Backrooms (2026)

    The thing about horror is that it gets stale. I watched a lot of slasher films in my teen years, but they don't do much for me anymore. Scream reinvigorated the genre, and kicked off a bunch of self-referential horror films. But that's stale too. Heck, the newest Scream pretty much abandoned the concept and just made another straight slasher movie.
    In the early 2000s a lot of Japanese horror films started making their way over here. I loved The Grudge and The Ring, because they weren't the same story over and over. Until they were. I've grown indifferent to a lot of themes.
    A few years ago I started reading Creepypasta. There's some real gems in there. No End House and Candle Cove were a couple of my favorites. There were a few recycled ideas, but overall horror felt fresh again.
    To me, the key to modern horror is to be unsettling. Anybody can film jumpscares and graphic gore, but it takes a real artist to make your skin crawl just by making things feel... a little off. Stanley Kubrick managed it in The Shining. The shots of Danny riding around the Overlook on his Big Wheel, you always had the feeling that something was Not Right, but you didn't know what. Say what you will about The Shining - No, it's not a good adaptation of the book, but the movie really nails the unsettling vibe.
    The fear of Liminal Spaces feels like a modern invention, but it's always been there, it just has a name now. People have always been creeped out by large empty rooms and mazelike hallways. Places that look like they should be occupied, but aren't.
    For me, they trigger false memories. I think I might be remembering dreams I've had, but it's been so long I can't tell them from actual memories. I distinctly remember going to a convention with my wife, getting off on the wrong floor, and finding ourselves on an entire floor of empty hallways. But I don't think it ever actually happened. The most lasting part of the memory is the feeling that You Should Not Be Here.
    A few year ago I wrote a short story about an office worker who returns to the office after hours, only to find it occupied by strange people who only appear in rooms that are supposed to be empty. The whole story is built around the "You Shouldn't Be Here" trope, and it's one of the creepier things I've written, IMO. If you're interested, the story is called "Third Shift" and it's in the collection "Rainbow Nightmares." All my books will be on sale for the month of June, on itch.io. Shameless plug over.
    Anyway, concepts like Liminal Spaces and Analog Horror either resonate with you or they don't. If you don't find the Backrooms trailer at least a little unsettling, you're not going to like the movie. The movie does a decent job of making you feel on edge, but only if you let yourself get into it. "Fear of the Unknown" does a lot of heavy lifting, so if you decide to see it, do as little research as possible. That's why I'm not going into a lot of detail in this blog.
    (Mild Spoilers) The movie is weird, like Vivarium weird. And like Vivarium, Backrooms doesn't really stick the landing at the end. But that's the problem with weird horror. The stranger you make the movie, the harder it is to write a satisfying payoff.
    Anyway, it's a pretty good time if you like weird. But no matter how much you let yourself get into it, you will find parts of it to be disappointing.

Scream 7

God, this doesn't even feel like a Scream movie. They've lost sight of everything the series was about. 

There's hardly any humor or movie references. There's one scene where one of the characters starts to talk about horror movies, and another character literally cuts them off by saying, "We don't do that anymore." I'm sure that was a nod to the fourth wall, but I have to ask: If Scream is no longer a self-referential horror snarkfest, then what sets it apart from other horror movies?

Mild spoilers ahead. So Ghostface starts killing again, what a shock. But then Sydney gets a video call from Stu Macher, taunting her and promising to come after her daughter. There are questions as to whether Stu actually survived the original film, or if it's an AI deepfake. I won't spoil that here.

It's a serviceable mystery/horror with some very explicit gore, but it lacks humor and clever dialogue. The twists aren't particularly notable, and the end reveal is underwhelming. It's also annoying how often people survive insane injuries. 

Sydney keeps telling her daughter, "Always shoot them in the head" as if Ghostface is a zombie. But she's right. People keep getting up minutes after getting shot repeatedly in the chest, while wearing clothing too tight to hide a bulletproof vest.

