HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER — The Monster Without a Myth

26 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in retrospective

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Some serial killers become cinematic monsters because cinema gives them mythology. They are brilliant, charismatic, obsessive, grotesquely theatrical or possessed by some recognisable pathology that allows an audience to construct a narrative around their violence. Henry Lee Lucas is different. The horror of John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer lies partly in the film’s refusal to provide that comfort. It does not transform its central character into an icon of evil. It makes him difficult to mythologise, difficult to diagnose and, ultimately, difficult to contain within the conventions of a genre film.

Henry moves through Chicago with the anonymity of a man who could disappear into any crowd. He works temporary jobs, drinks in cheap bars, sleeps in a modest apartment and drifts between acquaintances without creating any obvious impression of significance. He is not introduced as a cinematic monster. He is introduced as a man. Released in 1986 but arriving at audiences through a complicated distribution history that included years of censorship and controversy, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer occupies an unusual place in American horror. It is frequently discussed alongside the period’s slasher films and serial-killer thrillers, yet it feels fundamentally opposed to the conventions that made those films commercially attractive. There is no elaborate mythology to unravel, no grand confrontation between hero and killer, and no reassuring moral architecture in which violence ultimately produces justice.

The result remains one of the most unnerving portraits of violence in American cinema.

The Anti-Psychological Serial Killer

Michael Rooker plays Henry with a remarkable refusal to explain himself. There is calculation in the performance, but not theatrical calculation. Henry is watchful without appearing omniscient, volatile without constantly signalling that he is dangerous. Rooker gives him the physicality of somebody who has learned how to disappear inside ordinary behaviour. His face rarely provides the emotional information it expects from a protagonist, and this absence becomes increasingly frightening.

The film’s title is important. This is a portrait, not an explanation. McNaughton does not attempt to solve Henry. Instead, he observes him. That approach was radical in an era when serial killers were increasingly becoming objects of psychological fascination. The cinema of the serial murderer often encourages audiences to ask why. What childhood trauma created the monster? What pathology explains the compulsion? What event produced the killer? Henry is much less interested in providing those answers. It presents a man who kills and then asks what it means to live in proximity to someone for whom murder has become an ordinary possibility.

This is not to suggest that the film denies psychology altogether. Henry’s behaviour is clearly shaped by an unstable history, and the real-life Henry Lee Lucas provided the loose inspiration for the character. But McNaughton’s film deliberately moves beyond biography. The Henry of the film is a fictional construction, and his crimes are presented less as a case study than as an eruption of arbitrary violence. That arbitrariness matters because it removes one of the audience’s most familiar methods of making sense of a killer: finding a pattern.

The Banality of Evil

The film’s most disturbing insight is established early and then allowed to permeate everything around Henry: he does not require a special world in order to commit extraordinary violence. There are no gothic castles, elaborate murder chambers or heightened landscapes announcing that evil has arrived. Henry lives in apartments, drives ordinary streets and occupies spaces that would otherwise be invisible to the viewer. The contrast is not merely aesthetic. It denies the audience the reassuring distance that conventional horror can provide.

The opening sequence, in which Henry appears to kill a series of strangers while travelling through the city, establishes the film’s governing principle. The victims are not necessarily connected, the locations are not symbolically important and the violence does not arrive with the narrative preparation audiences have been trained to expect. People simply die. The film’s episodic structure reinforces the randomness. Henry’s murders do not form a neat dramatic progression toward some ultimate confrontation; they occur alongside work, drinking, conversation and domestic disputes.

This is where Henry departs sharply from the slasher tradition. The slasher killer may be irrational, but the film generally creates rules around that irrationality. There is a signature, a pattern, a final girl, a geography of danger. Henry offers none of these structures. His unpredictability is not a mystery waiting to be solved. It is the condition of the film.

Otis and the Contagion of Violence

If Henry were simply a solitary killer, the film would already be disturbing. McNaughton makes it considerably more complicated by placing him alongside Otis, played by Tom Towles. Otis is not Henry’s equal; he is fascinated by him. That distinction transforms the film from a portrait of individual violence into an examination of what happens when violence becomes an object of desire.

Otis is attracted to the idea of Henry’s violence because it offers him something his own life lacks: power. He wants to participate in the mythology he imagines Henry represents, yet Henry has no mythology to offer him. Henry simply kills. The dynamic between the two men therefore becomes a study in the social transmission of violence. Otis wants to make murder meaningful, while Henry is largely indifferent to whether it means anything. When they are together, however, their respective attitudes begin to contaminate one another. Henry’s violence becomes spectacle for Otis, while Otis’s appetite for spectacle threatens to make Henry’s violence even more extreme.

Caught between them is Becky, Otis’s sister, played by Tracy Arnold. Becky introduces one of the film’s most painful elements: the possibility of ordinary human connection.

