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Cronenberg’s Body: From Shivers to The Fly

31 Friday Jul 2026

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How David Cronenberg Turned Flesh Into Fear

Before Seth Brundle stepped into the telepod, David Cronenberg had already spent more than a decade asking audiences to look at the human body differently. Not as something sacred. Not as something inviolable. But as something vulnerable. Something porous. Something capable of changing without permission.

From the parasitic creatures of Shivers to the psychic violence of Scanners, from the biological mutation of Rabid to the technological nightmare of Videodrome, Cronenberg’s cinema has repeatedly returned to the same unsettling proposition:

The body is not a fixed thing.

It is a process.

And processes can go wrong.

By the time The Fly arrived in 1986, Cronenberg had already established himself as one of cinema’s great anatomists of fear. Yet the film represents something more than another entry in his growing body of work. It is a culmination. Everything Cronenberg had been exploring—the relationship between flesh and identity, science and mutation, sexuality and disease, technology and transformation—converges in Seth Brundle’s tragic metamorphosis. The fly did not arrive from nowhere. Cronenberg had been building towards it for years.

The Parasite Within

Shivers—released in 1975—announced Cronenberg as a filmmaker fascinated by the vulnerability of the human body. Its premise is deliberately grotesque. Parasitic creatures spread through a luxury apartment complex, transforming the residents into sexually driven hosts. But beneath the visceral horror lies an idea that would become central to Cronenberg’s cinema. The body can be invaded. Worse still, it can be persuaded to betray us.

The parasites in Shivers do not simply attack their victims from outside. They become part of them. The boundary between self and other begins to collapse.

This is a recurring Cronenberg anxiety. What happens when something enters the body and cannot be removed? What happens when the thing we fear is no longer outside us? What happens when we become the host? These questions would return repeatedly throughout his career. And eventually, in The Fly, the invader would be almost impossibly small.

A single insect.

A moment of contamination.

One microscopic intrusion capable of changing everything.

Rabid: The Body as Transmission

If Shivers introduced the idea of bodily invasion, Rabid developed it into something more recognisably biological. Rose is transformed following experimental surgery. The result is not merely physical alteration. Her body becomes a vector. An instrument of transmission. Those she encounters are infected. The personal becomes communal. The individual body becomes a threat to everyone around it.

Cronenberg’s fascination with disease is already apparent. The horror does not remain contained within one person.

It spreads.

It moves.

It crosses boundaries.

The body becomes both victim and perpetrator. That duality is crucial to understanding The Fly. Seth Brundle is both the person suffering from his transformation and the creature capable of causing harm. His tragedy is therefore not simply that his body is changing. It is that the transformation begins to change his relationship with everyone else. The disease becomes identity.

The Brood: Trauma Made Flesh

With The Brood, Cronenberg moved away from conventional infection and towards something more psychologically complex. The body becomes an expression of trauma. Pain becomes physical. Emotion becomes biological. The distinction between psychological and physiological suffering begins to disappear.

It is an idea that would become increasingly important to Cronenberg’s work. The body doesn’t simply experience the mind. It expresses it. This makes The Brood an important stepping stone towards The Fly. Seth Brundle’s transformation may be caused by science, but his experience is fundamentally emotional.

Fear.

Denial.

Anger.

Desperation.

Isolation.

His body becomes the physical manifestation of an existential crisis. Cronenberg’s monsters are therefore rarely just monsters. They are states of being.

Scanners: The Mind Is Flesh Too

If The Brood explored the relationship between emotion and the body, Scanners expanded Cronenberg’s investigation into the relationship between mind and matter. The film’s infamous exploding-head sequence remains one of the most iconic images in Cronenberg’s cinema. Yet its deeper significance lies in the idea that the body cannot be separated from consciousness. The mind is not an abstract entity floating above the physical world.

It exists within flesh.

It is vulnerable to flesh.

And when the mind is overwhelmed, the body pays the price.

This becomes crucial in The Fly.

Seth’s intellect survives even as his physical form deteriorates.

He remains conscious.

He remains aware.

The tragedy is not that his mind disappears alongside his body. It is that it remains. The monster knows what is happening.

Videodrome: Welcome to the New Flesh

If there is a single film that provides the philosophical bridge between Cronenberg’s early body horror and The Fly, it is Videodrome.

“Long live the new flesh.”

The phrase became a defining statement of Cronenberg’s cinema. In Videodrome, technology doesn’t simply affect the body. It becomes part of the body. The boundaries between human flesh, media and machinery collapse. Reality becomes unstable. The body becomes something that can be rewritten.

Transformed.

Reprogrammed.

The concept of the “New Flesh” is not simply about mutation. It is about the end of certainty. The human body is no longer a stable category. It can be altered by technology.

By disease.

By desire.

By trauma.

By information.

By the world around it.

By the time Seth Brundle enters the telepod, the question is no longer whether the body can change. Cronenberg has already answered that. The question is:

What happens when we discover that change cannot be stopped?

The Dead Zone: The Body as Burden

The Dead Zone is sometimes treated as an outlier in Cronenberg’s filmography. It shouldn’t be. Although it lacks the overt grotesquerie of Shivers or Videodrome, its protagonist is still trapped inside a body that has become unfamiliar. Johnny Smith wakes from a coma with extraordinary abilities. But those abilities come at a cost.

His body has changed.

His life has changed.

His identity has changed.

He is forced to live with knowledge that isolates him from everyone else.

The supernatural premise is different from Cronenberg’s earlier films, but the emotional territory remains familiar. The individual becomes trapped within a condition they did not choose. The body becomes a prison. The person remains inside.

The Human Animal

Cronenberg’s fascination with transformation has always extended beyond disease. It is also about evolution.

What separates humans from animals?

What happens when that boundary begins to disappear?

This question sits at the centre of The Fly.

Seth initially interprets his transformation as evolution. He calls it “Brundlefly.” He imagines that he has transcended the limitations of humanity. He has become something new.

Something stronger.

Something better.

The tragedy is that he is not entirely wrong. There is something seductive about his transformation.

He is faster.

Stronger.

More energetic.

His body initially appears to improve.

But Cronenberg turns evolutionary optimism into existential horror.

Evolution has no moral compass. New does not mean better. Stronger does not mean happier. Survival does not mean humanity. Seth’s transformation becomes a grotesque parody of progress.

Sex, Desire and the Body

Sexuality has always been deeply embedded within Cronenberg’s body horror. From Shivers onwards, physical intimacy is rarely presented as entirely safe. Desire creates vulnerability.

Bodies come together.

Boundaries disappear.

Something is exchanged.

In The Fly, the relationship between Seth and Veronica begins with attraction. Their intimacy becomes the emotional centre of the film. And then the body that Veronica loves begins to change. The horror is therefore deeply connected to intimacy.

To touch someone is to know their body.

To love someone is to recognise them.

What happens when the body becomes unrecognisable?

What happens when the person you desire becomes someone—or something—you fear?

The film’s body horror is therefore inseparable from its love story. The transformation is frightening because it happens to someone. Not something.

Technology as the Catalyst

Cronenberg’s relationship with technology is rarely simplistic. Technology is not necessarily evil. It is simply powerful. And human beings are often incapable of understanding the consequences of their own inventions.

This is why the telepods are so important. They work. Seth has succeeded. The experiment is a triumph of scientific ingenuity. The tragedy comes from an unforeseen consequence. Technology has done exactly what Seth asked it to do. It simply doesn’t understand what he meant. The telepod cannot distinguish between the scientist and the fly. It sees matter. It sees patterns. It sees two organisms occupying the same space. And it creates something new. The horror is therefore not technological failure. It is technological success without human wisdom.

The Body as Identity

Perhaps the most important idea connecting Cronenberg’s films is the relationship between physical form and identity.

If the body changes, are we still ourselves?

If the mind survives, does the person survive?

If the face changes, does identity change with it?

If desire changes, does the self change?

Cronenberg never provides easy answers.