And for all the "rules of horror" they used to talk about, people make ridiculous decisions in this one. They've basically turned the series into a straightforward horror story, complete with all the tropes they used to reference ironically.

I don't know what this is, but it isn't Scream.

When The Trailer Is Better Than The Movie

I love scary movies where there’s a sense of “wrongness” instead of an obvious monster. You know, movies where the vibe is more unsettling than scary. However, most of these movies end up disappointing me by the end. It seems like nobody can write a payoff that lives up to the original concepts. Sometimes these stories would have worked better as short films than full-length features. For that reason, the trailers for these movies are often more interesting than the movie itself. In some cases, I’d happily watch the trailer over and over again, just because they’re like short films in themselves.

Lights Out was a great short film. I can’t comment on the full movie because I haven’t seen it, but from the reviews I’ve read, it wasn’t very good. And that makes sense. The concept of Lights Out just doesn’t work as a two-hour movie. The scare was based around a single special effect – a shadowy figure that only appears in the dark, and vanishes when the lights are on. I don’t think that concept would even work for a half-hour “Tales From The Darkside” episode. But as a 5 minute film, it’s pretty scary.

Vivarium had a really cool concept. A couple is in the market for a house, and looks at a place in one of those cookie cutter communities. When they’re ready to leave, they get lost trying to find their way out of the neighborhood. After dozens of turns, they end up back in front of the same house. They try again and again until they run out of gas, and always end up in front of the same house. At one point one of them climbs up on the roof for a better view, and just sees an endless neighborhood of identical houses, as far as the eye can see in every direction. The trailer for Vivarium pretty much sums up the first half hour of the movie, which is the best part. After that, it just goes downhill. The writers just couldn’t think of anything that could top the concept itself. It’s still not a bad movie, and it has a few cool ideas, but the full movie just can’t live up to the trailer.

Don’t Worry Darling is pretty much the same way. The trailer shows an ideal, almost utopian community from the 50s or 60s, but you can tell something dark is going on behind the scenes. Unfortunately, when you see the full movie, the actual twist is nowhere near as cool as whatever you were building up in your head.

Smile wasn’t bad. I enjoyed it, I really did. But it wasn’t nearly as creepy as the movie I thought I was going to see. It doesn’t help that the coolest scene in the trailer turns out to be a dream in the film itself. Given the title of the movie and all the smiling people in the trailer, I thought the smiling aspect was going to be a bigger part of the plot. But it’s more of a standard killer ghost story, and smiling before death is just one symptom of its curse. Note that Smile was also based on a short film.

A little off-topic, but I absolutely hated Cabin Fever (2002). It doesn’t really fit the “creepy and unsettling” theme of this blog, but it’s a great example of a horror movie with misleading trailers. I knew it was about a disease, but I thought the disease would make people attack each other like zombies. But no, it’s just about a quick-spreading flesh-eating virus. People catch it, they get sick, they die. I know it sounds like I was just disappointed that it wasn’t a zombie movie, but even for what it is, it’s a snoozefest. It never goes anywhere particularly interesting, and some of the characters are downright annoying.

The bottom line is, some movies just work better as short films. And sometimes the people who edit trailers are more competent than the people who write movies. But none of this is going to stop me from seeing the next cool-looking movie with a five-minute concept. You might say I never learn, but the truth is, I just have nothing better to do with my time.

Unfriended: Dark Web

As my wife and I get older, our tolerance for certain film tropes is waning.  She has a problem with sex scenes and with realistic gore.  As far as the gore is concerned, I don't think she's really changed, it's just that special effects got so much better, and it grosses her out.  Regarding sex scenes, her morals haven't changed - she still believes in the right of consenting adults to do whatever makes them happy - she just doesn't want to watch it.

As for me, I'm developing more empathy, and it makes it hard to enjoy horror movies the way I once did.  I don't mind if a few characters get killed, but I feel a lot better about it if they've done something to deserve it.  Watching innocent people get killed is starting to feel less and less like entertainment, and more and more like torture porn.

