I LOVE PARIS: Everybody Wants a Piece of You

01 Thursday Oct 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review, MonsterFest

Tags

horror, MonsterFest, vampires, vampire, movies, books, writing, nicky murphy

Vampires, vanity and the blood-soaked economics of becoming famous

The music industry has always been a vampire story.

Everybody wants something from you. Your voice. Your image. Your time. Your body. Your attention. Your followers. Your soul, if the contract is right.

Nicky Murphy’s I Love Paris simply has the good sense to stop pretending that metaphor is enough.

Shot through the deliberately grubby and voyeuristic lens of a mockumentary, I Love Paris follows Paris, an aspiring singer hustling through the Parisian music scene while chasing the increasingly elusive promise of fame. When a vampire attack unexpectedly interrupts her already precarious career trajectory, becoming undead proves to be less of a career-ending catastrophe than you might expect. In fact, immortality, nocturnal working hours and an endless appetite for blood may simply be another set of obstacles to negotiate on the road to stardom.

It is an inspired premise because Murphy understands that the vampire and the aspiring artist have considerably more in common than either might initially admit. Both are creatures of appetite. Both require an audience. Both survive by taking something from other people. Both can become objects of fascination while remaining fundamentally parasitic. And both eventually discover that the machinery which promises to elevate them can just as easily consume them.

The genius of I Love Paris is that it doesn’t hammer this metaphor into submission. Instead, it lets the absurdity of vampirism coexist with the mundane humiliations of trying to make it in the music business. Paris still needs recognition. She still needs contacts. She still needs someone to take her seriously. She still needs social media engagement. Becoming a blood-drinking immortal doesn’t magically make the gatekeepers disappear.

If anything, it gives her another fucking problem.

Murphy’s mockumentary approach is crucial to the film’s success. There is an immediate intimacy to the footage, as though we have stumbled into somebody else’s chaotic documentary about artistic ambition and simply forgotten to leave. The camera doesn’t stand outside Paris and judge her. It follows her. It watches her. It records the good, the bad, the embarrassing and the increasingly bloody.

That creates an uncomfortable relationship between subject and spectator.

At times, I Love Paris reminded me of Man Bites Dog, not because Murphy is attempting to replicate Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde’s particular brand of cinematic provocation, but because the camera develops the same unsettling complicity with what it observes. We aren’t merely watching a dangerous situation unfold. We are watching people watch it unfold. And the longer the camera remains present, the more difficult it becomes to determine where documentation ends and exploitation begins.

That is where the film’s real fangs emerge.

Because how much are we willing to let go by in the name of entertainment?

How much cruelty becomes acceptable once there is a camera pointed at it?

How much exploitation are we prepared to forgive if the resulting footage is funny, shocking, fashionable or simply good art?

These aren’t abstract questions in I Love Paris. They are embedded in the very construction of the film. The camera is hungry. Paris is hungry. The music industry is hungry. The vampires are hungry.

Everybody wants a piece.

And somebody is going to get drained.

Aminata Thiboult is magnificent at the centre of this ecosystem. Paris is not constructed as some conventional tragic vampire figure, nor is she simply the naïve young artist who stumbles into darkness. She is ambitious, flawed, funny, occasionally infuriating and recognisably human. That humanity becomes particularly important once the supernatural enters the equation. Thiboult’s performance allows Paris to remain a person rather than becoming merely a vessel for the vampire gag. Her ambition survives the transformation. So does her ego. So does her desire to be seen.

Perhaps that is the real horror.

She hasn’t changed as much as she thinks she has.

Leonor Oberson is equally effective as Lutèce, the vampire responsible for bringing Paris into this nocturnal existence. Their relationship becomes one of the film’s richest sources of comedy and tension, because Lutèce is not simply an undead mentor handing down the sacred laws of vampirism. She is another complicated human being trapped inside a supernatural existence, and the relationship between the two women has the messy, affectionate and occasionally toxic quality of a friendship that has become impossible to categorise. An interview with Murphy, Thiboult and Oberson reveals that much of the film’s dialogue was developed through a mixture of scripted material and improvisation, with the performers translating and reshaping Murphy’s English-language scripts into something more naturally their own.

That authenticity is one of the film’s great assets.

Murphy allows Paris to feel inhabited rather than performed.

The streets feel lived in. The conversations have the looseness of people who know each other. The comedy doesn’t always announce itself as comedy. Sometimes it simply emerges from the collision between the utterly ridiculous and the completely ordinary.

And then there is the blood.

The vampire mythology is deliberately less interested in elaborate rules than in the practical inconvenience of being a creature that needs to feed. Murphy’s vampires don’t exist as some impossibly elegant aristocratic species floating above humanity. They are humans with an additional biological requirement.

They need blood.

Lots of it.

And if that sounds straightforward, try building a music career around it.

The result is a strange tonal balancing act. I Love Paris is funny without allowing its comedy to completely defang the horror. There are moments when the absurdity provokes laughter and moments when the laughter becomes slightly uncomfortable because the thing being laughed at is, objectively, horrible. That instability is important. The film understands that laughter and horror often occupy the same psychological space.

Sometimes we laugh because something is funny.

Sometimes we laugh because we don’t quite know what else to do.

And sometimes we laugh because the alternative is acknowledging that what we’re watching is genuinely disturbing.

Murphy’s direction allows these contradictions to breathe. The guerrilla-style production, shot on the streets of Paris with an extremely small footprint, could have produced something visually disposable. Instead, the limitations become part of the film’s aesthetic identity. The city doesn’t feel like a backdrop constructed for a vampire movie. It feels like Paris continuing to exist while these increasingly deranged people attempt to pursue their ambitions inside it.

That grounded reality is particularly important to Thiboult and Oberson’s performances. Their characters aren’t floating through some artificial vampire universe. They are negotiating relationships, artistic ambition, money, fame and survival within recognisable social spaces. The supernatural is therefore not an escape from reality. It becomes an exaggeration of it.

The vampire simply makes the exploitation harder to ignore.

This is where the film’s tension between greed and culture becomes particularly potent. Art is supposed to represent something beyond commerce, yet the music industry is an ecosystem built around selling identity. Paris wants to create. Other people want to package her. She wants to be heard. Other people want numbers. She wants artistic recognition. Other people want engagement.

And eventually the question becomes brutally simple:

Who is feeding on whom?

The answer, of course, is complicated.

The vampire feeds on the living.

The industry feeds on the artist.

The audience feeds on the spectacle.

And the filmmaker feeds the audience.

Suddenly that little mockumentary camera becomes considerably more sinister.

This is where I Love Paris earns its comparison with the voyeuristic discomfort of Man Bites Dog. The camera doesn’t merely record exploitation; its very presence raises the possibility that exploitation is the entertainment. We are watching Paris struggle, fail, scheme, bleed and feed because the film has invited us to watch.

We are not innocent observers.

We bought the ticket.

We pressed play.

We stayed.

And that makes the film’s questions about art considerably more interesting than a straightforward satire of the music industry. I Love Paris asks whether the audience itself is part of the ecosystem that creates these hungry creatures of celebrity.

Are we guilty of propelling the hungry hounds towards their glory, only to condemn them when they begin behaving like hungry hounds?

We want authenticity, but we also want spectacle.

We want artists to be vulnerable, but only in ways that entertain us.

We want to see behind the curtain, but rarely stop to ask whether the person standing behind it wanted the curtain removed.

And perhaps this is why the vampire is such a perfect metaphor for celebrity culture. The vampire is immortal because the audience refuses to let the image die. The celebrity survives through attention. Attention becomes currency. Currency becomes power. Power becomes appetite.

The cycle continues.

I Love Paris doesn’t need to lecture us about any of this. It simply puts the blood on the table and lets us decide whether we’re still hungry.

The film’s greatest achievement may ultimately be its ability to make Paris simultaneously ridiculous and sympathetic. She can be selfish. She can be vain. She can be frustrating. But she is also recognisable. Her hunger for success isn’t supernatural. It’s painfully human.

The vampire simply gives that hunger teeth.

Murphy’s film therefore becomes something considerably more interesting than a vampire comedy set against the music industry. It is a film about the performance of identity, the commodification of creativity and the uncomfortable relationship between artist and audience. It understands that the modern celebrity machine doesn’t necessarily need to destroy people outright.

Sometimes it simply keeps feeding.

And the people being fed upon keep smiling for the camera.

The Prognosis:

I Love Paris is a wonderfully strange hybrid: vampire movie, mockumentary, music-industry satire and uncomfortable exercise in cinematic voyeurism. Nicky Murphy’s direction finds considerable strength in allowing the natural elements of Paris, the performances and the improvised rhythms of everyday interaction to remain visible rather than burying them beneath excessive genre machinery.

Aminata Thiboult and Leonor Oberson give the film its grounded human pulse, creating characters whose relationships remain compelling even when the world around them becomes increasingly absurd. Their performances help ensure that the vampire mythology never overwhelms the film’s more interesting concerns: ambition, exploitation, artistic identity and the desperate hunger to be seen.

But perhaps the sharpest blade is directed back at us.

Because I Love Paris doesn’t simply ask what happens when a vampire enters the music industry.

It asks what happens when we keep watching.

When does fascination become voyeurism?

When does art become exploitation?

And how much blood are we prepared to overlook if the show is good enough?

The vampires may be hungry.

The industry may be hungry.

But the audience has been feeding them all along.

I LOVE PARIS screens at Monster Fest 2026 on Sunday 4 October at 5:00pm at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, following its Australian Premiere run after winning the Gold Audience Award for Best International Feature at Fantasia.

Come for the vampires.

Stay for the uncomfortable realisation that perhaps we’ve always been part of the feeding frenzy.

Saul Muerte

INFIRMARY: When the Found Footage Becomes the Familiar

01 Thursday Oct 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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horror, shudder, shudder australia

A haunted hospital, a bodycam and the problem with knowing exactly where the scare is coming from

There are few locations more obliging to the horror filmmaker than the abandoned psychiatric hospital. Its corridors arrive preloaded with cinematic history: peeling paint, institutional lighting, empty rooms, distant noises and the suggestion that whatever happened here was sufficiently terrible that nobody bothered to clean up afterwards. Add a bodycam, a security guard working the night shift and a mysterious disappearance, and the machinery of contemporary found-footage horror appears to assemble itself almost automatically.

Infirmary knows this machinery intimately.

Perhaps a little too intimately.

Nicholas Pineda’s feature debut takes us into the Wilshire Infirmary, a decaying psychiatric facility whose history is considerably less dormant than the building itself. Edward (Paul Syre Lee) arrives for his first night as a security guard and is partnered with Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), a veteran guard whose abrasive personality suggests that workplace induction has taken a particularly unfortunate turn. Before long, the routine patrol becomes something else entirely, and the footage recovered from Edward’s body camera offers investigators a record of a night that apparently cannot be reconciled with ordinary reality.

It is a perfectly serviceable premise for found footage, and Infirmary immediately demonstrates that it understands the form. The bodycam perspective is complemented by fixed surveillance cameras, giving Pineda multiple visual grammars with which to explore the hospital. We move from the intimate, unstable perspective of the guards to the impersonal geometry of security footage, where corridors become lines disappearing into darkness and rooms become observation chambers in which something may or may not have moved.

The surveillance camera is, after all, one of modern horror’s most useful inventions. It promises knowledge while delivering uncertainty. It tells us that somebody is watching, but never guarantees that the person watching understands what they are seeing.

Infirmary understands that contradiction.

What it struggles to overcome is familiarity.

The film is littered with the conventions that have become almost inseparable from found-footage horror: the institutional setting, unexplained noises, strange figures glimpsed at the edge of the frame, malfunctioning equipment, characters wandering into places they probably shouldn’t and the inevitable suggestion that the camera has captured something the human eye missed.

None of these devices is inherently problematic. Horror is built from recurring forms. The issue is that Infirmary rarely gives them quite enough additional pressure to make them feel newly dangerous.

