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Top 13 Killer Films of 2025: Horror, Form, and the Politics of Endurance

25 Thursday Dec 2025

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In 2025, horror cinema continued its decisive shift away from spectacle toward structure. Rather than functioning as vehicles for shock, the most compelling works of the year positioned fear as a sustained condition — something embedded within systems, bodies, and histories. These films do not simply represent terror; they organise it, asking spectators to endure rather than react, to interpret rather than consume.

Across this selection, horror emerges as an analytic mode — a means of interrogating authority, inheritance, technology, and perception itself. What follows is not a list of crowd-pleasers, but of films that demonstrate how the genre continues to function as one of contemporary cinema’s most rigorous critical tools.

13. Ash

Ash occupies a transitional space between experimental media art and narrative cinema, foregrounding sensation over causality. Flying Lotus privileges rhythm, texture, and sonic density as primary conveyors of meaning, destabilising conventional narrative comprehension in favour of affective immersion.

The film’s significance lies less in its storytelling than in its refusal of interpretive clarity. Ash treats disorientation as a structuring principle, aligning the spectator’s cognitive uncertainty with the film’s thematic concern for alienation and fragmentation. In doing so, it advances a mode of sci-fi horror that operates phenomenologically, privileging experience over explanation.

Ash (2025): A Sensory Voyage from a Singular Artist

12. The Rule of Jenny Pen

Situated within a tightly regulated institutional space, The Rule of Jenny Pen examines how authority produces horror not through excess, but through routine. The film’s power derives from its attention to systems of control that are normalised rather than questioned, rendering violence bureaucratic and cruelty procedural.

Rather than positioning its antagonist as aberrant, the film implicates the structure itself. Performance and restraint are key formal strategies here: menace accumulates through micro-gestures and withheld action, forcing the spectator to recognise how institutional power becomes most terrifying when it is administered calmly and without spectacle.

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025) – A Chilling Game of Fear and Manipulation

11. Dangerous Animals

Dangerous Animals strips survival horror down to its most elemental components, foregrounding endurance over escalation. The film’s pacing resists the logic of set-piece thrills, instead cultivating a slow accretion of threat that mirrors the bodily exhaustion of its characters.

What distinguishes the film is its refusal to sentimentalise victimhood. Predator and prey are rendered as unstable positions rather than fixed identities, suggesting violence as a latent condition rather than a moral rupture. In this sense, Dangerous Animals operates as an examination of instinctual hierarchy, locating horror within the mechanics of survival itself.

10. Keeper

With Keeper, Osgood Perkins continues his exploration of isolation as a spatial and psychological condition. The film’s austere formalism — marked by elongated takes, sparse dialogue, and an emphasis on negative space — transforms setting into a form of narrative pressure.

Rather than offering mythological coherence, Keeper relies on emotional continuity. Ritual functions not as exposition but as repetition, reinforcing the sense of entrapment that defines the film’s affective core. Horror emerges gradually, not through revelation, but through the suffocating persistence of the unresolved.

Keeper (2025) — Osgood Perkins and the Slow Bleed of Mythic Terror

9. Sun

Sun rejects legibility as an organising principle. Its aggressive visual strategies — saturated colour, disjunctive editing, and sensory overload — position the spectator in a state of sustained assault, aligning form with thematic inquiry.

The film treats identity as unstable and perception as corrosive. Rather than constructing horror through narrative causation, Sun deploys excess as a destabilising force, implicating contemporary media saturation in the erosion of subjectivity. The result is a work that positions horror as experiential collapse rather than narrative event.

Dancing with Demons: SUN Burns Toxic Masculinity Alive in the Neon Abyss

8. Companion

Companion engages with speculative horror through a register of intimacy, examining how technological mediation reshapes emotional labour and consent. The film’s restraint is central to its effectiveness; moments of unease are generated through behavioural shifts rather than overt threat.

By situating its horror within domestic and relational spaces, Companion reframes technological anxiety as an extension of existing power dynamics. The film resists dystopian exaggeration, instead suggesting that the most disturbing futures are those that emerge seamlessly from present-day norms.

Companion (2025): A Sharp Blend of Humour, Tragedy, and Tech Gone Wrong

7. Presence

Defined by subtraction rather than accumulation, Presence employs absence as its primary aesthetic strategy. The film’s minimalism forces the spectator to attend to what is not shown, transforming silence and spatial emptiness into sites of tension.

