On Why I Did Not Watch Bring Her Back; Or, if there is a navel in which to gaze, I will plumb its goddamn depths. (Sorry about it, Leila!)
I’ve been having a stupid amount of anxiety about whether or not to watch a movie. Not life-altering anxiety, not “keeps me up at night” anxiety, but a persistent, gnawing discomfort that feels wildly disproportionate to the actual stakes. It’s a horror film. I could watch it, or I could not watch it. That should be the end of the decision. Except there’s this nasty little edgelord gatekeeper who lives somewhere deep in my heart, and he’s been working working real hard to make me feel like shit, insisting that real horror fans don’t get to be squeamish, that there are no safe words when it comes to the genre, that opting out means I’m a fraud.
The movie is Bring Her Back, the follow-up to Talk to Me by the Philippou brothers. It’s a grief story wrapped in a resurrection ritual with demons and possession and traumatized foster children caught in the middle. Sally Hawkins gives a performance that’s apparently devastating. I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, thinking maybe knowing what happens would make it easier to watch. It confirmed my instinct to pass. The thing is, if this were just schlock, I could dismiss it easily. But people whose opinions I respect are saying it’s great, emotionally resonant, beautifully crafted. That it earns its horror. And somehow that makes it worse, because skipping a well-crafted, emotionally intelligent horror film feels like admitting I can’t handle what the genre is capable of at its best. Like I only want horror when it’s safely in the realm of fantasy, when it’s vampires and monsters and things that don’t exist. Not when it’s about the actual horrors people inflict on each other, especially on children.
I’ve spent years forcing myself to watch things because I thought that’s what being a serious horror fan required. I sat through films that left me feeling wrung raw and emotionally eviscerated (Martyrs, Irreversible, A Serbian Film, Funny Games, etc.) because I didn’t want to seem fragile or squeamish. I pushed through content that made me miserable because I was afraid of being dismissed as someone who couldn’t handle it. And maybe some of that was useful, expanding my tolerance and understanding of what horror can do. But a lot of it was just needless punishment, this idea that suffering through something proves your dedication to the genre. Like horror fandom is a test of endurance rather than a love of storytelling. But I’ve gotten tired of treating horror like something I have to survive. Somewhere along the way I forgot I’m supposed to actually enjoy this, and I don’t want my horror to feel punitive anymore. As a friend observed on Facebook, “we don’t have to continually poke the tender spots.” Amen.
There’s probably something gendered in this anxiety too. Women in horror spaces often feel like we have to prove we can handle anything, that we’re not “too sensitive” or easily shocked. We can’t be the ones who look away or cover our eyes or admit that something was too much. That confirms every stereotype about women being weak or unsuited for the genre. So we perform toughness, we laugh at things that aren’t funny, we act unbothered when we’re very much bothered. And maybe I’ve been doing that for so long that I’ve forgotten it’s okay to just… not.
I write about horror publicly. On my blog, in my reviews (whether what I am reviewing is horror-related or not!), and I even have a little column in a horror magazine now. I’ve built some kind of authority, however teeny tiny, on my ability to engage with the genre thoughtfully. And there’s this fear that admitting I won’t watch something undermines that authority. Like, I lose credibility, like people will question whether I’m qualified to write about horror if I’m picking and choosing what I can handle. But that’s the edgelord talking again, insisting that real expertise means consuming everything indiscriminately, that boundaries are weakness. And you may be tempted to say “Sarah, it’s not that deep,” to which I would invite you to fuck off because I hate it when people say that. It is that deep. It is always that deep.
So I’m not watching Bring Her Back, at least not right now. Not during October when I’m already watching or reading or listening to something horror-related every single day and writing about it immediately afterward. As someone who’s more of a reader than a movie watcher, this much screen time is exhausting. And I’m already doing so much in general in terms of blogs, reviews, magazine columns, books (in additon to my day job I’ve had for twenty years, which is a fraught situation unto itself because there’s a TBD expiration date on it); work that never feels like enough, no matter how much I produce. I can’t feel okay without creating, but oftentimes creating doesn’t actually make me feel okay either. It’s an impossible trap.
Maybe that’s what this anxiety is actually about. My mother and grandparents used to call me lazy and lackadaisical. They’re all dead now. They never saw any of the things I’ve accomplished, and they won’t see what I accomplish next. But I’m still trying to prove them wrong anyway, still measuring myself against voices that can’t hear me anymore. I will apparently be proving myself to the dead until I myself am dead. Maybe that gatekeeper living in my chest isn’t really about horror fandom at all. Maybe he’s just an echo of something older and even more devastating, a voice insisting that no matter what I accomplish, I’m still fundamentally shiftless, useless, and worthless.