The film can be atmospheric without necessarily becoming frightening.

That distinction matters.

There is a certain elegance to the visual conception of the hospital. The corridors are oppressive precisely because they are so ordinary. Rather than filling every available corner with grotesquerie, Pineda allows the architecture to do some of the work. The empty institutional spaces become a kind of visual purgatory, their very emptiness creating the expectation that something ought to be there.

And occasionally something is.

But Infirmary repeatedly approaches the threshold of genuine unease only to retreat into the familiar language of the found-footage scare. A noise becomes an event. A shadow becomes a revelation. An empty corridor becomes a runway for anticipation. The film knows precisely how to prepare the audience for a disturbance, but preparation is not the same thing as terror.

The result is a curious paradox: Infirmary can be technically unsettling while remaining emotionally underpowered.

This is particularly noticeable because the central performers give the film more character than its narrative sometimes affords them. Paul Syre Lee’s Edward is positioned as the audience’s principal conduit into this nightmare, while Mark Anthony Williams gives Lester an abrasive, unpredictable energy that complicates the conventional rookie/veteran relationship. Danielle Kennedy’s Ms. Downey adds another layer to the institutional mystery, reinforcing the sense that Edward has entered a workplace where nobody is particularly interested in explaining the rules.

That characterisation is important because the hospital itself is not the only thing being watched.

Edward is being watched too.

The bodycam creates an unusual relationship between character and audience. We are not simply observing Edward’s experience; we are effectively receiving his evidence. The footage is supposed to tell us what happened. Yet the further the film progresses, the less useful that evidence becomes as an explanatory instrument.

That is potentially rich territory.

Found footage works best when the recording device becomes more than a gimmick. The camera should alter our relationship with events. It should make us question whether seeing something actually means understanding it, whether recording violence transforms us into spectators, or whether the supposedly objective camera is simply another unreliable witness.

Infirmary gestures towards these possibilities but doesn’t always push them far enough.

Instead, it sometimes feels like a film walking through the museum of found-footage horror, admiring the exhibits and occasionally switching on the lights.

The psychiatric hospital itself is another familiar piece of genre architecture. From Session 9 to Grave Encounters, abandoned institutions have become almost a subgenre within the haunted-location movie. Infirmary doesn’t radically reinvent that geography. What it does achieve is a certain institutional bleakness: the building feels less like a conventional haunted house than a place whose purpose has become corrupted. It is a workplace, a ruin and a repository for unpleasant memories simultaneously.

That is arguably where the film’s strongest horror lies.

Not necessarily in what haunts the building, but in the idea of institutions retaining the psychological residue of what happened inside them.

The film’s mythology involving patients, experimentation and the possibility of something being transferred from human beings into artificial forms gives the narrative a potentially fascinating thematic dimension. There is an intriguing idea lurking underneath the scares: that madness might not disappear simply because the people who experienced it are gone. It might migrate. It might become embedded in objects, spaces or memories.

That is considerably more disturbing than another shadow disappearing around a corridor.

Unfortunately, Infirmary is not always able to convert that conceptual material into sustained dramatic momentum. The film keeps returning to the familiar rhythms of exploration, discovery and reaction, and eventually the audience can begin to feel the mechanism operating beneath the floorboards.

This is the central weakness of Infirmary: the film rarely surprises us at the level of form.

It is competent at being a found-footage horror film. It understands what the form requires. It knows how to frame an empty corridor, when to hold a shot, how to use surveillance footage and how to create the expectation that something will appear just outside the visible frame.

But horror isn’t merely the art of making an audience expect something frightening.

It is the art of making them uncertain about what frightens them.

And Infirmary too often allows that uncertainty to collapse into anticipation.

The sound design is another significant component of the experience. Electronic textures and sudden sonic disruptions create an appropriately oppressive atmosphere, although the film occasionally leans so heavily on audio cues that the sound begins doing the emotional work the imagery hasn’t quite managed to accomplish. The effect can be less a tightening of the nerves than a reminder that the film would very much like us to be frightened right now.

There are moments when it works.

There are moments when the hospital becomes genuinely uncanny.

And there are stretches where the sheer emptiness of the frame is more effective than any conventional scare could be.

But these moments arrive intermittently rather than accumulating into the sustained psychological assault the premise promises.

That makes Infirmary an interesting example of the current state of found-footage horror. The form has become so established that simply employing its conventions is no longer enough. The audience knows the language. We know the bodycam is going to capture something. We know the surveillance monitor will eventually reveal something that wasn’t there a moment earlier. We know the character will walk towards the noise.

The question is no longer whether the film understands the grammar.

The question is whether it has something new to say with it.

Pineda clearly has an eye for the physical spaces of horror, and there is enough atmosphere and character work here to suggest a filmmaker worth watching. Infirmary is not incompetent filmmaking; quite the opposite. Its problem is almost more frustrating because of that competence. You can see the film that it wants to become flickering within the one that is actually on screen.

A more radical approach to its mythology, a greater willingness to abandon familiar scare rhythms or a deeper interrogation of its surveillance conceit might have transformed its unease into something genuinely destabilising.

Instead, Infirmary walks a well-trodden corridor.

It is just unfortunate that we can usually see where the corridor is going.

The Prognosis:

Infirmary is a technically assured piece of found-footage horror that understands atmosphere, location and the visual grammar of surveillance. Nicholas Pineda makes good use of the decaying hospital environment, while Paul Syre Lee and Mark Anthony Williams give the film a stronger human dimension than its increasingly familiar narrative mechanisms always allow.

But familiarity is the spectre that ultimately haunts Infirmary. The film moves through the conventions of bodycams, surveillance footage, abandoned institutions and unexplained phenomena with relative ease, yet too rarely finds the moment that makes those conventions feel dangerous again.

There is a good horror film buried somewhere inside the Wilshire Infirmary.

The problem is that, for much of the night, Infirmary seems content to patrol the corridors around it.

INFIRMARY premieres exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ on Friday, October 2, 2026.

Saul Muerte

BLOODLUST: The Australian Revenge Western at the End of the World

30 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in MonsterFest, Movie review

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cinema, film, horror, Jocelyn Lambourne, Liam Maloney, Matt Michalik, monster fest, movies, reviews, Ronald MacKinnon, Rupert Evans

The Western has always been a genre about what happens when civilisation runs out of road. Take away the courthouse, the sheriff, the town square and the comforting fiction that justice can be administered by somebody wearing a badge, and you are left with a man, a gun and a very personal understanding of what constitutes a reckoning. Bloodlust takes that ancient machinery of revenge and drives it into the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic Australia, where the world has already ended but the oldest human impulse apparently missed the memo.

Keith and Becca are survivors in more ways than one. They have managed to carve out something resembling companionship in the remains of a world where almost everything else has disappeared. Their existence is stripped back to the essentials: movement, survival and each other. Then a chance encounter with four other survivors turns violently catastrophic. Becca is murdered, Keith is left for dead, and the few possessions they possess are taken from them. Six months later, Keith emerges from the wreckage with a singular purpose. He has found the men responsible, and whatever remains of the man they once encountered on the road is about to be buried beneath something considerably colder.

This is where Bloodlust finds its most compelling territory. Revenge stories traditionally begin with a moral equation: someone has been wronged, therefore somebody must pay. It is the cinematic equivalent of an eye for an eye, except that cinema has always been fascinated by what happens when the eye is finally collected. The closer the avenger gets to his target, the more complicated that original equation becomes. Bloodlust understands this tension and allows Keith’s pursuit to become something more unsettling than a straightforward exercise in settling scores.

Because what exactly is Keith trying to restore?

Becca cannot be brought back. The old world cannot be reconstructed. There is no functioning justice system waiting for Keith to deliver the perpetrators into its hands. There isn’t even much of a civilisation left to protect. His revenge therefore exists in a moral vacuum. He is not restoring order so much as creating his own version of it, one corpse at a time.

That makes Bloodlust feel like an Australian Western that has somehow wandered through the apocalypse and forgotten to change its clothes.

There is the lone figure moving across hostile terrain. There is the murdered woman whose death becomes the catalyst for violence. There is the hunt. There are the men who have done the wronging and the man who intends to make them answer for it. Yet instead of Monument Valley or the dusty frontier towns of classical Western mythology, Michalik and Evans give us the decaying remains of Australia. The frontier has not merely been pushed further west. The entire country has become the frontier.

And that gives the film a wonderfully strange identity.

The post-apocalyptic setting could easily have become an excuse for generic wasteland imagery, but Bloodlust uses its limited resources to create something much more intimate. This isn’t a world populated by armies of mutants, elaborate settlements or armies of marauding survivors. It is a reduced landscape in which the absence of civilisation becomes part of the horror. The emptiness matters. The spaces between people matter. Every encounter carries the possibility of violence because there are so few structures left to prevent it.

In that respect, Bloodlust belongs to a long tradition of Australian cinema that understands landscape as something more psychologically complicated than scenery. The Australian bush has frequently been represented as a place where familiar rules become unreliable, where isolation can turn ordinary human behaviour into something primal. Here, the landscape has been stripped even further. The civilisation that once gave the environment context has disappeared, leaving only the terrain and the people who remain trapped inside it.

And Keith is very much a product of that landscape.

His transformation is central to the film’s power. Revenge cinema has always loved the metamorphosis of the victim into the avenger, but Bloodlust isn’t interested in pretending that this transformation is clean. Violence changes the person who administers it. Every act of vengeance carries the possibility that the distinction between justice and brutality will become increasingly academic.

The film’s title consequently becomes more revealing the further we travel into Keith’s story. Bloodlust isn’t simply describing the violence surrounding him. It suggests something more fundamental: that revenge can become an appetite.

Once the first blood has been spilled, how much is enough?

That is the question hanging over Keith’s journey.

Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans approach this material with a remarkable degree of economy. The pair wrote, directed, shot and edited the film themselves, while also appearing in front of the camera, expanding what began as a ten-minute action short made during their university years into a 70-minute feature. The film was shot over four months with a crew of just four people.

That context is worth knowing, not because Bloodlust needs excuses made for it, but because it explains something important about the film’s physicality. There is a stripped-down quality to the filmmaking that suits the material. The movie doesn’t feel like an enormous production pretending to be small. It feels like a group of filmmakers who understood the resources available to them and built the film around movement, landscape, bodies and violence.

And when Bloodlust gets violent, it doesn’t treat brutality as decorative seasoning.

The violence has consequence. It is ugly, physical and deliberately uncomfortable, which gives the revenge sequences an interesting tension. We understand why Keith wants vengeance. We understand the enormity of what has been taken from him. But understanding the motivation doesn’t necessarily mean we can comfortably inhabit the morality of what follows.

That distinction is crucial.

The easiest revenge films allow us to cheer because the villains are so thoroughly monstrous that their destruction becomes a form of audience wish fulfilment. Bloodlust operates in murkier territory. Its central figure has been wronged beyond comprehension, yet his response increasingly forces us to question whether vengeance is capable of remaining proportional once there is nobody left to enforce the boundaries.

It is the old Western problem dressed in post-apocalyptic clothing.

Who watches the watcher when there is nobody left?

And perhaps more importantly: who judges the man who has decided that he alone is qualified to deliver justice?

There is something almost primitive about Bloodlust in this regard. Beneath its post-apocalyptic surface lies an ancient story. A loved one is taken. A survivor swears vengeance. The road stretches ahead. The enemies wait somewhere beyond the horizon. The avenger walks towards them carrying grief that gradually hardens into purpose.

The difference is that this particular frontier has already burned down.

That collision between old and new is where the film derives much of its character. The Western is one of cinema’s oldest mythologies, while post-apocalyptic fiction is one of its most persistent modern anxieties. Put the two together and you get a strange hybrid in which the past and future appear to have crashed into each other somewhere in the Australian wilderness.

The result is lean, brutal and occasionally twisted in ways that feel distinctly its own.

