Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In Evil Dead Burn, Alice is expected to keep proving her loyalty to her dead husband, Will. At the family meal after his funeral, his father, Edgar, objects to her missing wedding ring and the clothes she wore to the service. Those complaints make her appearance into evidence against her. His family treats her distance … Read more
Talamasca: The Secret Order spent late August near the top of Netflix’s TV chart, which is a strange fate for a show its own network had already given up on. AMC aired the six-episode gothic thriller last fall, canceled it in March, and moved on. The odd part is what the Netflix numbers prove. The … Read more
Somewhere in the last stretch of The Strangers: Chapter 2, you start to notice the movie is not going to end. Not really. It just stops, mid-chase, with the door left open for another film. If that feels like a pause instead of an ending, there is a concrete reason, and it has nothing … Read more
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 arrived on Netflix this month carrying two numbers that do not belong together: 17 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and 82 percent from audiences. That gap is not a rounding error. It tells you how this franchise works. The basics first, since people come looking for them. It … Read more
Backrooms does not end with a rescue. Clark walks into the yellow halls and stops coming back, and the therapist who follows him out again is not the woman who went in. If you came for the short version, that is it. But the ending only lands once you accept what the film has … Read more
Every Scream movie holds up a mirror to the horror of its moment. The 1996 original mocked the rules of the slasher while obeying every one of them. The recent requels went after legacy sequels and the possessive fans who guard them. Scream 7 reaches for the sharpest idea the series has had in … Read more
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy started streaming on HBO Max on July 3, and anyone pressing play expecting bandages and a cursed pharaoh is about to be thrown. There is no shambling corpse in wrappings here. Cronin, the director of Evil Dead Rise, has called his version “one part Poltergeist, one part Seven,” and that … Read more
Bear gets exactly what he wishes for. The tragedy is that it works. He asks a cheap occult trinket to make the girl he loves want him more than anyone in the world, and it obeys him to the letter, which turns out to be a kind of murder. If you are here because … Read more
The scariest movie on HBO Max right now cost less than a used car and barely shows you its monster. Undertone, a tiny Canadian horror film that slipped into theaters in March and reached the platform on June 25, spent its first weekend as the most-watched thing on the service. It works because it understands … Read more
Black Phone 2 is now streaming, and it sends Finney and Gwen up against a Grabber who is no longer quite human. The sequel ends with a frozen lake, three vengeful ghosts, and a phone call that recasts the whole story. If you want the ending untangled, here is what actually happens, what the twist … Read more