. In the meantime, Walker has directed two other features – A Little Bit Zombie (2012) and Home Bodies (2026) and has produced a number of films, including Chris Nash’s 2024 break-out hit, In A Violent Nature (which we loved).

Ithaqua is set in winter in 1821 at a fur-trading post, Fort Thomas, in the Canadian wilderness. The place is inspired, Walker says, by Fort William Historical Park, a living-history museum in his home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Indeed, Ithaqua was filmed at Fort William, at its reconstruction of an early nineteenth-century fur trading post. It was also filmed in an unusually cold winter, and Walker has recounted the enormous challenge of filming in temperatures of minus 34 degrees Celsius to minus 55 (including a scene in which a man strips off his clothes).

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