A woman realizes she’s been catfished by her worst nightmare.
It is Horror Short Sunday again, and this time we’re taking a look at Heartbeater, where a date quickly turns sinister!
Director: Rob Himebaugh
Writer: Rob Himebaugh
Country & year: US, 2022
Actors: Hailee Lipscomb, Caroline Quigley
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt21435782/
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…
Director: Silas Orion (Doctor Nowhere)
YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/@doctornowhere
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/
“Be careful what you wish for“… yeah, there you have an old aphorism. We so often think we know exactly what we want, without thinking over what the fulfillment of said wish would cause. Like the angry child who stomps up the stairs and shouts “I hope I never see any of you jerks again!“ to his family. Yeah, we all know the feeling of wishing something in the heat of the moment without thinking it over more properly, and we also know that the story of the aforementioned child has a happy ending and that the wish wasn’t really fulfilled. Not all stories about people having their wishes come true have a happy ending, though.. not everyone gets a cheerful genie in a lamp. Sometimes they get the monkey’s paw.
In this story, we start off with what could be the buildup for a romantic comedy. Baron Bailey aka Bear has deep feelings for his childhood friend Nikki Freeman, but he doesn’t know how to tell her. He also fears that his feelings won’t be reciprocated, and that it would ruin their friendship. One day Bear comes home, finding his cat Sandy dead from having eaten some of his oxycodone pills (kudos for the movie for making this scene an emotional one instead of just a shock-factor one, as is too often done with dead animals in horror movies). Still grieving, he is persuaded by Nikki to go out with their friends. He decides to buy her a gift, and ends up in a mystic shop where he buys a novelty toy called a “One Wish Willow“: some kind of stick that, once broken, can grant a wish. Only one wish per person, though, with only the first stick counting, so no use stacking up. Naturally, he just thinks of this gift as something silly and fun, but eventually ends up being the one who opens it and wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone in the world“. Poof, wish granted! Nikki is now head over heels for him, which should’ve been the best thing ever.. right? Well, not so much, because Nikki isn’t just in love with him, she’s obsessed in all the wrong ways.. maybe Bear should’ve been more careful with how he phrased that wish.
Obsession is a supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Curry Barker. Barker has earlier uploaded some of his works on YouTube, including his found footage movie Milk & Serial. It was his 2023 horror short The Chair that made Film Producer James Harris of Tea Shop Productions to reach out with an interest of turning it into a feature, but Barker pitched him with Obsession instead. He had gotten some inspirations for it after watching an episode of The Simpsons, where Homer interacts with a monkey’s paw. Jason Blum under Blumhouse Productions joined as executive producer after the film’s festival premiere last year.
Together brought some relationship issues and unnerving codependency themes on the table last year, and this year we’re having a horror movie about a horribly codependent relationship mixed with an extreme borderline FP (Favorite Person) dynamic in a relationship. And I was honestly not prepared for just how tense this movie actually managed to be! While it has, more or less universally, been hailed as a modern horror masterpiece, it isn’t really that original or “groundbreaking“ if you look at it on a surface level. It is the execution, the build-up of scenes and the always smothering tension and the psychology that makes this movie so great.
Despite all the tension, the movie becomes darkly funny at times and I have to give some big thumbs up for Inde Navarrette’s performance as Nikki. She is genuinely frightening, with her erratic and often insane behaviour, mixed with what can only be perceived as so much pain and anxiety that she’s not able to function properly. However, while Nikki is the frightening one just from her erratic and dangerous behaviour, there’s still no doubt as to who’s the real “villain“ here. Bear may at first look like the ultimate nice guy, seemingly sweet and sympathetic, but it is his underlying selfishness that causes his downfall. Also…who the fuck wishes for someone to love them more than anyone in the world..? That’s just crazy…and while Bear is never really presented as the villain (or victim, for that matter), he is the one who created the situation, but instead of looking for a solution as soon as possible he just embraces it, with little regard to how this has literally broken Nikki. He has, although unwittingly, turned her into something that is no longer the person he fell in love with…in fact, she’s barely a person at all anymore.
