We’re in a small town in Scotland, where rookie police constable Rachel Heggie is on patrol. Suddenly she witnesses a car strike some mysterious man in a trenchcoat, who seemingly disappears after getting hit. The driver of the car, Francis “Caesar“ Sargison, is a familiar face to the police so Heggie is quick to arrest him. After she brings him into the police station, Sgt Jim Macready charges Caesar for reckless driving. So in a cell he goes, where there’s already another guy who is in for beating his wife. Now, the only thing Heggie needs to do, is finding the mystery man wearing a trenchcoat (and no, it’s not Castiel, but this could have easily belonged somewhere in the Supernatural universe) and she radios two other police officers for the task. It appears his disappearing act wasn’t too solid, as they quickly locate him and brings him in for questioning. He’s covered in scratches, goes by the name “Six“, and carries a notebook with a list of names. Soon, it becomes apparent that this mysterious dude is on a mission, and the names in his notebook are from people who have committed horrible acts and not done anything to atone for them. And it is also soon revealed that nearly everyone in the police station have dark secrets of their own…it’s not only the ones behind bars that are the bad guys…
Let Us Prey is a supernatural horror film from 2014, directed by Brian O’Malley (who also directed The Lodgers from 2017) and co-written with Fiona Watson and David Cairns. And if you’re in for something fun, gory and supernatural this might just be right up your alley! While you become aware very early in the movie that you’re watching one of those “pray for your sins“ kind of story, it does so with a bit of almost cartoonish glee by giving us a bunch of characters that truly deserves it. The characters are all interesting enough, where he have the protagonist Heggie who is struggling with something from her past, and is pretty much the only likable character among the bunch, except from perhaps Six himself. The others are…mostly a bunch of horrible a-holes. They’re all having a history of violence and wrongdoings, and we’re certainly looking forward to see them finally pay for their misdeeds.
The movie is mostly very fast-paced with few dull moments, with a fitting John Carpenter-esque synth score by Steve Lynch. It also becomes bloody and gory at times, where especially towards the end we get full-on mayhem where one of the bad guys covers himself in barbed wire and tries to become Rambo and blast everything to pieces. Crazy and fun! And since the majority of the characters here are deliberately unlikable, it goes a long way to have a devilish “antagonist“ who isn’t really the bad guy here.
Let Us Prey is one of those popcorn movies that is simply a good time, with lots of violence and fun and a finale that goes wild!
Director: Brian O’Malley Writers: Fiona Watson, David Cairns, Brian O’Malley Country & year: UK/Ireland, 2014 Actors: Liam Cunningham, Pollyanna McIntosh, Bryan Larkin, Hanna Stanbridge, Douglas Russell, Niall Greig Fulton, Jonathan Watson, Brian Vernel, James McCreadie, Sophie Stephanie Farmer IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3148348/
A girl is running out of her home, terrified and constantly looking after someone…or something. After getting inside a car, she drives away and later that night she ends up at a beach all alone. On her cell phone, she tells her parents that she loves them, and that’s the last call she ever makes. The next thing we see is the girl’s brutally mutilated corpse in the morning sunlight. And yes, this remains one of the very best opening scenes in modern horror movies, as it effectively introduces us to what could happen to the victims here in a very simple yet brutal and terrifying way!
Then we head over to our protagonist, Jay Height (Maika Monroe), who goes to the movies with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary). Suddenly, Hugh asks her if she can see a girl wearing a yellow dress, which she can’t. He then freaks out and urges them to leave. Well, we all have those moments of not wanting to meet a specific someone from our past, right? Nothing to worry about…and absolutely no red flags when a guy freaks out so much over seeing someone that he makes you leave the theater before the movie is finished. At least Jay’s naive enough to not put much thought into it, and later they have sex for the first time in his car. How romantic…until he chloroforms her. When Jay wakes up, she’s tied to a wheelchair in an abandoned building, and while she might have a thousand and one different reasons circulating in her head why he wanted to do this to her, at least there’s no way she expected this: he explains that he is followed by some demonic entity that wants to kill him, which takes appearance of random people and only he can see. The only way to throw it off your trail (at least for a while) is to have sex. Yes, you just need to fuck around, plainly and simply. Then the entity will follow the person you had sex with instead, but here’s the catch: once that person is killed, it will come back to get you. So: he urges Jay to keep having sex with people to keep the entity at bay. Talk about the worst STD ever.