Instead, his films continually destabilise the idea of a fixed identity.

The body becomes fluid.

The self becomes unstable.

The boundary between human and non-human becomes increasingly difficult to define. Seth Brundle represents the ultimate expression of this philosophy. He is neither entirely human nor entirely fly. He exists between categories. And that is precisely where Cronenberg’s cinema has always been most comfortable.

From Infection to Transformation

Looking across Cronenberg’s career, a progression becomes visible.

Shivers asks what happens when the body is invaded.

Rabid asks what happens when the body becomes contagious.

The Brood asks what happens when psychological trauma becomes physical.

Scanners asks what happens when the mind itself becomes a biological weapon.

Videodrome asks what happens when technology rewrites the body.

The Dead Zone asks what happens when the body becomes a prison for unwanted knowledge.

And then comes The Fly.

A film that asks all of these questions at once.

What happens when the body is invaded?

What happens when it becomes contagious?

What happens when the mind remains trapped inside it?

What happens when technology causes the transformation?

What happens when identity itself begins to dissolve?

The answer is Seth Brundle.

The Fly as Culmination

That is why The Fly occupies such a significant place within Cronenberg’s filmography.

It is not simply his most famous body-horror film.

It is his most complete.

The film takes the ideas that had occupied him for more than a decade and brings them together within a single character.

Seth is infected.

He is transforming.

His body is becoming contagious.

His mind is changing.

Technology has caused the mutation.

His identity is dissolving.

And the people who love him are forced to watch.

Everything is connected.

The horror is physical.

Psychological.

Sexual.

Technological.

Existential.

And emotional.

The body becomes the battlefield upon which all of these fears collide.

After Brundlefly

Cronenberg’s later career would move increasingly away from the visceral body horror that defined his early work. But the body never truly disappeared. It simply became less visible. The themes remained.

Identity.

Transformation.

Desire.

Technology.

Mortality.

The instability of the self.

Even when Cronenberg’s films moved into crime drama, psychological thriller or literary adaptation, the same fascination remained beneath the surface. His characters continued to inhabit bodies that could not be trusted.

Bodies that betrayed them.

Bodies that desired things the mind could not control.

Bodies that became sites of transformation.

The flesh remained.

The Prognosis:

David Cronenberg did not invent body horror. But he transformed its possibilities. He understood that the most disturbing thing about the human body is not what happens when something attacks it. It is what happens when it changes.

When it stops behaving as expected.

When it becomes unfamiliar.

When it begins to reveal something about ourselves that we would rather not see.

From the parasites of Shivers to the mutation of Rabid.

From the psychic violence of Scanners to the New Flesh of Videodrome.

From the isolated body of The Dead Zone to the tragic metamorphosis of The Fly.

Cronenberg’s cinema has always been asking variations of the same question.

Where does the human end?

Is it the skin?

The mind?

The memory?

The face?

The body?

The answer becomes increasingly difficult to locate. And perhaps that is the point. Because in Cronenberg’s universe, the body is never fixed. It is always becoming something else.

Sometimes that transformation is terrifying.

Sometimes it is liberating.

Sometimes it is both.

But eventually, every one of us must confront the uncomfortable truth at the centre of Cronenberg’s work.

We are not separate from our bodies.

We are them.

And when the body changes, so does the person inside it. Seth Brundle simply takes that journey further than most of us ever will. He becomes the ultimate Cronenbergian nightmare. Not because he stops being human. But because he discovers, far too late, just how fragile the idea of being human really was.

  • Saul Muerte

The Fly (1986) at 40: The Body Is the Horror

27 Monday Jul 2026

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There are monsters that lurk in the shadows.

There are monsters that emerge from beneath the bed.

There are monsters that arrive from another planet, another dimension, another time.

And then there are monsters that begin with us.

David Cronenberg’s The Fly is often described as one of the greatest body-horror films ever made. But that description, while accurate, feels strangely inadequate. Because The Fly isn’t frightening simply because a man’s body begins to change. It is frightening because he knows it is happening. He watches himself disappear.

Released in 1986, Cronenberg’s reimagining of the 1958 science-fiction horror film transformed a familiar monster-movie premise into something far more intimate and devastating. Where Kurt Neumann’s original film explored the consequences of scientific experimentation, Cronenberg turned the story inward, making the body itself the site of an existential catastrophe.

At its centre is Seth Brundle. A brilliant scientist. A man who believes technology can overcome the limitations of human existence. A man who falls in love. And then, through a moment of scientific accident, becomes something else entirely. The horror is not that Seth becomes a monster. The horror is that, for a while, he remains human enough to understand exactly what he is losing.

The Beautiful Lie of Progress

Seth Brundle’s teleportation experiment begins with optimism. He has created something extraordinary. The telepods can transport matter from one location to another. Instantaneously. The impossible has become possible.

In the world of The Fly, science is not inherently sinister. The experiment works. That is what makes it so terrifying. The telepods aren’t defective. Seth isn’t punished because his invention fails. He is punished because it succeeds in a way he never anticipated.

A fly enters the pod. Seth enters after it. The computer doesn’t understand that two organisms have occupied the same space. It simply combines them. The result is not an explosion. It is not immediate death. It is transformation. And transformation, as Cronenberg understands better than almost any filmmaker, is infinitely more frightening than destruction.

Death is an ending.

Change is a process.

The Horror of Becoming

Seth doesn’t wake up one morning as Brundlefly. He becomes Brundlefly. That distinction forms the emotional foundation of the entire film. At first, the changes appear almost miraculous. Seth is stronger. More energetic. More confident. He moves with an exhilarating physicality. His body appears to have been improved. He calls it “the next step” in human evolution. For a brief moment, he believes he has transcended humanity.

This is perhaps the most seductive stage of the transformation. The monster doesn’t initially feel like a monster. It feels like an upgrade. Cronenberg’s genius is to make that idea both exhilarating and horrifying. Seth believes he has discovered something wonderful. The audience understands that he has discovered something terrible.

Then the body begins to betray him. The skin changes. The hair disappears. The fingernails loosen. The teeth become unstable. The body begins shedding itself. And Seth watches. That is the true horror.

The Body as Betrayal

Cronenberg’s cinema has always been fascinated by the fragile boundary between mind and flesh. In Shivers, the body becomes an instrument of infection. In Rabid, physical transformation becomes inseparable from sexuality. In The Brood, emotional trauma manifests physically. In Scanners, the mind becomes a weapon. In Videodrome, technology invades the body and consciousness itself.

By the time Cronenberg made The Fly, the body had become his most important cinematic landscape. But here, the body isn’t merely invaded. It is changing from within. Seth cannot escape himself. There is nowhere to run. No monster outside the window. No external force to defeat. His enemy is his own biology. The horror becomes profoundly intimate.

The Disease Film

It is tempting to view The Fly entirely through the lens of science fiction. But the film increasingly resembles something else. A disease narrative.

Seth develops symptoms. He rationalises them. He searches for explanations. He tries to understand what is happening. He becomes increasingly isolated. The people around him struggle to comprehend the transformation. And eventually, there is no cure.

The science-fiction premise provides the mechanism. The emotional experience is recognisably human. This is the horror of illness. Of watching someone change. Of witnessing the deterioration of someone you love. Of knowing that the person standing in front of you is still there somewhere, even as the body becomes unrecognisable. The fly is therefore not simply a monster. It is a metaphor for the terrifying unpredictability of mortality.

The Love Story at the Centre

Without Veronica Quaife, The Fly would still be an extraordinary piece of horror cinema. With her, it becomes something else. A tragedy.

Veronica isn’t merely the witness to Seth’s transformation. She is the person who loves him while it happens. That distinction gives the film its emotional weight. She meets Seth before the accident. She knows the man beneath the changing flesh. She remembers his voice, his humour, his intelligence and his vulnerability. As his body deteriorates, she is forced to confront an impossible question.

At what point does the person you love cease to be the person you know?