Becky and the Possibility of Escape

Becky is not simply the woman who discovers the monster. Her presence gives the film an emotional centre that Henry himself cannot provide. She is vulnerable, isolated and damaged, but she also possesses something that Henry and Otis have largely abandoned: the desire for connection. Her relationship with Henry is tentative and uneasy, built from small gestures rather than romantic certainty. She sees something in him that suggests the possibility of safety, even as the audience increasingly understands that safety may be impossible.

This makes the film’s emotional trajectory particularly cruel. Becky wants to escape her circumstances; Henry wants to keep moving; Otis wants to possess. None of them can construct a stable future. The film therefore becomes less about whether Henry will kill again and more about whether ordinary human attachment can survive proximity to someone whose moral boundaries are essentially absent. The answer is devastating.

The Video Camera and the Cinema of Violence

Perhaps the film’s most disturbing sequence is the home invasion filmed through a video camera. The sequence is horrifying not merely because of what happens but because of the way it transforms murder into recorded entertainment. Otis watches the footage and becomes fascinated by the image. The violence has been converted into something consumable.

McNaughton is therefore making a film about violence while simultaneously asking what it means to represent violence. The camera becomes a participant in the crime, Otis becomes a spectator, and the audience becomes uncomfortably aware of its own position. We are not only witnessing murder; we are witnessing people watching murder, and the distance between those positions begins to collapse.

This reflexivity is one of the reasons Henry remains so powerful. The film understands that violence on screen can become another form of consumption, turning the viewer’s curiosity into part of the ethical problem rather than allowing spectatorship to remain neutral.

Violence Without Catharsis

Most horror eventually offers some form of catharsis. The monster is defeated, the killer is caught, the survivor escapes and the nightmare ends. Henry offers very little of that. Its violence accumulates without producing the conventional release associated with horror.

McNaughton’s restraint is crucial. The film does not indulge in elaborate gore effects because spectacle would give the violence an aesthetic satisfaction it deliberately wants to deny. Instead, the camera often remains detached. The horror comes from implication, duration and the absence of narrative release. Even when violence becomes explicit, the film refuses to turn it into a triumphant set piece.

That approach also changes the audience’s relationship with Henry. We are denied the pleasure of watching a monster reveal itself and then waiting for its destruction. There is no reassuring endpoint toward which the film is moving. The violence simply continues until the narrative itself can no longer contain its consequences.

Henry as a Void

What ultimately makes Michael Rooker’s performance so extraordinary is the extent to which Henry resists interpretation. There are moments when he seems almost gentle, moments when he appears frightened and moments when he seems capable of affection. Then the violence returns. The film refuses to tell us which version is the “real” Henry because perhaps the question itself is inadequate.

Henry is not presented as a puzzle whose solution will reveal the person underneath. Rooker instead creates a character whose contradictions remain unresolved. He can perform tenderness without becoming redeemed, fear without becoming sympathetic and normality without becoming safe. That instability prevents the audience from converting him into a single, manageable idea.

The Legacy of Henry

The influence of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer can be felt throughout subsequent representations of real-world violence. Its descendants are found not simply in serial-killer cinema but in the broader movement toward horror that distrusts explanation, spectacle and conventional catharsis.

Its importance also lies in the way it anticipated an increasingly mediated culture. The film’s fascination with recorded violence, spectatorship and the transformation of murder into entertainment feels disturbingly prescient. What was once shocking about the idea of someone filming violence has become commonplace in an era in which catastrophe can arrive through a phone screen within seconds. Yet Henry does not depend upon contemporary technology for its power. The video camera is important because it changes the relationship between perpetrator, witness and spectator; the underlying question is much older: what happens when violence becomes something people choose to watch?

The Portrait Without a Frame

The most unsettling thing about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is ultimately what it refuses to give us. There is no satisfying explanation for Henry, no definitive psychological diagnosis that solves him, no grand mythology that transforms him into an icon and no moral framework that allows the audience to believe the world has been restored after his violence. McNaughton leaves those familiar structures deliberately incomplete.

That is why the film remains difficult to dismiss as merely a notorious piece of extreme cinema. It is a film about the failure of familiar cinematic language when confronted with violence that refuses to become mythology. Henry cannot be reduced to a supernatural monster, a psychological case study or a conventional slasher villain. He is simply a human being capable of extraordinary cruelty, and the film refuses to make that fact easier to process than it should be.

The Prognosis:

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer remains a landmark of American psychological horror because it understands that violence does not become frightening simply because it is extreme. It becomes frightening when the structures we use to explain and contain it begin to fail. John McNaughton’s film does not ask us to solve Henry. It asks us to watch him, and then confront the uncomfortable limits of what watching can tell us about violence.

Saul Muerte

FAUST AT 100: When Goethe’s Devil Became a Shadow

26 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in retrospective

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buddhism, centenary, faust, FW Murnau, goethe, history, literature, writing

There are stories that belong to literature, and there are stories that seem to have been waiting for cinema.

The Faust legend is one of them.

