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Halloween Horror Nights, for those unaware, is a seasonal event where Universal Studios Hollywood, and the other parks around the world I assume, redecorate their parks with horror themed attractions, mazes, and wandering characters for the entertainment of guests during special evening hours. It is wildly successful, with packed attendance, and greatly anticipated by members of the horror community. I have attended twice, once paying for the more expensive admission that allowed you to skip the usual lines as without that the wait for the mazes stretched more than an hour each. I thoroughly enjoyed each visit but find that the two-and-a-half-hour drive to get there a little much for the event.

Blumhouse

Nikki Freeman is a character portrayed by Oscar-nominated actor Inde Navarette in 2026’s breakout horror hit Obsession. In the film Nikki is enslaved by a magically empowered wish, becoming obsessed with Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnson), eventually leading to multiple deaths by the story’s end. Produced for less than a million dollars and grossing at the global box offer over half a billion dollars Obsession is a certified blockbuster.

With a film that successful and one that was distributed by Universal, there could be no doubt that Obsession would play a part in 2026 Halloween Horror Nights, but it is not a film that lends itself to easy adaptation to the park’s event. Bear’s home, where much of the film’s unsettling events transpire, is not something that would make a suitable horror maze, and the film release in May of 2026 would give the park little time to design and construct the maze, something the designers of Halloween Horror Nights typically spend more than a year on. To capitalize on the film’s fantastic success the quickest and most identifiable way would be an additional wandering character added to the event.

The wandering characters found at Halloween Horror Nights are most often to the point of exclusively the monstrous villains of the horror movies that birthed them. The performers portraying these characters are there to create unsettling sights and ‘jump scares’ for the attendees. They are also visually distinctive, think Freddy Krueger, Jason, Michael Myers, or Art the Clown, who have such unique appearances that even from many, many yards away there is no mistaking them for anything but who they are.

It is uncontested, except by the most brain dead, that Obsession’s true villain is Bear, who enslaved, and kept enslaved even after the torment he was causing became evident, the woman that he desired, Nikki Freeman. However, Bear makes a very poor wandering character for Halloween Horror Nights. A shaggy, shy and slightly stuttering young man in ill-fitting clothes? That is not the sort of image that grabs the attention from a dozen or more yards away. What would be his signature jump scare? Sneaking up behind you and sobbing loudly? Hardly the stuff that would make your blood run cold and your heart race.

Nikki is the only possible wandering character, with her blood-stained face sporting an incongruous smile, her distinctive little black dress and hand-drawn tattoos, are all visually distinctive. There is a reason it is by far that image is the most common thumbnail for people on YouTube reacting to the film. Already reports are coming in of people startled by the wandering Nikki stealthily coming up unseen and suddenly screaming, “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?”

But it is also uncontested that Nikki is the most victimized character in Obsession, suffering extra-dimensional torment and sexual assault. Her pain and anguish, disregarded by the man-baby that supposedly loves her, all combine to make her experience the true horror of the film. (The fact that this needs to be explained to some is the real-life horror that Obsession has revealed.) It is understandable and reasonable that some have found using a character who suffered sexual assault as a mode to frighten people as quite objectionable. Their viewpoint is not without merit.

It is unrealistic to expect a global monster of a corporation like Universal Studios to ignore one of its most successful properties, and given the unique nature of Obsession and its characters, ‘Freaky Nikki’ is the only option to expect them to utilize. Given that reality, what we can do is make sure that in addition to the fun and thrill of Halloween Horror Nights we can use the text of the film to talk about the entitled ‘nice guy’ that is the real monster of the film and look to life for those that walk among us.

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A one-night-stand in a motel leads to a prolonged chase between predator and victim culminating with numerous deaths of both the guilty and the innocent in 2023’s Strange Darling.

JT Mollner’s script and film received much praise when it hit theaters in 2023. But before I managed to find a time slot that worked with my schedule it had completed its run and no longer played in any local auditorium forcing me to wait until it appeared on one of my streaming services which it did this month with Shudder.