Jay is of course bewildered and probably a little heartbroken too. One thing is being unlucky enough to encounter a man (or woman) who only uses you for sex, but this is on a whole other level. At school, she notices an old woman walking towards her. And surprise, surprise…no one else can see this lady. And what is essentially a rather normal-looking old grandma who might have escaped from a nearby care home, is here turned into one of the most creepy scenes ever, just outright chilling…and that’s pretty much what the movie delivers throughout the rest of the playtime: lots of really creepy and even outright scary scenes, packed with tension and paranoid suspense throughout!
It Follows is a supernatural horror film from 2014, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. It grossed $23.3 million worldwide against its $1.3 million budget, and has later been deemed a modern horror classic. Mitchell’s inspiration for the film was based on some recurring dreams he had in his youth, all centered around him being followed. The movie was shot in Detroit, Michigan, and in the scene where Hugh has Jay tied to the chair, the interiors were shot at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant. They had originally planned to shoot it at some other location, but that place became an active crime scene as a murder had been committed there. Always good to have a backup-plan, I guess.
I remember back in the day (yikes, it’s already been 12 years since this movie’s release already!) when It Follows hit the theaters. Naturally, we were excited to check it out as it had received a fair amount of buzz, and to be fair, this movie certainly deserved it. It’s actually the last movie that was able to give me the willies. To be honest, I actually miss the feeling of a movie being able to scare me a little…not that there haven’t been any scary movies afterwards, of course! There’s been plenty of them…but the more horror movies you see, then, well…desensitizing can be a bitch. Then again, I certainly don’t miss the times of not wanting to go to the bathroom at night, so I’ll take that win at least.
Much of the movie’s unsettling atmosphere and tension is thanks to Mike Gioluakis, who said that both he and Mitchell were fans of the still photographer Gregory Crewdson, with the somewhat surreal suburban imagery which suited It Follows so well. There’s a heavy use of wide-shots, making us constantly looking for something within the frame that might be creeping towards the protagonist. This is what makes It Follows so genuinely creepy! It is all about how it makes the entity look like everything from completely normal people to something a lot more uncanny. You never know who it is, or where it is. It makes you paranoid, and it craves that you pay attention to everything that happens on screen. I also love the retro music score, composed by Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland).
And while there have been many interpretations about metaphors, including that it’s about STD’s (Sexually Transmitted Disease, except in this case it would be more like a Sexually Transmitted Demon), it mostly serves as allegories for transition into adulthood, assault, and the inevitability of death. Death always creeps towards us, and it might have been very close to us at certain times too. And, to quote the director himself: “We’re all here for a limited amount of time, and we can’t escape our mortality, but love and sex are two ways in which we can – at least temporarily – push death away.”
It Follows remains, and will most likely do so, a horror classic that still holds up very well and has for sure been an inspiration to many others. A sequel has been in the talks for years, but it wasn’t until 2023 when a sequel entitled They Follow was announced to be in development. Filming is set to begin sometime this summer.
Writer and director: David Robert Mitchell Country & year: USA, 2014 Actors: Maika Monroe, Jake Weary, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Bailey Spry, Claire Sloma, Mike Lanier, Ingrid Mortimer IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235888/
Our story starts in the world of the upper-class people, where obese lawyer Billy Halleck lives in a typical upper-class house in Connecticut together with his wife Heidi and their daughter Linda. Days go by as usual, where Billy recently defended the Mafia boss Richie “The Hammer“ Ginelli, because that guy could never have actually killed anyone, right? Innocent as a lamb! So Billy celebrates together with the Mafia boss as yet another murder charge has been acquitted. And it becomes obvious that Billy’s favorite means of celebration is eating, he’s literally obsessed with food and looks the part. While driving home one night, after berating him for his eating disorder, his wife has the sudden bright idea to give him a blowjob while he’s behind the wheel. What could possibly go wrong…well, it ends with Billy running over an elderly Romani woman named Suzanne Lempke from the traveling Romani carnival that recently arrived in town. The woman dies, and you can probably already guess where this goes: the upper-class lawyer gets help from his close friends Judge Cary Rossington and police chief Duncan Hopley, making sure he won’t spend a single second in prison or face any consequences whatsoever.
