Abomination
Year is only about halfway done and I'll say it: Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus is the best horror of the year. I mean-- something better might come in October (Eggers' Werwulf comes out December), but can't imagine what that might be, or how it can be.
Talked about Curry Barker's Obsession and how his premise of the obsessed lover isn't anything new; Kane Parsons' Backrooms is if anything even less new dressed in world wide web clothing.
First to come to mind are the mindscapes described by Stanley Kubrick late in his career-- the vast redcarpeted mansion in Eyes Wide Shut; the urban ruins that stand at the end of Full Metal Jacket; above all the Overlook in The Shining with its infinite corridors dotted with secretive doors, looping on itself again and again like an intestine and lined with a carpet of repeated design dyed that maddeningly distinct burnt orange you see in interiors of the late '70s and '80s. Folks always maintained Jack Torrance was nuts from the beginning of the picture; I think that rug helped him along.
(Warning: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail)
Curry Barker Obsession (2025) is basically W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," and "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" meet Fatal Attraction and Misery-- nothing startling new, only he's leaned into the sneaky comic spin of the premise, has a terrific cast to inhabit the roles, and the visual chops to tell the story with snap and zing.
Pig hunt
(Warning: plot and surprise twists in book and TV series discussed in explicit detail)
I remember reading William Golding's 1954 debut novel as a teen and having nightmares about running through the jungle with other boys in pursuit, waving sticks sharpened at both ends-- did not help the development of my socialization skills, lemme tell you.
The book comes off as a fable, the characters barely sketched-in symbols, the theme clear enough and neat enough for literature majors to milk for their theses: humans have this ingrown tendency to violence, and we flirt with or ignore it at our peril. Really that simple, the novel's chief virtue and key weakness, and folks who seek to adapt it flirt with this fact or ignore it at their peril.
Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early.
No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like.
Masquerade
(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in close and explicit detail)
Saw Tim Burton's Batman Returns on the big screen again after three decades and far as I'm concerned: not just the best onscreen incarnation of the character ever but one of three best examples of its genre, period. Channels a distinct look-- German Expressionism-- with extensive use of miniatures and forced perspective and gigantic sets and minimal digital effects; puts Danny Elfman's creepy-swoony-funny holiday season score to lively use; features a trio (actually a quartet) of stylized performances savoring the sparkling dialogue they've been served (by Daniel Waters)-- as if seated at an extravagant champagne feast of which they've never seen the likes before, and likely never will again.
And the film's so kinky. And subversive. And stuffed to the ears with eat-the-rich sentiment. A lot of frankly explicit jokes, including a scene of Selina (Michelle Peiffer) getting hold of Bruce's (Michael Keaton's) codpiece (prolly helped that Keaton-- clever lad--specifically requested to be able to relieve himself while wearing the costume). You could tell writer and director couldn't care less about the plot, much less the eponymous character (or at least his official job title), much less the source material, and it's a liberating feeling, a pretentious goth art film masquerading as a multimilliondollar superhero movie. Parents were right to be outraged and Warner Brothers was right to be alarmed, and I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone who thinks Pixar and Disney movies are worth watching. This is strictly a one-of-a-kind gloriously bonkers misfire that deserves to be treasured as such.
Hail, Mary
(Warning: plot twists and story discussed in full and explicit detail!)
If you don't know anything about Guillermo del Toro's
Is the film worth a look? Well let me tell you.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense featured a nicely intense performance from a child actor, some creepy atmospherics, a neat twist that makes you want to sit up and applaud for O all of two seconds. Unbreakable I found more interesting because Shyamalan had shrugged off his mainstream appeal and started to show his true colors: a comic-book freak who takes his superheroes seriously, to the point of spending the budget of a major motion picture telling an origin story.
Shyamalan's latest-- where Mel Gibson and family find funny going-ons in the middle of their cornfield-- shows no sign whatsoever of him apologizing for his career to date. His first movie was a hit his second an interesting failure (though not to my eyes, not quite); he's on to something, he believes, and in Signs he wants to make believers of all of us.
Psychospace
I thought Weapons-- Zach Cregger's brilliantly structured supernatural thriller about seventeen children running out their front doors and vanishing into the night-- was hot shit, arguably the best horror of 2025; along comes Kurosawa Kiyoshi saying "hold my beer."
