Horror

Every family that has ever made a film together has had the same argument at the same table, and Family Movie is the first one I know of to sell tickets to it. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick direct, with Dan Beers writing the concept they sparked to; their children Sosie and Travis Bacon act; and the conceit is a low-budget horror film about a family making a low-budget horror film, which is either the laziest idea in the world or the most honest, depending on whether you have ever had to cast your own cousin because the day rate was zero. It premiered at SXSW on a Friday the 13th, in the Narrative Spotlight, with Gersh selling and no distributor yet attached at the time Deadline wrote it up. Deadline loved it. AwardsWatch gave it a D+. I find both verdicts defensible and the gap between them more interesting than either, because the gap is exactly where micro-budget meta films live. ...

Jason Blum has a rule for cheap horror that every producer in this tier can recite with a drink in hand: you may have a big cast, many locations, or heavy practical effects, and you may choose two. Nicholas Pineda, making his first feature, Infirmary, could afford one. He chose the building. Everything else in this production, the form, the cast size, the story, even the title, is downstream of that single pick, and the result, a found-footage night shift in a psych ward shot entirely inside a real abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, premiered at FrightFest in the UK and is now streaming on Shudder. I have not read a cleaner demonstration of the one-rule constraint this year, so let me walk it in the order the decisions were actually made, because the order is the lesson. ...

Follow the budgets and you can read Adam Wingard’s whole career like a bank statement. Mumblegore features made for around $75,000. Then You’re Next and The Guest, million-dollar festival darlings that turned into commercial hits. Then a decade in the land of intellectual property, a Blair Witch, a Death Note, and two Godzilla-and-Kong machines carrying budgets upward of $150 million for Warner Bros. And then, in May 2024, the trade announcement that reverses the whole curve: Wingard walks away from directing Godzilla x Kong: Supernova to make Onslaught, an original action-horror picture with his oldest writing partner, Simon Barrett, for A24 and Aaron Ryder’s company, at $15 million. From one hundred fifty to fifteen: a director buying back his own name at ninety percent off. ...

Blumhouse dropped The Last Kiss onto digital platforms as a surprise for the Halloween season, which is the modern genre economy’s way of saying: here is a small one, find it if you can. Tant pis for the surprise strategy, because what the director’s press reveals is a film made with considerably more design intention than the release pattern suggests. Yoko Okumura, directing and co-writing from a script by Krystal and Alon Zivs that the company brought to her, has the hook every teen slasher prays for: a girl whose kisses show her how the kissed will die. Mckenna Grace leads; the kills are, in Okumura’s word, predictive. A slasher where the heroine sees the murder before the murderer commits it is a mystery engine and a horror engine bolted together, and the interesting part is how deliberately the machine around it was built. ...

Christopher Smith may be the most useful case study in British genre cinema, precisely because he refuses to become a brand. SciFiNow’s FrightFest notice makes the point with his own filmography: the tube-tunnel debut Creep, the office-outing splatter comedy Severance, the looping seabound puzzle Triangle, the plague procession of Black Death, hauntings, possessions, a Christmas film, and now Spider Island, an eco-horror comedy that premiered at FrightFest on the 30th of August. Two decades inside genre without repeating an idea is a career strategy with a real cost, since every film must find its audience from scratch, and a real reward, which is that nobody can predict him. The new one returns him to the Severance register: a protected Pacific island, a greenwashed luxury hotel called the Pearlhaven, thirty imported influencers, and a population of pack-hunting spiders whose cave habitat has been plugged with smuggled concrete and who have relocated, sensibly, into the hotel’s air conditioning. ...

Follow the causal chain, because it is a clean one and it ends somewhere instructive. Eli Roth makes Borderlands for a studio at a budget north of one hundred million US dollars; the studio interferes; the film grosses thirty-three million worldwide. Roth responds the way a certain kind of veteran responds, and honestly the way I respect: he builds a smaller house where nobody can tell him what to do. The banner is called The Horror Section, and its first picture, Ice Cream Man, a Pied Piper slasher in which a stranger’s sweets turn a suburban town’s children into killers, was made as an economical indie for around five million US dollars, released through Iconic Events. From one hundred million and no control to five million and total control: that is the entire argument for independence, executed by a man with the name recognition to pull it off in one move. ...

Take one snowed-in summer camp, a reclusive final girl, an experimental filmmaker with a franchise pitch due, a bucket of fried chicken with assorted dipping sauces, and a killer who wears a box fan for a face, and you have, precisely, Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature. The title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, does the work of a mission statement: it names the two engines of the slasher form and promises to take them seriously as subjects rather than as fuel. Schoenbrun arrives at this after We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the low-budget debut that earned praise from Scorsese among others, and I Saw the TV Glow, and the trajectory matters, because this is what happens when a filmmaker who grew up inside genre stops quoting it and starts interrogating it under studio lights of their own design. ...

Bref, recreating the past is usually an expensive trap. When a director says they want to set their film in the 1970s, the producers immediately start sweating. Period cars, period wardrobe, period licensing—it drains a budget faster than a bad storm. So, how did the Cairnes brothers manage to build a flawless 1977 American late-night television broadcast on a modest $2 million budget? They did what all great independent filmmakers do: they contained the madness. ...

Modern horror is too often built in post-production. Directors rely on the invisible hand of digital effects to generate dread, rather than building it into the physical space. Ari Aster’s Hereditary operates differently. Aster and his production designer, Grace Yun, understood that true terror does not come from what is hiding in the shadows; it comes from realizing that the walls themselves have been constructed to trap you. The 1:12 Scale Puzzle The film heavily features intricate dioramas created by the protagonist, Annie Graham. To execute this, the production brought in Toronto-based visual effects artist Steve Newburn and his team. They constructed these miniatures at a strict 1:12 scale—the industry standard for traditional dollhouses. C’est pratique. If time ran short, they could source compatible, pre-made components. ...

A film frame is a prison. It dictates exactly what the audience is permitted to see, and by extension, what they are forced to imagine lurking just outside the borders. Most directors treat the aspect ratio as a passive window. But in Censor, Prano Bailey-Bond and cinematographer Annika Summerson transform the frame itself into an active mechanism of psychological torture. Anatomy of the Craft: The Shrinking Cell In the final third of the film, as the protagonist Enid descends into a complete psychological breakdown, the film’s visual language violently shifts to mirror her subjectivity. The most terrifying trick Bailey-Bond employs is a dynamic, painfully slow-moving aspect ratio change. ...