C. M. Rosens

The next 10 horror movies take us to 60, and we’re only 40 away of our goal! This crop of films has been a wild ride. Here are 60/100.

• Bluebeard (1944) dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, written by Pierre Gendron. I did like this one as a background film, but not sure I’d rewatch it on purpose. It’s a fairly tame noir, set in Paris, with a bit of risqué-for-Forties-cinema goings-on, but essentially a fairly meh serial killer flick starring John Carradine. Young female models are being strangled. Will law enforcement be able to stop the crime wave before more women become victims?

• 경성학교: 사라진 소녀들/The Silenced (2015) dir. Lee Hae-young, written by Lee Hae-young and Lee Yong-ju. Set during the Japanese occupation of Korea, sinister goings-on are afoot at an all-girls boarding school. The violation of the girls is insidious, in the form of medical experiments to create supersoldiers, and there’s a good scene that shows what rewards await collaborators… A sickly girl Ju-ran transfers to a new sanitorium boarding school to regain health. But she discovers that students are disappearing and notices abnormal changes happening to her body. She suspects the school for what’s happening and tries to discover what secret is hidden.

• Kraken (2026) dir. Pål Øie, written by Vilde Eide, Kjersti Helen Rasmussen, and Natasha Arthur . The CGI on this is fairly decent for the budget. And genuinely, I get really freaked out by massive sea creatures and the shots from above built tension so well, as did the score. A few moments reminded me of the shot of Maxine Minx swimming just ahead of the gator she didn’t know was behind her in X. I also really fucking hate parasites. Tell me why this is my first 5* watch of the challenge?? A marine biologist is doing research on a fish farm when she encounters several strange occurrences. Along with the brutal deaths of two teenagers, all signs point to the deep fjord; can there be more to the depths than the eye can see?

• 婆/Onibaba (1964) dir. Kaneto Shindō, written by Kaneto Shindō. This is a great film – I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. It’s such a good premise and I love the elements of it, the grim reality of warfare set against questions of what it is to be human. I liked the pacing too, although I was surprised how late in the film the mask shows up (due to the poster and the things I knew about it beforehand). While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can’t steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.

• Loop Track (2023) dir. Tom Sainsbury, written by Tom Sainsbury. Hiking horror where the horror is other people, but also the dangers lurking in the New Zealand bush. I either vibe with NZ humour or I don’t, it’s a lot drier and sometimes more cringe-humour than I can take, while Aussie humour is dark as fuck and brutal, but I really got on with this. I was invested in Ian’s anxiety and need to be alone, as I strongly relate, but also the way that horror ramps up as we get into the forest is really well done. I really enjoyed the tension, and the character dynamics were great. Nicky was such a massive dick but I kind of liked him. It turns into a creature-feature using some very NZ prehistoric wildlife. A four-day journey turns into a fight for survival. This is a psychological thriller about Ian, who wants to get as far away from humanity as possible, into the New Zealand bush. Some other individuals get attached to him. And he has the feeling that they are being followed. Is that real though?

• Jack Be Nimble (1993) dir. Garth Maxwell, written by Garth Maxwell. New Zealand Gothic Horror. Twins, a boy and a girl, are separated by the adoption system and then go and find one another. It’s a gritty start and gets worse. I had no idea where any of it was going at any point, and it just kept getting worse. I had an inkling we’d get twincest, but we didn’t (exactly). It gets so weird, and I was here for it. RIP Alexis Arquette (who plays Jack). Jack and Dora, abandoned by their parents as babies, are desperate to find each other after years of adoption. Jack’s young life has been spent with a sadistic family. Dora, whose life has been somewhat better, has developed extra-sensory powers which tell her that Jack’s in danger and drives her to search for him.