Incoming
First things first: Weapons is easily the best horror in 2025 to date, an ingeniously written inventively shot and staged film written and directed by Zach Cregger, whose debut feature Barbarian was also an inventive ingenious horror released in 2022.
With that out of the way-- (WARNING: plot and surprise twists discussed in close and explicit detail!)
'Who is that masked man?!'
I have yet to warm up to Ari Aster, a talented filmmaker who does inventively staged and shot twists on classic horror but has yet to deliver a cohesive feature. Hereditary his debut starts off with a fairly unique premise-- a mildly dysfunctional family where the horror arises not from supernatural evil or witches' covens but from a peanut allergy; later Aster drags in the evil and covens, in a weak-tea attempt to emulate Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar is Aster's stab at remaking The Wicker Man with twice the budget and half the subtle wit. Beau is Afraid is arguably his most original work-- or at least his work with the most wide-ranging influences such that it seems original, even autobiographical-- and perhaps the one feature I like best to date.
Eddington feels like a step backwards. Aster starts off well-- he almost always starts off well-- introducing a small town and half a dozen of the interlinked characters of that town, mainly Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his boss Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and as Phoenix usually plays characters who lean into their awkward grotesqueness and Pascal usually plays charismatic patriarch figures you can be sure these two alpha males will lock horns at the mayor's re-election campaign.
Charles Dickens got it right.
Some hundred and eighty years ago, he wrote a passage in Oliver Twist describing a haunting:
He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along. He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped it did the same. If he ran, it followed--not running too: that would have been a relief: but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.
That sentence-- not running too: that would have been a relief-- is key. The undead are not in a hurry, they are never in a hurry; if they ever for once hurried that would break the tension.
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The Devil Blues
The first forty minutes of Ryan Coogler's Sinners may be one of the best films of 2025. The rest? Not so much.
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(WARNING: Plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail)
When I saw Interview With The Vampire I was floored, I couldn't get the movie out of my mind. Said to myself: have to read the book. The very next day I hooked myself a copy and read it. I couldn't believe it, I was devastated; the book if anything was worse than the movie.
The blood drinkers
(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit and gory detail)
FW Murnau did a low-budget unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula titled Nosferatu (1922) which Stoker's widow pursued with a vengeance, demanding all prints and negatives be destroyed (despite which the film went on to achieve unholy immortality); Werner Herzog did a remake in 1979 employing ten thousand rats and his own inimitable filmmaking style; now Robert Eggers-- who professes admiration for the Murnau-- has crafted his own version, shifting emphasis from vampire to victim in his 2024 remake.
And how does Eggers' compare? Well let me tell you.
A comedy of horrors
Not that Viy (Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov, 1967) is the first-ever Soviet horror film (There's A Spectre Haunts Europe (1923)) or even the first adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol story (the first was 1909, considered lost)-- but it's the rare Soviet horror film so visually striking and tonally bizarre it's at least worth a look.
The Fountain of Ew
Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), about the decline of celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) and rise of her showbiz doppelganger Sue (Margaret Qualley), leans hard-- very hard-- into the idea that beauty is a daily impossible burden for women to aspire to sometimes fail to attain and if they do attain must maintain said beauty for as long as they can-- forever if possible.
How to do a proper sequel? Used to be a silly question but in this age of endless remakes, reboots, recycling in one form or another it's almost become a major artistic question, if art can or has ever been considered major (was there a time in the '60s and '70s, or were we just fooling ourselves?).
Watching The Coffee Table-- picture the ugliest piece of furniture on the face of the earth, a pair of gilt nymphs loosely screwed to a gilt base arcing unsteadily towards each other (every time someone walks around, actually every time someone makes an emphatic move anywhere near, the furniture shudders as if flinching), supporting a reportedly unbreakable glasstop. Picture a chubby mustachioed salesman (Eduardo Antuna) looking up at his prospective customers, meekly if gamely trying to sell them on the table's virtues. Facing him on either side are Maria (Estafania de los Santos) and Jesus (David Pareja) and for the next five minutes they bicker-- Maria about how expensive and godawful tacky the furniture is (she's not wrong), Jesus on how he's spent the day following her and doing what she wants and their whole life-- insisting on having a child, naming the child (Cayetano, which he hates) has been devoted to making her happy. Now he wants a table, this table, for himself alone, just because.