Supernatural elements are deliberately ambiguous, allowing grief and memory to function as competing explanatory frameworks. In refusing to stabilise meaning, Presence aligns haunting with psychological persistence, suggesting that terror often resides not in invasion, but in endurance.

Steven Soderbergh’s Presence: A Chilling Descent into the Unseen

6. Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back operates through narrative fracture, destabilising temporal and causal coherence as a means of articulating loss. The film demands active spectatorship, requiring viewers to assemble meaning from incomplete information.

Its body horror is not gratuitous but instrumental, externalising the violence of obsession and the desire for restoration. By refusing interpretive closure, Bring Her Back transforms confusion into affect, positioning horror as a confrontation with the limits of understanding.

“Bring Her Back” Is a Brutal, Brain-Bending Horror That Sticks With You

5. The Dead Thing

The Dead Thing frames horror as a byproduct of unresolved trauma, privileging emotional continuity over narrative propulsion. The film’s measured pacing allows grief to permeate its formal construction, rendering terror inseparable from mourning.

What emerges is a portrait of desire as compulsion — a need not to escape pain, but to remain tethered to it. The film’s restraint prevents catharsis, reinforcing the notion that some forms of suffering resist narrative resolution.

The Dead Thing (2025) – A Haunting Descent into Obsession and the Unknown

4. The Long Walk

The Long Walk is structured around repetition as punishment. Its relentless forward motion mirrors the ideological rigidity of the system it depicts, transforming endurance into a mechanism of control.

By denying reprieve, the film implicates the spectator in its logic of attrition. Horror arises not from unpredictability, but from inevitability, positioning authoritarian violence as procedural rather than spectacular. The result is a work of sustained ideological critique.

No Finish Line: The Long Walk Turns Minimalism into Masterpiece

3. Nosferatu

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu approaches adaptation as cinematic archaeology, reconstructing gothic horror through meticulous attention to texture, light, and performance. The film privileges atmosphere over innovation, treating fidelity as a form of rigor rather than limitation.

Its power lies in its seriousness of intent. By resisting irony or revisionist impulse, Nosferatu reasserts the enduring potency of myth when rendered with formal precision. The film functions as both homage and reaffirmation of horror’s classical foundations.

A Haunting Symphony of Shadows: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu

2. Weapons

Weapons fragments narrative authority, refusing to privilege any single perspective or resolution. The film’s structural ambiguity destabilises conventional genre expectations, repositioning horror as epistemological uncertainty.

Rather than delivering answers, Weapons foregrounds absence and contradiction. Its terror emerges through implication, forcing the spectator to confront the discomfort of unresolved meaning. In this sense, the film operates less as a thriller than as an inquiry into perception and belief.

Buried Truths & Walking Away: Why Weapons (2025) Matters

1. Sinners

At the pinnacle of 2025’s horror landscape, Sinners synthesises genre with historical inquiry. The film locates terror within inherited structures — cultural, racial, and familial — positioning horror as an extension of collective memory.

Ryan Coogler’s formal restraint allows atmosphere and performance to carry ideological weight. Rather than externalising evil, Sinners frames it as an embedded legacy, transmitted across generations. The result is a work of rare gravity: a horror film that understands fear as something learned, remembered, and endured.

Sinners (2025) Burns Slow, Strikes Deep: A Southern Gothic Horror for the Soul

  • Saul Muerte

Together (2025) — Love, Loss, and the Horror of Becoming One

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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Michael Shanks’ Together arrives draped in the familiar trappings of modern relationship horror: an isolated move, emotional fractures laid bare, and the suggestion that intimacy itself might be the most dangerous terrain of all. What distinguishes the film—at least initially—is its willingness to literalise emotional dependency through supernatural means, turning the language of co-dependence into something disturbingly corporeal.

The story centres on a couple already fraying at the edges, their relocation to the countryside framed less as fresh start than slow retreat. Shanks smartly uses the rural setting as an amplifier rather than a cause, isolating the pair in a space where grievances echo and silences grow heavy. When the supernatural intrusion arrives, it does not feel like an external threat so much as an acceleration of tensions already present. Love, here, is not broken—it is mutating.

At its best, Together is sharply observant about the quiet violences couples inflict on one another in the name of closeness. The film’s central conceit—an “extreme transformation” of love and flesh—is handled with a commitment to physical horror that aligns it with the recent wave of intimacy-as-body-horror cinema. Shanks stages these moments with an unflinching eye, allowing discomfort to linger rather than rushing toward release. The implication is clear: to merge completely is to erase boundaries, and erasure is rarely benign.