For centuries, the story of the scholar who trades his soul for knowledge, experience, youth or worldly fulfilment has been repeatedly rewritten because its central temptation is almost infinitely adaptable. Christopher Marlowe transformed the legend into Renaissance tragedy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe turned it into one of the great philosophical works of European literature. Later generations would reinvent the Faustian bargain through science, politics, art, technology, sex, wealth and the pursuit of immortality.

In 1926, F. W. Murnau attempted something different.

He turned Faust into an image.

Premiering at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 14 October 1926, Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage arrived as one of the great technical and artistic achievements of German silent cinema. Produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, photographed by Carl Hoffmann and designed by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, the film brought together material from the old Faust legend, Marlowe and Goethe rather than attempting a literal transcription of Goethe’s drama.

At 100, that distinction matters.

Murnau’s Faust is not simply Goethe translated into pictures. It is a cinematic argument with the Faust myth itself. It takes the philosophical questions of the literary tradition — knowledge, mortality, desire, temptation, redemption — and strips them down until they can be expressed through light, shadow, movement, architecture and the human face.

Goethe gave Western culture one of its great literary Fausts.

Murnau gave cinema one of its great nightmares.

From Goethe’s Page to Murnau’s Frame

The temptation when discussing an adaptation of Faust is to measure its fidelity to Goethe.

That is the wrong question.

Goethe’s Faust is vast, structurally eccentric and philosophically restless. It encompasses theological argument, poetry, comedy, romance, political allegory, classical mythology and metaphysical speculation. Murnau could never reproduce that totality in a silent feature, nor does he attempt to.

Instead, the screenplay by Hans Kyser draws upon several versions of the Faust tradition, including the old folk legend, Marlowe and Goethe. The result is effectively divided into two movements. The first draws heavily upon the folk tradition, introducing Faust during a devastating plague and establishing his pact with Mephisto. The second moves much closer to Goethe, with Gretchen becoming increasingly central to the tragedy.

This structure allows Murnau to do something profoundly cinematic.

He begins with the cosmic and gradually reduces it to the personal.

The film opens on a scale of apocalypse. A plague devastates the land. Mephisto spreads across the landscape like a supernatural force. Faust confronts the limits of his knowledge and finds that the intellectual authority he has accumulated cannot save the people around him.

But eventually the great philosophical problem becomes a human one.

Faust meets Gretchen.

The Devil’s bargain acquires consequences.

The apocalypse becomes intimate.

When Knowledge Fails

The plague is one of Murnau’s most important departures from the conventional Faust story because it establishes the emotional condition in which Faust becomes vulnerable.

He is not simply bored.

He is defeated.

His learning cannot cure the plague. His books cannot save the dying. His intellectual authority collapses in the face of suffering.

And this is where Mephisto enters.

The Devil does not initially need to persuade Faust that knowledge is worthless. Faust discovers its limits himself.

That distinction is crucial.

The Faustian bargain has often been reduced to a simple equation: ambitious man wants forbidden knowledge, Devil offers it, man pays the price. Murnau’s version is more interesting because Faust’s crisis begins with the realisation that knowledge without power is inadequate to the suffering of the world.

The Devil offers a solution.

Faust can cure the plague.

But the cure has a price.

The supernatural therefore enters through desperation rather than mere curiosity.

That makes the opening of Faust remarkably close to the psychological machinery of horror. The monster does not create the vulnerability. It identifies it.

Mephisto Descends

And then Emil Jannings appears.

There are many cinematic devils, but few have ever possessed the sheer physical presence of Jannings’ Mephisto.

He is not simply a man playing evil.

He becomes an image of evil.

Murnau repeatedly manipulates scale to make Mephisto seem larger than the human world around him. His enormous wings stretch across the landscape. His body becomes a looming architectural presence. In the plague sequence, he is not merely standing among the people; he appears to dominate the entire environment.

This is one of the great achievements of silent cinema: the Devil becomes geography.

Jannings also understands something important about the Devil.

Mephisto can be terrifying, but he is not required to be terrifying all the time.

He can be sardonic.

Petulant.

Amused.

Almost comic.

That is important because the Devil’s greatest power is not necessarily his ability to frighten Faust.

It is his ability to make the bargain appear reasonable.

The Faustian Bargain

The soul is the currency of the story, but the soul is not really what Faust wants.

He wants experience.

He wants youth.

He wants sensuality.

He wants freedom from the limitations of his existence.

He wants to stop being an old scholar trapped inside the accumulated knowledge of a life that has failed to satisfy him.

This is where Murnau’s film connects so powerfully with Goethe’s larger conception of Faust. The horror is not simply that Faust desires too much. It is that nothing he obtains is sufficient.

The Devil can give him youth.

But youth does not solve the problem.

He can give him beauty.

It does not solve the problem.

He can give him pleasure.

It does not solve the problem.

He can give him Gretchen.

And now another human being becomes entangled in the consequences.

The bargain therefore becomes a machine that converts desire into consequence.