Cronenberg refuses to provide an easy answer. Seth remains Seth. And yet he doesn’t. He is simultaneously himself and something else. The film’s horror exists in that uncertainty.

Jeff Goldblum’s Transformation

Much has been written about the physical transformation of Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle. The prosthetics. The makeup. The practical effects. The grotesque imagery. All of it remains extraordinary. But the true achievement belongs to Goldblum’s performance.

He doesn’t simply play a man becoming an insect. He plays a man discovering that he is becoming an insect. The distinction is enormous. The early Seth is charismatic and restless. He is brilliant but socially awkward. His excitement is infectious. As the transformation progresses, that energy becomes something more dangerous.

Confidence becomes arrogance.

Curiosity becomes obsession.

Euphoria becomes desperation.

The physical performance changes because the psychological performance changes. Goldblum doesn’t disappear beneath the makeup. He remains visible within it. That is why the transformation is so disturbing. We never forget who is underneath.

The New Flesh

Cronenberg’s concept of the “New Flesh” had already emerged through Videodrome, but The Fly offers perhaps its most accessible expression. Seth believes that he has evolved. He imagines himself as something beyond humanity. Yet the film presents evolution as indifferent rather than glorious.

There is no moral progression. No guarantee that “new” means “better.” The body changes because biology demands change. The universe doesn’t care whether the result is beautiful. It doesn’t care whether Seth is ready. And it certainly doesn’t care whether Veronica can bear to watch.

The New Flesh is therefore both promise and nightmare. Transformation without consent Evolution without morality. Progress without compassion.

The Monster We Pity

The great achievement of The Fly is that it makes the audience pity its monster. We don’t simply fear Brundlefly. We mourn him. The film continually asks us to remember the man who existed before the transformation. That memory becomes increasingly painful.

The more monstrous Seth becomes, the more desperately we want to find him. And eventually, the film confronts us with an unbearable possibility. Perhaps there is no Seth left to save. Or perhaps there is. Perhaps he is trapped somewhere inside the creature. Perhaps the monster understands exactly what it has become. The uncertainty is devastating.

The Horror of Care

There is another dimension to The Fly that becomes more apparent with age. The film is about caregiving. About witnessing decline. About loving someone whose body is changing beyond their control. Veronica’s experience is therefore not simply that of a horror heroine. She becomes a caretaker. A witness. An advocate. And eventually, the person who must confront the limits of compassion.

There is a profound cruelty in asking someone to remain beside you while you disappear. There is an equal cruelty in asking someone to leave. The Fly understands that love does not always provide solutions. Sometimes love simply means staying long enough to witness the truth.

The Horror of Mortality

Every great monster story contains a fear of death. The Fly contains something worse. It contains the fear of living while dying. Seth’s transformation is gradual. There is time to understand it. Time to fear it. Time to deny it. Time to rage against it. That makes the film more devastating than a simple creature feature.

Death is unavoidable. But the prospect of watching ourselves deteriorate piece by piece is something far more difficult to contemplate. Cronenberg forces the audience to confront that fear through flesh. The body becomes a clock. Every new symptom marks another step towards the inevitable.

Forty Years of Rot

Four decades after its release, The Fly remains one of the most extraordinary examples of mainstream body horror ever produced. The film was released by a major Hollywood studio. It featured recognisable stars. It possessed a substantial budget. And yet it refused to soften its central nightmare.

The practical effects remain shocking because they serve the story rather than overwhelm it. The gore is not decoration. It is narrative Every transformation tells us something about Seth’s physical and psychological decline. The body horror is therefore inseparable from the emotional horror. We recoil because we understand what the images mean.

The Remake That Became Something Else

Cronenberg’s film is technically a remake. But it feels less like a remake than a reinvention. The 1958 The Fly emerged from an era fascinated by atomic science and the dangers of experimentation. Cronenberg’s 1986 film belongs to another age. An era increasingly anxious about technology, genetic transformation, disease and the instability of the human body. The premise remains familiar. The nightmare changes.

That is what makes The Fly such a fascinating example of cinematic reinterpretation. The same story can be told twice. The monster can remain the same. Yet the fears surrounding it can evolve completely.

The Final Transformation

By the film’s conclusion, Seth Brundle has become almost entirely unrecognisable. But the tragedy is not that he has become an insect. It is that he knows what he has become. The final moments are not about defeating a monster. They are about acknowledging one. Veronica’s final act is not triumphant. It is devastating.

There is no victory. No cure. No restoration of the natural order. Only an ending. The kind of ending that forces us to confront the fact that some transformations cannot be reversed.

The Prognosis:

Forty years after David Cronenberg’s The Fly first entered cinemas, its reputation as a masterpiece of body horror remains entirely justified. But to describe it only as a body-horror film is to underestimate what Cronenberg achieved.

This is a film about disease.

About technology.

About evolution.

About sexuality.

About mortality.

About love.

And ultimately, about the terrifying fragility of identity.

Seth Brundle does not become frightening because he becomes less human. He becomes frightening because some part of his humanity remains. We recognise him. We remember him. We understand what he is losing. And because we understand that loss, we understand the film’s deepest horror.

The body is not a vessel we inhabit. It is the thing through which we experience ourselves. It is how we recognise one another.

How we touch.

How we love.

How we move through the world.

And eventually, it is the thing that betrays us.

That is why The Fly remains so powerful at forty. The monster is not the fly. The monster is the knowledge that none of us can remain unchanged forever. Seth Brundle simply gets to experience that truth sooner than the rest of us.

  • Saul Muerte

Jeepers Creepers (2001) at 25: The Film Horror Fell Out of Love With

27 Monday Jul 2026

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Editor’s Note: This retrospective discusses Jeepers Creepers as an influential work of horror cinema while acknowledging that its legacy is inseparable from the crimes of its writer-director. Rather than attempting to resolve the long-running debate over separating art from artist, this article examines how our relationship with the film has evolved over the past twenty-five years.

When it arrived in 2001, Jeepers Creepers felt like a breath of fresh air.

The slasher boom of the late 1990s was beginning to lose momentum. Horror was searching for new monsters, new myths and new icons. Along came a film that blended road movie, creature feature and urban legend into something genuinely unsettling. It introduced audiences to one of the genre’s most memorable monsters of the twenty-first century.

Today, however, discussing Jeepers Creepers inevitably means discussing something else. Not because the film demands it. Because history does.

Before We Knew

For audiences discovering Jeepers Creepers in 2001, the experience was remarkably straightforward. A brother and sister drive along a lonely highway. A rusted truck appears. An unsettling figure disposes of something down an abandoned church pipe. Curiosity triumphs over common sense. The nightmare begins. It remains one of modern horror’s finest opening acts.

The first thirty minutes demonstrate an extraordinary understanding of suspense. Xavier Gens (Frontier(s)) once observed that great horror often begins with ordinary journeys interrupted by extraordinary events. Whether consciously or not, Jeepers Creepers embraces that philosophy.

The highway becomes isolation. Curiosity becomes vulnerability. Every decision made by Darry and Trish feels recognisably human, making the terror all the more effective. Long before the creature fully reveals itself, dread has already taken hold. It is masterfully constructed.

The Birth of a Modern Monster

The Creeper immediately distinguished itself from the masked killers dominating horror at the turn of the millennium. It wasn’t another silent slasher. Nor was it a ghost, vampire or zombie. Instead, it felt ancient. Predatory. Almost mythological. Its motivations remained elusive. Its appearance combined familiar horror iconography with something uniquely grotesque. Most importantly, it possessed personality. The dilapidated truck. The haunting pipe. The leathery wings. The ritualistic harvesting of human body parts. These details transformed the creature into more than another cinematic killer. The Creeper became folklore.

A monster that felt as though it had always existed, waiting patiently for someone to uncover its story. It is no coincidence that the character continues to occupy conversations surrounding modern horror monsters. The design remains exceptional.

When Context Changes Everything

Films often outlive the moment in which they were created. Sometimes that enriches them. Sometimes it fundamentally alters them. Jeepers Creepers belongs firmly to the latter category. There are works of art that remain relatively untouched by the lives of their creators. This is not one of them.