Where the film falters is in its balance between metaphor and mechanics. The supernatural rules remain hazy, and while ambiguity suits the emotional material, it occasionally undermines narrative momentum. There’s a sense that Together knows precisely what it wants to say about relationships, but struggles to sustain tension once its thesis has been made flesh. The final stretch, in particular, leans heavily on repetition, circling its ideas rather than deepening them.

Still, Shanks deserves credit for resisting easy catharsis. Together refuses to offer a clean moral or a redemptive escape hatch. Its vision of love is not romanticised nor outright condemned—it is presented as something dangerous precisely because it is so often mistaken for safety. The horror comes not from the supernatural encounter itself, but from the realisation that devotion, unchecked, can become a kind of possession.

The Prognosis:

Uneven but thoughtful, Together is a grim meditation on intimacy and identity, using body horror to expose the cost of losing oneself in another—even when the invitation sounds like love.

  • Saul Muerte

Keeper (2025) — Osgood Perkins and the Slow Bleed of Mythic Terror

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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Osgood Perkins has never been interested in horror as spectacle. His films drift, linger, and rot from the inside out, favouring mood over momentum and suggestion over shock. Keeper finds the director once again circling his most enduring fixations—the paranormal, the mythic, and the occult—and when he commits fully to these shadowy preoccupations, the results are among his most unsettling to date.

The premise is deceptively simple. Liz and Malcolm retreat to a secluded cabin for an anniversary weekend, a familiar setup that Perkins treats less as narrative engine than ritual initiation. When Malcolm abruptly returns to the city, the film fractures, leaving Liz alone in a space that begins to feel less like a holiday retreat and more like a consecrated site. What follows is not a barrage of scares but a slow accretion of dread, as the cabin reveals itself to be a vessel for something ancient, watchful, and profoundly uninterested in human morality.

Perkins’ greatest strength has always been his willingness to let horror breathe. Like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel, Keeper operates on a frequency closer to folklore than modern genre mechanics. The evil here is not noisy or demonstrative; it is embedded, inherited, and ritualistic. The cabin feels less haunted than kept—maintained by forces that predate Liz’s arrival and will endure long after she’s gone. Perkins paints this world with a vivid but restrained brush, using sound design, negative space, and repetition to suggest a cosmology that remains tantalisingly opaque.

Tatiana Maslany anchors the film with a performance of remarkable control. Isolated for much of the runtime, she carries Keeper through micro-expressions, physical tension, and an ever-shifting relationship to her surroundings. Her Liz is neither hysterical nor heroic; she is observant, increasingly wary, and quietly devastated as the rules of reality begin to slip. Maslany understands Perkins’ rhythms, allowing fear to register not as reaction but as recognition—an awareness that something has always been wrong here.

If the film falters, it’s in its refusal to fully sharpen its final act. Perkins’ devotion to ambiguity, while thematically consistent, occasionally blunts the emotional impact. There are moments where the mythology feels more gestured at than excavated, and viewers seeking narrative closure may find the ending frustratingly elusive. Yet this, too, feels intentional. Keeper is not about defeating evil or escaping it, but about realising one’s place within a larger, indifferent order.

In the context of Perkins’ body of work, Keeper stands as a confident reaffirmation of his obsessions. When he centres his stories on the occult and the mythic, he is capable of conjuring horror that feels timeless, intimate, and deeply unclean. This is a film that seeps rather than strikes, lingers rather than lunges.

The Prognosis:

A haunting, slow-burning descent into ritual and isolation, Keeper confirms Osgood Perkins as one of modern horror’s most singular—and uncompromising—voices.

  • Saul Muerte

The Strangers: Chapter 2 (2025) — When Survival Becomes Sequelitis

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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The Strangers was once terrifying precisely because it refused to explain itself. Masks without motive. Violence without catharsis. Bryan Bertino’s original film understood that randomness is the most unsettling horror of all. The Strangers: Chapter 2, directed by Renny Harlin, represents the franchise’s continued drift away from that ethos—an increasingly desperate attempt to stretch a concept built on nihilistic simplicity into an ongoing mythology it was never designed to sustain.