Faust gets what he wants.

That is the horror.

The Devil as Cinema

Murnau’s greatest contribution to the Faust tradition may be the extent to which he understands that the Devil can be expressed without dialogue.

Silent cinema cannot give Mephisto the verbal fireworks that make Goethe’s Mephistopheles so compelling. Murnau compensates by making the character visual.

The Devil becomes movement.

He becomes silhouette.

He becomes shadow.

He becomes the sudden interruption of human scale.

This is where Faust connects directly to Murnau’s wider cinema. His films repeatedly treat architecture, landscape and light as psychological forces. In Nosferatu, space becomes a mechanism through which fear travels. In The Last Laugh, the camera turns physical environment into emotional experience. In Faust, the supernatural and the visual world become almost indistinguishable.

Murnau isn’t merely photographing a story about good and evil.

He is photographing the conflict between light and darkness.

The Architecture of Temptation

The sets by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig are essential to this achievement.

The world of Faust rarely feels like a neutral location in which characters happen to exist. It feels constructed around them.

Buildings lean.

Streets become corridors.

Interiors trap their occupants.

Landscapes become stages upon which supernatural forces operate.

The architecture has the logic of a dream rather than a realistic historical reconstruction.

That is one of the defining qualities of German Expressionism, but Faust pushes the idea further by connecting the environment directly to the metaphysical conflict. The world itself appears unstable because Faust’s moral universe has become unstable.

The frame is never simply containing the action.

It is judging it.

Faust and the Horror of Mortality

At the centre of the story is an anxiety that horror cinema would return to repeatedly throughout the twentieth century: the terror of being finite.

Faust’s problem is not simply that he is old.

It is that he is mortal.

Age is evidence of limitation. His body reminds him that knowledge cannot defeat time. His intellectual achievements cannot prevent death. His accumulated wisdom cannot make him infinite.

The Devil therefore offers the ultimate temptation: not knowledge, but escape.

Youth becomes supernatural technology.

The body becomes negotiable.

Time becomes something that can apparently be purchased.

This is why the Faustian bargain has proved so durable. Every generation discovers a new form of Faustian desire because every generation discovers a new way of being dissatisfied with the limits of human existence.

Murnau simply gives that dissatisfaction a face.

Gretchen and the Price of the Bargain

Then the film changes.

Gretchen enters, and Faust becomes less concerned with what Faust wants and increasingly concerned with what his wanting does to someone else.

Camilla Horn’s performance is crucial because Gretchen brings the film back from metaphysical abstraction to human vulnerability. The Devil may operate on a cosmic scale, but the consequences of Faust’s bargain are experienced by individual people.

Her brother Valentin dies.

Her mother dies.

Gretchen is abandoned.

She becomes increasingly isolated and ultimately descends into madness.

The Goethean tragedy takes over.

The Faustian bargain has acquired a human cost.

This is where Murnau’s adaptation becomes much darker than the image of Faust the adventurer might initially suggest.

Faust’s deal does not remain his private transaction.

It radiates outward.

Other people pay for it.

And Gretchen pays the most.

The Woman Inside the Faustian Myth

There is a temptation to regard Gretchen merely as the innocent victim of Faust’s corruption.

Murnau’s film is more complicated than that.

She is certainly caught inside forces she cannot control, but she is also the emotional mechanism through which the film exposes the inadequacy of Faust’s self-centred quest.

The old scholar wanted experience.

The young woman experiences the consequences.

That contrast gives the film its emotional structure.

Faust begins by believing that his dissatisfaction justifies extraordinary action.

Gretchen’s tragedy demonstrates that desire is never entirely private.

Someone else can become the collateral damage of another person’s attempt to transcend their limitations.

The Devil understands this.

Faust does not.

A Faustian Horror Film

Seen through the lens of horror, Faust becomes even more fascinating.

There is the plague.

There is supernatural possession of the landscape.

There is forbidden knowledge.

There is bodily transformation.

There is an ancient bargain.

There is a monstrous figure manipulating human desire.

There is death.

There is madness.

There is damnation.

But Murnau does not organise these elements according to the conventions of later horror cinema. There is no single monster stalking a group of protagonists. There is no conventional haunted house. There is no mystery to solve.

Instead, the horror emerges from temptation.

That is what makes Faust such an important ancestor to the genre.

The Devil does not simply attack the protagonist.

He gives him exactly what he thinks he wants.

The Production as Spectacle

There is something almost appropriate about the scale of Murnau’s production.

UFA committed enormous resources to the film, which became one of the studio’s most technically elaborate productions before Metropolis surpassed it the following year. Shooting took place between September 1925 and May 1926 at the Ufa studios in Berlin-Tempelhof.

The result is not a modest literary adaptation.

It is a cinematic spectacle.

Yet the extraordinary thing is that the spectacle never completely overwhelms the central idea.

The effects exist to visualise the metaphysical.

Mephisto’s wings are not merely impressive.