Knowledge changes spectatorship. Once audiences become aware of the real-world context surrounding a work, viewing can never return to a state of innocence. Every frame becomes filtered through understanding that did not previously exist—or that individual viewers may not have confronted at the time. The film itself remains unchanged. The audience does not.

That shift creates an unavoidable tension that now accompanies every discussion of Jeepers Creepers. Not because the monster on screen has become less frightening. But because another shadow exists beyond the frame.

Can a Monster Escape Its Creator?

Perhaps the most difficult question surrounding Jeepers Creepers is not whether it remains an effective horror film. It undeniably does. The more challenging question is whether its central creation can ever become independent of the individual responsible for bringing it into existence. Cinema is inherently collaborative.

Actors.

Cinematographers.

Editors.

Designers.

Composers.

Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of artists contribute to a single finished work.

Yet audiences often experience films through the singular identity of their director. The Creeper has become one of horror’s most recognisable modern monsters. Its design, mythology and iconography have endured well beyond the film’s original release. Whether that monster can ever truly exist independently of its creator remains a question each viewer must answer for themselves. There is no universal solution. Only individual reflection.

Horror and the Loss of Innocence

Perhaps that is why Jeepers Creepers feels so different today. Not because the scares have disappeared. Not because the filmmaking has diminished. But because innocence has.

Horror has always invited audiences to confront uncomfortable truths. Usually those truths remain fictional. Occasionally they emerge from outside the film itself. When that happens, the relationship between audience and artwork inevitably changes. Rather than simply asking whether a film is “good” or “bad,” viewers begin asking entirely different questions.

Can admiration coexist with discomfort?

Can influence be acknowledged without celebration?

Can cultural significance exist alongside moral complexity?

Jeepers Creepers offers no easy answers. It merely forces those questions into the open.

The Prognosis:

Twenty-five years after its release, Jeepers Creepers remains one of the defining horror films of the early twenty-first century. Its opening remains a masterclass in escalating suspense. The Creeper remains one of horror’s most memorable modern monsters. Its influence upon creature features and road horror is undeniable. Yet its legacy can no longer be separated from the knowledge audiences now carry into every viewing. The film has not changed. We have.

Perhaps that is Jeepers Creepers’ greatest tragedy. Not that horror rejected one of its most compelling modern monsters… but that it became impossible to discuss that monster without confronting the shadow that has followed it ever since. Time hasn’t diminished its power. It has fundamentally changed the way we look at it.

  • Saul Muerte

Maximum Overdrive (1986) at 40: When Stephen King Discovered That Writing and Directing Are Two Very Different Horrors

24 Friday Jul 2026

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Some horror films fail because they lack imagination.

Maximum Overdrive fails because it has too much.

Released in 1986 and directed by Stephen King in his one and only theatrical directing effort, the film occupies one of the strangest places in horror history. It is loud, excessive, wildly inconsistent and, at times, utterly baffling. It is also undeniably fascinating. Not because it succeeds. But because it represents one of horror’s greatest storytellers discovering that mastery of one creative discipline offers no guarantee of another.

Forty years later, Maximum Overdrive remains less a great horror film than an extraordinary case study in the difference between writing fear and directing it.

Every Stephen King Nightmare at Once

Adapted from King’s short story Trucks, the premise is delightfully absurd. As Earth passes through the tail of a mysterious comet, machines across the globe suddenly become sentient and begin turning against humanity. At an isolated truck stop, a small group of survivors find themselves besieged by everything from eighteen-wheelers to arcade machines, vending machines and lawnmowers. It is a premise that could only have emerged from Stephen King’s imagination.

King has always excelled at taking the ordinary and revealing the terror hidden beneath it.

Cars.

Dogs.

Hotels.

Laundry mangles.

Industrial machinery.

Everyday objects frequently become vessels for extraordinary horror. On the page, those ideas flourish because King’s greatest weapon has never been spectacle. It has been empathy. Readers spend time living inside his characters’ fears long before the monsters arrive. Cinema demands something different.

The Difference Between Storytelling and Filmmaking

Directing requires ruthless discipline. Every shot must serve rhythm. Every scene must build momentum. Every performance requires modulation. Maximum Overdrive rarely finds that balance.

Ideas spill across the screen with infectious enthusiasm but little restraint. Characters appear only to disappear moments later. Action sequences escalate without clear dramatic progression. Moments that should feel suspenseful instead become unintentionally comic through repetition and excess.

Ironically, King’s greatest strength as a novelist becomes one of the film’s greatest weaknesses. Novelists are encouraged to explore. Directors must choose. Maximum Overdrive often feels like watching every idea survive the editing process.

Rock ‘n’ Roll, Cocaine and the MTV Generation

No discussion of Maximum Overdrive can ignore its unmistakable 1980s identity. The opening blast of AC/DC immediately announces the film’s intentions. This is horror turned up to eleven. Everything is louder.

Faster.

Bigger.

The soundtrack propels the action with relentless energy, transforming scenes of mechanical destruction into something approaching a rock concert. It is gloriously excessive. It is also exhausting. The MTV generation had transformed filmmaking into an increasingly kinetic experience, and Maximum Overdrive embraces that philosophy wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, style frequently overwhelms suspense. Noise replaces tension. Movement replaces atmosphere. The result resembles an extended heavy metal music video punctuated by murderous appliances.

When the Machines Became the Characters

Perhaps the film’s greatest miscalculation lies in where it places its emotional investment. The trucks receive more personality than many of the humans. The infamous Green Goblin truck remains wonderfully iconic, while the machines themselves possess an anarchic charm that almost turns them into mischievous antagonists rather than terrifying ones.

The people, however, rarely receive enough development for audiences to become genuinely invested in their survival. King’s novels thrive because readers care deeply about ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations. Maximum Overdrive often reverses that equation. The extraordinary machines become the stars. The humans become incidental.

Failure Can Be Fascinating

Yet dismissing Maximum Overdrive as merely “bad” overlooks why it continues to attract audiences four decades later. There is something undeniably infectious about its complete lack of restraint.

The film never apologises for its absurdity. It commits wholeheartedly to every outrageous idea. A drinks machine fires cans like bullets. An electric carving knife attacks its owner. A soda machine becomes an instrument of death. Everyday technology suddenly declares war on humanity with gleeful abandon. Few films possess this level of creative confidence, even when that confidence proves misplaced. It becomes impossible not to admire the sheer conviction behind the chaos.

Stephen King’s Greatest Lesson

Stephen King has often spoken candidly about making Maximum Overdrive, famously attributing much of the production to excessive cocaine use. The anecdote has become almost as legendary as the film itself, but reducing Maximum Overdrive to that punchline overlooks a more interesting truth. The film taught King something invaluable.

He never directed another theatrical feature. Instead, he returned to what he understood better than almost anyone else. Storytelling. Sometimes recognising where your greatest talent lies is every bit as important as discovering it in the first place.

The Prognosis:

Maximum Overdrive is not Stephen King’s finest achievement.

It is chaotic.

Uneven.

Tonally erratic.

Often unintentionally hilarious.

Yet it remains irresistibly watchable precisely because of those flaws.

Rather than viewing it as a failed horror film, it is perhaps more rewarding to see it as a remarkable creative experiment—a celebrated novelist attempting to translate the limitless imagination of the written page into the rigid language of cinema. The experiment may not have succeeded. But it revealed something important.

Stephen King didn’t need to direct horror to become one of its defining voices.

He simply needed to keep writing.

And for that…

Perhaps Maximum Overdrive‘s greatest legacy isn’t what it became.

It’s what it convinced Stephen King never to become again.

  • Saul Muerte

Haunted Honeymoon (1986) at 40: Gene Wilder’s Last Love Letter to Classic Horror

24 Friday Jul 2026

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There are films that look towards the future.

Then there are films that quietly look backwards.