Picking up immediately after the events of Chapter 1, the film leans hard into continuation. Maya survived. That alone already strains the fatalistic purity of the original premise, but Chapter 2 doubles down: the Strangers are no longer abstract forces of intrusion, but pursuers with intent, persistence, and—most damagingly—narrative obligation. Survival, we’re told, was just the beginning. Unfortunately, so was the creative erosion.

Harlin, a director long associated with bombastic escalation (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger), approaches the material with a franchise mindset rather than a conceptual one. The result is a film that confuses momentum for menace. The stalking becomes repetitive, the violence procedural, and the sense of existential dread gives way to something closer to slasher mechanics. The masks are still there, but the mystery behind them has been hollowed out.

The film’s most baffling misstep arrives midway through with a moment so tonally deranged it threatens to derail the entire enterprise: Maya’s encounter with a boar, framed with portentous symbolism and played as some kind of primal omen. It’s a genuine what-the-hell-am-I-watching beat—the precise moment the film abandons any remaining psychological coherence and wanders off into horror non sequitur. What should have been stripped-back terror curdles into accidental surrealism, as if the film briefly mistakes itself for an arthouse allegory before snapping back to franchise obligation.

The latter half retreats into an even more familiar, and equally uninspired, space: the hospital. The nods to Halloween II are unmistakable—fluorescent corridors, wounded survivor, killer(s) returning to finish the job—but where Carpenter and Rosenthal used the setting to extend a nightmarish inevitability, Chapter 2 uses it as connective tissue. The hospital becomes less a space of vulnerability than a narrative checkpoint, a place where the franchise can pause, reset, and prepare itself for further chapters.

This is the core problem: The Strangers was never meant to be episodic. Its power lay in finality. In meaninglessness. In the suggestion that violence doesn’t continue because it must, but because it can. By forcing continuation, Chapter 2 drains the concept of its philosophical cruelty. The Strangers don’t feel inevitable anymore—they feel contractual.

By the time the film limps to its conclusion, it’s clear that the franchise is running on fumes. What was once cold, terrifying minimalism has become overextended, over-explained, and increasingly absurd. The boar may be the most obvious sign that the film has gone off the rails, but the real damage was done the moment The Strangers decided it needed chapters at all.

The Prognosis:

A sequel that mistakes persistence for purpose, and mythology for menace—proof that some doors, once closed, should stay that way.

  • Saul Muerte

The Home (2025) — Senility, Surveillance, and the Long Memory of Evil

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

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James DeMonaco has always been fascinated by systems—how they rot, how they fail, and how violence seeps through their cracks. From the blunt social allegory of The Purge to the leaner, meaner contours of his later work, DeMonaco’s cinema operates in a state of controlled paranoia, convinced that institutions are not safeguards but incubators. The Home feels like a natural extension of that worldview, a film obsessed with corridors, rules, and the slow revelation that something malignant is being politely maintained behind closed doors.

The premise is deceptively modest. A troubled drifter takes a job at a retirement home. The residents are strange. The caretakers are stranger. The fourth floor is forbidden. This is familiar territory—The Home traffics in the grammar of institutional horror—but DeMonaco filters it through a jittery, conspiratorial lens. The building is less a location than a system of concealment, its bland hallways buzzing with the low-grade menace of withheld information. Every locked door feels like a threat. Every smile reads as camouflage.

The film’s manic energy is largely carried by Pete Davidson, whose casting initially seems like provocation but gradually reveals a sharp, unsettling logic. Davidson plays the protagonist as a man permanently braced for impact, his body language twitchy, his eyes scanning for exits that may or may not exist. He weaponises his familiar cadences—half-joking, half-defensive—until they curdle into something desperate. This is Davidson stripped of irony, and while the performance is uneven, it is never uninteresting. His character’s foster-care trauma bleeds into the film’s institutional dread, turning the retirement home into a warped echo of the systems that failed him as a child.

DeMonaco leans hard into paranoia, sometimes to the film’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment. The Home is thick with suggestion—rituals half-glimpsed, whispers behind doors, glances held a second too long—but it often mistakes accumulation for escalation. The mystery coils inward, doubling back on itself, feeding the sense that the protagonist may be uncovering a conspiracy or simply unraveling under its weight. The film wants to exist in that uncertainty, but its third act can’t quite resist explanation, flattening some of the unease it works so diligently to cultivate.

Visually, the film is austere and oppressive. The retirement home is rendered as a liminal space where time has curdled—neither alive nor dead, neither nurturing nor openly hostile. DeMonaco’s camera prowls rather than observes, peering down hallways like it expects to be noticed. The forbidden fourth floor looms as an almost abstract concept, a vertical metaphor for buried memory and institutional secrecy that the film circles obsessively.