When I watched the first Unfriended in 2016, I was impressed.  It was an original concept, as fresh as Blair Witch felt when the "found footage" genre was new.  I liked how Unfriended was presented as if your TV screen was the protagonist's laptop.  I liked how you could tell what she was thinking by which tabs she opened, and what searches she made.  I liked how sometimes she would start to type something, then erase it, then type something else - giving us more insight into her thought process than you usually get in a movie.

But something else I liked, though it didn't really dawn on me at the time.  (Spoiler alert)  Everyone who got killed was guilty.  All of the characters were complicit in the events that led to the ghost's suicide, at least to some degree.  In a way, the ghost was the protagonist, and the movie was a revenge story, a la Death Wish.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that all the characters in Unfriended deserved the death penalty for their part in the girl's suicide.  But their deaths do sting less knowing that they're bad people, and the world isn't any worse off for their absence.

Which brings us to the sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web.  Warning, spoilers follow.  

First off, U:DW is only a sequel in the sense that it uses the same format.  Once again, the TV screen is the main character's laptop.  Once again, the characters are killed off one by one.  Once again... no wait, that's it.  That's pretty much where the similarities end.

For one thing, it's not a vengeful spirit this time.  It debatable whether there's anything supernatural in U:DW at all, but more on that in a minute.  For another thing, this movie's victims didn't do anything wrong.  Well, okay, the main character stole the laptop from a coffee shop's lost and found, which is what gets the plot going.  But the other characters are innocent and, for the most part, likable.

I don't like that.  The twist at the end (major spoiler) is that the laptop was lost on purpose, by Dark Web hackers, as part of a game.  Apparently they wait until someone takes the laptop, then hunt them down and kill them, along with any potential witnesses.  This is all done for entertainment, with sadistic viewers all over the Dark Web watching this online cat-and-mouse game for fun.

Okay, but what about all this am I supposed to find fun?  If the Dark Webbers are presented as evil for watching this kind of thing, what does that say about me if I find the movie enjoyable?  Granted, to me it's fiction, while to the story's fictional viewers, real people are getting killed.  I get that.  But still, it almost feels like the movie's meta statement is, only evil people enjoy watching this kind of setup.

Another complaint I have has to do with continuity.  It feels like the writers couldn't decide whether the killer was going to be supernatural or not.  For 99% of the movie, I'm confident that the bad guys are just super hackers.  But there's this special effect that happens whenever they're on camera.  Their presence causes the cameras to glitch.  

Okay, so maybe they're carrying some sort of device that plays with camera frequencies.  But there's one scene that challenges that theory.  It's filmed from the ground, when a bad guy pushes someone off a roof.  Even from that distance, the killer glitches and warps in a way that really shouldn't happen if nothing supernatural is involved.

But who knows.  Regardless of whether the killers are using high technology or a pact with demons, this movie just didn't do it for me the way the first one did.  The interface is still cool, but I've already seen it.  There's nothing really innovative here, nothing that improves on the original, and nothing that would make me want to see it a second time.

Bottom line:  It's not terrible, but I'd rather just rewatch the first one.

Ranking the Nightmare on Elm Street Movies

Ranking movies is fun, and I would like to do more blogs that rank movies of a series.  However, I have strict criteria that prevents me from making all the lists I'd like.  My two rules:
1. I have to have seen every single film in the series.
2. There needs to be at least six movies in the series.  I picked six arbitrarily, but less than that just doesn't feel like enough to be worth ranking.

A friend suggested I rank the Friday the 13th movies.  The problem is, I don't like most of them, so the bottom six or so would probably be tied with each other.  Plus, I don't think I've seen the 2009 reboot, so I would be violating rule #1.  I considered Alien, but I still haven't seen Covenant.  Plus I'd want to combine it in the same list as the Predator franchise, and I haven't seen the most recent Predator either.