Obsession is without a doubt a masterful horror rendition about a very fucked up relationship, with the underlying message of being careful what you wish for. Definitely one of the highlights of the year! Currently Curry Barker has two other movies upcoming already: a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie and one called Anything But Ghosts, with Blumhouse as producer, where the filming was wrapped on 11 April this year. Barker has mentioned that this film “exists in the same universe as Obsession”. Sounds interesting for sure, but no release date for this one as of yet.
Writer and director: Curry Barker
Country & year: USA, 2025
Actors: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter, Haley Fitzgerald, Darin Toonder, Anthony Pavone
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt37287335/
Yeah, you’ve probably already heard the flying monkeys yelling from the rooftops that this is the worst horror movie of the year because Obsession is a masterpiece. Bollox. But if that’s so, then I guess all horror movies have already sucked since 1973 after The Exorcist. Someone said it best: Not all horror movies need to be the best horror movie ever, or the scariest movie since the scariest movie. Sometimes it’s OK to just be good, or just OK to be OK, like enjoying a quick fat cheeseburger.
Passenger is basically a haunted house movie on wheels where we follow the young lovebirds Tyler and Maddie from Brooklyn as they set out for a six-week road trip across the USA in a nomad van, protected with a Saint Christopher necklace and a Bob Ross bobblehead on the dash. “No mistakes, just happy accidents“, as he famously said. We all love Bob Ross, but to be more safe than sorry, they should also add bobbleheads of Ed and Lorraine, and maybe Bob Larson, you know, just to be sure.
Their relationship gets put to the test when they hit some, well, bumps in the night, pun intended. Because there’s one golden rule for road nomads to follow: If you must drive at night, don’t ever stop, if the road is haunted/cursed. And you better know what the hobo codes mean. If the morbid curiosity wouldn’t first get the best of me, I’d also stay away from Clinton Road. A specific country road is more haunted than others, where our love couple stops by (Uh-oh) an ugly car accident (that we see in the opening) where they instantly get attached to a curse of a demonic, ghoulish old geezer known as, yes, you guessed it: The Passenger. To make it more obvious and not subtle at all, their van gets marked with three scratches. Maddie is the first one to see visions and gets her head fucked with, while her boyfriend has a hard time believing her. Pretty much the same set up like in every episode of A Haunting. But instead of being isolated in some house, they’re isolated on rural country roads where there’s hardly any street lights. And I think I would prefer a haunted house on wheels over a deep house.
And, of course, like any curse, we eventually have to pick up the pieces to solve the puzzle before losing grip on reality. To be on the safer side, they stack up the whole van of all the Saint Christopher necklaces they can buy, to hopefully “beat the devil out of it“.
Even though Passenger doesn’t reinvent the wheel, no pun intended, André Øvredal showcases that he still manages to make the woods look haunting with some creative use of lights, like he did back in the Troll Hunter days. A scene that sticks out is when a film projector gets used as a flashlight, and an eerie liminal space sequence at an empty parking lot. Moments like this, where the film gets more room to breathe and lets the atmosphere sink in while the imagination goes rampant, are the strongest part. A fun nod to The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) at the beginning as well. And yes, the bag of clichés is unfortunately not left home in Brooklyn, where you have some of the typical lame straight-forward jumpscares with loud boom-sound. And it has to be said that getting pulled from the ground into darkness while screaming at the camera just makes me eye-roll. The demonic entity could also have been explored more.
That said, Passenger is overall an enjoyable flick, with some inventive scares, grim woodsy atmosphere spiced with vibrant, stylish flair. It’s far from Øvredal’s scariest film, as he himself claims, but it’s surely a big step up after his previous one, The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). Now that he’s back on track again, and found his way back to the campfire, I hope for More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Director: André Øvredal
Writers: Zachary Donohue, T.W. Burgess
Country & year: USA, 2026
Actors: Jacob Scipio, Lou Llobell, Melissa Leo, Joseph Lopez, Miles Fowler, Alan Trong, Devielle Johnson
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33763941/