Bloodlust isn’t interested in building an elaborate mythology around the apocalypse. It doesn’t need to tell us every detail of what happened to the world. The absence of information becomes part of the atmosphere. What matters is what remains: a handful of people, a hostile environment, old grievances and the increasingly fragile boundary between being the victim and becoming the monster.

That makes it a particularly fitting addition to Monster Fest’s Homegrown Horrors program. The festival describes it as a stripped-back piece of independent Australian filmmaking that punches above its weight, and there is something satisfying about watching a film whose production circumstances seem almost perversely appropriate to its story: a tiny crew creating a film about people trying to survive in a world where almost everything has already been stripped away.

There is no cavalry coming for Keith.

No sheriff.

No courtroom.

No final appeal.

Just the road.

And somewhere at the end of it, somebody is going to pay.

The Prognosis:

Bloodlust takes the familiar anatomy of the revenge film and performs an interesting autopsy on it. By transplanting the Western’s moral landscape into a post-apocalyptic Australia, Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans create a film that is simultaneously familiar and strangely alien. Its brutality is considerable, but its more interesting wounds are psychological: what happens when grief becomes vengeance, vengeance becomes purpose, and purpose begins to consume the person pursuing it?

This is Australian genre filmmaking stripped to the bone, but the skeleton underneath is an old one.

The frontier.

The outlaw.

The wronged man.

The reckoning.

Only this time, there isn’t a civilisation waiting on the other side of the dust.

BLOODLUST screens as an Australian Premiere at Monster Fest 2026 on Saturday 3 October at 7:30pm at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, with a Q&A following the screening.

If revenge is an eye for an eye, Bloodlust asks a much nastier question:

What happens when there is nobody left to close their eyes?

Saul Muerte

GODMOTHER: Welcome to the Desert, Where the Family Values Get Weird

30 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in MonsterFest, Movie review

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alanah pearce, books, bruce davison, Cameron Cuffe, Dee Wallace, film, horror, john vernon, MonsterFest, movies, Paige Evans, reviews

There are few things more suspicious in a horror film than the phrase “romantic getaway.” It is cinema’s way of placing a flashing neon sign above the protagonists and quietly informing the audience that somebody, somewhere, has made a terrible booking decision. In Godmother, that decision begins innocently enough: a couple head into the New Mexico desert hoping to escape the machinery of everyday life, only for their retreat to become considerably less intimate when Theo invites her heartbroken sister Katie along for the ride. Then the house itself starts introducing complications, and suddenly the idea of a relaxing weekend away begins to resemble the sort of holiday brochure that should come with a psychiatric warning.

Directed by John Veron in his feature debut and co-written with Alanah Pearce, Godmother initially plays its cards with a certain restraint. There is an appealingly awkward quality to the interpersonal dynamics, with relationships already carrying enough baggage before the supernatural—or whatever lurks at the edges of the story—has had an opportunity to unpack its own. That gives the film an important foundation. The horror doesn’t simply arrive from somewhere outside the characters; it grows out of the increasingly uncomfortable social space they have entered.

And then the temperature begins to rise.

This is where Godmother becomes considerably more interesting. Rather than detonating its entire arsenal at once, the film gradually turns the screws, allowing the atmosphere to curdle. What initially resembles an offbeat desert drama starts acquiring the peculiar logic of a nightmare in which every attempt to maintain normality only makes the situation stranger. The New Mexico landscape becomes more than picturesque backdrop. It is a pressure cooker—wide open, sun-blasted and seemingly offering nowhere useful to hide.

That gradual escalation is one of the film’s strengths. Godmother understands that horror can benefit from letting the audience sit in the wrong room for a little too long. There is something distinctly off about the experience: the sense that we have taken a perfectly ordinary road trip, missed the appropriate exit somewhere outside civilisation and are now following a road sign pointing towards a destination nobody remembers agreeing to visit.

The film is also blessed with the presence of two actors who bring considerable genre history into this increasingly strange equation. Dee Wallace has spent decades inhabiting the emotional architecture of horror, from The Howling and Cujo through E.T. and beyond, and she possesses the rare ability to make warmth and unease coexist within the same performance. Bruce Davison, meanwhile, carries his own formidable genre pedigree, having moved through everything from Willard to X-Men and The Lords of Salem. Their presence gives Godmother an intriguing generational dimension: this is a film featuring performers who know precisely how much menace can hide behind a seemingly ordinary smile.

Their roles work particularly well because the film doesn’t treat veteran genre performers as museum pieces. They aren’t simply here to give horror fans a knowing wink. Instead, Wallace and Davison become part of the machinery that allows Godmother to transition from uncomfortable social encounter into something considerably more sinister.

And that transition is where Alanah Pearce and John Veron’s collaboration becomes particularly noticeable. There is a creative curiosity running through the film—a willingness to let the premise become increasingly peculiar rather than constantly steering it back towards familiar genre territory. Pearce brings a background steeped in games, storytelling and popular culture, while Veron approaches the material as a filmmaker making his feature debut. The result is a film that feels interested in the possibilities of its own premise rather than simply ticking boxes on a horror checklist.

It also helps that Godmother understands the value of not immediately explaining everything. Horror is often at its most effective when the audience has enough information to become suspicious but not enough to feel entirely comfortable. The film plays with that uncertainty, allowing its characters to keep making decisions that seem reasonable right up until the moment they very clearly aren’t.

The desert is particularly useful territory for this kind of horror. It is the landscape of American mythology stripped of its reassuring edges: enormous distances, isolated properties, strange encounters and the persistent possibility that civilisation is considerably further away than you initially thought. It is also a perfect setting because the environment itself seems to encourage bad decisions. You can almost imagine the road disappearing behind you while some unseen voice in the passenger seat whispers, Keep driving. It’ll be fine.

It won’t be fine.

But Godmother doesn’t need to pretend that it is reinventing horror to be worthwhile. Its pleasures are found in the way it builds, the peculiarities it introduces along the way and the performances that give its increasingly bizarre circumstances a human centre. The film has an infectious willingness to push its premise further, and when it finally begins letting the horror properly off the leash, the earlier restraint pays dividends.

There is also something pleasingly old-fashioned about its construction. The film is interested in characters first, atmosphere second and outright mayhem somewhere further down the road. That makes the eventual escalation feel earned rather than simply inserted because the runtime has reached the point where somebody needs to start screaming.

For Monster Fest audiences, Godmother offers precisely the kind of festival experience that works best when you know as little as possible beforehand. It is an Australian Premiere with a strong creative partnership at its centre, a couple of veteran genre performers lurking within the cast, and a premise that becomes increasingly difficult to classify the further it travels from the romantic getaway advertised on the itinerary.

So pack the sunscreen, fill the tank and leave your better judgement at home.

The Prognosis:

Godmother is a steadily escalating horror film that finds its personality in the collision between uncomfortable domestic dynamics, desert isolation and increasingly strange genre territory. John Veron and Alanah Pearce have fashioned something that is happy to take the scenic route before driving directly into darker territory, while Dee Wallace and Bruce Davison provide welcome genre gravitas to a cast of characters whose weekend is about to become considerably less relaxing.

GODMOTHER screens as an Australian Premiere at Monster Fest 2026 on Saturday 3 October at Cinema Nova, Melbourne.

Monster Fest runs from 2–10 October, with the festival’s 2026 program presenting the film among its international and Australian genre premieres.

If you’re heading to Monster Fest, this is one desert getaway where I’d recommend checking the return journey before you leave.

Saul Muerte

Under the Scalpel: Interview with John Veron

To accompany our exploration of Godmother, Surgeons of Horror’s Under the Scalpel goes directly to the source. Saul Muerte speaks with director John Veron about the film’s journey from screenplay to screen, the challenges of independent horror production, the decision to place this particular nightmare against an isolated desert landscape, and the creative influences that helped shape its uneasy blend of occult menace and psychological tension. It’s a spoiler-free conversation that offers a glimpse behind the curtain without dismantling the mysteries that make Godmother work — an opportunity to hear the filmmaker himself discuss the anatomy of the film before the scalpel goes in.

RESIDENT EVIL (2026): The Man Who Couldn’t Decide

19 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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austin abrams, horror, movies, resident evil, reviews, umbrella corporation, zach cregger

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil begins with a man who does not want his life to change. Bryan is a medical courier, a man whose existence is defined by movement without necessarily having any direction. He drives things from one place to another. He delivers what other people need. He takes another job because it pays double. He is useful, but largely interchangeable. Then his girlfriend tells him she is pregnant, and suddenly the future has arrived without asking his permission. Cregger’s ingenious move is to turn that emotional paralysis into a survival-horror movie. By the time Bryan enters the nightmare of Raccoon City, he is already living inside a horror story of his own making. The monsters simply make it literal.

There is a tendency to discuss video-game adaptations according to how faithfully they reproduce characters, locations, mythology and iconography. Resident Evil takes a more interesting route. Cregger does not attempt to reproduce one particular game so much as reconstruct the experience of playing one. The film is an original story running parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2, but its architecture is unmistakably that of the games: locked doors, scarce resources, improvised weapons, bizarre obstacles, escalating objectives, seemingly useless objects, sudden encounters and the persistent feeling that somewhere just beyond the next corridor is something considerably worse. Cregger understands that Resident Evil is not necessarily about watching an action hero defeat monsters. It is about being the person who has to decide whether opening the next door is worth the risk.

The Rise of Zach Cregger

There is an intriguing progression through Zach Cregger’s work to this point. His emergence as a horror filmmaker was already something of a surprise given his background in sketch comedy with The Whitest Kids U’ Know, but Barbarian announced a filmmaker fascinated by destabilisation: the sudden reconfiguration of audience assumptions, the willingness to abandon one story for another and the conviction that horror becomes more effective when the viewer cannot quite predict what the film is going to do next. Weapons expanded that impulse. Its fractured perspectives and shifting character emphasis demonstrated a filmmaker increasingly interested in how information changes our understanding of horror. Cregger’s movies have consistently asked the audience to reassess what it thinks it is watching.

Resident Evil is different. It is arguably his most straightforward film, but that does not make it less considered. In some respects, the constraints of the franchise force Cregger to become more precise. There is no need to manufacture the sort of narrative rug-pulls that powered Barbarian or the structural complexity of Weapons. Instead, Cregger takes an existing piece of popular culture and asks a deceptively difficult question: what would it actually feel like to be trapped inside a Resident Evil game? The answer is Bryan. Cregger has spoken about wanting to recreate the soul and pacing of the games rather than construct a scene-for-scene adaptation, and that distinction is crucial. The film does not require Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield or any of the franchise’s established heroes because Bryan is not supposed to be one of them. He is supposed to be us.

The Loser as Player

Bryan is spectacularly ill-equipped for the apocalypse. He is not a police officer, soldier or special agent. He does not have years of survival training and he does not suddenly discover a hidden reservoir of action-hero competence when the monsters arrive. When he encounters the weapons that would traditionally transform a horror protagonist into an action hero, Cregger instead makes them extensions of Bryan’s incompetence. That is where Austin Abrams becomes indispensable.

Abrams does not play Bryan as a secretly capable action hero waiting to emerge. He plays him as a man who is frightened, confused, frustrated and frequently overwhelmed. His body becomes part of the film’s comedy: running, stumbling, panting, screaming, improvising and occasionally looking at the nightmare unfolding around him with the exhausted disbelief of someone who has absolutely no idea why this has become his problem. Bryan is funny because he is human. His reactions are often the reactions that a normal person might actually have if confronted with a mutated creature, a zombie or a grotesque biological impossibility. He does not become cool under pressure. He does not suddenly acquire the vocabulary of the action movie. He swears, panics, runs and makes mistakes.