Released in 1986, Gene Wilder’s Haunted Honeymoon arrived at a curious moment in horror history. While audiences flocked to visceral body horror, nihilistic slashers and increasingly graphic supernatural nightmares, Wilder chose to revisit another age entirely—one populated by haunted mansions, eccentric aristocrats, secret passages and mysterious shadows dancing across candlelit walls.

It was a film that felt decades out of step with contemporary horror.

Perhaps that is precisely why it feels so charming today.

Viewed forty years later, Haunted Honeymoon isn’t merely a horror-comedy.

It is Gene Wilder’s deeply affectionate farewell to the Gothic fantasies that first ignited his imagination.

A Love Letter Hidden Inside a Comedy

On the surface, Haunted Honeymoon is delightfully straightforward.

Radio stars Larry Abbot and Vickie Pearle travel to Larry’s ancestral estate ahead of their wedding, only to find themselves surrounded by bizarre relatives, mysterious happenings and a series of increasingly supernatural events.

Yet the plot almost feels secondary.

Every scene is constructed around the atmosphere of classic horror rather than modern suspense.

The thunder crashes.

The wind howls through ancient corridors.

Portraits stare from darkened walls.

Every hidden doorway promises another secret.

Rather than parodying Gothic horror, Wilder lovingly recreates it.

Watching Haunted Honeymoon often feels like wandering through the haunted memories of cinema itself.

The Ghosts of Universal Horror

Long before horror became synonymous with explicit violence, it thrived upon mood.

The Universal Monsters of the 1930s understood this instinctively.

James Whale’s The Old Dark House.

Bride of Frankenstein.

The atmospheric mysteries that blended comedy with creeping unease.

Those films rarely relied upon relentless terror.

Instead, they invited audiences to enjoy the delicious uncertainty of candlelit hallways and suspicious glances.

Haunted Honeymoon proudly inherits that tradition.

Its mansion functions less as a realistic location than as a cinematic playground assembled from decades of Gothic iconography.

Every staircase.

Every suit of armour.

Every thunderstorm.

Feels lovingly borrowed from horror’s earliest golden age.

Rather than modernising those influences, Wilder preserves them exactly as he remembered them.

Before Television… There Was Radio

One of the film’s most overlooked qualities lies in its celebration of radio drama.

The opening scenes immerse audiences in the world of live radio broadcasts—a reminder that horror reached millions long before cinema or television entered the home.

For generations, terrifying stories existed only as voices carried across invisible airwaves.

Listeners supplied the monsters with their own imaginations.

That tradition quietly echoes throughout Haunted Honeymoon.

Larry Abbot’s greatest battle is not against supernatural forces but against fear itself—fear that manifests through performance, illusion and storytelling.

It is an elegant reminder that horror has always depended as much upon imagination as spectacle.

The Tenderness of Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner

It is impossible to revisit Haunted Honeymoon today without acknowledging the warmth radiating from its central performances.

Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner share a chemistry that feels almost effortless.

Their affection extends beyond scripted dialogue.

It exists in stolen glances.

Gentle smiles.

Moments of quiet reassurance.

Knowing the couple’s real-life relationship inevitably colours the experience.

There is a sincerity to their performances that elevates even the broadest comedic moments.

This was never simply another studio comedy.

It feels intensely personal.

Perhaps that explains why the film continues to resonate with audiences who discover it long after its original release.

A Film Released at the Wrong Time

Timing can shape a film’s legacy as profoundly as its quality.

By 1986, horror audiences expected something very different.

David Cronenberg was redefining body horror.

Slasher films dominated multiplexes.

Special effects became increasingly elaborate.

The genre had embraced excess.

Against that backdrop, Haunted Honeymoon must have appeared almost quaint.

Its humour was rooted in vaudeville.

Its horror belonged to another century.

Its monsters preferred theatrical entrances to graphic violence.

Had the film appeared ten years earlier—or perhaps even twenty—it may have found a more receptive audience.

Instead, it became something stranger.

A nostalgic film released before nostalgia had become fashionable.

Haunted by Cinema Itself

Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement lies in what it chooses to haunt.

Not the mansion.

Not the characters.

But cinema itself.

Every frame carries echoes of earlier storytellers.

James Whale.

The Universal classics.

Old radio serials.

Abbott and Costello.

Bob Hope.

The elegant horror-comedies that once dominated Saturday afternoons and late-night television.

Rather than merely referencing those influences, Wilder gently preserves them.

Haunted Honeymoon becomes less a parody than an archive.

A celebration of a style of filmmaking quietly disappearing from popular culture.

The Prognosis:

Haunted Honeymoon has never occupied the same celebrated place within Gene Wilder’s extraordinary career as Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles or Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

Nor is it his funniest film.

Yet it may well be his most affectionate.

Beneath its playful humour and Gothic theatrics lies an unmistakable love for horror’s past—a belief that haunted mansions, eccentric families and mysterious shadows still possessed the power to enchant audiences.

Forty years later, Haunted Honeymoon feels less like an overlooked comedy and more like a heartfelt farewell.

Not to Gene Wilder’s career.

But to an entire tradition of horror storytelling that shaped generations of filmmakers before him.

Its ghosts were never meant to frighten us.

They were meant to remind us where horror came from.

And thanks to Gene Wilder…

…they’re still wandering those candlelit corridors today.

  • Saul Muerte

Them (Ils) (2006) at 20: When Horror Stopped Explaining Itself

18 Saturday Jul 2026

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Every horror film begins with a question.

Who is the killer?

What is the monster?

Why is this happening?

For decades, audiences were conditioned to expect answers. Gothic horror unravelled ancient curses. Slashers often revealed buried traumas or revenge. Even supernatural nightmares eventually exposed the mythology lurking beneath their terror.

Then, somewhere during the early years of the twenty-first century, horror quietly changed its mind.

It stopped explaining itself.

Released in 2006, Xavier Palud and David Moreau’s Them (Ils) arrived at the forefront of that transformation. Ostensibly a minimalist home invasion thriller, the film stripped away comforting explanations until all that remained was fear in its purest form.

Not fear of monsters.

Not fear of the supernatural.

Fear of uncertainty.

The Sound That Shouldn’t Be There

Lucas and Clémentine live peacefully in an isolated country house on the outskirts of Bucharest. Their lives are ordinary, their surroundings tranquil.

Until one night…

They hear something.

It is a deceptively simple beginning.

No elaborate set-up.

No ominous prophecy.

No forewarning that evil is approaching.

Instead, Them introduces terror through one of humanity’s oldest instincts: the unsettling awareness that something isn’t quite right.

A noise.

A movement.

A light where no light should be.

The brilliance of Palud and Moreau lies in their understanding that genuine fear rarely arrives with spectacle.

It begins with doubt.

Every sound invites another question.

Every silence becomes heavier than the last.

The End of Explanation

What makes Them so effective is not what it reveals.

It is what it refuses to explain.

The film belongs to a remarkable wave of horror that emerged during the 2000s—a period that increasingly rejected neat psychological motivations in favour of existential uncertainty.

Films such as Wolf Creek, Funny Games, Inside, The Strangers and Eden Lake all shared a similar philosophy.

Violence no longer required elaborate justification.

Sometimes terrible things simply happened.

That shift fundamentally altered horror’s relationship with its audience.

Explanation offers comfort.

If we understand evil, perhaps we can avoid it.

Randomness removes that reassurance entirely.

Suddenly horror no longer feels like a puzzle to solve.

It becomes a condition to endure.

Them understands this instinctively.

Every unanswered question deepens the terror because uncertainty itself becomes the antagonist.

Home No Longer Means Safety

Home invasion stories have always exploited one of humanity’s deepest assumptions.

Home is where we retreat from the world.

It represents privacy.

Security.

Control.

Them dismantles each of those certainties with ruthless efficiency.

The house ceases to function as a sanctuary and instead transforms into an elaborate labyrinth.

Doors no longer provide protection.

Windows become vulnerabilities.