They make evil enormous.

The transformation of Faust is not merely a trick.

It makes mortality visible.

The plague is not simply a disaster.

It establishes the world in which faith and knowledge collapse.

Murnau repeatedly takes an abstract idea and searches for its physical equivalent.

That is what makes Faust feel so modern.

The Forgotten Battle Over the Words

There is another fascinating layer to the film’s history: even its words were caught in a battle over how Goethe’s legacy should reach the screen.

Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel Prize-winning German playwright, was commissioned to write the film’s verse intertitles. His titles were used at a Berlin preview in August 1926, but UFA ultimately discarded them for the October premiere, returning to Hans Kyser’s titles.

Modern restoration has made this history particularly significant.

The Munich Filmmuseum reconstructed a version using Hauptmann’s original intertitles, allowing audiences to experience a substantially different rhythm between text and image.

It is an extraordinary reminder that silent cinema was never actually silent.

Words mattered.

Music mattered.

The performance mattered.

And the relationship between those elements determined how the image was understood.

Murnau’s Faust has therefore survived not as one immutable object but as a film with its own complicated afterlife.

The Restoration of a Nightmare

That afterlife is part of what makes a centenary retrospective worthwhile.

The surviving film has travelled a remarkable path from its original UFA release to multiple versions, restorations and reconstructions. A major restoration by the Filmoteca Española was undertaken under Luciano Berriatúa in 1999, with a later digitalisation coordinated by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation.

Different versions have also emphasised different material. The American release contained variations created for its intended audience, while later restorations have attempted to reconstruct the German version and recover material lost or altered over decades.

This matters because Faust is itself a film about transformation.

It has been transformed by history.

Its images have survived while its original circumstances have changed.

Its words have been replaced and recovered.

Its versions have diverged.

Its audience has changed.

And yet Mephisto remains.

From Faust to Frankenstein

It is impossible to watch Murnau’s Faust without thinking about the horror cinema that followed.

The connection to Frankenstein is particularly obvious.

Both stories begin with a learned man confronting the limits of human knowledge.

Both cross a forbidden boundary.

Both discover that knowledge can become dangerous when it is divorced from responsibility.

But there is a crucial distinction.

Victor Frankenstein tries to create life.

Faust tries to escape life as it has been given to him.

Frankenstein’s transgression is creation.

Faust’s is dissatisfaction.

The two stories eventually become almost interchangeable within popular culture because both embody the same warning: human beings can destroy themselves by refusing to accept the limits of being human.

That is one of the great engines of horror.

From Faust to Everything Else

Once you begin looking for the Faustian bargain in horror, it appears everywhere.

The scientist who wants to defeat death.

The artist who wants eternal genius.

The vampire who promises eternal youth.

The millionaire who wants immortality.

The occultist who seeks forbidden knowledge.

The grieving parent who wants the dead returned.

The desperate person who accepts supernatural power in exchange for an unseen price.

The modern horror film has repeatedly returned to the same structure because it is so fundamentally human.

We want something.

We believe we deserve it.

We become convinced that the price is manageable.

Then we discover that the price was the story.

The Devil in the Modern World

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Murnau’s Faust at 100 is that its Devil does not feel particularly old.

The world around him may be medieval or Romantic, but his method remains contemporary.

Mephisto identifies dissatisfaction.

He offers a solution.

He removes the obstacle.

He waits for the consequences.

That mechanism requires no particular period.

The Devil does not need to understand the twenty-first century.

He understands people.

That is why Faust continues to speak to horror cinema a century after its premiere. Technology changes. Society changes. Our anxieties change. But the desire to escape the conditions of our own existence remains remarkably persistent.

The bargain survives because the temptation survives.

Goethe’s Faust, Murnau’s Faust

This is where the relationship between the original Faust and Murnau’s film becomes particularly valuable.

Goethe’s work gives us the intellectual and philosophical architecture of the Faustian myth.

Murnau gives us its dream imagery.

Goethe can make Mephistopheles argue.

Murnau can make him fill the sky.

Goethe can explore Faust’s contradictions through language.

Murnau can place a man before a mirror, a woman in the snow, a plague beneath enormous wings, and a figure of evil looming over a city.

The filmmaker does not replace the writer.

He changes the vocabulary.

And that is the real achievement of Faust.

It demonstrates that adaptation does not have to mean reproduction.

Sometimes it means discovering what a story becomes when another medium removes everything except its essential images.

When the Devil Became a Shadow

A hundred years later, the extraordinary achievement of Faust is not simply that it remains beautiful.

It is that it remains conceptually alive.

The images have become part of cinema’s collective memory: Mephisto spreading his wings over the plague-stricken town; Faust confronting the limits of age; the transformation of the scholar into the young man; Gretchen’s descent into tragedy; the enormous spaces in which human beings appear almost insignificant.

Yet beneath the spectacle is a surprisingly simple horror story.

A man is unhappy with the limits of his existence.