Because Cregger largely isolates him, Abrams has to carry an enormous amount of the film almost by himself. This is not simply a performance of dialogue. It is a performance of reaction. The camera watches Bryan experience the game. At various points, he effectively becomes the audience’s controller. He searches rooms, tries objects, discovers weapons, encounters locked doors, learns what works and makes mistakes. He gradually becomes better at the game because he is learning how to play it. That progression gives the film a genuine gamification that extends beyond Easter eggs. Bryan is almost an NPC who has accidentally become the player character: a man who does not understand the rules, does not know what he is carrying, does not know how to use the weapons he finds and survives largely because the game keeps presenting him with another objective.

A Green Herb and a World of Rules

For longtime players, Cregger scatters the film with recognisable pieces of Resident Evil iconography. The green healing items. The locked gates. The weapons. The resource management. The increasingly grotesque mutations. The movement through seemingly disconnected environments. The hospital. Raccoon City. The sense that every apparently innocuous room might contain either salvation or something waiting to tear you apart.

These details could easily have become the cinematic equivalent of a merchandise catalogue. Instead, they are integrated into the mechanics of Bryan’s journey. The objects become punctuation marks. Cregger understands that fans do not necessarily need to be shown their favourite characters standing in a doorway. They need to feel that the rules of Resident Evil have suddenly become real. That is a much more sophisticated form of fan service.

The film is therefore remarkably restrained in its mythology. It does not spend its runtime explaining the entire history of Umbrella Corporation or stopping to introduce every recognisable name in the franchise. Instead, it places an ordinary man inside the outbreak and allows the familiar architecture to emerge around him. The result feels less like a remake of a particular Resident Evil game and more like a lost campaign running alongside one.

Cregger’s Hues: Light Inside the Dark

Visually, Cregger also understands the value of contrast. Resident Evil is a film of darkness, but it is not visually monotonous. The cold blue-black of the night, the sickly illumination of abandoned spaces, the sterile artificiality of hospital interiors and the violent eruptions of colour within the gore create a visual language that repeatedly moves between safety and danger. That contrast matters because Resident Evil has always understood light as conditional. A lit room does not necessarily mean a safe room. A familiar corridor can conceal something monstrous. A fluorescent hospital can be considerably more frightening than a dark forest.

Cregger has spoken about growing technically through Weapons, particularly in his understanding of lenses, editing and considering light sources during storyboarding. That development is evident here. The film’s visual choices are not simply about making Raccoon City look appropriately grim. They continually manipulate the relationship between visibility and vulnerability. The darkest spaces are frightening because we cannot see. The brightest spaces can be frightening because we can.

The Joke Is the Pressure Valve

Yet for all the discussion of horror, gore and game mechanics, humour may be the element that keeps Resident Evil moving. Cregger’s comedy background has always been part of his horror vocabulary. Horror and comedy share a similar anatomy: timing, tone, expectation and surprise. The joke often arrives precisely when the film could otherwise become oppressive, with Bryan’s reactions puncturing the grandeur of the apocalypse. His incompetence deflates the macho posturing that has traditionally accompanied video-game protagonists, while the absurdity of the situations becomes part of their entertainment value.

This is also where Resident Evil brushes against what I have come to think of as Gallows Horror: the point at which the joke does not relieve the horror so much as expose how grotesque the situation has become. There is a particular cruelty to laughing at Bryan because the circumstances surrounding him are genuinely appalling. He is frightened, exhausted, increasingly desperate and surrounded by things that should be utterly terrifying, yet his very inability to behave like a conventional horror protagonist becomes funny. The laughter comes not because the danger has disappeared, but because the alternative is to stare directly into the absurdity of it.

That distinction matters. Gallows humour traditionally allows us to laugh in the face of death, but Cregger pushes that instinct into the mechanics of the Resident Evil universe. The game has always contained an inherent absurdity: a character can encounter an impossible biological abomination and then spend several minutes searching a room for a key, solving a puzzle or examining an oddly specific object. Cregger understands that this ridiculousness is part of the franchise’s identity. Rather than smoothing it away in the transition from game to cinema, he allows it to become part of the film’s texture.

Importantly, the humour does not entirely dissolve the horror. It gives the audience somewhere to breathe, but it also makes the next descent into darkness sharper. The laugh becomes a pressure valve, and once that valve closes, the horror rushes back in. This creates a rhythm that keeps the film moving without allowing either tone to completely dominate the other. Cregger reportedly removed some jokes after test audiences found an earlier version too funny, making what remains particularly revealing. The surviving humour is largely embedded in character and circumstance rather than simply being added as comic relief.

And that makes Abrams’ performance even more important. For long stretches, he is effectively performing a solo comedy-horror routine against creatures, environments and visual effects. He has to make the audience laugh without making Bryan ridiculous, frightened without making him pathetic and sympathetic without turning him into a conventional hero. Abrams finds that balance, and in doing so turns Bryan’s predicament into something approaching tragicomedy. We laugh at him because we recognise him, and we recognise him because his instinct to keep running, keep joking and keep moving is also an instinct to avoid confronting what is waiting for him.

The Fear of Becoming Someone Else

The film becomes more interesting when the delivery itself begins to acquire symbolic weight. Bryan spends the entire film carrying something. He does not initially know exactly what it is. He simply knows that it is important and that someone needs it delivered. At the same time, his girlfriend Michelle is carrying something too: a child. The two forms of carrying gradually begin to echo one another.

Bryan’s job is to transport a future that he does not understand. His personal life is confronting him with another future he does not understand. In both cases, the thing being carried represents responsibility. In both cases, Bryan’s instinct is not necessarily to embrace it but to keep moving. Movement becomes his substitute for decision. He drives, runs, delivers, escapes, doubles back and keeps going. What he rarely does is stop and decide what he actually wants.

This is where the film’s apparent simplicity begins to reveal something darker. Bryan is afraid of fatherhood because fatherhood represents irreversible change. His relationship with Michelle has reached a point at which the future can no longer be postponed, and his instinct is to defer the conversation. He is caught between fight and flight, but neither quite describes him. He chooses movement without commitment.

That is his defining state. And it is why the monsters are so effective as extensions of the story. The infected are bodies that have changed without consent. Bryan is terrified of changing by choice.

The Horror of Stagnation

This makes Resident Evil unexpectedly interested in stagnation. At first glance, it is one of the fastest-moving films Cregger has made. Bryan is constantly travelling through new environments, encountering new monsters and receiving new objectives. But psychologically, he is stuck. He has been stuck before the film begins. The outbreak simply gives physical form to that condition.

Every new objective provides Bryan with an excuse not to confront the larger question waiting at home. Deliver the package. Find the weapon. Get through the gate. Reach the hospital. Find the scientists. Get the cure. There is always another task, another immediate problem and another reason not to think about tomorrow. This is precisely what makes the video-game structure so appropriate. Games are built around objectives. The player is constantly told what to do next. Bryan’s life becomes easier when he has an objective because an objective means he does not have to make a decision for himself.

The tragedy is that the game eventually runs out of objectives.

SPOILERS: The Thing He Carries

The ending makes this explicit. Bryan has spent the entire film carrying the thing that might save him. The package he initially believes to be an organ is ultimately revealed to contain a crucial component required to create the antidote. He has been carrying the answer without understanding its significance. But by the time the cure is created, Bryan’s infection has progressed too far.

The irony is devastating. He has done exactly what he was supposed to do. He delivered the package. He completed the mission. He reached the destination. And it still is not enough. The scientists cannot save him before his transformation overwhelms him, and Bryan emerges at the end no longer as the frightened courier we have spent the film following, but as another creature within the world he has been desperately trying to escape.

This is where the film’s fatherhood metaphor becomes particularly bleak. Bryan spends the movie afraid of what becoming a father will do to him. He worries about losing himself. He worries about change. He wants to return to the life he understands. And when he finally confronts the possibility of accepting that responsibility, it is already too late. His body changes without his permission. The thing he feared most happens anyway. He becomes something else.

The film therefore turns his indecision into horror. Bryan has spent the entire night oscillating between fight and flight, between accepting responsibility and escaping it, between confronting the future and postponing it. Eventually there is no decision left to make. The infection makes it for him.

The Answer Was in His Hands

There is a cruel elegance to the fact that Bryan’s salvation is with him for almost the entire film. He does not need to discover the answer. He needs to recognise what he is carrying. That distinction is central to the character.

Bryan is constantly searching for something outside himself: a weapon, an escape route, another person, a safe place, a solution. Yet the most important object in the film is literally attached to him. The cure is in the bag. The future is in the phone. The decision is waiting at home. He simply cannot bring himself to confront it.

This is why his transformation feels more thematically complete than a straightforward “hero gets infected” ending might suggest. The film does not punish Bryan because he is cowardly. It punishes him because he cannot decide what he is willing to become. And perhaps that is the real horror of Resident Evil. Not mutation. Not infection. Not even death. Change without choice.

A Resident Evil About Being the Wrong Person

Cregger’s film ultimately succeeds because it finds a way to make the Resident Evil franchise’s mechanics serve its character rather than the other way around. The game references are fun. The weapons, keys and locked doors reward familiarity. The creatures provide increasingly grotesque obstacles. The first-person sequences place us directly inside Bryan’s panic. But beneath all that is a surprisingly coherent character study.

Bryan is a loser. He is unlucky. He is underprepared. He is perpetually one bad decision away from disaster. And yet we desperately want him to make it. That sympathy is the film’s secret weapon. Because when the inevitable happens, we are not watching a franchise protagonist fall. We are watching an ordinary man who has spent the entire night trying to get home. And he never does.

That is why Austin Abrams matters so much. Without his ability to make Bryan funny, frightened, irritating, vulnerable and ultimately tragic, the film’s elaborate game mechanics would remain mechanics. Abrams gives them a human pulse. Cregger, meanwhile, has reached an intriguing point in his development. Barbarian demonstrated his ability to destroy audience expectations. Weapons showed a filmmaker increasingly interested in structure, perspective and the emotional consequences of horror. Resident Evil demonstrates something slightly different: that Cregger can take an enormous piece of existing popular culture and impose a coherent authorial sensibility upon it without needing to dominate it.

He understands that the franchise’s real appeal has never been simply zombies and monsters. It is the feeling of being trapped in a place where every decision matters. Every bullet matters. Every door matters. Every object matters. And eventually, every choice matters.

Bryan spends the entire film trying not to choose. By the end, the choice has been taken from him. The courier finally stops moving. The game is over. And the man who could never decide what he wanted to become becomes something else entirely.

Saul Muerte

GOODY GOODY (2026): A Solid Birth of Horror

14 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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Colby Hollman, Colleen Foy, Raymond Creamer, Samantha Robinson, shudder, shudder australia, Zoë Renee

Horror does not always need to reinvent the machinery of the genre to be effective. Sometimes the value lies in how cleanly the familiar pieces are assembled: a confined location, a vulnerable group of characters, an increasingly hostile environment and the creeping suspicion that something is profoundly wrong. Goody Goody, the feature debut from writer-director Raymond Creamer, operates firmly within those parameters. It is not a film of radical invention, but it is a tightly constructed and consistently watchable piece of genre filmmaking, held together by a small cast capable of making its increasingly nightmarish circumstances feel immediate.

The premise is deceptively simple. An expectant couple and their midwife find themselves trapped inside an isolated home during a blizzard as a seemingly routine home birth begins to go badly wrong. What initially appears to be a matter of medical complications gradually develops into something more sinister, with the weather outside turning the house into a sealed environment and the suggestion of an unwanted presence transforming an already stressful situation into outright horror. Creamer understands the fundamental advantage of this setup: childbirth is already an experience built around vulnerability, uncertainty and the loss of control. The supernatural elements therefore have fertile ground in which to take root.

The film’s greatest strength is its economy. With a modest cast and essentially one primary location, Goody Goody has little opportunity to disguise structural weaknesses through spectacle. Instead, Creamer puts his faith in the performers and in the gradual tightening of the narrative. Samantha Robinson and Colleen Foy provide the film with its principal dramatic engine, their characters occupying opposing positions within the increasingly unstable birth. Robinson brings an unsettling ambiguity to Goody, while Foy gives the midwife a practical, grounded presence that provides the audience with someone to trust as the situation deteriorates.