Corridors stretch into darkness.

Every room offers only temporary refuge before demanding another desperate escape.

The geography itself begins to betray the characters.

Palud and Moreau construct the house almost like a living organism, constantly shifting the audience’s sense of orientation. We rarely know exactly where the attackers are.

More importantly…

Neither do Lucas and Clémentine.

That disorientation becomes one of the film’s most powerful weapons.

Fear Without Spectacle

One of Them‘s greatest achievements is its remarkable restraint.

There are no elaborate special effects.

No extravagant action sequences.

No orchestral flourishes announcing every scare.

Instead, the directors rely upon absence.

Darkness conceals more than it reveals.

Silence becomes oppressive.

The audience is encouraged to imagine threats rather than simply witness them.

It recalls the philosophy of Val Lewton’s great psychological horror films of the 1940s, where suggestion proved infinitely more terrifying than explicit revelation.

By refusing to overwhelm the senses, Them forces viewers to become active participants in their own fear.

The imagination completes what the screen deliberately withholds.

Innocence Reimagined

Perhaps the film’s most unsettling idea emerges during its closing act.

Without dwelling upon its revelations, Them quietly challenges one of society’s most deeply rooted assumptions—that innocence naturally accompanies youth.

It is a profoundly uncomfortable inversion.

Horror has frequently explored corrupted children, from The Omen to Village of the Damned, but Them approaches the concept with startling realism.

There are no supernatural forces.

No demonic possession.

Only the disturbing possibility that appearances and assumptions may offer little protection from cruelty.

The result leaves the audience confronting questions that linger long after the narrative itself has concluded.

The Legacy of Uncertainty

Looking back two decades later, Them feels less like an isolated success and more like the beginning of a broader movement within horror cinema.

Its fingerprints can be found throughout the home invasion films and survival thrillers that followed.

More importantly, it demonstrated that horror no longer required mythology to be effective.

Atmosphere became enough.

Ambiguity became enough.

Not knowing became enough.

It is a remarkably confident approach to storytelling.

One that continues to influence the genre today.

The Prognosis:

Them (Ils) remains one of the defining horror films of the 2000s not because it reinvented the home invasion subgenre, but because it quietly redefined what audiences expected from fear itself.

Rather than offering explanations, it strips them away.

Rather than confronting viewers with elaborate monsters, it asks them to confront uncertainty.

That philosophical shift proved enormously influential.

In the years that followed, horror increasingly abandoned comforting answers in favour of unsettling ambiguity, recognising that the unknown has always been the genre’s most enduring monster.

Twenty years later, Them still understands a truth that many horror films continue to chase.

The most frightening question isn’t, “Why?”

It’s…

“What if there isn’t one?”

  • Saul Muerte

Vamp (1986) at 40: When Vampires Became Pop Art

17 Friday Jul 2026

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There are vampire films that seduce.

There are vampire films that terrify.

And then there is Vamp.

Released in 1986, Richard Wenk’s neon-drenched horror comedy occupies a curious place within vampire cinema. Arriving between the elegant sensuality of Tony Scott’s The Hunger and the youthful rebellion of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, Vamp chose neither path. Instead, it carved out an identity all of its own—a fever dream where horror, fashion, cabaret and MTV collided beneath the pulsating lights of an underground nightclub.

It has never enjoyed the critical acclaim of its contemporaries.

Nor has it attained the same cultural footprint.

Yet forty years later, Vamp remains one of the decade’s most distinctive vampire films precisely because it dared to imagine the vampire not simply as a monster…

…but as performance.

Entering the Underworld

The premise is wonderfully simple.

Two fraternity pledges, Keith and AJ, venture into a notorious nightclub to recruit an exotic dancer for their college party, only to discover that the club’s performers and patrons conceal a far darker appetite.

On paper, it sounds like another horror-comedy built upon familiar genre conventions.

What Richard Wenk delivers, however, feels closer to mythology than exploitation.

The nightclub isn’t merely a location.

It is a threshold.

Once its doors close behind the protagonists, the ordinary world disappears. Time seems suspended. Morality becomes fluid. Every corridor feels detached from reality itself.

Like the River Styx or Dante’s descent into the Inferno, the nightclub functions as a liminal space where the living unknowingly wander into the realm of the dead.

The audience quickly realises something the protagonists do not.

They were doomed the moment they walked through the door.

Grace Jones Doesn’t Play Katrina…

She Becomes Her.

If Vamp possesses a beating heart—or perhaps an undead one—it belongs entirely to Grace Jones.

To say she steals the film feels almost inadequate.

She is the film.

Jones speaks remarkably little throughout her performance, yet commands every frame through sheer physical presence. Every movement feels choreographed. Every pose resembles sculpture. Every glance carries more weight than pages of dialogue ever could.

This is performance stripped back to its purest visual language.

Long before audiences discuss Katrina, they remember her silhouette.

Her impossibly angular features.

The stark make-up.

The hypnotic dance sequences.

Jones understands something fundamental about monsters.

The most frightening rarely explain themselves.

They simply exist.

Her portrayal recalls the silent horror icons of the 1920s, where actors communicated terror through expression, posture and movement rather than words. There are echoes of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu buried beneath the extravagant costumes, yet Jones transforms those influences into something unmistakably modern.

She doesn’t merely portray a vampire.

She reinvents the image of one.

The Nightclub as Theatre

Much has been written about the visual excess of 1980s horror, but Vamp deserves greater recognition for how completely it embraces the aesthetics of the MTV generation.

By 1986, music videos had transformed visual storytelling.

Narrative often became secondary to atmosphere.

Smoke drifted endlessly through impossible spaces.

Neon lights bathed every surface.

Reality gave way to spectacle.

Vamp absorbs that language effortlessly.

The nightclub resembles less a functioning business than a stage production where horror itself becomes entertainment. Every corner appears carefully designed to overwhelm the senses, blurring the boundaries between dance performance, fashion show and supernatural nightmare.

Watching the film today, it often feels as though someone stretched an avant-garde music video into feature length.

Remarkably…

That isn’t a criticism.

It is precisely what gives the film its enduring personality.

Reimagining the Vampire

For generations, cinematic vampires have reflected contemporary ideas surrounding beauty and desire.

Bela Lugosi embodied Old World aristocracy.

Christopher Lee projected commanding masculinity.

Catherine Deneuve radiated unattainable elegance.

Grace Jones offered something entirely different.

She challenged conventional beauty.

Angular rather than soft.

Commanding rather than seductive.

Androgynous rather than traditionally feminine.

She was neither attempting to imitate Dracula nor subvert him entirely.

Instead, she expanded the mythology.

Jones demonstrated that vampires need not conform to inherited notions of attractiveness to remain mesmerising.

Power itself became seductive.

Presence became irresistible.

It remains one of horror cinema’s most fascinating reinterpretations of vampirism.

Comedy Without Compromise

One of Vamp‘s greatest strengths is its understanding of tonal balance.

Comedy frequently threatens horror by undermining tension.

Richard Wenk avoids that trap.

The humour arises naturally from the increasingly absurd predicament facing Keith and AJ rather than at the expense of the horror itself.

If anything, the comedy heightens the surrealism.

Laughter becomes another means of disorientation.

The audience never feels entirely comfortable enough to relax.

That unpredictability gives Vamp an eccentric charm that has aged surprisingly well.

More Than a Cult Curiosity

It would be dishonest to describe Vamp as flawless.

Certain performances drift towards caricature.

The pacing occasionally loses momentum.

Some practical effects inevitably reveal the limitations of a modest budget.

Yet none of those imperfections diminish what makes the film memorable.

Its ambition.

Richard Wenk wasn’t interested in making another Dracula story.

He wanted to create an experience.

A vampire film infused with nightclub culture, performance art and the hyper-stylised visual language of the 1980s.

In that respect, Vamp succeeds magnificently.

The Prognosis:

Vamp may never occupy the same revered status as The Lost Boys or Near Dark, but perhaps comparison misses the point.

