Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 5, 2026

TRANS BODIES OF WATER: Frankenstein (1931)

Guest Post

Rowan Marie Abbott

I have a complicated relationship with the beach.

On one hand, I’m obsessed with it. I have a list of addresses on my phone titled “For Your Regularly Scheduled Mental Breakdowns”—they’re all boardwalks.

There’s something comforting about that vastness. I can wade into the water and let it swallow me up. Nothing but ocean for miles and miles; and I get to be a small little dot buried within it. Within that mass, stressing over deadlines or arguments feels trivial.

And the waves? Oh my god, the waves.

I’m treading water and then, suddenly, this wall of sheer force rises up from nowhere and comes crashing down on me. I’m sent tumbling through, smashing into the sand and seaweed, and spat onto shore coughing up saltwater. If serenity isn’t enough to take me out of my own head, the beach is more than happy to try violence instead.

And it works! In that moment, I’m not a buttoned-up professional. I’m a stupid mammal covered in flesh and hair. I’m susceptible to cold and wet and salt and inertia. And I’m alive, I’m so alive. As soon as I catch my breath, I run back, returning to the ocean just as quickly as it spat me out. The ocean makes an unabashed masochist out of me.

Posted on October 31, 2026

Scream 3: A Retrospective

Guest Post

Jaymen Neff-Strickland and Shane H Weathers

Without taking the mixed reception of the recent Scream 7 (Kevin Williamson, 2026) into consideration (a film about which the authors of this retrospective disagree), Scream is considered one of the most consistent slasher series. There are few film series in American cinema history that can boast the consensus that they contain no truly “bad” entry, whether judged by critical or fan reception. Toy Story, The Lord of the Rings, John Wick, Mission: Impossible, and Back to the Future are just a few of these examples. Prior to 2026, almost every Scream film was well-received by fans and critics, with each receiving above a 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, except one: Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000), a film that maintains (as of October 2026) a 45% Tomatometer and a 38% Popcornmeter score. The RT consensus is as follows: “Despite some surprising twists, Scream 3 sees the franchise falling back on the same old horror formulas and cliches it once hacked and slashed with postmodern abandon” (Rotten Tomatoes). The film often ranks at the bottom in series rankings (see Franich; Nemiroff; Simpson and Lawrence; Vorel). However, with the passing of the 25^th anniversary of Scream 3 in 2025, and the 30^th anniversary of the original film taking place this year, a retrospective analysis confirms what many Scream fans have come to accept: while this is by no means the best Scream film, even the “worst” Scream film is still a cut above the rest.

Posted on October 29, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Josh Tanner’s Posthumous

Dawn Keetley

I watched Posthumous as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its East Coast premiere on October 21, 2026.

Posthumous is Australian writer-director Josh Tanner’s debut feature (co-written with Jade van der Lei). It starts out really strong and offers a lot to like.

The film centers on Zoe (Sophie Lowe), who has just turned thirty and who has returned to her childhood home where her estranged father, Neil (David Roberts) still lives. Zoe’s birthday is anything but happy for both herself and her father, as it’s the day Zoe’s mother died (of cancer) right after giving birth to Zoe. Seemingly at something of a crossroads in her life, a listless and grief-stricken Zoe discovers a VHS cassette on which her mother recorded birthday messages every year until she (Zoe) turned twenty-one. The viewer only gradually realizes that Zoe’s mother is not aging in these messages – and that her pregnancy is slowly growing larger. These messages aren’t recorded over a long period of time; they were recorded over nine months. Zoe aged but her mother remains frozen on tape, getting only sicker, not older.

Posted on October 24, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Ryan Glover’s Split Rock

Dawn Keetley

I watched Split Rock as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere on October 21, 2026.

Written and directed by Ryan Glover, Split Rock is his second feature after The Strings, which was released in 2020 (and is available on Shudder). Split Rock is about a group of geologists – Lauren (Clark Backo), Ben (Drew Ray Tanner), Sam (Olivia Luccardi), and Trevor (Graham Verchere) – who are surveying an area of the Badlands in southern Saskatchewan. They’re exploring rock formations and measuring seismic activity in the region and, relatively early on, they find an anomalous rock – one they struggle to identify, one that shouldn’t be there. They theorize that it was dragged down into the region by a glacier. Even as the team talks about the rock in scientific terms, however, attempting to explain it rationally, bizarre things are happening at the camp. Lauren, especially, seems deeply affected by the presence of the rock, even as she too tries to explain what’s happening to them, to her, in scientific language.

black and red decorative image for the Agatha Christie Reconsidered podcast

Posted on October 22, 2026

Agatha Christie Reconsidered Podcast: The Moving Finger & A Murder is Announced

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Podcast

Though her placid demeanor when compared against the worldly and theatrical Hercule Poirot often results in Miss Marple’s contributions within detective fiction being overlooked, we think that Agatha Christie’s observant spinster is an absolute force when it comes to interrogating the dangers that lurk in domestic spaces. In part three of our seven-episode exploration of Agatha Christie’s enduring Gothic legacy, we focus on The Moving Finger (1942) and A Murder Is Announced (1950). In the former, “poison pen” letters disrupt a seemingly tranquil community ending in murder and recriminations. In the latter, a small town is disrupted by the newspaper announcement of an impending murder that while at first dismissed as a party game, soon becomes a lightening rod for accusations and death.

Grounding our discussion in Christopher Yiannitsaros’s work on surveillance and incarceration in Christie’s villages, we look at how the shadows haunting the home in both novels are shaped by post-war trauma and local community norms. As always, please note that this episode will include spoilers.