That relationship is particularly important because Goody Goody works best when it treats its supernatural threat as an extension of the characters’ circumstances rather than simply an excuse for conventional scares. The medical reality of the situation provides the initial source of anxiety; the horror grows from the realisation that rational explanations may no longer be sufficient. It is a familiar progression, certainly, but the film understands that horror often derives less from discovering something entirely new than from placing recognisable fears into increasingly hostile configurations.

Creamer’s direction is similarly restrained. There is a welcome absence of unnecessary visual grandstanding, with the claustrophobic setting doing much of the atmospheric work. The house becomes progressively less like a place of safety and more like a trap, while the blizzard surrounding it removes the possibility of easy escape. This is classic contained horror architecture: the outside world remains visible but inaccessible, leaving the characters isolated with whatever is happening inside.

And yet this is also where the film’s limitations become apparent. Goody Goody is solidly made, but rarely feels as though it is pushing against the boundaries of its influences. Its ideas are familiar, its escalation follows recognisable genre pathways and there are few moments where Creamer radically reconfigures the material. The film knows precisely what kind of horror movie it wants to be, but it does not always demonstrate the appetite to become something more unusual.

That does not make it unsuccessful. In fact, there is something refreshing about a film that understands its scale and works within it rather than attempting to manufacture importance. The relatively small cast gives the story an intimacy that larger horror productions often struggle to achieve, while the contained setting allows the performances to remain central. The result is a film that feels assembled with care rather than inflated beyond its means.

There is also a pleasing tension between the title’s almost aggressively innocent suggestion and the increasingly unpleasant reality contained within it. Goody Goody sounds like something benign, even twee; the film itself is considerably less interested in sweetness. That contrast gives the title a darkly playful quality, even if the movie surrounding it remains comparatively straight-faced.

Ultimately, Goody Goody is perhaps best appreciated for what it is rather than what it might have been. It lacks the formal invention or conceptual audacity that might elevate it into genuinely distinctive horror, but it is competently written, tightly woven and supported by a cast that understands the importance of selling the circumstances. Creamer demonstrates a solid command of contained genre filmmaking, even if the film occasionally feels content to walk paths that other horror movies have already travelled.

There is enough here to recommend it, particularly for viewers who appreciate slow-building, character-driven horror and the pressure-cooker mechanics of a contained setting. It may not leave a particularly radical mark on the genre, but it doesn’t need to. Goody Goody is a sturdy piece of horror craftsmanship: modest in ambition, dependable in execution and ultimately an enjoyable watch.

The Prognosis:

Goody Goody is not going to redefine supernatural horror, but it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its familiar ingredients either. Raymond Creamer’s film succeeds through construction, atmosphere and a small ensemble that gives its contained premise credibility. Solid rather than spectacular, familiar rather than inventive, but thoroughly watchable.

Saul Muerte

BACKROOMS: LOST IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR

14 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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backrooms, Chiwetel Ejiofor, horror, kane parsons, Renate Reinsve

Kane Parsons has built Backrooms around a wonderfully simple cinematic proposition: what if you could walk through the wrong wall and discover that the world behind it was infinitely larger than the world you thought you knew? It is the kind of premise that sounds almost childish when reduced to a sentence yet becomes profoundly unsettling once given physical space. A doorway appears where no doorway should exist. A basement gives way to an impossible architecture. Rooms lead to rooms, corridors fold into corridors and the familiar becomes subtly, irrevocably wrong.

For a filmmaker barely out of his teens, Parsons demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of why such spaces disturb us. His feature debut, adapted from the online phenomenon he helped develop through his Kane Pixels YouTube series, does not treat the Backrooms simply as a monster’s playground. Instead, it approaches them as a psychological landscape, a physical manifestation of memory, regret, failure and the human need to impose meaning upon spaces that refuse to provide it. The result is an ambitious piece of conceptual horror that absolutely lived up to the enormous expectations surrounding its transition from internet phenomenon to feature film — and yet, somewhat paradoxically, not always in the ways one might expect.

The mythology of the Backrooms began with an image rather than a narrative: an apparently empty, yellow-walled interior illuminated by fluorescent lighting, a space that seemed both completely mundane and profoundly unnatural. Parsons understood the potential of that image early, transforming it into a series of increasingly elaborate short films before expanding the concept into this feature. The achievement of Backrooms is that it retains the essential strangeness of the original idea while giving it human beings to inhabit.

That distinction is crucial.

Because an empty room can be unsettling, but an empty room inhabited by someone carrying the weight of a broken life becomes something else entirely.

At the centre of the film is Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect whose professional and personal lives have both collapsed into a kind of stagnant middle age. Separated from his wife, drinking heavily and working in a furniture showroom that feels almost comically disconnected from the life he once imagined for himself, Clark is already living in a psychological backroom before he ever discovers the literal one.

That is one of Parsons’ smartest ideas.

Clark is an architect who has failed to construct the life he wanted, and he subsequently finds himself trapped inside an impossible architecture. The metaphor could easily have been unbearably obvious, but Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik understand that the Backrooms do not need to function as a simple allegory. Their power comes from existing simultaneously as a physical impossibility and a psychological possibility.

Clark’s first encounter with the Backrooms therefore carries an unusual mixture of fear and fascination. The space is terrifying, but it is also liberating. Its infinite corridors offer something that the world above cannot: possibility. Here is a place without conventional boundaries, a space where the rules of reality have become negotiable. For a man whose existence has narrowed into disappointment, the infinite can initially look like freedom.

That makes Chiwetel Ejiofor such an inspired choice.

Ejiofor has always possessed an ability to communicate enormous amounts of emotional information without appearing to perform it. Here, that quality becomes essential. Clark is not simply frightened by the Backrooms. He is fascinated by them, frustrated by them, angry with them and, at times, almost seduced by them. Ejiofor allows those contradictory responses to coexist.

There is a weariness to his performance that makes Clark’s predicament feel much larger than the mechanics of the horror story. He is a man who has already become trapped before the film begins. The Backrooms merely give that condition architectural form.

It is one of the film’s most impressive pieces of psychological construction.

Renate Reinsve is equally effective as Dr Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist, and her presence gives the film another layer of psychological inquiry. If Clark represents someone trapped inside his own resentments, Mary represents someone who has built a professional life around helping other people navigate theirs. Her decision to enter the Backrooms after Clark therefore becomes more than a conventional rescue mission.

The therapist enters the patient’s nightmare.

And once she does, the distinction between observer and participant begins to collapse.

This is where Backrooms becomes particularly inventive. The film repeatedly toys with the idea that the environment may not simply be an external supernatural space but something connected to the characters’ memories and emotional histories. The rooms appear to contain fragments of lived experience, distorted approximations of reality that resemble memories reconstructed by someone who cannot quite remember them correctly.

The result is architecture behaving like trauma.

A corridor does not necessarily lead somewhere.

A room does not necessarily contain anything.

A familiar object may have no explanation.

And the deeper the characters travel, the less useful conventional geography becomes.

Parsons is exceptionally good at this kind of spatial uncertainty. He understands that horror does not always require darkness. In fact, Backrooms demonstrates how effectively a filmmaker can make fluorescent lighting frightening. The sickly yellow interiors and endless artificial illumination create a world that is permanently exposed and yet somehow impossible to see clearly.

There is nowhere to hide because there is nowhere that feels safe.

The cinematography and production design deserve enormous credit for creating this sensation. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox transform the supposedly mundane language of commercial interiors into something oppressive and almost cosmic. Walls, carpets, ceiling panels and furniture become components of an endlessly repeating visual vocabulary. The repetition is essential because it gradually erodes the audience’s confidence in their own spatial memory.

We have seen this room before.

Haven’t we?

That corridor looks familiar.

Or perhaps it doesn’t.

The film understands that the human brain is constantly trying to map its surroundings, and Backrooms weaponises that instinct against us.

This is where the film’s connection to liminal-space horror becomes more than a fashionable aesthetic. The liminal space is frightening because it is a location without a clear purpose. It is the hotel corridor after everyone has gone home. The office after the workers have disappeared. The shopping centre before opening. The school after the final bell.

These spaces are recognisable but stripped of their social function.

Backrooms takes that idea and removes the endpoint entirely.

There is no closing time.

There is no final corridor.

There is no obvious outside.

There is simply more.

And more.

That is conceptually brilliant.

It is also where the film begins to reveal its greatest weakness.

Because once the audience understands the central conceit, the question becomes what Parsons can actually do with it for almost two hours.

The answer is frequently impressive.

But not always frightening.

Backrooms is an exceptionally inventive film, yet its inventiveness does not consistently translate into shock appeal. Parsons is more interested in unease than conventional scares, and that decision is understandable given the material. The original Backrooms concept was never particularly dependent upon jump scares. Its power came from suggestion, emptiness and the sense that something might be waiting just outside the limits of the frame.

The problem is that a feature-length film eventually has to provide some escalation.

And the middle section occasionally feels as though it is wandering through the very architecture it has created.

The endless rooms are fascinating to explore, but fascination and fear are not identical emotions. The film’s central conceit is sufficiently compelling that simply moving through the Backrooms can remain interesting for quite some time. Yet there comes a point where the viewer begins to anticipate the rhythm: another corridor, another room, another strange object, another distant sound.

The film starts to experience its own version of spatial fatigue.

This is not a failure of imagination. Quite the opposite.

There is almost too much imagination and not quite enough dramatic propulsion.

The film’s psychological ideas are considerably more successful. The Backrooms become a kind of externalised interiority, a landscape in which characters confront versions of themselves that have been distorted by memory and regret. Parsons is interested in the way people become trapped inside narratives about their own lives, particularly the stories they tell themselves about why they failed.

Clark is an especially compelling example because his professional identity has collapsed alongside his personal one. He was supposed to design spaces. Instead, he finds himself working in a furniture showroom, surrounded by representations of homes that he no longer possesses.

The irony is beautifully constructed.

He sells people the fantasy of domestic stability while sleeping in the store himself.

Then he discovers an infinite series of spaces that seem to exist behind reality.

The Backrooms therefore become both escape and punishment.

That duality gives the film its emotional weight.

And it is why Ejiofor’s performance matters so much. Without him, Backrooms could easily become an elaborate exercise in production design. With him, the corridors acquire emotional significance.

He makes the film human.

There is something particularly impressive about watching an actor of Ejiofor’s calibre respond to a premise that could so easily have remained trapped within internet horror. He doesn’t treat the Backrooms as an excuse to perform fear. He treats them as a psychological event.

That difference elevates the material.

The supporting performances contribute to the same effect, particularly as the film moves away from Clark’s solitary exploration and begins introducing other characters into the labyrinth. The Backrooms become more threatening when they are shared because their presence introduces conflicting interpretations of what the space actually represents.

Is it a supernatural dimension?

A psychological projection?

A manifestation of memory?

A place that exists outside conventional reality?

Parsons wisely refuses to provide a completely comfortable answer.

That ambiguity is one of the film’s strengths.

Yet it also contributes to the sense that the horror never quite lands with the force it could.

There are certainly disturbing images. Parsons has an excellent eye for grotesque shapes and unnatural movement, and when the film finally reveals some of the entities inhabiting the Backrooms, they are strikingly designed. But there is something almost academic about the horror. We observe it. We analyse it. We wonder what it means.

We don’t necessarily recoil from it.

And that distinction is perhaps the key to my response to the film.

Did Backrooms live up to expectations?

Yes and no.

It absolutely lives up to the expectation that Kane Parsons would bring something inventive and visually distinctive to the big screen. It demonstrates a remarkable understanding of atmosphere, spatial design and psychological horror. The performances are considerably stronger than one might expect from a film originating in internet creepypasta culture, with Ejiofor providing the emotional centre and Reinsve offering an equally compelling counterpoint.

But it does not always live up to the expectation of being genuinely frightening.