Yet for all its ambition, The Home struggles to fully reconcile its ideas. The social commentary—about neglect, aging, and the expendability of those who fall through institutional cracks—is present but underdeveloped. DeMonaco gestures toward something corrosive and systemic, but the film’s manic intensity sometimes drowns out its own argument. What remains is a mood piece that crackles with unease but lacks the narrative clarity to make its paranoia feel truly revelatory.

The Home is not a failure so much as an overextended diagnosis. It captures the sensation of discovering that the rules you trusted were never meant to protect you, but it can’t quite land the final indictment. Still, in its jittery energy, uneasy performance, and claustrophobic design, it offers a compelling if flawed entry in DeMonaco’s ongoing exploration of American institutions as haunted houses.

The Prognosis:

A film that trembles with suspicion and half-remembered trauma—unnerving in the moment, frustrating in retrospect, and never entirely at ease with its own revelations.

  • Saul Muerte

Wolf Blood (1925) — A Century Later, Still Howling for a Pulse

15 Monday Dec 2025

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One hundred years on, Wolf Blood remains less a horror film than a cinematic curiosity—an early brush with werewolf mythology that never commits to being a werewolf film, a thriller without thrills, and a relic overshadowed entirely by the genre giants that defined its era. Released in 1925, it limps into its centenary not as a pioneering milestone but as an instructive footnote in what not to do with burgeoning horror iconography.

It’s almost unfair, at first glance, to compare Wolf Blood to Nosferatu (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—but the comparison is inescapable. Murnau’s Nosferatu was already reshaping cinematic language, introducing expressionist shadows and spectral dread that embedded itself into the DNA of screen horror. Phantom, released the same year as Wolf Blood, showcased the artistry of Universal’s early macabre sensibilities, anchored by Lon Chaney’s transformative terror and lavish Gothic production design.

Wolf Blood, by contrast, feels timid and strangely uninterested in horror altogether. Where Nosferatu stalked its audience with plague-ridden menace, and Phantom delivered operatic Gothic spectacle, Wolf Blood spends a remarkable portion of its runtime on logging-camp melodrama, business rivalries, and a love triangle so tame it seems allergic to narrative urgency. The title promises lycanthropy; what it delivers is a medical transfusion and a man convinced—psychologically, never literally—that he may be turning into a wolf. No transformation, no bite, no curse. The supernatural is purely theoretical, and the film leans on dream sequences instead of embracing the monstrous.

In the 1920s, horror cinema was still defining its parameters, testing the boundaries of what images could frighten or disturb. Wolf Blood could have been part of that formative experimentation. Instead, it skirts away from genre entirely. Its werewolf premise is never realised; its mood never crosses into the uncanny; and its execution—flat staging, wandering pacing, and little sense of atmospheric danger—renders it a film that neither innovates nor entertains.

Even as proto-werewolf cinema, it is overshadowed by later, more robust entries (Werewolf of London in 1935 and The Wolf Man in 1941), which would properly codify the mythos that Wolf Blood only half-heartedly gestures toward. Its legacy, such as it is, lies in being technically the first feature to reference a form of lycanthropy—though even that badge comes with an asterisk, given that nothing resembling a werewolf appears on screen.

As a centenary artefact, Wolf Blood is valuable mostly in contrast. It reveals how essential atmosphere, visual imagination, and narrative conviction were to early horror’s development—and how barren a horror film becomes without them. While its contemporaries still throb with cinematic life, Wolf Blood feels anaemic, drained of tension and lacking both bite and bark. Forgotten by audiences and film history alike, it stands today as a reminder that not every first is foundational, and not every early effort deserves resurrection.

  • Saul Muerte

Beast of War (2025) — Sharks, Sweat, and Survival at the Edge of Roache-Turner’s Cinema

15 Monday Dec 2025

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Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testosterone, gallows humour, and a gleeful refusal to apologise for excess. Beast of War doesn’t abandon that DNA—it just throws it into the open ocean and strips it back to muscle, salt, and desperation.

Set during World War II, the film strands a group of young Australian soldiers on a shrinking raft in the Timor Sea after their boat goes down. There’s no grand campaign, no strategic victory to be won—just survival. The enemy comes in familiar forms: hunger, exposure, paranoia, and the creeping inevitability of death. Then there’s the shark. Big. Hungry. Patient. Circling like a debt that always comes due.

