Posted on August 15, 2026

The Digital Etchings of the Scaffold: The Executioner’s Anonymity and Audience Participation

Guest Post

Declan Ackroyd

In his seminal study of the English people and their attitudes toward execution V. A. C. Gatrell notes that, even before the abolition of public executions in 1868, ‘the polite’ of Victorian society had begun to distance themselves from the spectacle, resulting ‘in a deepening embarrassment about any unseemly display’ that these acts entailed.[1] Having shifted the violence of the state away from public view it took until 1968, another hundred and one years, for execution to become completely banned in the UK. (1969 in Northern Ireland). In our modern era the consumption of public violence is now widely considered taboo, but it still appears in parts of our society in differing forms, from the sport that we watch to the cinema that we consume. This essay will explore the latter.

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Posted on August 8, 2026

Suburban Blandness and Visual Violence The Mise-en-Scène of the Opening of Scream

Guest Post

Gary Miceli

Scream (1996) centers on Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a high school student in California who becomes the target of a costumed serial killer named Ghostface on the anniversary of her mother’s murder. Directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, the movie also stars Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, and Drew Barrymore. The opening scene of the movie is widely considered one of the greatest and most horrifying openings in the history of the horror genre. It completely subverted expectations by brutally killing off Drew Barrymore, an actress the audience expects to be the star of the movie, within the first ten minutes. This shocking narrative subversion mirrors a technique previously executed by horror legend Alfred Hitchcock in his classic 1960 movie Psycho. Ultimately, Wes Craven manipulates the stereotypical slasher rules that we all know, making his own rules – all of which we see in the powerful mise-en-scène of the opening scene.

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Posted on August 5, 2026

The Unknown’s (2026) Horror of Depersonalization and the Metamorphosis of Schizophrenia

Guest Post

Kit Neikirk

The anticipated next film from Anatomy of a Fall (2023) co-writer Arthur Harari, The Unknown (French: L’Inconnue, 2026), bills itself as a body-swap horror. In it, after a brief sexual encounter beneath a subdued club light, a lonely and slightly off-putting Parisian street photographer, David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), swaps bodies with an unknown woman (Léa Seydoux) he sleeps with. This concept has been thoroughly explored – from the body horror characteristic of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) to the racial allegory of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). In this genre, the concept of body swapping is generally contextualized as desirable and steeped in class politics; in Possessor, the bodies of the poor are colonized by the wealthy, used as corporate property that undergoes swapping. Get Out, meanwhile, uses body swapping to embody the simultaneous White fetishization and otherization of the Black body. This is not to mention the long-standing comedic potential of this genre, spanning from 2003’s family comedy Freaky Friday to the explicitly Scream-inspired comedy-horror Freaky (2020). Meanwhile, contemporary reimagining of the body-swap genre is ripe with trans-gender interpretations, best exemplified by Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), wherein the body swap is intertwined with the transposing of oneself onto fandoms and alternative realities as an escape from gender dysphoria.

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Posted on July 30, 2026

“It’s Not Me”: Inde Navarrette’s brilliant non-naturalistic performance in Obsession

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

Obsession tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), a lost young man who is in love with his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), an independent young woman. Rather than render himself vulnerable he uses a novelty item to wish for her intense, unconditional love, and gets more than he bargained for. Before Bear’s curse, Nikki was salty, forthright, and ambitious. As Bear’s “dream girl” she takes on the persona of the well-worn trope, the “manic pixie,” giving up her own ambitions to quirkily help Bear fulfill his own. Or rather, she tries and fails to take on this persona, exposing its fundamental horrors.

In Obsession, the seemingly spontaneous emotions of a woman following romantic codes are revealed as labor, and this revelation is largely dependent on Inde Navarrette’s brilliant, non-naturalistic approach to the role. Her talent has been widely noted in reviews, but I predict that as this film becomes the subject of academic criticism, less attention will be paid to her performance than to director Curry Barker’s (admittedly fascinating) direction and screenplay, as well as to audience reception and to the larger ascension of YouTube creators. The lack of focus on acting in scholarly work stems from laudable impulses to concentrate on the medium’s particular formal properties. However, it is important that we consider how performance styles and choices complement or contradict the film language of shots, sound, and editing.

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Posted on July 26, 2026

Hearing is Believing: Undertone’s Aural Horror

Guest Post

Jered Mabaquiao

I initially experienced writer-director Ian Tuason’s Undertone (2026) in its opening weekend in a Dallas Cinemark XD and IMAX theater. Undertone follows Evangeline (Evy) Babic, played by Nina Kiri, who is co-host of a paranormal podcast and token skeptic. Additionally, we understand Evy also takes care of her dying mother who is a devout Catholic. Evy’s house is decorated with various religious iconography. Her friend, Justin, voiced by Adam DiMarco, is the other host of the podcast and a firm believer in the possibility of another realm. Justin anonymously receives ten audio files, each sequencing disturbing activity experienced by a couple named Mike and Jessa who seem to unleash a demonic entity, named Abyzou. Abyzou possesses mothers and causes miscarriages or outright kills infants out of jealousy due to its own infertility. Throughout Undertone, Evy is wrestling with having just learned that she’s pregnant, out of wedlock, thus adding critical mental and physical stress involving whether or not she should keep the child.

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