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It is September and therefore time for another horror movie marathon hosted by Film Geeks San Diego with their annual Secret Morgue.  I have attended all of the Secret Morgues except for 2023, when they hosted two, one themed on witches and witchcraft, which I attended, and the September edition focused on animal attacks, which I did not.

I knew going into the event this year that I faced the highest likelihood that more than not several if not most of the films playing would not really work for me as the theme was my least-liked sub-genre of horror, slashers and serial killers. Of the six films of the marathon, two I had not seen but thoroughly enjoyed; one was another unseen one but fell into the trappings of routine slashers that left me unimpressed; another I had seen and detested; one more I had previously watched and found mildly interesting and the final film of the evening; which I missed due to a growing migraine attack, I could tell from a trailer I would not have liked at all.

Peeping Tom from the UK kicked off the event. Released in 1960, the same year as Psycho, this film was savaged by critics and the public upon its release and fell into obscurity only to be later recognized as a work of superb filmmaking.  The film’s focus is Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a shy, quiet young man who records the women he murders with a motion picture camera. Peeping Tom explores the damaged and lethal psyche created by years of childhood abuse, placing it far ahead of any film of its period in actually trying to understand the psychology of serial murder. This was quite good and I am happy it has been restored not only physically but in terms of its filmmaking as well.

Memories of Murder by Oscar winner Bong Joon-Ho is a police procedural following two mis-matched cops as they attempt to identify and capture a serial rapist and murderer in a rural Korean district. Where most ‘mis-matched cops’ movies are conceived as ‘buddy cop’ stories, this one is not.Memories of Murder carries Bong Joon-Ho’s biting commentary on Korean culture, inspired by and loosely based on a series of actual murders. This film sidesteps easy answers or even an illusion of closure.

The third film, which I have already reviewed here on my site and sent me out of the Comicon museum where the Secret Morgue is hosted to walk around Balboa Park for the next 87 minutes because I have no need at all to ever see again Strange Darling.

Kolobos kicked off the swing into the evening programming. A first feature from a pair of film school graduates, Kolobos does not follow in the meta commentary of the Scream clones of the late ’90s but rather is supposed to take more of its inspiration from the Italian giallo genre of the early ’70s. That said, Kolobos I found lacked the character and writing that exemplifies the best of the giallo genre. The characters were flat stock stereotypes with trite and too on-the-nose dialog. By the end of the film’s short running time I had already begun to have the stirring of a migraine attack.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare started as the fifth film of the evening, but the twin facts that I had already seen the film and the growing migraine prompted me to abandon the rest of the marathon and return home early. New Nightmare is a much more interesting meta commentary on horror film than Scream or any of its imitators. (And yes, I am aware that Craven directed both.)

I later learned that the final film, again from the UK, was Stitches, a slasher featuring a clown, that from the trailer, I am sure would have tested my patience.

Even with the headache and being haunted by Strange Darling dogging my steps, I am glad I attended and look forward to next year’s marathon.

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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.