Someone offers him a way out.

He accepts.

Other people suffer.

The Devil keeps his promise.

That last point is important.

Mephisto does not necessarily deceive Faust by refusing to deliver what was promised.

He gives him the bargain.

Faust is simply incapable of understanding what it will cost.

That is the essence of the Faustian horror story.

The Devil does not have to lie.

He only has to let us believe that we understand the deal.

At 100, Murnau’s Faust remains one of silent cinema’s great supernatural achievements because it transforms that idea into pure cinematic language. It is a film about knowledge and ignorance, mortality and desire, temptation and consequence, but above all it is a film about the danger of wanting to transcend the boundaries that define us.

Goethe gave Faust a language through which to question existence.

Murnau gave him a landscape of shadows.

And somewhere inside those shadows stands Mephisto, waiting patiently for the next person who believes that the price of getting everything they want might not be quite as high as it seems.

From the Library to the Screen

This centenary retrospective also connects directly with a recent episode of The Library of the Occult, where we explored Goethe’s original Faust and the extraordinary literary tradition surrounding the man who dared to bargain with the Devil. If Murnau’s film leaves you wanting to go deeper into the ideas behind the imagery — Faust’s pursuit of knowledge, his dissatisfaction with mortality, the nature of the bargain and Goethe’s much larger philosophical conception of the story — the Library episode is the perfect companion piece. The Library of the Occult examines Faust as literature; Faust at 100 examines what happens when that literature is transformed into cinema. Together, they offer two different ways of approaching the same enduring question: how much of ourselves are we willing to surrender to become the person we believe we want to be?

The Prognosis:

Faust remains essential horror cinema because its Devil is not merely an embodiment of evil. He is the embodiment of temptation itself. A century after Murnau first summoned him onto the screen, the most frightening thing about Mephisto is not that he can destroy us. It is that he knows exactly what we would ask for if he offered us the chance.

Saul Muerte

RESIDENT EVIL (2026): The Man Who Couldn’t Decide

19 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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austin abrams, horror, movies, resident evil, reviews, umbrella corporation, zach cregger

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil begins with a man who does not want his life to change. Bryan is a medical courier, a man whose existence is defined by movement without necessarily having any direction. He drives things from one place to another. He delivers what other people need. He takes another job because it pays double. He is useful, but largely interchangeable. Then his girlfriend tells him she is pregnant, and suddenly the future has arrived without asking his permission. Cregger’s ingenious move is to turn that emotional paralysis into a survival-horror movie. By the time Bryan enters the nightmare of Raccoon City, he is already living inside a horror story of his own making. The monsters simply make it literal.

There is a tendency to discuss video-game adaptations according to how faithfully they reproduce characters, locations, mythology and iconography. Resident Evil takes a more interesting route. Cregger does not attempt to reproduce one particular game so much as reconstruct the experience of playing one. The film is an original story running parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2, but its architecture is unmistakably that of the games: locked doors, scarce resources, improvised weapons, bizarre obstacles, escalating objectives, seemingly useless objects, sudden encounters and the persistent feeling that somewhere just beyond the next corridor is something considerably worse. Cregger understands that Resident Evil is not necessarily about watching an action hero defeat monsters. It is about being the person who has to decide whether opening the next door is worth the risk.

The Rise of Zach Cregger

There is an intriguing progression through Zach Cregger’s work to this point. His emergence as a horror filmmaker was already something of a surprise given his background in sketch comedy with The Whitest Kids U’ Know, but Barbarian announced a filmmaker fascinated by destabilisation: the sudden reconfiguration of audience assumptions, the willingness to abandon one story for another and the conviction that horror becomes more effective when the viewer cannot quite predict what the film is going to do next. Weapons expanded that impulse. Its fractured perspectives and shifting character emphasis demonstrated a filmmaker increasingly interested in how information changes our understanding of horror. Cregger’s movies have consistently asked the audience to reassess what it thinks it is watching.

Resident Evil is different. It is arguably his most straightforward film, but that does not make it less considered. In some respects, the constraints of the franchise force Cregger to become more precise. There is no need to manufacture the sort of narrative rug-pulls that powered Barbarian or the structural complexity of Weapons. Instead, Cregger takes an existing piece of popular culture and asks a deceptively difficult question: what would it actually feel like to be trapped inside a Resident Evil game? The answer is Bryan. Cregger has spoken about wanting to recreate the soul and pacing of the games rather than construct a scene-for-scene adaptation, and that distinction is crucial. The film does not require Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield or any of the franchise’s established heroes because Bryan is not supposed to be one of them. He is supposed to be us.

The Loser as Player

Bryan is spectacularly ill-equipped for the apocalypse. He is not a police officer, soldier or special agent. He does not have years of survival training and he does not suddenly discover a hidden reservoir of action-hero competence when the monsters arrive. When he encounters the weapons that would traditionally transform a horror protagonist into an action hero, Cregger instead makes them extensions of Bryan’s incompetence. That is where Austin Abrams becomes indispensable.

