Posted on June 28, 2026

“Trust His Instincts”: Disease & Death in Good Boy (2025)

Guest Post

Grace Fuller

Good Boy, directed by Ben Leonberg in 2025, initially appears to be a supernatural horror film from a dog’s perspective. However, upon closer examination, it reveals a deeper, unsettling meaning. Not only does it function as a haunted-house narrative, but it also serves as a metaphor for how dogs perceive human illness, both physical and mental. Dogs have an innate ability to sense changes in their owners’ physical and behavioural states before fully understanding them. They remain loyal even in the face of fear as they witness their beloved owners’ decline.

Good Boy is an independent horror film directed by Ben Leonberg and co-written by Alex Cannon. The film stars a dog named Indy and his owner, Todd, played by Shane Jensen. Todd moves into a rural family house that is supposedly cursed. This is the same house where his grandfather and his faithful dog, Bandit, both lived and died. While they are there, Indy begins to sense a supernatural presence in the house, as does Todd, who is battling a chronic lung disease.

Read more

closeup of a bloody tent
Posted on June 16, 2026

Secrets and Mean Girls: What Happened to Those Girls Review

Elizabeth Erwin

Early on in the forthcoming novel What Happened to Those Girls, a character remarks, “There’s a point in horror movies when characters realize they’ve left their reality where nothing bad ever happens, when suddenly they’re no longer a complex human being but a delicate sack of meat.” This succinct summation of horror’s essential terror drives Carlyn Greenwald’s latest propulsive thriller while also hinting at an emotional toll similarly themed stories frequently fail to acknowledge. With its surprisingly brutal moments of body horror and its refusal to paint character motivations as binary, the story resists sanitizing death or the complicated emotions that can follow and is a very welcome addition to the YA thriller catalog. Read more

Posted on June 12, 2026

AI horror in The Backrooms

Guest Post

Ian Haig

Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms emerged on the internet. The creepy pasta backstory of the film is well known: like a piece of haunted media within the network, it began as a mysterious still image posted on 4chan, and later a short film on YouTube with over 60 million views, and now a Hollywood movie. What’s striking about the recent film, The Backrooms, is the way  viral marketing has spread across the internet, the algorithm suggesting more and yet more stories, interviews with cast and characters and various analyses of the film, amplifying the idea of the film being a product born out of the internet and the algorithmic culture of social media from where it originally emerged.

Read more

Posted on June 7, 2026

Terrible in Their Beauty: Artistic Echoes of George ‘AE’ Russell in A Dark Song

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Guiding the audience through a claustrophobic psychological and physical labyrinth in the pursuit of divine revenge, director Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song (2016) presents an overwhelmingly majestic yet equally terrifying vision of an angelic presence that defies rational explanation. The film’s climax, I contend, through elements of terror, beauty, and dread contingent on ecstatic religious experiences, startlingly echoes mystic, poet, and artist George ‘AE’ Russell’s expressions of lost gods and guardians of ancient Eire.

Read more

Posted on June 2, 2026

Open Cracks in Horror Narratives: Philip Fracassi, Behold the Void

Guest Post

Tomáš Erhart

“There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.” (Abbott, 2016: 13)

This is originally a quote from Brian Evenson, which was used by another writer of contemporary horror, Philip Fracassi, as the motto for the introduction to his collection of short stories – Behold the Void. Stories in it recount seemingly ordinary events, such as a grandmother’s funeral or a visit to a swimming pool, but then a rift opens (once even literally), filling the text with something dark and frightening. With a slightly looser interpretation, where we understand the crack as a gap in the narrative, Evenson’s words may describe one thing typical of horror narratives. Many horror stories do not explain the origin or nature of supernatural events that take place in them, leaving a gap leaking darkness.

Read more

Back to top