Maybe I’ll watch this film eventually, or maybe I won’t. But for now, I’m giving myself permission to say not this one, not today!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
[Whoops, somehow posted this a day ahead of time again! Dangit! Oh well!]
I had a movie on my list that I’d been dreading, one of those films I felt obligated to watch as a “serious horror fan” but knew would leave me feeling scraped raw. Thinking about not watching it was stressing me out almost as much as thinking about actually going through with it! But life’s too short for trauma porn masquerading as art, so I bailed and put on The Monkey instead. I was stupidly worked up about this dilemma, and ultimately needed something goofy, something that might make me laugh.
The first three minutes are perfect. Adam Scott stumbles into a pawn shop, bloodied and desperate to get rid of a wind-up toy monkey, and before he can finish the transaction, the monkey triggers a brief, brutal wave of carnage. It’s absurd and shocking and sets up exactly what kind of movie this is aiming for. Then we jump back to meet twin brothers Hal and Bill as teenagers, discovering their dead father’s monkey in the attic and accidentally unleashing its power. Tatiana Maslany shows up as their mother, and she’s the only person in the entire film who seems like an actual human being. She’s irreverent and sharp and so good in her limited screen time that it makes you wish the whole movie had been about her instead. But she’s gone quickly, and what’s left is a parade of increasingly cartoonish deaths (heads exploding, bodies electrocuted in pools, the kind of Final Destination excess that’s fun the first few times and then just repetitive) strung together by characters who feel like sketches rather than people.
Theo James plays adult Hal and Bill after a time jump, and he’s too effortlessly handsome and composed to sell either version convincingly. Hal is supposed to be an anxious, absent father trying to reconnect with his son while being haunted by this cursed monkey, but James can’t quite shake his natural suave energy. Bill is supposed to be unhinged and bitter, blaming Hal for their mother’s death because Hal was born first and supposedly “ate more of the mother’s placenta”, which is actually kinda hilarious. But the movie never fully commits to being that kind of dark comedy. It can’t decide if it wants to lean into the ridiculous or explore generational trauma with any sincerity, so it ends up doing neither particularly well. I didn’t hate it, but I also couldn’t tell you much about the second half. It was fine. It made me chuckle a few times. That’s all I needed!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
In Wake Wood, a grisly tale of grief unfolds in the aftermath of a devastating loss. When their young daughter Alice is brutally killed by a dog, Patrick (played by Littlefinger), a veterinarian, and his wife Louise retreat to the Irish countryside, hoping distance might soften their unbearable pain. Nestled in a remote, rural pocket where wind turbines and old-world mysteries coexist, each casting long shadows over the other, they discover an extraordinary possibility: an ancient pagan ritual that can briefly return the dead, offering families three days to say a proper goodbye.
Peter Pettigrew is Arthur (sorry, but that’s how I best know this actor), a village elder familiar with the community’s hidden, ancient rhythms and traditions passed down through generations. When Arthur reveals the ritual that could momentarily restore their daughter, the couple sees a lifeline through their overwhelming grief. But grief makes desperate people careless, and they promptly and spectacularly ignore the ritual’s carefully maintained rules.
I felt for them, truly. But good grief, did they fuck things up. Their flagrant violation threatens an intricate system that has sustained this community for generations. This isn’t just about one grieving couple’s moment of weakness, it’s about shitting on a delicate social contract that has kept something ancient and dangerous at bay. Ooh, that made me so mad!
Though never gratuitous or grotesque, there are scenes that are definitely graphic and visceral – the brutal dog attack that kills Alice, the ritual’s gory preparation involving a recently deceased body, Alice’s final rampage through the village, and probably lots of other stuff too. There were a lot of carcasses, I guess it what I am saying. Just a small forewarning, if that bothers you. But for those drawn to horror that thrums with the pulse of ancient traditions and buried secrets, Wake Wood delivers a perfectly serviceable dark, twisted tale of grief and consequence.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I have a deep and abiding fondness for stories where humans come face to face with the depths of the unknown and should-not-be-known. The ocean floor and deep space have always been perfect hunting grounds for this kind of existential dread. Think Event Horizon‘s hellish spaceship, Leviathan‘s mutating deep-sea creatures, or The Thing‘s parasitic alien infiltration. These are stories that understand the trespassing of somewhere we don’t belong, each explores the same terrifying question about what happens when human curiosity crests beyond the boundaries of safety and understanding. When someone whispers with that specific tremor of dread, “we’re not supposed to be here,” the words carry the raw electricity of human vulnerability. It’s a moment of existential recognition. Our fragile human consciousness brushes against something vast and incomprehensible. We are small. We are temporary. And somewhere in the darkness, something ancient and indifferent watches.