Miramax

Strange Darling, billed as a thriller in 6 non-sequential acts, is quite competently crafted; it is vibrantly colorful with production designed by Pricilla Elliot that is wonderfully photographed by cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. The two principal characters remain mostly unnamed in the script, credited only as ‘The Lady’ (Willa Fitzgerald) and ‘The Demon’ (Kyle Gallner). Both performers provide good solid acting as they reveal the nature of their characters. With a brief 97-minute runtime Strange Darling is not a movie that requires a large commitment from its audience and there is more than enough chase, capture, and escape reversals to keep it from becoming overly dull. And yet, with all the praise that this movie earned from the horror film community I cannot endorse it. The more I ponder the movie and its construction the more I find it to be irritating and not entertaining. To discuss why it makes me feel that way requires dancing around the core of the film’s nature that skates right into spoiler territory, so here is your spoiler warning. Proceed no further unless you are prepared to.

ABANDON ALL IGNORANCE YE WHO READ FURTHER

One of the things discussed on the various horror film podcasts I listen to about this movie is that it has a twist. The mere knowledge that a movie has a twist is itself a spoiler, particularly for those of us inclined to work out plots of our own for fun. We will go into the experience looking for the twist, trying to work it out rather than let it reveal itself naturally.

A twist performed properly and fairly can be a great thing to witness; the moment of revelation when everything you have watched before suddenly gets recontextualized and a new paradigm for the story is on display. Strange Darling does not play fair. It cheats its audience to create the moment when everything is supposed to change, presenting moments and sequences entirely out of context, knowing that without the vital context the audience is going to make very erroneous assumptions. This is the reason the six chapters of this thriller are presented in the order of chapters 3, 5, 1, 4, 2, and 6, because to show them in chronological order would render the second half of the film absent of any surprise or unexpected reveal.

Withholding context for a scene is not always a ‘cheat.’ Memento presents each scene in reverse order, depriving the audience of the context for where and how its protagonist came to be in the situation, but because the character is unable to make new memories, he is just as lost as the audience. This puts the audience firmly in the character’s point of view, which is not what is happening with Strange Darling. This movie withholds context in hopes of creating a moment when the floor drops out from under the audience’s feet, but the characters who have lived the story in chronological sequence have no such handicap. This withholding of context is lying to the audience, lying to create in their minds an assumption that is not true so that the ‘truth’ can be revealed.

The movie’s lying begins right at the start with the first title cards that identify one character as ‘The Demon’ and another as ‘The Lady,’ but ‘The Demon’ has a proper name that is used on screen. However, ‘Demon’ creates a deliberate and false impression in the audience, one that powers the story’s supposed twist.

Strange Darling, despite the raves it has gathered from most of the horror community, is a movie that I cannot recommend and one that with each reconsideration becomes more and more one where the time watching becomes time wasted.

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The third feature film from celebrated indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, (henceforth referred to as At Camp Miasma) is her most mainstream project but even then this is an arthouse feature that is more of a tributary feeding into a mainstream than the usual mass market summer fare.

Reviewing At Camp Miasma is a difficult undertaking both because some of the film’s most interesting and daring takes require ‘spoilers’ for the events of the feature and because the nature of the film is much closer to the dream logic of something like Mulholland Drive than yet another slasher loose in the woods dispatching adult actors attempting to portray teens.

MUBI

On the most surface level the plot is this: indie filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is getting the chance to pitch to the mainstream studios about reviving a dormant property, Camp Miasma, a slasher from the 80s with more than a score of sequels but source material that is deeply problematic and transphobic. Kris, a queer filmmaker for whom the original films are a foundational element of her own awakening, is aware that the studio interest in her is to ‘woke-wash’ the property in hopes of avoiding a disastrous online campaign against the movie when they release it. She has traveled deep into snowy mountains to meet with Billie Preston (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original Camp Miasmaand who has become a retired recluse in hopes of bringing her onto the project, but Billie is nothing like what Kris expected and soon over the course of a few days in the isolated and abandoned camp where the first in the franchise had been filmed, reality and fantasy blur for the two women as they untangle what the films mean to them and to each other.

On another level, At Camp Miasma is about the relationship between story and audience: is the audience the master of the story, or does the story in fact create its own audience? When reality blurs for Kris and Billie, that blurring also bleeds into the audience watching the film about the pair of women. The outdoor sets throughout At Camp Miasma have a deeply artificial appearance, one that I found reminiscent of the planet set from the original Star Trek series, something so powerfully artificial, particularly to modern eyes, that the effect in this film must have been intentional.

And on yet another level, At Camp Miasma is about coming into your own sexually, fully accepting yourself, with all of your flaws and limitations, and loving yourself for who you are, and in that process finally being able to accept love from others. In the end, it is a deeply committed love story between Kris and Billie where each woman finally finds the half that they have been desperately missing.