Now, horror movies have taught us over and over that you do not mess with the Romani people, so what happens next is inevitable: Suzanne’s devastated father puts a curse on Billy when waiting for him outside the courthouse, touching his cheek and simply says the word “thinner“…and that’s that. Definitely a much more easy and laidback way to put a curse on someone compared to what happened in Drag Me to Hell. And Billy…well, he believes he’s been blessed rather than cursed. He can suddenly keep eating like a pig and surprisingly lose weight! And he keeps eating…and keeps losing weight. His wife becomes worried it might be a sign of cancer, but his tests comes back fine. As Billy gets literally thinner and thinner, he starts realizing that something ominous is going on here. And when he also finds out that his friends, the judge and the police chief, are suffering from strange illnesses as well, he can no longer deny that what seemed to be pure luck at first turned out to be a diet from death.
Thinner is a horror film from 1996, directed by Tom Holland (most known for directing Fright Night from 1985 and Child’s Play from 1988). It is based on a Stephen King novel from 1984 with the same name, which he actually wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The movie did not get well received upon release, and got mostly negative reviews. Now, as many Stephen King adaptions go, this is by far any kind of masterpiece for sure, but it’s entertaining, and that’s enough for me.
The story starts off rather whimsically, where you can’t quite catch the tone. There’s a dark story underneath but also it’s rather goofy, and you can’t help but feeling the comedy-tone all over the place with Robert John Burke (who plays Billy) wearing that fatsuit. The effects aren’t that bad, though, they’re perfect for a campy little thing like this. Classified as a body horror movie, it’s mostly Billy’s friends that go through the most extreme changes, though, and while Billy gets, well, thinner, we don’t see him end up like the guy in The Machinist or anything even remotely close. Thankfully, I might add.
As for the morals of the story, there’s no doubt who’s the real villain here. It’s not exactly subtle, either, with the movie opening with him getting a Mafia boss free from (yet another) murder charge. Billy isn’t sympathetic, and neither are his friends who are more than obviously in on everything. Corruption and camaraderie goes hand in hand, and we are not supposed to think they’re the good guys. They’re a bunch of arrogant upper-class a-holes who think their lives and well-being are more important than others. “White Man from Town“ is an a-hole. And, while you may not think he “deserved“ to have a curse put upon him, you can’t exactly sympathize that much with him either, especially as the story goes along…because the whimsical tone really does take a shift and turns everything into a much more gloomy revenge-fueled story. Despite going a tad bit darker than the initial setup would make you believe, it’s still fun, even with its rather bleak ending.
Like the majority of Stephen King movies, Thinner is one you watch when you want something silly and campy, where you can just lay back and enjoy on a lazy evening with some popcorn or candy.
Director: Tom Holland Writers: Michael McDowell, Tom Holland Country & year: USA, 1996 Actors: Robert John Burke, Lucinda Jenney, Bethany Joy Lenz, Time Winters, Howard Erskine, Joe Mantegna, Terrence Garmey, Kari Wuhrer, Michael Constantine IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117894/
Three ambitious true crime podcasters prepare for their biggest episode yet, featuring Charlie Baker, the sole survivor of a brutal attack by a mysterious serial killer – The Beast. However, their pursuit of recognition collides with the very horror they’ve been chronicling when they find themselves fighting to survive against a terrifying figure that may be The Beast himself.
Horror Ghouls are taking a break from reviews until July 3rd, but we’re still posting the weekly Horror Shorts on Sundays! This time we’re taking a look at Nails, which gives us some gory slasher fun!
Director: William Lott Writer: William Lott Country & year: US, 2025 Actors: Keaton McLachlan, Conner Piers, Bries Vannon, Mary Baurkot, Darren Hanvey, Sandra Hover, Tommy Delbarrio IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt32544584/
A dark horror tale that tells the story of Edward, a distant widower discovering his children are grieving their mother’s death in their own terrifying way, after having met a mysterious entity in the woods.
Horror Ghouls are taking a break from reviews until July 3rd, but we’re still posting the weekly Horror Shorts on Sundays! This time we’re taking a look at The Rickety Man, a creepy period folk horror film!
Director: Cameron Gallagher Writer: Jeremiah Lewis Country & year: US, 2021 Actors: Ava Torres, Russell Shealy, Kurtis Martin, Allison GiamBruno, Wyatt Cary IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt13915690/
Lab-grown vegan meat unexpectedly develops teeth, leading to a chaotic situation as its creators grapple with the unforeseen consequences of their world-saving venture.