When author Ryan LaSala (The Honeys) posted about Underwater on Threads, sharing that, “I love this movie and I don’t think anyone has ever looked better in a film than Kristen Stewart and her little buzz cut and big oil rig worker jacket,” I thought, “huh.” But I saw that was in response to another post that this was a pretty good movie that came out five years ago, with an actual Cthulhu, and no one saw it. OK, now my interest was got! Intrigued by the promise of an overlooked cosmic horror, I dove in.
The film drops viewers immediately into chaos at a deep-sea drilling facility seven miles beneath the ocean’s surface. Kristen Stewart plays Norah, a mechanical engineer who becomes an unlikely survivor when the Kepler Station starts imploding around her. Pretty sure this happens not even ten minutes into the film, so it’s quite intense fairly early on. With escape pods gone and survival seeming impossible, she and a handful of other workers must trek across the ocean floor to another station, all while wearing pressurized suits that are barely designed for the journey.
What starts as a disaster film quickly becomes a creature feature, with the survivors discovering they’re not alone in the murky depths. The monsters are grotesque and menacing, with a finale that hints at something much larger and more terrifying lurking in the ocean’s unexplored regions. It’s a film that understands the primal fear of the unknown, moving at a breakneck pace with minimal character development but maximum tension.
I mentioned to Yvan that critics thought the film was derivative. He laughed and said, “The movie-going public loves ‘derivative’!” Hee hehehe, catty Yvan! But I don’t think he is wrong, his offhand comment spoke to how we return to the same narrative wells, finding comfort in tales that echo our deepest fears, in stories that remake our deepest anxieties with just enough variation to feel both strange and familiar. It feels true to me, anyway. I don’t know if this film was great, but I don’t care. I will always love a film like this.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Some days we don’t have time or energy for full-length features, so we ferret out those little scraps of weirdness and ephemera that float across the bizarre wonderland of the internet. Today’s post is a grab bag of quick, bite-sized terrors: trailers, shorts, lists, and random video discoveries!
“Gacha Gacha” transforms the collectible joy of capsule toys into a twisted horror premise.
“Portrait of God” uses a school project as a vehicle for existential terror.
In “Other Side of the Box,” a seemingly cozy holiday moment turns horrific with the arrival of a gift.
Scooby Doo was my first foray into being scared and led to my love of horror! Here’s a bit of its history.
On Tasting History, a “very thirsty” chicken paprikash dish from Dracula! Which I am totally going to make.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Michele Soavi’s The Church is a mess of medieval massacres and modern-day demonic possession, built on a premise that sounds far more compelling than its actual execution. The film opens with Teutonic Knights brutally slaughtering an entire village accused of devil worship, burying their bodies in a mass grave and constructing a massive cathedral directly over their corpses, a not-so-subtle metaphor about the Church’s historical violence and attempts to cover up its sins.
Enter Evan, the librarian who is late to work on his first day and immediately demonstrates he has no business being in this extraordinary job. When a woman is restoring a wild, Bosch-like fresco, he asks about her work, and her blasé “meh, it’s whatever” shrug in response, perfectly encapsulates how little these characters appreciate their uniquely weird positions. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking at old books,” Evan whines, which is hilarious coming from a medieval church librarian. Sir, what exactly did you think this job would entail?
The film traps a wonderfully absurd collection of visitors inside the church when demonic possession takes hold: a school group on an outing, two motorcyclists heading to a concert, a bridal magazine photo shoot, and a collection of random tourists. Among them, one particular elderly woman emerges as the film’s most delirious highlight. She chirps to her husband Heinrich about “groovy biscuits” and drags him up some obscure stairs with a gleeful “I have a FAB idea!” Somehow, Heinrich loses his head (how exactly? The film never quite explains), and suddenly she’s enthusiastically bonging the church bell using his decapitated head.