Richard Wenk’s film isn’t attempting to preserve vampire tradition.

It is transforming it.

By merging horror with fashion, music video aesthetics and one of cinema’s most unforgettable screen presences, Vamp became something entirely its own.

Grace Jones doesn’t simply play a vampire.

She becomes a living piece of pop art.

Forty years later, that singular vision remains every bit as hypnotic as the neon lights that first illuminated Katrina’s nightclub.

Sometimes monsters don’t need elaborate mythology.

Sometimes they simply need the confidence to walk into a room…

…and make the darkness feel like a stage.

  • Saul Muerte

Squirm (1976) at 50: When Nature Stopped Biting Back… and the Ground Turned Against Us

13 Monday Jul 2026

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There are monsters we expect to fear.

Vampires emerge from the darkness.

Werewolves howl beneath a full moon.

Sharks circle unseen beneath the water’s surface.

But every now and then, horror asks us to fear something so ordinary that we barely notice it.

The ground beneath our feet.

When Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm slithered into cinemas in 1976, audiences were treated to what sounded like one of the decade’s more outrageous premises: a violent electrical storm sends high-voltage power lines crashing into the rain-soaked earth, transforming an ordinary population of worms into ravenous flesh-eating predators.

It is exactly the sort of wonderfully absurd concept that could only have emerged during the golden age of 1970s creature features.

Yet beneath its B-movie exterior lies something surprisingly revealing about the decade that produced it.

When Nature Turned Against Us

The 1970s marked a turning point in horror cinema.

Gone were the Gothic castles and supernatural curses that had dominated previous generations. Instead, filmmakers increasingly looked towards the natural world as the source of humanity’s nightmares.

The decade was shaped by growing environmental awareness. Industrial pollution, pesticide use, the oil crisis and fears surrounding humanity’s exploitation of the planet entered public consciousness with unprecedented urgency. The first Earth Day had been celebrated only a few years earlier, while environmental activism was steadily becoming part of mainstream conversation.

Cinema responded accordingly.

Rather than presenting nature as something beautiful or indifferent, horror increasingly imagined it fighting back.

Suddenly frogs became deadly.

Ants organised themselves into terrifying colonies.

Spiders descended in overwhelming numbers.

Even rabbits—perhaps cinema’s least threatening creatures—were transformed into monstrous killers.

In that context, Squirm wasn’t an isolated oddity.

It was part of a wider movement that suggested humanity had disrupted the natural order for so long that nature itself had begun to retaliate.

The enemy was no longer a vampire.

It was the ecosystem.

The Horror Beneath Our Feet

What distinguishes Squirm from many of its contemporaries is the simplicity of its central fear.

Most monster movies encourage audiences to look outward.

Towards the sea.

Towards the forest.

Towards the night sky.

Lieberman asks us to look down.

It is a remarkably effective psychological shift.

Worms are among the least glamorous creatures imaginable. They are silent, blind and usually hidden beneath the earth. We rarely think about them at all.

Until Squirm.

By transforming the soil itself into a source of danger, Lieberman quietly undermines one of our most basic assumptions—that the ground is safe.

There is something deeply unsettling about that idea.

The earth, after all, is supposed to be stable. It is where we build our homes, grow our food and seek shelter from the unknown.

Squirm imagines that sanctuary becoming hostile.

The monster is no longer lurking somewhere beyond civilisation.

It has been beneath civilisation all along.

B-Movie Sincerity

Viewed today, Squirm is undeniably a product of its time.

Its performances occasionally drift towards melodrama.

Some of the dialogue invites unintentional laughter.

Certain effects reveal the limitations of a modest budget.

Yet those very imperfections are part of its enduring charm.

Lieberman never approaches the material with irony.

He believes in the premise wholeheartedly.

That sincerity proves infectious.

Modern creature features often hide behind self-awareness, acknowledging their absurdity before audiences have the opportunity to question it.

Squirm refuses to apologise.

It commits completely to the idea that ordinary worms can become instruments of unimaginable terror.

Oddly enough…

That commitment makes the film easier to embrace.

The Legacy of Eco-Horror

While Squirm may never receive the same critical recognition as some of horror’s more celebrated classics, its place within the evolution of eco-horror deserves acknowledgement.

Alongside films such as Frogs, Night of the Lepus, Empire of the Ants, Kingdom of the Spiders, Australia’s Long Weekend and Prophecy, it helped define a period in which nature ceased to be a backdrop for horror.

It became horror itself.

Many contemporary environmental thrillers continue to explore similar anxieties, albeit through different metaphors.

Climate change.

Pandemics.

Ecological collapse.

The specifics may have evolved, but the underlying fear remains remarkably familiar.

Humanity’s greatest threat may ultimately be the world we have reshaped.

The Prognosis:

Squirm is far from a flawless film.

Its premise borders on the ridiculous, its execution occasionally stumbles and it lacks the polish of many better-known horror classics from the decade.

Yet dismissing it as nothing more than a killer worm movie overlooks its significance.

Jeff Lieberman captured a moment when horror cinema stopped asking audiences to fear distant monsters and instead encouraged them to question their relationship with the natural world itself.

Perhaps that is why the film continues to burrow beneath the surface of horror history.

Not because giant carnivorous worms are especially believable…

But because Squirm reminds us that the most effective creature features are rarely about the creatures.

They’re about the fears waiting just beneath the surface.

And in 1976, few fears felt more immediate than the possibility that nature had finally decided to fight back.

  • Saul Muerte

A Page of Madness (1926) at 100

09 Thursday Jul 2026

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Before Horror Found Its Monsters, It Found Madness

There are horror films that ask us to fear the monster.

There are horror films that ask us to fear the dark.

Then there are films that ask us to fear our own minds.

Nearly a century before psychological horror became one of cinema’s most celebrated subgenres, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (狂った一頁) was already dismantling the relationship between audience and reality. It offered no comforting explanations, no reliable narrator and very little dialogue to guide the viewer through its fractured world. Instead, it immersed audiences in an emotional and psychological experience that remains startlingly modern one hundred years later.

Watching A Page of Madness today is less like viewing a silent film and more like stepping into someone else’s nightmare.

Released in 1926, the film arrived during a period of extraordinary artistic experimentation. Across Europe, German Expressionism was transforming architecture and shadow into reflections of emotional distress, while Surrealism was beginning to challenge the boundaries between dreams and waking life. In Japan, however, Kinugasa was forging an entirely different cinematic language.

Working alongside novelist Yasunari Kawabata, whose literary interests centred on perception, memory and emotional subjectivity, Kinugasa rejected conventional storytelling in favour of sensation. Their collaboration sought not simply to tell a story, but to place the audience inside a fractured state of consciousness. The result was a film unlike anything produced before it—and, arguably, unlike anything produced since.

Its premise appears deceptively straightforward.

A janitor secretly works within an isolated mental asylum, hoping to free his wife, who has been institutionalised after attempting to take her own life. Yet this synopsis barely scratches the surface. Narrative quickly gives way to emotion as dreams, memories, fantasies and reality begin folding into one another until they become almost impossible to separate. This is not a mystery designed to be solved. It is an experience designed to be felt.

Perhaps the film’s boldest artistic decision lies in its rejection of explanatory intertitles. While most silent cinema relied heavily upon written cards to propel narrative and clarify motivation, A Page of Madness strips much of that certainty away. Viewers are forced to navigate its emotional landscape through expression, movement, editing and atmosphere alone. The effect is profoundly disorientating.

Like the asylum’s patients, we struggle to distinguish memory from hallucination. The film doesn’t merely depict mental illness—it constructs a cinematic language that places us within uncertainty itself. Kinugasa’s direction remains astonishing even by contemporary standards. Rapid montage fractures both time and space. Double exposures allow multiple emotional realities to occupy the same frame. Reflections distort identity. Masks appear and disappear with haunting ambiguity. The camera glides through corridors with dreamlike fluidity before suddenly becoming trapped inside frantic bursts of chaotic movement.