There are moments of terror, but the film is ultimately more interested in the uncanny than the shocking.

That is not necessarily a criticism.

In fact, some audiences will consider it the film’s greatest virtue.

But for a horror film built around such an inherently disturbing concept, there is a nagging feeling that Parsons could have pushed the material further into genuine nightmare territory.

The middle section in particular could have benefited from greater narrative urgency. The Backrooms are fascinating, but the film occasionally mistakes movement through an interesting environment for dramatic progression. The characters continue exploring, the mythology expands and the psychological dimensions deepen, but the narrative momentum periodically stalls.

When the film finally accelerates towards its conclusion, it becomes considerably more effective. The space suddenly feels smaller, despite remaining physically enormous. The threat becomes more immediate. The characters’ movement through the environment gains urgency.

And for a brief period, the film achieves the perfect marriage between its conceptual and visceral qualities.

This is what makes Backrooms so frustratingly close to greatness.

You can see what Parsons is capable of.

There are sequences where the film stops feeling like an adaptation of an internet horror phenomenon and starts feeling like the emergence of a genuinely distinctive cinematic voice. The imagery, sound, performances and psychological ideas converge into something that feels strange and original.

Kane Parsons has clearly spent years thinking about how spaces can frighten us.

Now he has to learn how to make stories frighten us just as effectively.

That is an exciting prospect.

Because Backrooms may ultimately be less significant as a fully realised horror movie than as a statement of intent from an extraordinarily promising filmmaker. At just twenty, Parsons has taken an idea born from internet folklore and translated it into a feature that possesses a visual and conceptual identity of its own. That achievement alone is considerable.

The film’s greatest success is perhaps that it makes the Backrooms feel cinematic rather than merely viral.

The internet created the mythology.

Parsons has created a world.

And it is a world worth getting lost in.

Even if, occasionally, the journey takes a little too long.

The Prognosis:

Backrooms is an inventive, psychologically rich and beautifully performed piece of liminal horror that proves Kane Parsons has far more to offer than an expansion of his viral YouTube phenomenon. Its middle section occasionally loses momentum, and its strange, unsettling imagery rarely delivers the visceral shock one might expect from its premise. But the intelligence of its ideas, the extraordinary production design and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s superb central performance make it an intriguing and often hypnotic debut. It may not always frighten as much as it fascinates, but there is no question that Kane Parsons is a filmmaker worth watching.

Saul Muerte

PARASOMNIA: WHEN THE NIGHTMARE WAKES

01 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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film, horror, Horror movies, James Ross II, Jasmine Matthews, movies, reviews, shudder, shudder australia

Sleep is supposed to be the great surrender. We close our eyes, relinquish control and allow consciousness to dissolve into whatever strange machinery waits on the other side. Horror has long understood the vulnerability of that state, from the nightmare logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street to the psychological labyrinths of contemporary supernatural cinema. Parasomnia takes that familiar anxiety and gives it a promising contemporary framework: what happens when the thing haunting your dreams stops respecting the border between sleep and waking life?

Directed by James Ross II, the Shudder Original places Jasmine Mathews’ Riley at the centre of a story shaped by night terrors, unresolved trauma and disappearance. When her best friend becomes the latest person to vanish, Riley begins to suspect that the demonic presence stalking her dreams may have found a way into the waking world. It is an immediately attractive premise, one that offers the possibility of psychological horror, supernatural mystery and nightmare imagery existing simultaneously, with Riley’s own fractured perception leaving us uncertain about where one state ends and another begins.

Unfortunately, Parasomnia never quite manages to turn that intriguing foundation into the film it initially promises to be.

There is plenty here to admire. The central concept has genuine potential, particularly in the way it connects Riley’s trauma with the supernatural threat. Rather than simply introducing a demon and allowing it to run amok, the film attempts to make the creature part of a larger psychological landscape. Riley’s night terrors are not merely convenient vehicles for scares; they are connected to grief, memory and the unresolved events that have shaped her life. That gives the supernatural elements an emotional foundation, even if the eventual story struggles to build upon it.

Jasmine Mathews is particularly strong in the lead. Riley could easily have become a conventional horror protagonist — traumatised, frightened and increasingly convinced that nobody believes her — but Mathews gives the character a more complicated interior life. There is a convincing fragility to her performance, but also a determination that prevents Riley from becoming passive. She carries the film through some of its weaker narrative stretches, grounding the more fantastical material in recognisable human emotion.

That becomes increasingly important as the storyline begins to show its limitations.

The problem with a horror film built around dreams is that the possibilities are virtually limitless. Once the audience understands that reality itself may be unreliable, the filmmaker has access to a wonderfully unstable cinematic space. A bedroom can become a trap. A familiar face can become threatening. A mundane location can suddenly acquire the logic of a nightmare. The rules of reality can be stretched, distorted or discarded entirely.

Parasomnia occasionally understands this, but too often it seems reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities of its own premise.

The film’s strongest moments are those in which uncertainty takes precedence over explanation. When Riley is caught between sleep and waking, the question isn’t necessarily whether what she is experiencing is real, but whether reality still provides a useful distinction. Those sequences possess an unnerving ambiguity, allowing the horror to operate somewhere between psychological breakdown and supernatural intrusion.

Yet the more the film attempts to explain its mythology, the less compelling that ambiguity becomes.

This is a recurring problem with supernatural horror. The unknown is often considerably more frightening than the known, particularly when the unknown exists inside something as personal and uncontrollable as a nightmare. Once the film begins establishing the mechanics behind its demonic presence, some of the mystery starts to evaporate. The audience is no longer trapped inside Riley’s uncertainty; we are increasingly being given the answers.

And unfortunately, those answers aren’t always particularly satisfying.

The storyline feels serviceable rather than revelatory. There are ideas here that could have produced something considerably more psychologically intricate, particularly around trauma and the persistence of grief, but the screenplay frequently settles for conventional supernatural-horror machinery. Characters move towards revelations because the narrative requires them to, discoveries arrive with an increasingly familiar rhythm and the mystery ultimately feels less substantial than the concept that initially introduced it.

This is where Parasomnia becomes frustrating rather than outright disappointing.

Because there is clearly a better film lurking inside it.

The concept is strong. The performances are strong. The atmosphere is often effective. There are moments where the film creates precisely the kind of disorientation it needs, leaving Riley — and the audience — uncertain about whether they are experiencing a nightmare or something considerably more tangible.

But those ingredients don’t quite coalesce into a satisfying whole.

The supernatural entity itself is another example of this imbalance. As an idea, a demonic figure capable of moving between dreams and reality is an excellent horror proposition. It weaponises one of humanity’s most universal vulnerabilities: sleep. There is something deeply unsettling about the possibility that closing your eyes doesn’t protect you from the monster, but actually gives it access to you.

Yet the creature ultimately feels more effective as an idea than as a fully realised antagonist.

The film is strongest when the demon remains at the periphery of Riley’s experience, when its presence is suggested through fragments and disturbances rather than presented as something that needs to be completely understood. Once it becomes a more conventional supernatural threat, Parasomnia loses some of the psychological unease that made its premise so attractive.

There is also a noticeable tension between the film’s ambitions and its storytelling. It wants to explore trauma, grief, friendship and the lingering consequences of tragedy while simultaneously delivering supernatural thrills. Those elements are not incompatible — horror has been doing exactly that for decades — but they require a narrative capable of allowing the emotional and genre components to reinforce one another.

Here, they sometimes feel like separate tracks running alongside each other.

Riley’s emotional history gives the horror meaning, but the horror doesn’t always deepen our understanding of Riley.

That distinction matters.

The best psychological horror makes the monster inseparable from the character confronting it. The supernatural threat becomes an external expression of something internal, allowing every encounter with the creature to reveal something about the protagonist. Parasomnia gestures towards that territory without quite committing to it.

As a result, the film’s emotional material can feel somewhat underdeveloped just when it should be reaching its greatest intensity.

That is particularly evident in the final act.

Without venturing into spoilers, the conclusion struggles to deliver the catharsis that the preceding story seems to be building towards. The film has established a compelling relationship between Riley’s trauma and the supernatural threat, but the eventual resolution doesn’t quite capitalise on that connection. Instead of transforming the earlier ideas into something thematically resonant, the ending largely feels like the narrative arriving at its required destination.

It isn’t disastrous.

It simply isn’t enough.

And that distinction is important because Parasomnia is never a bad film. It is an intermittently effective one that repeatedly demonstrates what it could have been. There are enough strong ideas and performances here to make the experience worthwhile, but also enough conventional storytelling to prevent it from becoming the psychologically disquieting nightmare its premise suggests.

Mathews remains the film’s greatest asset. Her performance gives Riley emotional credibility even when the screenplay becomes predictable, and she brings enough vulnerability and resolve to make the character worth following. The supporting performances similarly help maintain the film’s human dimension, preventing the supernatural material from becoming entirely detached from the people experiencing it.

Ultimately, however, Parasomnia is caught between two versions of itself.

One is a strange, unsettling psychological horror about trauma invading dreams and nightmares crossing into reality. That film is genuinely intriguing. It understands that the most frightening aspect of sleep is not necessarily what we dream about, but the surrender of control that makes dreaming possible in the first place.

The other is a more conventional supernatural thriller that needs to explain its mythology, organise its scares and eventually provide answers.

The first film is considerably more interesting than the second.

When Parasomnia embraces uncertainty, it works. When it allows Riley’s perception to become unstable and makes us question whether the nightmare has crossed over or whether Riley is simply losing her grip on reality, the film finds its unsettling centre. But whenever it retreats into familiar supernatural storytelling, the tension dissipates.

There is a good horror movie buried somewhere within Parasomnia. At times, you can almost see it clawing its way to the surface.

What ultimately holds it back is not a lack of ideas, atmosphere or talent. It is that the story doesn’t quite know what to do with all three.

The Prognosis:

Parasomnia is a film with a genuinely strong horror concept and committed performances, particularly from Jasmine Mathews, but its mediocre storyline prevents the material from reaching its full potential. It is worth entering the nightmare for the atmosphere and ideas; just don’t expect the waking world to provide quite the payoff you’re hoping for.

Saul Muerte

PASSENGER (2026): A Road Trip That Loses Its Way

16 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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andre ovredal, horror, jacob-scipio, melissa-leo, passenger

The opening minutes of Passenger suggest that André Øvredal might have found another wonderfully confined nightmare.

A couple comes across a gruesome accident on an isolated stretch of highway. The darkness is oppressive, the road seemingly endless and the wreckage offers just enough information to make us suspicious of what we are seeing. Something is wrong. Something is watching. And when the couple eventually realise that whatever was responsible for the accident has followed them, Passenger briefly becomes the kind of lean, atmospheric horror film that Øvredal has demonstrated an instinct for before.

It is a particularly tantalising beginning from the director of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a film that understood how to extract extraordinary tension from a restricted space and an increasingly disturbing mystery.

Unfortunately, Passenger spends much of the journey trying to find its way back to that opening.

What begins as a potentially unnerving supernatural road movie gradually becomes a predictable procession of demonic appearances, mythology dumps and familiar jump scares. The highway offers isolation, movement and endless possibility, but the film increasingly feels as though it is travelling in circles.

There is a good horror film trapped somewhere inside Passenger.

Unfortunately, it never quite gets out.

The Road Less Interesting

The premise is undeniably appealing.

Maddie and Tyler have embraced van life, leaving behind their previous existence to travel across America. The open road is supposed to represent freedom, escape and reinvention. Instead, after stopping at the scene of a horrific accident, their journey becomes a nightmare from which they cannot simply drive away.

There is something inherently cinematic about horror on the highway.

The road is a liminal space. It connects places without belonging to any of them. It can be empty for miles, leaving travellers isolated from help. At night, the world is reduced to headlights, darkness and whatever might be waiting beyond the reach of the beams.