Meanwhile, baby-faced Asia Argento, who looks about 10 but is sneaking out to clubs and hanging with older boys, adds another layer of weirdness to this already bizarre narrative. As the church’s self-defense mechanism activates, the film becomes a psychedelic hallucination of Italian horror, with the Goblin score and wild visual setpieces barely holding together a narrative that feels like a nightmare projected through a kaleidoscope of blood and baroque architecture. It’s the kind of Italian horror that’s infinitely more interesting to discuss than to actually watch, with its convoluted plot about an ancient evil waiting to be unleashed, jumbled references to historical trauma, and absolutely zero logic.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
A few nights ago in a Facebook chat, the man who was extremely formative in my weird upbringing recommended From Beyond, after sharing his disbelief that I’d never seen Reanimator before. Decades earlier, he’d been my mom’s boyfriend, the guy who showed my sister and I Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, gifted me an Aleister Crowley Thoth tarot deck and Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages when I was 11, and always kept a standing credit the the used bookstore he worked at for me to pick out the most lurid horror paperbacks. These memories and experiences feel like a weird, wonderful cultural inheritance, a way of understanding the world through its strangest, most unsettling stories. To sum up, he is the major answer to WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS, SARAH and From Beyond shot to the top of my list.
Being on a bit of Jeffrey Combs kicks, I was all in. Here, he plays Crawford Tillinghast, a twitchy scientist working with the monumentally creepy Dr. Pretorius on the Resonator, a machine that reveals creatures normally invisible to humans. One experimental session goes horrifically wrong, with Pretorius getting decapitated and Tillinghast landing in a psychiatric ward. Enter Barbara Crampton’s Dr. Katherine McMichaels, who springs Tillinghast to investigate the machine, accompanied by Ken Foree as Detective Bubba Brownlee.
The Resonator emits a kind of perverse, horny energy, unleashing extremely inappropriate behaviors in these serious people of science with a whole bunch of gross, grandiose talk about the exquisite sensuality of the mind and so on and so forth …although actually the late Dr. Pretorius was quite the degenerate lech before the machine got ahold of him, with a whole closet full of leather and a collection of sleazy home video tapes, and worst of all an uncapped tube of red lipstick that Dr. McMichaels finds and paints her mouth with. Out of all the disgusting things in the movie, I think that old-uncapped-and-open-to-the-elements lippie is what I found most stomach-churning.
The practical effects are a grotesque carnival of gloppy, slimy transformations (I read that the slime was edible?!) Combs goes from twitchy scientist to a brain-munching nightmare, all wild-eyed and unhinged. Crampton’s transformation is even more ridiculous, from buttoned-up no-nonsense psychiatrist to a scarlet-lipped leather lady, reveling in depravity. All in all, it was a blast, a specific strain of gonzo horror existing at the intersection of Lovecraftian imagination and cinematic audacity. Give me more!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I knew Poison for the Fairies was about two little girls playing at witchcraft and spinning dark fantasies, but I wasn’t prepared for the exquisite, macabre dreamscape Carlos Enrique Taboada creates. Set in the golden afternoon light of 1965 Mexico City, the film feels like a Charlie Brown cartoon reimagined by a gothic fairy tale witch, where adult faces are almost entirely absent, glimpsed only in death, and fragmented, shadowy moments.
Veronica, an orphaned girl raised on supernatural stories by her caretaker, befriends Flavia, a privileged new student. . Their relationship is a weird, intense, shapeshifting thing; Veronica manipulating, Flavia getting pulled deeper into her invented world. And their clothes! They change outfits constantly, like they’re performing different versions of themselves with each scene. Their costumes shift like mood rings, each outfit a new character in their strange ritual.
This isn’t horror, exactly. It’s not even pure fantasy. It’s something more complicated: a story about how kids use imagination to survive loneliness. Veronica has invented this entire witch persona as a way to have power, to be something more than just a kid without parents, something powerful and mysterious. Flavia becomes her reluctant participant, her almost-unwilling apprentice, caught between fascination and fear.
The cinematography is remarkable in its deliberate simplicity. The camera stays perpetually at child height, making the adult world feel distant and irrelevant. Everything looks like a memory, hazy light filtering through dusty windows, deep shadows in corners, each frame composed like a folk tale illustration, tableau vivants of childhood’s darker impulses.
What emerges is less a supernatural narrative and more an exploration of how young girls might reclaim power through storytelling. Veronica transforms herself from lonely orphan to potential witch, creating a mythology that gives her more than the real world offers. It’s about imagination, invention, and survival.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
With cover art by Alex Eckman-Lawn, whose darkly playful, wondrously unsettling collage work also graces my own book of macabre art, I was predisposed to love One Yellow Eye before I even read the first page. Eckman-Lawn’s work has this quality of being simultaneously horrifying and oddly comforting, like a postcard from the void that shows up just when you need it most, with your own skull peeking out to say hello. Turns out the cover is a perfect match for what’s inside: a heartbreaking, obsessive love story dressed up in zombie apocalypse trappings.