There are moments where the editing feels decades ahead of its time, anticipating techniques later embraced by experimental filmmakers and psychological horror alike. Without claiming direct influence, it is difficult not to recognise echoes of its fragmented subjectivity in films such as Repulsion, Jacob’s Ladder, Perfect Blue, Black Swan and The Lighthouse. Each similarly invites audiences to question whether what they are witnessing is external reality or internal collapse.

Yet A Page of Madness achieves this without the benefit of synchronised sound, modern visual effects or contemporary editing technology.

It relies entirely upon cinema’s most fundamental tools.

Light.

Shadow.

Movement.

Rhythm.

Emotion.

The title itself offers another fascinating clue to Kinugasa’s intentions.

A Page of Madness.

Not The Madman.

Not The Asylum.

Not The Monster.

Just… a page. A fragment. A fleeting glimpse into a consciousness we can never fully comprehend.

Madness here is not presented as spectacle or villainy. Instead, it becomes a deeply human condition, one that exists not only within the institution’s walls but potentially within every one of us. The asylum ceases to function merely as a location and instead becomes a metaphor for the fragile architecture of the human mind. That ambiguity remains one of the film’s greatest strengths.

For all its visual innovation, A Page of Madness is ultimately a remarkably compassionate work. Rather than sensationalising mental illness, it portrays those living within the asylum with empathy and sadness. The janitor’s desperate attempts to reconnect with his wife are driven not by fear, but by love, guilt and hope. Horror emerges not through monsters or violence, but through the devastating possibility that some emotional wounds cannot simply be undone. The film’s own history possesses an almost mythical quality. For decades, A Page of Madness was believed lost.

Like so many silent masterpieces, it seemed destined to survive only through written accounts and fading memories. Then, in the early 1970s, Kinugasa himself discovered a print stored away in his own warehouse. A film concerned with memory, fractured identity and forgotten lives had itself become forgotten before unexpectedly returning to the world. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting fate.

One hundred years after its original release, A Page of Madness continues to resist easy interpretation. It asks audiences to surrender certainty in favour of emotion. To abandon narrative comfort in favour of instinct. To accept that some experiences cannot be neatly explained. Perhaps that is why it still feels so contemporary. Modern psychological horror frequently asks us whether we can trust our senses. Kinugasa asked the same question in 1926.

Long before horror found its vampires.

Long before masked killers stalked suburban streets.

Long before demons possessed isolated cabins.

It found something altogether more unsettling. The terrifying possibility that our greatest fears are not waiting for us in the darkness…

…but quietly taking shape within ourselves.

The Prognosis:

A Page of Madness remains one of the most daring achievements in horror-adjacent cinema—not because it presents terrifying images, but because it dismantles the audience’s certainty. It transforms madness into atmosphere, editing into emotion and silence into psychological unease. A century later, its fractured vision still feels startlingly modern, reminding us that the most enduring horrors have never depended upon monsters. Sometimes, they simply ask us to question whether the world we are seeing was ever real at all.

If you enjoy exploring the forgotten corners of horror history, be sure to visit the Surgeons of Horror archive, where you’ll find retrospectives celebrating landmark works from across the genre’s rich and varied past—from silent cinema and Gothic classics through to modern psychological horror. Every film tells a story. Every anniversary offers a chance to rediscover it.

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Onibaba: The Demon That Haunts Global Cinema

Twenty Years Beneath the River: The Host (2006)

The Woods (2006) Twenty Years Later, Lucky McKee’s Forgotten Folk Horror Fable Feels More Relevant Than Ever

08 Wednesday Jul 2026

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There is something fitting about The Woods having spent much of its existence lost in the shadows.

Released in 2006 after a troubled production and delayed release schedule, Lucky McKee’s Gothic horror film arrived with little fanfare, quietly slipping through the cracks during a period when mainstream horror was dominated by remakes, torture horror and the lingering aftershocks of J-Horror. Audiences largely overlooked it. Critics were divided. The film faded into obscurity.

Yet twenty years later, The Woods feels less like a forgotten oddity and more like a film released a decade too early.

Long before the resurgence of folk horror ushered in films such as The Witch, Hagazussa and You Won’t Be Alone, McKee was already exploring the dark intersection between female experience, folklore and institutional oppression. Viewed retrospectively, The Woods now emerges as a fascinating companion piece to May and a precursor to the righteous fury that would later define The Woman.

Like much of McKee’s work, The Woods is concerned with outsiders.

More specifically, it is concerned with what happens when young women are forced into environments designed to suppress who they are.

Set in 1965 New England, the film follows troubled teenager Heather Fasulo (Agnes Bruckner), who is sent by her estranged parents to Falburn Academy, an isolated girls’ boarding school hidden deep within an ancient forest. Already burdened by familial neglect and simmering anger, Heather quickly discovers that both the school and the surrounding woods harbour secrets far older and more dangerous than she could possibly imagine.

At first glance, The Woods appears to occupy familiar territory. The isolated boarding school, strict authority figures and adolescent anxieties evoke echoes of classic Gothic literature. Yet McKee uses these conventions not merely to generate atmosphere, but to interrogate the social structures that seek to discipline and define young women.

Falburn Academy is less a place of education than one of containment.

The institution demands conformity, obedience and silence. Individuality is discouraged. Dissent is punished. Heather’s rebellious nature immediately places her at odds with both her peers and the faculty, particularly the formidable Headmistress Traverse, played with delicious severity by Patricia Clarkson.

As in May, McKee once again demonstrates an extraordinary empathy for those who exist on society’s fringes. Heather is prickly, defensive and often difficult to like, yet McKee never judges her. Instead, he recognises her anger as a natural response to abandonment, alienation and emotional neglect.

She is not broken.

She is resisting.

This focus on female alienation has become one of McKee’s defining artistic signatures. Across films such as May, The Woods and The Woman, he consistently explores how patriarchal structures marginalise, pathologise and seek to control women who refuse to conform.

In The Woods, these themes manifest through the film’s central metaphor: the forest itself.

The woods surrounding Falburn are not merely a setting. They are a living, breathing presence — ancient, unknowable and overwhelmingly feminine. In contrast to the rigid order imposed by the school, the forest represents instinct, freedom and a primordial power that cannot easily be domesticated.

Nature, McKee suggests, remembers.

And nature resists.

Viewed through a contemporary lens, it is difficult not to see The Woods as an early entry in what would later become the modern folk horror renaissance. Its fascination with isolated communities, feminine power, folklore and the tension between civilisation and the natural world anticipates many of the thematic concerns explored by later filmmakers.

Admittedly, the film is not without flaws.

The screenplay occasionally struggles to balance its competing ideas, while certain narrative revelations feel somewhat underdeveloped. The final act, in particular, leans more heavily into conventional supernatural spectacle than the film’s earlier psychological ambiguity perhaps warrants. There are moments where one senses studio interference, an understandable consequence given the film’s troubled production history.

Yet these shortcomings do little to diminish the film’s considerable strengths.

Visually, The Woods remains a sumptuous piece of Gothic horror. McKee and cinematographer John R. Leonetti cloak the film in autumnal hues, transforming the New England landscape into an intoxicating realm of beauty and menace. The atmosphere is consistently rich, evoking the sensation of wandering through a dark fairy tale where danger lurks just beyond the treeline.

And at its centre stands Agnes Bruckner, delivering one of the strongest performances of her career. Heather’s journey from frightened outsider to self-possessed young woman provides the film with its emotional core, grounding its supernatural elements in genuine feeling.

The Prognosis:

Twenty years on, The Woods deserves rediscovery.

Not merely as an overlooked curiosity within Lucky McKee’s filmography, but as an important stepping stone in the evolution of contemporary folk horror and feminist genre cinema. In many respects, the film feels startlingly prescient, anticipating conversations that horror audiences would only fully embrace years later.

Some films fade because they have nothing left to say.

The Woods disappeared because audiences simply weren’t ready to listen.

  • Saul Muerte