Abrams does not play Bryan as a secretly capable action hero waiting to emerge. He plays him as a man who is frightened, confused, frustrated and frequently overwhelmed. His body becomes part of the film’s comedy: running, stumbling, panting, screaming, improvising and occasionally looking at the nightmare unfolding around him with the exhausted disbelief of someone who has absolutely no idea why this has become his problem. Bryan is funny because he is human. His reactions are often the reactions that a normal person might actually have if confronted with a mutated creature, a zombie or a grotesque biological impossibility. He does not become cool under pressure. He does not suddenly acquire the vocabulary of the action movie. He swears, panics, runs and makes mistakes.

Because Cregger largely isolates him, Abrams has to carry an enormous amount of the film almost by himself. This is not simply a performance of dialogue. It is a performance of reaction. The camera watches Bryan experience the game. At various points, he effectively becomes the audience’s controller. He searches rooms, tries objects, discovers weapons, encounters locked doors, learns what works and makes mistakes. He gradually becomes better at the game because he is learning how to play it. That progression gives the film a genuine gamification that extends beyond Easter eggs. Bryan is almost an NPC who has accidentally become the player character: a man who does not understand the rules, does not know what he is carrying, does not know how to use the weapons he finds and survives largely because the game keeps presenting him with another objective.

A Green Herb and a World of Rules

For longtime players, Cregger scatters the film with recognisable pieces of Resident Evil iconography. The green healing items. The locked gates. The weapons. The resource management. The increasingly grotesque mutations. The movement through seemingly disconnected environments. The hospital. Raccoon City. The sense that every apparently innocuous room might contain either salvation or something waiting to tear you apart.

These details could easily have become the cinematic equivalent of a merchandise catalogue. Instead, they are integrated into the mechanics of Bryan’s journey. The objects become punctuation marks. Cregger understands that fans do not necessarily need to be shown their favourite characters standing in a doorway. They need to feel that the rules of Resident Evil have suddenly become real. That is a much more sophisticated form of fan service.

The film is therefore remarkably restrained in its mythology. It does not spend its runtime explaining the entire history of Umbrella Corporation or stopping to introduce every recognisable name in the franchise. Instead, it places an ordinary man inside the outbreak and allows the familiar architecture to emerge around him. The result feels less like a remake of a particular Resident Evil game and more like a lost campaign running alongside one.

Cregger’s Hues: Light Inside the Dark

Visually, Cregger also understands the value of contrast. Resident Evil is a film of darkness, but it is not visually monotonous. The cold blue-black of the night, the sickly illumination of abandoned spaces, the sterile artificiality of hospital interiors and the violent eruptions of colour within the gore create a visual language that repeatedly moves between safety and danger. That contrast matters because Resident Evil has always understood light as conditional. A lit room does not necessarily mean a safe room. A familiar corridor can conceal something monstrous. A fluorescent hospital can be considerably more frightening than a dark forest.

Cregger has spoken about growing technically through Weapons, particularly in his understanding of lenses, editing and considering light sources during storyboarding. That development is evident here. The film’s visual choices are not simply about making Raccoon City look appropriately grim. They continually manipulate the relationship between visibility and vulnerability. The darkest spaces are frightening because we cannot see. The brightest spaces can be frightening because we can.

The Joke Is the Pressure Valve

Yet for all the discussion of horror, gore and game mechanics, humour may be the element that keeps Resident Evil moving. Cregger’s comedy background has always been part of his horror vocabulary. Horror and comedy share a similar anatomy: timing, tone, expectation and surprise. The joke often arrives precisely when the film could otherwise become oppressive, with Bryan’s reactions puncturing the grandeur of the apocalypse. His incompetence deflates the macho posturing that has traditionally accompanied video-game protagonists, while the absurdity of the situations becomes part of their entertainment value.

This is also where Resident Evil brushes against what I have come to think of as Gallows Horror: the point at which the joke does not relieve the horror so much as expose how grotesque the situation has become. There is a particular cruelty to laughing at Bryan because the circumstances surrounding him are genuinely appalling. He is frightened, exhausted, increasingly desperate and surrounded by things that should be utterly terrifying, yet his very inability to behave like a conventional horror protagonist becomes funny. The laughter comes not because the danger has disappeared, but because the alternative is to stare directly into the absurdity of it.

That distinction matters. Gallows humour traditionally allows us to laugh in the face of death, but Cregger pushes that instinct into the mechanics of the Resident Evil universe. The game has always contained an inherent absurdity: a character can encounter an impossible biological abomination and then spend several minutes searching a room for a key, solving a puzzle or examining an oddly specific object. Cregger understands that this ridiculousness is part of the franchise’s identity. Rather than smoothing it away in the transition from game to cinema, he allows it to become part of the film’s texture.