Horror Ghouls are taking a break from reviews until July 3rd, but we’re still posting the weekly Horror Shorts on Sundays! This time we’re taking a look at Happy Meat, a fun creature feature!
Director: Matt Green Writer: Matt Green Country & year: UK, 2024 Actors: Matthew Bentley, Joe Wiltshire Smith, Justine Moore, Tim Ahern, Adei Bundy IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt33323834/
Fran Keel, a lone hypochondriac, finally confronts the root of his illness.
Horror Ghouls is taking a break from reviews until July 3rd, but we’re still posting the weekly Horror Shorts on Sundays! This time we’re taking a look at Desiderio. If you want something artistic, bizarre and uncanny as hell, this one should definitely scratch that itch…
We’re in the year 1990, and we start off by seeing some scientists from the Async Research Institute watching some recovered footage from Naren Warne, a researcher who went into an expedition into the large extradimensional space known as “the Backrooms“. This is a large place consisting of seemingly endless liminal spaces and weird rooms. We see the guy attacked by some kind of entity, and then we head over to furniture store owner Clark instead.
Clark is nowhere near where he really wants to be in life. He wanted to be an architect, but ended up selling furniture instead, a job he appears to despise rather than being grateful for having. His coping mechanism for dealing with his resentment over “failing“ in life is…yup, you guessed it: Mr Whiskey, of course! If being miserable, why not make sure to ruin everything else in your life at the same time, eh? At least that gives him yet another excuse to continue drinking. And as can be expected, Mr. Whiskey has only exacerbated his troubles by making him even more angry, irritable and petulant, lashing out at his wife and frequently coming home late at night, drunk as a skunk. The correct spelling for all of that is d-i-v-o-r-c-e. So Clark, now sleeping in one of the unsold beds in his furniture store, regularly visits his therapist Mary Kline. She’s got her life a lot more together than her client, no doubt, but we learn early on that she’s also got issues of her own to deal with. She grew up with a mentally ill mother, and the house where they lived together has been demolished, something she seems to struggle a bit with. She’s having a keepsake from the place, more or less as her own personal trauma token. Despite her own issues, she’s doing her best to help her clients and especially Clark, but unfortunately his anger and resentment proves to make him very treatment resistant…which is often the case with people who go to therapy because they want to feel better, and not because they want to be better.
As Clark is having more than enough on his table, trying to dress up as a pirate in order to film a funny commercial for his store (and literally falling on his ass instead) there’s also a new problem: the electrical bill is mysteriously high, and the store building occasionally gets flickering lights. As if his financial issues weren’t bad enough already. He calls for an electrician, who finds some really oddly placed colored switches that don’t connect to anything in the store. One night, Clark goes into the basement of the store where he notices a glowing slit in the wall, and discovers that he can walk right through it. On the other side is the infamous Backrooms! Clark is as oblivious as a rock of this fact, of course. He’s got no idea where, what, how or why, but he’s curious. Who the hell wouldn’t be. And now he’s got something new and interesting to fill his time with: exploring the seemingly never-ending place of weird, empty hallways and rooms, all filled with malformed furniture and other strange stuff. He also discovers that, despite how empty the gigantic place at first seems to be, there’s definitely something else there, too…
Backrooms is a sci-fi psychological horror film, written by Will Soodik and directed and co-scored by Kane Parsons in his feature length directorial debut. Kane, inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta and the 4Chan post that started it all, made an entire web series based on it. He also made the horror short The Backrooms from 2022, and at the time he was only 16 years old. Parsons was approached by several studios regarding a feature film, and in 2023 this was officially announced. Filming began in summer of 2025, and ended in August the same year. It’s a joint production between A24, Cherning Entertainment, Atomic Monster, and 21 Laps Entertainment. In order to create the liminal space environments for the film, they built a set across four sound stages, with more than 30,000 square feet. That sure as hell is a lot of yellow wallpaper and carpeting, which were actually sourced locally in Canada to avoid the impact of the U.S. tariffs. Due to the setup of these areas, the actors found the environment physically challenging and some were reportedly even getting lost on set.