Cinema has exploited that anxiety for decades, from Duel and The Hitcher to Jeepers Creepers and countless other variations on the idea that stopping on the wrong stretch of road can have consequences.

Passenger has all the ingredients.

What it doesn’t always have is the imagination to make them feel new.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe Effect

This is perhaps what makes the film most frustrating.

André Øvredal has already demonstrated how good he can be at turning limited environments into engines of suspense. The Autopsy of Jane Doe remains such an effective piece of horror because its mystery is allowed to accumulate gradually. A seemingly straightforward situation becomes progressively stranger, and the physical limitations of the morgue make escape increasingly difficult.

Passenger initially seems to promise a similar experience.

The van becomes the new morgue.

The highway becomes the new enclosed chamber.

The darkness outside becomes something unknowable.

But rather than allowing that uncertainty to breathe, the film increasingly explains itself.

And once the Passenger stops being a mysterious presence and becomes a set of supernatural rules, the film loses much of its power.

The Monster Is Better Before We Meet Him

The Passenger himself is a potentially effective horror creation.

There is something inherently unsettling about the figure that appears at the roadside. The idea of a supernatural entity attached to travellers and accidents has a folkloric quality that could have given the film a genuinely sinister identity.

The problem is that the more the film explains him, the less frightening he becomes.

Mystery is often the most valuable currency in supernatural horror.

What is that thing?

Why is it there?

What does it want?

What happens if we encounter it?

Passenger answers these questions with increasing enthusiasm.

And each answer diminishes the fear.

The entity eventually feels less like an unknowable evil stalking the highway and more like a horror villain operating according to a list of rules that the screenplay has conveniently provided for us.

The mythology may explain the Passenger.

It doesn’t make him more interesting.

The Hobo Code

The film attempts to build its mythology around the idea of signs and symbols used by travellers and outsiders, incorporating religious folklore and what is presented as a “hobo code” into the supernatural history of the Passenger.

There is an intriguing film hiding inside this idea.

The highway is already filled with stories. Missing people, roadside memorials, abandoned buildings, forgotten towns and travellers who never reached their destinations could have provided the foundation for something genuinely folkloric.

Instead, the mythology often feels like exposition arriving to explain what the audience should already have been allowed to fear.

The film’s greatest mistake is not that its mythology is too complicated.

It is that the mythology is less interesting than the mystery it replaces.

When the Road Becomes a Formula

The early sections of Passenger understand the importance of anticipation.

A figure glimpsed in the distance is more effective than a monster standing in full view.

A strange movement outside the van can be more unsettling than a sudden attack.

The darkness beyond the headlights is more frightening when we don’t know what might be inside it.

Øvredal occasionally demonstrates that understanding.

But too often the film opts for the easier route.

Something appears.

The music rises.

The camera moves.

The jump scare arrives.

Repeat.

The result is a horror film that increasingly telegraphs its intentions. Even the more effective sequences can feel as though they have been constructed around the expectation that the audience will know exactly when to brace themselves.

That is particularly disappointing coming from Øvredal.

His earlier work demonstrated a much greater patience with dread.

The Van Life Nightmare

There is also a missed opportunity in the film’s treatment of van life.

The idea of two people abandoning conventional domesticity for a life on the road should provide an extraordinary horror setting.

The van is simultaneously home and prison.

It offers freedom but little security.

It can take you anywhere, but once something gets inside, there is nowhere to hide.

That contradiction is terrific.

Yet Passenger doesn’t exploit it as deeply as it could.

The van becomes primarily a plot device rather than an extension of the characters’ psychological lives.

And that makes the road trip feel strangely anonymous.

The film could have explored what it means to voluntarily abandon the security of a permanent home only to discover that the open road offers no sanctuary.

Instead, the van largely becomes another location for the next supernatural encounter.

A Couple We Don’t Quite Know

The relationship between Maddie and Tyler also struggles to provide the emotional foundation the film needs.

A supernatural road movie becomes considerably more frightening when we care about the people who cannot escape the road.

But Maddie and Tyler remain somewhat thinly drawn.

Their relationship is functional enough to move the plot forward, but the film doesn’t give us enough sense of what makes them compelling as a couple before the nightmare begins.

That matters because Passenger is ultimately a story about two people trapped together.

The horror should test the relationship.

Instead, the relationship sometimes feels as though it is simply there to populate the horror.

The performances are capable, but the material doesn’t give them enough to work with.

The Promise of Øvredal

There are flashes of the film Passenger could have been.

A handful of visual ideas are genuinely striking. The nighttime sequences occasionally create an effective sense of spatial uncertainty, while Øvredal’s camera can still find interesting ways of turning apparently familiar locations into threatening environments.

One particularly inventive sequence involving a projected film spilling across the surrounding forest demonstrates the director’s ability to create imagery that is genuinely strange and memorable.

These moments remind us that the problem isn’t a lack of technical ability.

Øvredal can make a horror film look good.

He can stage a scare.

He can create atmosphere.

He can establish a threatening environment.

What Passenger lacks is a screenplay capable of consistently matching those instincts.

A Journey to Nowhere

The longer the film continues, the more its initial promise begins to evaporate.

The road should create momentum.

Instead, the narrative begins to drift.

The mystery should deepen.

Instead, it is explained.

The Passenger should become more frightening.

Instead, familiarity sets in.

And the relationship at the centre of the story should become more emotionally involving.

Instead, the characters remain largely where we found them.

This is where the film’s 94-minute running time begins to feel longer than it actually is.

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of Passenger: the film is never particularly long, but it feels as though it is taking a very long time to arrive anywhere.

It is a road movie without much sense of discovery.

The Horror of Predictability

Predictability is particularly damaging to horror because fear depends upon uncertainty.

Once the audience understands the rhythm, the tension begins to drain away.

We know the Passenger will appear.

We know someone will investigate.

We know the darkness will conceal something.

We know the characters will discover another piece of mythology.

And we know that the next scare is likely to arrive just when the soundtrack becomes suspiciously quiet.

There are still moments that work.

But they become isolated jolts rather than part of a sustained atmosphere of dread.

The film’s strongest scare may actually be its opening because, at that point, Passenger hasn’t yet told us what kind of film it is.

It simply lets us be afraid.

A Film Out of Time

Perhaps the strangest thing about Passenger is how contemporary its premise feels and how familiar its execution feels.

The horror landscape has become increasingly adventurous in recent years, with filmmakers finding fresh ways to approach supernatural folklore, body horror, psychological terror and genre hybridity.

Against that backdrop, Passenger feels unusually conventional.

That doesn’t automatically make a film bad.

There is nothing wrong with making a straightforward supernatural horror movie.

But straightforward doesn’t have to mean predictable.

Passenger occasionally seems satisfied with reproducing horror mechanics that other films have already used more effectively.

Its greatest sin isn’t that it is old-fashioned.

It’s that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing anything with being old-fashioned.

A Road Trip That Never Reaches Its Destination

The frustration with Passenger comes down to that central contradiction.

There is so much potential in the premise.

A demonic entity stalking people on America’s lonely highways.

A young couple living permanently on the road.

A vehicle that functions simultaneously as home, refuge and trap.

A folklore of missing travellers and roadside death.

An experienced horror filmmaker behind the camera.

That should be enough to make something memorable.

And there are glimpses of it.

But Passenger gradually abandons its strongest qualities in favour of increasingly familiar supernatural-horror territory.

The highway becomes generic.

The mythology becomes explanatory.

The scares become predictable.

The characters remain underdeveloped.

And the Passenger, who should be the film’s great nightmare invention, becomes increasingly ordinary.

The Prognosis:

Passenger is a disappointing film precisely because André Øvredal has already shown us how much better he can do.

There is real promise in its opening, where the combination of an isolated highway, a mysterious accident and an unseen supernatural presence creates the possibility of a genuinely unsettling road nightmare. For a brief period, the film seems to understand that the most frightening thing about travelling through darkness is not knowing what might be waiting beyond the headlights.

But Passenger cannot resist turning that uncertainty into explanation.

The further it travels, the more predictable the journey becomes.

What could have been a lean, atmospheric supernatural road horror instead becomes a collection of familiar scares and increasingly cumbersome mythology. The film isn’t without craft, and Øvredal occasionally finds an image or sequence capable of reminding us of the filmmaker who gave us The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Those flashes make the disappointment sharper.

Because the film begins with the promise of a destination worth reaching.

Instead, it spends too much of its journey travelling the same stretch of road.

Passenger isn’t a complete disaster.

It’s something more frustrating.

It’s a horror film with a great road, a promising monster and a director capable of considerably more — and somehow it still manages to feel like we’ve been here before.

Saul Muerte

SACCHARINE: The Body Is the Battleground

15 Saturday Aug 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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Aussie horror, body horror, film, horror, movies, reviews

The body has always been one of horror’s most reliable battlegrounds. We fear what can enter it, what can escape from it and, perhaps most disturbingly, what it might become when it is no longer entirely under our control. With Saccharine, Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James takes that anxiety and feeds it through one of contemporary culture’s most persistent obsessions: the desire to change the body into something supposedly better.

Hana is a medical student consumed by dissatisfaction with her weight and appearance. When she encounters an obscure weight-loss craze promising extraordinary results, the temptation proves impossible to resist. The secret ingredient, however, is not some miracle pharmaceutical. It is human ash. And when Hana begins consuming it, she discovers that the dead aren’t necessarily prepared to become part of somebody else’s pursuit of perfection.

What begins as a grotesque diet-culture satire gradually develops into something stranger: a ghost story, a psychological horror film and a piece of body horror that asks how much of ourselves we are prepared to destroy in the pursuit of becoming somebody else.

It is an ambitious premise, and James is an ambitious filmmaker. The result doesn’t always manage to reconcile all of its ideas, but when Saccharine sinks its teeth into its central concerns, it demonstrates exactly why James has become such an interesting voice in Australian horror.

The James Body

Viewed alongside Relic, Saccharine begins to reveal something particularly fascinating about Natalie Erika James as a filmmaker.

These are very different horror films, dealing with very different forms of suffering, yet they are connected by an increasingly recognisable preoccupation: what happens when an internal experience becomes impossible to contain inside the mind and begins to manifest upon the body.

In Relic, that experience is dementia. Edna’s cognitive deterioration becomes increasingly physical, with the house itself seeming to absorb and reproduce the decay taking place within her. Mould spreads across the walls and eventually across Edna’s body, turning the invisible horror of neurological decline into something tangible.

Saccharine takes that same principle and turns it inward.

Hana isn’t losing control of her body because disease has taken it from her. She is attempting to take control of it herself. The horror emerges from the space between those two impulses. She wants to improve herself, to become thinner, more desirable and more acceptable, but the pursuit of that ideal gradually becomes an act of self-erasure.

James has described Saccharine as exploring the thin line between self-improvement and self-erasure, and that distinction provides perhaps the most useful key to understanding her cinema.

Her characters aren’t necessarily confronted by monsters that exist independently of their emotional lives. Instead, horror gives physical form to something they are already carrying.

In Relic, grief, ageing and the terror of watching a loved one disappear become an environment that literally decays around the characters. In Saccharine, shame, hunger and the desire to alter one’s body become a presence that enters Hana from within and gradually assumes control.

The monster is therefore never entirely external.

It is an expression.

From Decay to Self-Erasure

The connection between Relic and Saccharine becomes particularly striking when we consider their attitudes towards the body.

Edna’s body is betraying her.

Hana believes her body is betraying her.

The distinction is enormous, but James approaches both characters with the same fundamental empathy. Neither woman is simply a vessel for a horror metaphor. The supernatural allows James to explore experiences that are difficult to represent literally, while the human being remains at the centre of the film.

That is why the body horror in both films feels more tragic than sensational.

In Relic, the horror lies in the inevitability of deterioration and the helplessness of those watching it happen. In Saccharine, the horror lies in the possibility that the desire to escape dissatisfaction can become another form of destruction.

One woman cannot stop her body changing.

The other cannot stop trying to change hers.