I'm also behind on the most recent releases for the Halloween and Terminator franchises as well.  Some would say I'm better off, that most of these recent entries would be at the bottom of the list anyway, but I'm not going to cheat on these lists.

So until I either catch up or think of another prolific film series to rank, here's my list of the best Freddy Krueger movies.

1) A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
2) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
3) Wes Craven's New Nightmare
4) Freddy vs. Jason
5) Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
6) A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010 reboot)
7) A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
8) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
9) A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

More details:

1) A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors - This is the peak of the series.  It has the perfect balance of scary imagery and comic one-liners.  It has some of the most iconic scenes in the series, and the special effects were decent for the time, too.

2) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) - The original movie still holds up.  There's some bad SFX in there, and they hadn't quite figured out Freddy's personality yet, but it's a solid slasher movie if you're into that.

3) Wes Craven's New Nightmare - After the series peaked at 3, Freddy became less scary with each movie, and was more of a comedic character than anything.  New Nightmare managed to actually make him scary again.  Plus, I like sort of fourth wall, "movie within a movie" theme.

4) Freddy vs. Jason - I'm a sucker for crossovers.  I'm probably giving this movie more credit than it deserves, but I do appreciate how faithful it was to both characters, right down to each having their own theme music. 

5) Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare - The series had leaned heavy into comedy by this point, and I can't say this is a good movie.  But it was surreal enough to be entertaining, and at the very least it's my favorite of the bad movies.

6) A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010 reboot) - I barely remember the reboot.  It was serviceable, but didn't leave much of a mark.

7) A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - Four and five are actually tied for me, and the scenes in both movies run together.  At this point the series was just, "Let's see what funny death scenes we can think of."  They needn't have bothered having a plot at all, the teens buying tickets just wanted to see gore.

8) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - See above.

9) A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge - This one is bad, but almost enjoyable if you want a good laugh.  They hadn't really decided what direction the series was going to go yet, and this one feels very out of place when compared to the rest of the series.

Unfriended

A teenager kills herself after an embarrassing video of her is posted online.  Then her ghost comes back to torment her former friends.  Unfriended is a pretty basic story, nothing that's going to make you say wow.  The difference is in how the film is presented.  All the viewer sees is the main character's computer screen.  The movie is shown as if we're seeing live feed from her laptop.  We watch her move the arrow around and see everything she clicks in real time.  In one window she's talking to her friends over Skype.  In another, she has a private chat going on with her boyfriend.  She has her music playlist in another window.  In her web browser, she has Facebook and YouTube open, and she does other web searches over the course of the movie as the plot demands.

And we don't just see what she does, but we see what she almost does.  We see every sentence she almost types, then erases and rewords before hitting enter.  Because of this, we're privy to her thought process, giving us more insight than movies usually offer.  While the characters know a lot more than the audience initially sees, over the course of the movie you find out more of the details that led up to their friend's suicide.  Again, none of the revelations are going to blow you away, but the style is so original that it's hard to look away.  Despite the relatively simple plot, this is one of those movies where you need to pay attention every minute (sometimes to two things at once) or you might miss something significant.

It's tempting to compare this to "found footage" movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield.  However, found footage movies are inherently less scary to me because, by definition, everything in the movie has already happened.  Unfriended, however, is presented in such a way that it feels like it's happening right now... to you.  If you let yourself get drawn in, then your TV screen becomes your laptop.  The limited view increases your fear, because you feel like something's in the room with you, but you can't make main character turn her head to see.

As much as I liked the concept, I hope this doesn't become a genre like found footage movies did.  The uniqueness of this film is what makes it cool, and it's definitely worth seeing once.  But in some ways it's more like reading a movie than watching one, and once you're over the novelty of the format, it's not the kind of experience you're likely to sit through twice. 

So give this movie a try.   And for extra fun, watch it on your laptop.