The term “liminal space“ really took off back in 2019, spawning subcategories like Dreamcore and Weirdcore. The empty, nostalgic and slightly uncanny vibe of these kinds of images managed to capture the interest of a lot of people, giving nostalgia to some and the heebie-jeebies to others. And in this movie, they have specifically used the aesthetics of the old “original“ backrooms image, with the yellow color palette and all. And while Parsons’s horror short from 2022 mostly focused on the exploration and being chased by some kind of monster, this movie gives the entire story of the backrooms some surprisingly deep psychological metaphors, including the monsters inside and why they’re there.
And while speaking of certain metaphors and meanings, there was one scene in particular that really got to me: we see the living room of Mary’s childhood home, with all the clutter and newspaper in front of the windows. Then the camera moves downwards, and we see a slightly different version of the room…more simple, less clutter, but still the same room. And as the camera keeps moving downwards, we see several other versions of the room that gets more and more distorted each time…and this, of course, represents how memories can sometimes mess things up entirely, or like Clark mentions to Mary after exploring the Backrooms, he thinks that the place is the way it is because it “remembers“ and recreates. “The more times it remembers something… the less it does“. This reminds me so much of how things can also be remembered and recreated in dreams, and we all have probably experienced something similar where a dream or memory doesn’t really fit with what was real. For example, I actually very clearly remember my late grandmother’s house, which was torn down just some years back…but when I dream about it (which I often do, actually, and it’s one of the few things that can bring me in a lucid state) things started to gradually look “wrong“. First off, my grandmother is never present in those dreams anymore. The house is mostly empty, aside from her favorite chair and a few other things. The rooms are now often bigger, have a darker wallpaper, the hallways are longer…sometimes there are new floors, new rooms, etc. Whenever I dream about this house, the recreation is kind of based on a memory that was already wrong…and this is what really resonated so much with me during that scene in Backrooms to the point where it literally gave me chills.
While the psychological aspects are very much a huge part of the movie, it’s not without a solid, creepy atmosphere. When we see Clark exploring the surreal rooms there’s always an underlying tension, and when there’s a monster nearby it’s more about its presence than it actually being seen. The big rooms and other areas are definitely part of the experience itself, totally nailing the liminal space aesthetic. Some people that aren’t into this kind of thing will probably find the exploration parts a little slow, but I absolutely enjoyed every second of it. And I also love that the entire movie is set during the 90’s.
Backrooms is definitely a movie that will resonate stronger with some than others. It isn’t just about scares or the horror aspects of it, but also the deeper psychological levels that is more or less the essence of liminal space and its offspring.
Director: Kane Parsons Writer: Will Soodik Country & year: USA/Canada, 2026 Actors: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia, Robert Bobroczkyi, Ember Ambrose, Krista Kosonen, Philip Granger, Katharine Isabelle IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26657236/
After Reese brings home an antique chair, a series of horrific events follow, leading him to question if it’s a malevolent spirit the chair possesses or the darkness inside his own mind.
Horror Short Sunday is here again, and this time we’re taking a look at The Chair. Written and directed by Curry Barker, who recently released Obsession!
Director: Curry Barker Writer: Curry Barker Country & year: US, 2023 Actors: Jonnathon Cripple, Seth Goodfellow, David Alan Graf, Anthony Pavone, Haley Schwartz IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt15408560/
We’re in a small town in Scotland, where rookie police constable Rachel Heggie is on patrol. Suddenly she witnesses a car strike some mysterious man in a trenchcoat, who seemingly disappears after getting hit. The driver of the car, Francis “Caesar“ Sargison, is a familiar face to the police so Heggie is quick to arrest him. After she brings him into the police station, Sgt Jim Macready charges Caesar for reckless driving. So in a cell he goes, where there’s already another guy who is in for beating his wife. Now, the only thing Heggie needs to do, is finding the mystery man wearing a trenchcoat (and no, it’s not Castiel, but this could have easily belonged somewhere in the Supernatural universe) and she radios two other police officers for the task. It appears his disappearing act wasn’t too solid, as they quickly locate him and brings him in for questioning. He’s covered in scratches, goes by the name “Six“, and carries a notebook with a list of names. Soon, it becomes apparent that this mysterious dude is on a mission, and the names in his notebook are from people who have committed horrible acts and not done anything to atone for them. And it is also soon revealed that nearly everyone in the police station have dark secrets of their own…it’s not only the ones behind bars that are the bad guys…