Both are trapped by an increasingly hostile relationship with the physical self.

And in both cases, James makes that psychological imprisonment literal.

The House and the Body

There is also a fascinating architectural connection between the two films.

Relic is inseparable from its house. The building becomes an extension of Edna’s deteriorating mind, with rooms, corridors and walls transforming into expressions of confusion, entrapment and decay. The physical environment becomes a manifestation of the psychological experience.

Saccharine moves that idea into the body.

Hana’s environment still matters, but the primary architecture is now physical. Her body becomes the space through which the horror operates. The film’s medical settings are particularly appropriate because they turn the human form into something that can be examined, measured, dissected and categorised.

That is precisely what Hana is doing to herself.

She has internalised the idea that her body can be treated as a problem to solve.

James simply turns that idea into horror.

The result is a continuation of the spatial thinking that made Relic so effective. In both films, characters are trapped inside environments that increasingly reflect their psychological states. The difference is that Relic makes the house feel like a body, while Saccharine makes the body feel like a haunted house.

An Australian Body-Horror Tradition

This makes Saccharine part of a particularly interesting moment in Australian horror.

Australian genre cinema has long had an appetite for the grotesque, but recent years have seen filmmakers increasingly combine physical horror with sophisticated psychological and social themes. The Babadook, Relic, Sissy and Talk to Me are very different films, but each demonstrates the capacity of Australian horror to transform intimate anxieties into something monstrous.

Saccharine comfortably belongs within that tradition.

The horror doesn’t simply arrive from outside.

It grows from something recognisably human.

Hana’s obsession with her body is not an abstract concept. It is connected to the pressures surrounding beauty, desirability, self-worth and the seemingly endless cultural demand to improve ourselves.

James simply pushes those pressures to their most grotesque conclusion.

What if the shortcut actually worked?

What if you could consume something and become thinner almost immediately?

And what if the price of that transformation was another human being?

What Are We Willing to Consume?

The film’s weight-loss substance, Gray, is one of its most inspired concepts.

Initially, it appears almost miraculous. Users lose weight at an extraordinary rate, turning the fantasy of effortless transformation into reality.

But Hana is a medical student.

She investigates.

And what she discovers is horrifying.

The substance is human ash.

At that moment, Saccharine reveals its most deliciously perverse idea. The modern miracle cure isn’t some futuristic invention. It is simply death repackaged as a consumer product.

The body that society has taught Hana to despise can apparently be transformed through the consumption of another body.

It is cannibalism disguised as wellness.

And the more Hana understands about Gray, the further she is prepared to go to continue using it.

James is at her strongest when she allows this idea to speak for itself. She doesn’t need to explain the metaphor because the metaphor is already horrifying.

We have simply taken the language of dieting and pushed it into nightmare territory.

The Dead Fight Back

The film’s second major idea arrives when Hana begins to realise that the human remains she is consuming belonged to someone.

That someone does not necessarily appreciate what has happened.

The resulting ghost story gives Saccharine another layer of unease. Hana isn’t merely haunted because she has violated some supernatural rule. She is being confronted by the humanity she has tried to reduce to an ingredient.

The ghost becomes a physical manifestation of the moral consequence of Hana’s obsession.

The dead woman is no longer simply a body.

She is a person.

That distinction becomes increasingly important.

The more Hana becomes obsessed with changing herself, the more she begins to lose sight of the humanity of other people. The haunting therefore isn’t simply punishment.

It is confrontation.

Midori Francis’ Hana

Midori Francis carries much of the film’s emotional weight.

Hana could easily have become an unpleasant protagonist. Her decisions become increasingly disturbing, and her obsession leads her into ethically appalling territory. Yet Francis gives her enough vulnerability to make those choices comprehensible without excusing them.

There is desperation beneath the vanity.

There is loneliness beneath the obsession.

And there is an almost tragic belief that if Hana can simply fix her body, the rest of her life will somehow fall into place.

Francis understands that contradiction.

Hana knows that what she is doing is wrong.

She continues anyway.

That is much more interesting than a protagonist who simply doesn’t understand the consequences of her actions.

Her intelligence becomes part of the tragedy. She has enough medical knowledge to understand exactly what is happening, but knowledge cannot overcome obsession.

The Anatomy of Horror

James’ visual confidence is particularly evident in the way she treats the human body.

The medical environment provides an appropriately clinical backdrop. Bodies are dissected, examined and categorised. Human remains become objects of scientific study.

Then the film gradually turns those same bodies into objects of desire and consumption.

The clinical becomes corporeal.

The corporeal becomes edible.

The edible becomes supernatural.

James repeatedly finds ways of making the human body appear simultaneously fascinating and disgusting. Flesh, organs and food begin to occupy the same visual territory.

This is where Saccharine demonstrates some of its greatest confidence.

Body horror doesn’t necessarily require mutilation.

Sometimes the most disturbing image is something completely ordinary presented from the wrong perspective.

A meal becomes grotesque.

A body becomes food.

Food becomes flesh.

And the distinction between nourishment and destruction begins to disappear.

The Beautiful and the Grotesque

James’ visual evolution between Relic and Saccharine is equally revealing.

Relic is dominated by oppressive darkness, Gothic architecture, mould, shadow and gradual decay. Saccharine initially appears almost to reject that visual language. Its colours are brighter, its surfaces more artificial and its imagery more tactile.

But the underlying philosophy is remarkably similar.

James has spoken about wanting Saccharine to occupy a space between “candy and grime” — the artificial sweetness of pleasure alongside the physical rot underneath it.

That tension is central to her work.

The beautiful and the grotesque are never entirely separate.

In Relic, the family home contains both memories of love and the horror of deterioration. In Saccharine, the promise of beauty and self-improvement contains the possibility of self-destruction.

James seems instinctively drawn to the point where attraction becomes repulsion.

Something is beautiful because we desire it.

Something is horrifying because we understand what that desire can cost.

That is a sophisticated foundation for body horror.

A Ghost Story Inside a Body-Horror Film

The film’s most interesting structural decision is also one of its weaknesses.

James is essentially making two horror films at once.

One is a body-horror story about eating, weight loss and the desire to transform the physical self.

The other is a supernatural ghost story about a dead woman whose body has been violated and whose presence begins to haunt the person responsible.

Individually, both ideas are compelling.

Together, they don’t always fit comfortably.

The ghost story occasionally threatens to pull the film away from its strongest material. Just as the body-horror metaphor begins to bite, the narrative shifts towards more conventional supernatural mechanics.

This doesn’t make those sequences ineffective, but they are less distinctive.

James is at her best when the supernatural and physical become indistinguishable — when we aren’t quite sure whether Hana is being haunted by a ghost, by her own guilt or by the increasingly distorted relationship she has with her body.

The more conventional the haunting becomes, the less interesting the film feels.

When the Metaphor Starts Showing

There is no great subtlety to Saccharine.

That isn’t necessarily a criticism. Horror has always been capable of taking social anxieties and turning them into grotesque literalism.

James understands that the metaphor becomes more powerful when it becomes physically impossible to ignore.

But there are moments when the film explains what its imagery has already communicated.

We understand what Hana is experiencing.

We understand why she wants to change.

We understand the destructive nature of the culture surrounding her.

The film occasionally continues explaining after the horror has already made the point.

This becomes more noticeable as the narrative progresses. The film’s second half doesn’t always maintain the intensity established by its opening sections.

The irony is that the repetition has a thematic logic.

Obsession is repetitive.

The same thought returns.

The same ritual is repeated.

The same dissatisfaction resurfaces.

But what works psychologically doesn’t always work dramatically.

The Horror of Wanting More

One of the film’s strongest ideas is that Hana never reaches a point at which enough is enough.

The first transformation isn’t sufficient.

The next one isn’t sufficient.

The goal moves.

The body changes.

The dissatisfaction remains.

This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Saccharine because it doesn’t require a supernatural explanation.

The promise of perfection is inherently unstable.

There is always another flaw.

Another kilogram.

Another improvement.

Another version of ourselves waiting to be manufactured.

Hana’s horror comes from discovering that the thing she believes will finally make her happy has no finish line.

The body can always be changed.

The appetite can always return.

The obsession can always demand more.

The Horror of Self-Erasure

This is where Saccharine most clearly extends the ideas of Relic.

Edna’s body is being taken away from her.

Hana is voluntarily giving hers away.

The first is a horror of inevitable deterioration. The second is a horror of chosen transformation.

Yet both films ultimately arrive at a similar question:

What happens when the body ceases to feel like home?

James doesn’t provide an easy answer because neither film is really interested in easy answers.

Instead, she uses horror to make psychological experiences physical.

In Relic, decay becomes architecture.

In Saccharine, insecurity becomes consumption.

In both films, the body becomes the place where emotional and psychological damage can no longer remain invisible.

That may ultimately be the defining characteristic of James’ cinema.

She doesn’t use horror to escape reality.

She uses horror to make reality impossible to ignore.

The Australian Body-Horror Renaissance

There is something particularly encouraging about Saccharine existing within the current Australian horror landscape.

The country has always produced filmmakers willing to confront the grotesque, but there is now a remarkable confidence in Australian genre cinema’s ability to explore serious emotional and social issues through horror.

Saccharine doesn’t merely want us to recoil.

It wants the recoil to mean something.

The body becomes the battleground where social pressure, personal insecurity, desire, grief and guilt collide.

That makes James’ work part of a broader Australian horror tradition that treats genre as a means of examining the things we might otherwise find difficult to discuss directly.

And James is clearly developing a visual language of her own.

There is a confidence here that goes beyond the script’s occasional structural uncertainty.

A Film That Bites, But Doesn’t Always Chew

The frustrating thing about Saccharine is that its best ideas are genuinely excellent.

The concept of a weight-loss drug made from human ashes is inspired.

The collision of body horror and ghost story is fertile territory.

The Australian setting gives it a distinct identity.

Midori Francis is compelling.

And James has an instinct for visual horror that remains impressive.

But the film sometimes feels like it is carrying too many ideas at once.

The social commentary wants to be sharp.

The ghost story wants to be frightening.

The body horror wants to be disgusting.

The character drama wants to be emotional.

The romantic material wants to give Hana something to desire.

And the family material wants to explain where her relationship with her body originated.

Some of these elements complement one another beautifully.

Others simply compete for attention.

The result is a film that is frequently fascinating without always being completely satisfying.

The Prognosis:

Saccharine is an ambitious Australian horror film that deserves credit for taking a genuinely grotesque premise and using it to interrogate something far more familiar: our complicated relationship with our own bodies.

Natalie Erika James remains an assured visual filmmaker, and Saccharine confirms that the concerns emerging from Relic were not simply the product of a singular premise. There is a developing body of work here, one increasingly concerned with the physical manifestation of internal suffering.

Relic asked us to confront the horror of watching a body and mind deteriorate.

Saccharine asks us to confront the horror of desperately trying to prevent that body from being what it is.

One woman cannot stop herself changing.

The other cannot stop trying to change herself.

Both become trapped inside bodies that no longer feel like their own.

That continuity makes Saccharine more interesting than its individual successes and shortcomings might suggest. It establishes James as a filmmaker fascinated by the point at which psychological suffering crosses the threshold into physical horror.

The film doesn’t always achieve the devastating impact its premise promises. Its supernatural elements occasionally feel more conventional than its body-horror ideas, and its thematic commentary can sometimes become too explicit.

But there is enough ambition, imagination and outright grotesquerie here to make the film worthwhile.

James has created a horror story in which appetite becomes addiction, transformation becomes self-destruction and the dead refuse to remain reduced to ingredients.

It doesn’t always digest its ideas cleanly.

But when Saccharine sinks its teeth into its subject, it does so with considerable force.

And in an Australian horror landscape increasingly willing to make the body its canvas, that is something worth celebrating.

Relic made the house feel like a body.

Saccharine makes the body feel like a haunted house.

The next question is what James will choose to haunt.

Saul Muerte