Roache-Turner approaches the material with the same bruised knuckles and dark grin that have defined his career. This is still a male, sweat-soaked pressure cooker of a film—men snapping at one another, egos flaring, leadership eroding under the sun. But where Wyrmwood leaned into anarchic mayhem, Beast of War opts for attrition. The humour is still there, sharp and irreverent, often surfacing in moments of grim resignation rather than punchline gags. A joke muttered through cracked lips. A laugh that dies halfway out of the mouth.

Visually, the film punches well above its weight. The cinematography makes art out of scarcity: endless blue horizons that feel less like freedom and more like a prison, sun-bleached skin rendered almost raw, the raft shrinking not just physically but psychologically. The production design understands that less is more—the sea doesn’t need dressing, and the raft becomes both stage and coffin. For a low-budget production, Beast of War carries itself with remarkable confidence.

The shadow of Jaws looms large, and Roache-Turner doesn’t pretend otherwise. The shark is used sparingly, often implied rather than shown, its presence felt through ripples, shadows, and the soldiers’ growing dread. More telling is the film’s spiritual debt to Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue—men trapped in open water, slowly realising the ocean doesn’t care about bravery or patriotism. Survival isn’t heroic. It’s ugly. It’s luck and endurance and the will to keep breathing one more minute than the bloke next to you.

Where Beast of War occasionally stumbles is in its character depth. The soldiers are broadly sketched—archetypes rather than fully formed men—and while that serves the film’s hard-boiled tone, it limits its emotional reach. When tempers flare or bodies slip beneath the water, the impact is felt more viscerally than personally. It’s effective, but not devastating.

Still, as a continuation of Roache-Turner’s career, Beast of War feels like a natural evolution. It tempers his bombast without sanding down his instincts, trading chainsaws and zombies for saltwater and teeth, while retaining the same irreverent edge. It’s a lean, muscular survival thriller that knows exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.

The Prognosis:

Beast of War isn’t about winning. It’s about lasting. About men pushed past bravado into something rawer and quieter. A gritty, blood-in-the-water chapter in Kiah Roache-Turner’s ongoing fascination with endurance, masculinity, and monsters—human and otherwise.

  • Saul Muerte

Shelby Oaks (2025) — When Found Footage Loses the Plot

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of found-footage horror, investigative mystery, and internet-age urban legend—a convergence that has produced some of the genre’s most enduring works. Unfortunately, Shelby Oaks doesn’t synthesise these influences so much as stack them on top of one another, resulting in a film that is ambitious in intent but disastrously unfocused in execution.

The central hook is a familiar one: the disappearance of Riley Brennan and her sister’s increasingly obsessive attempt to uncover what happened. On paper, it’s a solid spine—personal stakes fused with creeping dread. In practice, the film never decides what kind of horror story it wants to tell. It borrows liberally from the breadcrumb-style investigation of The Blair Witch Project, the faux-documentary escalation of Lake Mungo, the cursed-media mythology of Sinister, and the online-conspiracy aesthetics of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Rather than coalescing into something cohesive, these elements clash, constantly resetting the tone and momentum.

The found-footage framework, already a precarious format, becomes especially unwieldy here. The film toggles between mockumentary interviews, handheld investigation, archival clips, and conventional narrative scenes without any clear internal logic. What should feel immersive instead feels arbitrarily assembled, as though the film were endlessly re-editing itself in search of an identity it never quite finds. Tension dissipates not because the scares fail, but because the narrative keeps stopping to reinvent its own rules.

Worse still, the mystery at the film’s core grows less compelling the more it is elaborated. Each new revelation muddies the waters rather than deepening the dread, until the supernatural threat becomes a vaguely defined catch-all evil—more concept than presence. The obsession that should drive the story forward instead mirrors the film’s own fixation on referencing better works, mistaking accumulation for escalation.

To Stuckmann’s credit, Shelby Oaks is not without flashes of promise. A handful of isolated sequences suggest a filmmaker with a genuine affection for the genre and an understanding of its visual grammar. But affection alone is not authorship. Without discipline, restraint, or a unifying vision, the film collapses under the weight of its influences.

The Prognosis:

Shelby Oaks feels less like a horror film than a collage—an anxious attempt to be every successful found-footage mystery at once, and in doing so, failing to be anything at all. What begins as a missing-person story ends as a noisy, overextended hot mess, its sense of dread smothered by its own excess.