And perhaps the most fun level of At Camp Miasma is the rich and keen-eyed satire of the entire slasher genre. I have said before and will likely say again in the future that slashers are my least loved of all horror films. Far too often I find them dull, repetitive, and populated by bland characterless characters to ever be engaged with the often less than intelligent plots as they unfold. I did not find Scream to be particularly witty, nor did I find X inventive, but even with a limited affection for slashers I found much of the meta-humor in At Camp Miasma quite enjoyable. This would make quite an interesting double feature with The Cabin in the Woods as a pair of films commenting on the genre that their film makers deeply care about.

Is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for you? I cannot say; even for people I know well, much less total strangers on the internet, I would have a hard time knowing if this movie will work for them. I can say that I enjoyed it and that I did not consider my time at the theater watching it wasted, but also I know I am unlikely to watch it again. If queerness is something that puts you off, then this film is not for you. If films that blur their own reality is something that you find that breaks your suspension of disbelief, then this is not for you. But if those things do not apply to you and you find yourself engaged with strange and unusual arthouse fare, then give this film a try.

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Spoilers for Obsession

I recently rewatched the entirety of Obsession, my favorite horror film of the last few years and possibly my favorite film of 2026. Dune part 3 and Avengers: Doomsday will have a very tough time beating it out for that top spot in my heart.

Obsession and its cast, in particular Inde Navarrette, have been getting a ton of praise for their work and this blog post is yet another one to add to that pile but I think this morning I want to dive deep and dissect an element of Navarrette’s performance that I have a difficult time articulating.

Navarrette is not a novice to acting, having been a recurring cast member on Superman & Loisand appeared in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, but it is unquestionable that her turn as Nikki Freeman, the doomed and tragic object of a young man’s obsession in this year’s breakout and surprising hit, has catapulted her into a very wide and public recognition.

In Obsession, Navarrette performs effectively as two distinct characters: Nikki Freeman, free of the wish’s curse and the ‘Nikki’ that is cursed to love Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey ‘more than anyone in the fucking world.’ I shall refer to these characters as True Nikki and Freaky Nikki to make it clear which is which.

In terms of screen time, the audience has little exposure to True Nikki; she is a voice on a telephone call, a friend chatting happily and teasing Bear at the bar on trivia night, and exposes herself emotionally for a few moments as Bear drives her home, revealing that she is not happy and emotionally keeps her feelings deeply contained saying that when she has a crush on a guy ‘no one knows.’

In contrast, for the majority of the film, Navarrette performs as Freaky Nikki, who is loud, unsubtle, manipulative, and unable to contain her feelings at all, possessing none of the subtlety of the character we were introduced to. So far this might be considered a rather standard Jekyll and Hyde sort of portrayal that has been a fairly standard performance since the 1930s, but there are layers and levels to Navarrette’s approach that I think belie this simplification.

While True Nikki and Freaky Nikki are poles apart in terms of the nature of their characters this is not usually played to exaggeration in the film. Freaky Nikki is a very different character, one the audience is well aware of and possibly would even be aware if there were not instances of True Nikki momentarily and terrifyingly regaining her body. The voices of the two Nikkis are slightly different, using different tonalities in their normal speech. I do not have a particularly well-trained ear, but it sounds to me that True Nikki’s voice is in a very slightly deeper register than Freaky Nikki’s. True Nikki sounds more composed and restrained while Freaky Nikki sounds more ‘girlish,’ perhaps a performance that might be more attractive to a man who lacks the self-confidence to take the emotional risks that courtship and dating require.

Even this, Navarrette’s performance as two different Nikkis, is not the element that astounds me. That moment from the film’s final scene is something I struggle to adequately describe.

Freaky Nikki, certain that Bear doesn’t love her, turns to the same One Wish Willow device that Bear used to enslave, creating a Pseudo-Bear that is obsessed with her as she is with him. This ‘romance’ is short-lived. Bear, seeking an escape from the horrors he birthed into the world, has taken a lethal overdose of pills. (True to Bear’s nature of being unable to commit and face up to unpleasant truths, he had begun to try and make himself vomit up the overdose, but Freaky Nikki’s wish derailed that.)

For a moment the two are ‘happy,’ but then the overdose works its lethal action and Pseudo-Bear dies in Freaky Nikki’s arms. Freaky Nikki wails and cries at the death of her obsession. She nearly ends her own life, but Bear’s death frees her from the wish’s curse suddenly becoming True Nikki again. There is a moment of silence before she throws Bear’s corpse to the floor and sobs.