British scientist Kesta Shelley has always been more comfortable peering through microscopes than navigating human relationships, until she met Tim – her cheerleader, her best friend, her absolute everything. When a devastating virus sweeps through London in its final days, Tim becomes one of the last infected. While the government rounds up and destroys all the zombies, Kesta manages to keep her husband hidden and sedated in their spare bedroom, handcuffed to the radiator, pumped full of drugs while she desperately searches for a cure. Kesta is reckless, selfish, making spectacularly dangerous decisions that put everyone around her at risk. She treats her colleagues and best friend like shit, using them as means to an end. And somehow Radford made it all believable, and empathetic and human to me.
I loved Kesta’s devotion to Tim, to science, to her singular, self-sacrificial quest. Yes, she’s infuriating and arguably torturing Tim by keeping him alive in this state. Yes, the science might be questionable (or maybe meticulously researched, I genuinely don’t know), and the security around this supposed top-secret government lab is laughably lax. But watching her mark anniversaries and birthdays with Tim’s yellow eyes staring listlessly back at her, telling him stories from their past while he’s chained up and barely conscious, it’s devastating. I could have read a book twice as long. The daily routines with Tim, the dense technical details about virus origins and research, Kesta’s completely neglected self-care, her interactions with lab mates, the way she keeps blowing off Jess, all of it fascinated me. The repetition that some readers found tedious worked for me because that’s what obsession looks like. It adds realism to Kesta’s desperation, making the science feel grounded even when her choices spiral into absolute madness.
I wish we’d gotten more of Tim when he was actually Tim, more concrete reasons to understand what made their relationship so special, beyond people telling us it was. Some plot threads (what happened to that journalist storyline?) just disappear. But none of that bothered me. The ending raises haunting questions about choice and agency: what does the virus want versus what’s left of the person trapped inside it? Can you separate the two? This is less about zombie survival logistics and more about grief warping someone beyond recognition, about how far you’d go to save the person you love most, even when “saving” might be the cruelest thing you could do to them.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
EDITED TO ADD: Le whoopsie, I hit “publish” instead of “schedule,” so this one is a day early…!
I’ve somehow both managed to completely forget the original version of this story, the book by Florence Engel Randall published in 1976, and also get it mixed up with The Owl Service by Alan Garner, which came almost a decade before in 1967. There’s something about British young adult supernatural fiction from that era, all misty woods and unexplained phenomena, that forever gets all mixed-up/remixed in my head.
I never saw the 1980 Disney adaptation of The Watcher in the Woods, but I have a feeling maybe I should have started there. This seems to be another remake that exists seemingly because someone thought, “Let’s do it again, but worse!”
The story follows an American family summering in the Welsh countryside, with eldest daughter Jan, a standard sulky teenager, immediately sniffing out something unsettling in the local atmosphere. Anjelica Huston is here, which means at least something interesting might happen. She at least looks interesting, all mournful and acid-tongued, dressed in black, wandering around the property and being generally witchy and weird. She plays Mrs. Aylwood, the mysterious manor owner, a woman weighed down by a decades-old loss, her entire existence shaped by the moment her daughter vanished without explanation. Or rather, I think that’s what they are going for. Most of the time Mrs. Aylwood’s spooky claims sound more like the ramblings of a dotty neighbor that you simultaneously indulge and edge away from every time you run into them.
The film introduces a plague doctor backstory that feels like it wandered in from a completely different film. Something about a doctor burned alive after trying to help a nearby village during the Black Plague, now haunting the woods. The town celebrates an annual festival commemorating their “miraculous” survival of the plague – a local tradition that feels more like collective delusion than historical truth. A midnight eclipse hovers at the story’s edges, promising supernatural significance but delivering nothing more than a cheap plot device. There’s a sense the filmmakers are trying to ground the ghost story in historical detail, but instead of creating intrigue, they’ve just made everything feel frustratingly vague and muddled and disconnected. The plot stumbles aimlessly, never finding its bearings or purpose. What could have been a moody, atmospheric exploration of local folklore becomes instead the equivalent of a youth group haunted house or a church basement Halloween party, tepid and toothless.
All of the images in this post are Anjelica Huston-centric because she was literally the only thing I cared about in this dumb enterprise.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