• Yndige Mennesker/Adorable Humans (2025) dirs. Anders Jon, Kasper Juhl, Michael Kunov, and Michael Panduro, an anthology film with each segment written by each director. (The Snow Queen segment is sapphic).
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  The first tale is a psychosexual spin on Dødningen, [The Dead Man], first published in 1830. Gnarly body horror in this one, and a lot of stuff about power over helpless bodies, necromancy, and an unfortunate care worker, Jonas.
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  The second story, The Story of a Mother is bad enough as it is thanks Hans, but the retelling forefronts the depression of an overworked widow confronting Death for the life of her suicidal child, refusing to give him up even when he is rotting away (literally), and is a tough watch.
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  The Snow Queen is the most fucked up story anyway, but they made it brutal, sapphic, psychosexual, and religious horror. I thought it was an interesting take on shame and the desire to become the monster you see yourself as – also sapphic shame, specifically, in a Lutheran context. There’s a lot of very visceral body horror here, a lot of internal and external reversals, and ways of seeing yourself.
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  The final story, Aunty Toothache, sees a return of Sofie, the love interest in the first segment, as a character in this one, to tie the end to the beginning. This story is basically HCA deciding that toothache is the most powerful thing in the world (as most children in his audience might agree) and uses it to prevent the world from gaining yet another poet. It’s a funny story, but this take on it is really dark. Don’t worry though, the humour is there, and returns at the end when he learns to work with and power through his imposter syndrome, which I think is what Aunty Toothache represents in this one. I hate tooth stuff. The whole using pain/messed up sex/drugs etc to open up has a much more positive ending than the story does – and indeed, veers off in the opposite direction to HCA’s story!
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  As supernatural forces slip through the cracks, four destinies are intertwined, and four souls are forced to confront their demons. A young woman’s hope for a fresh start is derailed by a mysterious enchanted mirror, while her psychiatrist is struck by visions of a terrifying accident. In the nearby city, a care worker uncovers dark and perverted secrets as he tends to a dying man, and writer’s block turns demonic for an ambitious musician.

• undertone (2025) dir. Ian Tuason, written by Ian Tuason. This is a Canadian-US collab, written and directed by a Filipino-Canadian director. I’m counting it as Canadian for this reason, and also because Black Fawn Films funding this are also Canadian, alongside US studio Spooky Pictures and a US-based distributor. I really appreciated the concept here and the slowburn of the script. I think it would have been better with headphones for a first watch… The motherhood themes here are fairly standard horror fare – the mother vs the anti-mother, the nurturer vs the destroyer, and I can see why these themes are so relevant for today in North America. This is also very Catholic, which I’m guessing is Tuason’s religious background, so the stark contrast of mother/anti-mother makes more sense in that context. The host of a popular paranormal podcast becomes haunted by terrifying recordings mysteriously sent her way.

• The Other Lamb (2019) dir. Małgorzata Szumowska, written by Catherine Smyth-McMullen. This is collaboration between Belgium, Ireland, USA, and UK, with a Polish director and a British writer, performed in English. This is a forest cult of women serving one man, Shepherd, and his daughter Selah, who begins to question her life there. A lot of weird period stuff, as people are indeed very weird about periods, coming-of-age in a repressed religious commune. This is the most fucked up family I’ve seen in a while, and I love the good-for-her at the end. I did also like that the explosion of violence that we see was only in her mind, and the external thing was much quieter and more in-keeping with her character. I think I would have liked to have seen a bit more at the end, but I also really liked that ending as it was. For her entire life, the cult she was born into has been all that teenage Selah has known. Along with a band of similarly cloistered young women she lives seemingly unstuck in time, cut off from modern society in a remote forest commune presided over by a man called Shepherd, a controlling, messiah-like figure with a frightening dark side. But when her insular world is rocked by a series of nightmarish visions and disturbing revelations, Selah begins to question everything about her existence—including her allegiance to the increasingly dangerous Shepherd.

• The Serpent’s Skin (2025) dir. Alice Maio Mackay, written by Alice Maio Mackay and Ben Pahl Robinson. Alice Maio Mackay is an Australian filmmaker, and I think this is a US-Australian collab, putting it under Australia as that’s where Mackay is from, and also a lot of the cast. This is basically queer Scanners but with a punk trans feel, and that’s pretty cool. Two young women form a romantic bond after discovering they have supernatural powers. Their insecurities unknowingly release a demon, which possesses one of their exes and begins feeding on their friends. As the bodies pile up, it becomes up to the women to face their pasts and stop the growing evil.