In a single take, we watch Freaky Nikki transition to True Nikki with both versions warped by the throes of sobbing and wailing, and yet in a manner I cannot quite put my finger on, these are very different wails, very different cries. Freaky Nikki is wailing at the loss of her Bear, and True Nikki is wailing at the horror and torments she has been forced to endure. Both wails are soul-wrenching produced by utter sorrow but are also utterly different, produced by the same actor without a break or a cut to give her time and space to shift emotionally. She wails from two very different reasons, and it is evident in the nature of her cries but in a method so subtle I cannot say precisely why they are different. I can only recognize that they are distinct, that they are two different characters wailing for two different reasons that are easily observed but seemingly impossible to define.

Inde Navarrette has earned every accolade heaped upon her for this performance, and I shall watch her career with great interest.

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Producer Val Lewton working for RKO pictures in the 1940s was tasked to create a number of horror films but without the money to hire established stars or productions of any real scale. His solution, turning to psychological horror, relying on what is left unseen but imagined by the audience yielded some fine examples of horror that has influenced filmmaking and the genre to this day. The Body Snatcher, adapted from a Robert Louis Stevenson story gave horror legend Boris Karloff his finest role and performance and launched the directorial career of Robert Wise who directed films in every genre clear into the 1970s. I Walked With a Zombie, blended inspiration from Bronte’s Jane Eyre with Caribbean mysticism, eschewing the cheap laughs or schlocky horror of zombie-centered stories for something with more drama and reigning as the ultimate zombie inspired film until displaced by Romero’s reinvention of the sub-genre in the late 60s. However, it is 1942’s Cat People that is arguably the most influential of these productions responsible for every over-used jump scare and inspiring an R-rated remake in 1982.

Criterion Channel

Helmed by legendary noir director Jacques Tourneur, who also made Night of the Demon, and written by DeWitt Bodeen, Cat People centers on Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) a young artist recently immigrated to the United States from Serbia. Irena labors under the belief that she is descended from wicked, evil witches,  and cursed that when suffering strong passions, such as lust or anger, she will transform into a large and murderous panther. Quite against her plans, Irena falls in love with naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and marries him but refuses the marriage bed due to her terror at transforming. The cast is rounded out by Jane Randolph playing Alice, Oliver’s assistant and the third component to the doomed romantic triangle and Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd, a psychiatrist friend of Oliver who attempts to help Irena past her ‘delusion.’

Lacking the resources for elaborate transformations Tourneur and Lewton relied upon atmosphere and mood to achieve the desired tension in the audience. One of the most influential sequences is when Alice, walking alone at night, becomes terrified that someone or something is stalking her. She is correct. As the audience, we know that Irena, hot with jealousy, is indeed following her along the dark street where only isolated islands of lights from the streetlamps allow any real visibility. When Alice reaches the bus stop, she and the audience are wound quite tight when the sudden and very loud hiss of the bus’s air brakes shatters that tension in what is widely considered to be cinema’s first ‘jump scare.’ A technique now so widely over-used that is often associated with mediocre directors who are unable to build the requisite tension in their films.

I find the character of Louis Judd the most perplexing member of the cast as I can’t determine he is meant to be seen as tragic or as an evil man. While I understand that code of conduct between doctors and their patients, even informal ones such as Irena, have changed greatly from 40s I find it hard to excuse in any manner Judd’s actions towards the young woman. Certainly by today’s standard and what we know of power dynamics between physicians and people under their care and power his disastrous attempt to seduce Irena is not only unjustifiable but also criminal, but this was hardly the case in 1942. When he released the panther within her, it can be seen as tragic for Doctor Judd or as a case of ‘good for her.’ Frankly, I believe that he got pretty much what he deserved.

Being produced in 1942 Cat People needed to stay firmly within the puritanical guidelines of the Production Code, which was rigidly enforced from 1934 through the middle of the 1960s, and as such the exact nature of Irena’s curse could not be fully and plainly spelled out. Sexual intercourse, beyond any depiction of it ever occurring outside of marriage, could not be directly referenced, only implied, making the details somewhat obscure to a modern audience, an obscurity that filmmaker Paul Schrader did not labor under when he remade Cat People in 1982.

Both versions of these films, the original and the remake are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.