  • Saul Muerte

Minimalist Horror Goes to the Dogs — and Sometimes Finds Its Bark

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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In the recent wave of minimalist horror — the creeping, patient, anti-spectacle cinema of Skinamarink, In a Violent Nature, The Outwaters, and When Evil Lurks’ quietest passages — fear is less a constructed set piece than a condition. A suffocating stillness. A negative space. A question of what the camera refuses to illuminate. Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy arrives squarely within this movement, committed to the genre’s most ascetic instincts: sparse storytelling, spatial ambiguity, and the eerie potency of silence. What distinguishes Good Boy from its contemporaries, however, is its protagonist — not a faceless killer or traumatised everyman but a 35-pound retriever named Indy, whose performance is so unwavering, so soulful, that he becomes the film’s emotional core and, crucially, its most expressive actor.

Indy’s work here has already made waves. The New York Times’ Erik Piepenburg called his eyes “soft” yet capable of conveying “joy, pathos and, most astonishingly, terror.” Variety’s Peter Debruge praised the film’s ability to “devastate us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.” These aren’t backhanded compliments; they are acknowledgments that Good Boy, for all its supernatural trappings, rests on a profoundly grounded emotional premise — the purity of a dog’s love for its human, and what happens when that human begins to slip into darkness.

The Haunted House as Negative Space

Leonberg’s directing style, shaped by an Eagle Scout pragmatism and an MFA’s sense of craft, embraces an artisanal minimalism. The film’s rural home — long vacant, thick with dust and memory — is not populated by jump scares but by suggestion. Corners breathe. Empty rooms hum with expectancy. The world is haunted not by apparitions but by absence.

This aesthetic places the entire burden of emotional interpretation on Indy, and astonishingly, it works. The dog’s reactions — a lowered head, a whine, a sudden lurch into the dark — become semiotic clues, as if the canine is whispering an alternate plot beneath the human one. In one early scene, Indy freezes at a doorway and refuses to enter, and the hesitation is more chilling than any spectral figure would have been.

Leonberg knows the grammar of minimalist horror: long takes, fixed shots, diegetic silence punctured only by the house’s nocturnal contractions. It’s a mode designed to induce paranoia in the viewer, to make us scrutinise every shadow for signs of the supernatural. The technique is effective — to a point.

The Strength and Strain of Minimalism

Minimalist horror is a delicate architecture. When the premise is razor-thin, pacing becomes everything. Good Boy’s story — Indy senses an invisible presence; Todd succumbs to it — is conceptually strong but narratively sparse. It relies on atmosphere and gesture rather than escalation, and as a result, the film occasionally buckles under the weight of its own simplicity.

Scenes of Indy pacing hallways, staring into voids, or reacting to sounds we never hear create a hypnotic loop that risks repetition. What feels unnerving in the first act begins to sag by the midsection, and although the third act reintroduces urgency, the film’s momentum never fully matches the intensity promised by its premise.

This is not a failure of direction so much as a structural challenge inherent to the genre. When your protagonist cannot speak, when your antagonist remains invisible, and when your environment is deliberately barren, rhythm becomes treacherous terrain. Good Boy is atmospheric, often beautifully so, but the atmosphere sometimes dilates beyond its dramatic utility.

Still, the emotional spine — the bond between Todd and Indy — remains compelling throughout. Their relationship bears the film’s heart, even when the plot stalls.

Indy, the Actor, and Indy, the Idea

To call Indy “remarkably focused” undersells the phenomenon onscreen. He is not a gimmick. He is not comic relief. He is not even, despite the title, simply “a good boy.” He is a full-fledged dramatic participant whose emotional arc mirrors Todd’s psychological unraveling.

We see the supernatural entirely through Indy’s sensory field, and in this choice lies the film’s most unusual power: the horror is not filtered through a traumatised human consciousness but through a loyal animal desperately trying to save someone who does not understand that he is in danger.

Leonberg’s gamble — to build a horror chassis around a dog — pays off because Indy is not performing as a trained animal. He is responding. Feeling. Reacting with an authenticity no human could replicate. If the film unsettles, it is because Indy believes the house is wrong.

Where the Film Lands: Devotion as Haunting

For all its experiments in minimalism, Good Boy is ultimately not about ghosts or curses but about devotion. The supernatural presence may be indistinct, the pacing uneven, the tension sometimes stretched thin, but the thematic clarity never falters: a dog will follow you anywhere, even into the spaces where the living and the dead bleed together.

This is what elevates the film above mere gimmick or novelty. It does not anthropomorphise Indy; it recognises something purer — the instinctive loyalty, the unguarded love, the readiness to protect. In a genre built on human fragility, Good Boy dares to centre an animal’s emotional resilience.

The Prognosis:

Good Boy is a compelling addition to the minimalist horror boom, a film that combines handcrafted genre sensibilities with an unusual and affecting performance from its canine star. While its slender premise occasionally stretches too thin, and its pacing wavers under the constraints of its aesthetic, the film remains memorable for the very thing that makes it risky: its sincerity.

A haunting, heartfelt experiment that sometimes falters but never loses sight of the bond at its core.

  • Saul Muerte

Good Boy streams on Shudder from Nov 21

Del Toro Reanimates a Classic — But Not Without Stitches Showing

15 Saturday Nov 2025

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Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives with the inevitability of myth. Few contemporary filmmakers are as attuned to the poetry of monsters, and fewer still have built an oeuvre so devoted to the wounded, the wondrous, and the lonely. From Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape of Water, del Toro has repeatedly crafted worlds where the grotesque becomes tender and the inhuman becomes a mirror. In many ways, Frankenstein should have been his ultimate expression. And yet, despite moments of breathtaking beauty, the film feels curiously unmoored from the gothic, romantic, and macabre heart of Mary Shelley’s novel.

Oscar Isaac delivers a volatile, almost venomous Victor Frankenstein — a man whose brilliance curdles into arrogance long before his creation opens its eyes. His performance pushes Victor into deliberately detestable territory, stripping away any lingering ambiguity and recasting him as a man driven less by intellectual yearning and more by a narcissistic hunger to be remembered. It is a bold interpretation, if not entirely a sympathetic one. Mia Goth, by contrast, seems misaligned with the film’s emotional wavelength; her Elizabeth feels spectral not in a tragic, Shelleyan sense, but in a way that leaves her displaced, as though the world around her was calibrated to a frequency she cannot quite inhabit.

Visually, however, Frankenstein is nothing short of sumptuous. Del Toro orchestrates frames that glow with painterly chiaroscuro — all bruise-blue moonlight, cathedral shadows, and the soft, funereal glow of candlelit laboratories. The creature’s awakening is a moment of pure cinema, a fusion of tactile prosthetics and operatic staging that reminds us why del Toro remains one of the most distinct visual fantasists working today. His fascination with the act of creation — as miracle, as violation — pulses through every coil of wire and stitched sinew.

But it is precisely here that the film begins to diverge from Shelley’s vision. Del Toro embellishes the narrative with new mythologies, symbolic digressions, and philosophical asides that, while intriguing, often pull the story away from its emotional core. Shelley’s novel is a haunting meditation on responsibility and alienation, its tragedy rooted in the fragile bond between creator and creation. Del Toro’s additions, though imaginative, diffuse this intimacy. The more the film expands outward — into backstory, lore, and ornate world-building — the further it drifts from the stark, romantic terror that makes Frankenstein endure.

This impulse is not new in del Toro’s cinema. His career is defined by a tension between narrative simplicity and imaginative excess. His greatest works embrace that balance: the aching solitude of The Devil’s Backbone, the fairy-tale fatalism of Pan’s Labyrinth, the delicate monstrosity of The Shape of Water. In Frankenstein, however, the scales tip slightly too far toward embellishment. The result is a film that is still enthralling to behold, but one that sometimes mutates the story so much that its thematic marrow — creation as curse, loneliness as inheritance — becomes diluted.

Still, even when it falters, del Toro’s Frankenstein contains moments of exquisite power: the creature standing beneath a storm-lit sky, grappling with consciousness; Victor, trembling not with triumph but with the first stirrings of dread; the quiet spaces where the monster reaches toward a world that will not reach back. These sequences remind us of what del Toro understands so deeply — that monsters are never the true horrors, but rather reflections of what humanity refuses to confront.

The Prognosis:

Frankenstein may not be the definitive adaptation its pedigree suggests. But as a work of del Toro’s imagination — a meditation on creation, isolation, and the fantastical — it is still compelling, still resonant, and still marked by the unmistakable touch of a filmmaker who has spent his career searching for beauty in the broken.

  • Saul Muerte