Importantly, the humour does not entirely dissolve the horror. It gives the audience somewhere to breathe, but it also makes the next descent into darkness sharper. The laugh becomes a pressure valve, and once that valve closes, the horror rushes back in. This creates a rhythm that keeps the film moving without allowing either tone to completely dominate the other. Cregger reportedly removed some jokes after test audiences found an earlier version too funny, making what remains particularly revealing. The surviving humour is largely embedded in character and circumstance rather than simply being added as comic relief.

And that makes Abrams’ performance even more important. For long stretches, he is effectively performing a solo comedy-horror routine against creatures, environments and visual effects. He has to make the audience laugh without making Bryan ridiculous, frightened without making him pathetic and sympathetic without turning him into a conventional hero. Abrams finds that balance, and in doing so turns Bryan’s predicament into something approaching tragicomedy. We laugh at him because we recognise him, and we recognise him because his instinct to keep running, keep joking and keep moving is also an instinct to avoid confronting what is waiting for him.

The Fear of Becoming Someone Else

The film becomes more interesting when the delivery itself begins to acquire symbolic weight. Bryan spends the entire film carrying something. He does not initially know exactly what it is. He simply knows that it is important and that someone needs it delivered. At the same time, his girlfriend Michelle is carrying something too: a child. The two forms of carrying gradually begin to echo one another.

Bryan’s job is to transport a future that he does not understand. His personal life is confronting him with another future he does not understand. In both cases, the thing being carried represents responsibility. In both cases, Bryan’s instinct is not necessarily to embrace it but to keep moving. Movement becomes his substitute for decision. He drives, runs, delivers, escapes, doubles back and keeps going. What he rarely does is stop and decide what he actually wants.

This is where the film’s apparent simplicity begins to reveal something darker. Bryan is afraid of fatherhood because fatherhood represents irreversible change. His relationship with Michelle has reached a point at which the future can no longer be postponed, and his instinct is to defer the conversation. He is caught between fight and flight, but neither quite describes him. He chooses movement without commitment.

That is his defining state. And it is why the monsters are so effective as extensions of the story. The infected are bodies that have changed without consent. Bryan is terrified of changing by choice.

The Horror of Stagnation

This makes Resident Evil unexpectedly interested in stagnation. At first glance, it is one of the fastest-moving films Cregger has made. Bryan is constantly travelling through new environments, encountering new monsters and receiving new objectives. But psychologically, he is stuck. He has been stuck before the film begins. The outbreak simply gives physical form to that condition.

Every new objective provides Bryan with an excuse not to confront the larger question waiting at home. Deliver the package. Find the weapon. Get through the gate. Reach the hospital. Find the scientists. Get the cure. There is always another task, another immediate problem and another reason not to think about tomorrow. This is precisely what makes the video-game structure so appropriate. Games are built around objectives. The player is constantly told what to do next. Bryan’s life becomes easier when he has an objective because an objective means he does not have to make a decision for himself.

The tragedy is that the game eventually runs out of objectives.

SPOILERS: The Thing He Carries

The ending makes this explicit. Bryan has spent the entire film carrying the thing that might save him. The package he initially believes to be an organ is ultimately revealed to contain a crucial component required to create the antidote. He has been carrying the answer without understanding its significance. But by the time the cure is created, Bryan’s infection has progressed too far.

The irony is devastating. He has done exactly what he was supposed to do. He delivered the package. He completed the mission. He reached the destination. And it still is not enough. The scientists cannot save him before his transformation overwhelms him, and Bryan emerges at the end no longer as the frightened courier we have spent the film following, but as another creature within the world he has been desperately trying to escape.

This is where the film’s fatherhood metaphor becomes particularly bleak. Bryan spends the movie afraid of what becoming a father will do to him. He worries about losing himself. He worries about change. He wants to return to the life he understands. And when he finally confronts the possibility of accepting that responsibility, it is already too late. His body changes without his permission. The thing he feared most happens anyway. He becomes something else.

The film therefore turns his indecision into horror. Bryan has spent the entire night oscillating between fight and flight, between accepting responsibility and escaping it, between confronting the future and postponing it. Eventually there is no decision left to make. The infection makes it for him.

The Answer Was in His Hands

There is a cruel elegance to the fact that Bryan’s salvation is with him for almost the entire film. He does not need to discover the answer. He needs to recognise what he is carrying. That distinction is central to the character.

Bryan is constantly searching for something outside himself: a weapon, an escape route, another person, a safe place, a solution. Yet the most important object in the film is literally attached to him. The cure is in the bag. The future is in the phone. The decision is waiting at home. He simply cannot bring himself to confront it.

This is why his transformation feels more thematically complete than a straightforward “hero gets infected” ending might suggest. The film does not punish Bryan because he is cowardly. It punishes him because he cannot decide what he is willing to become. And perhaps that is the real horror of Resident Evil. Not mutation. Not infection. Not even death. Change without choice.

A Resident Evil About Being the Wrong Person

Cregger’s film ultimately succeeds because it finds a way to make the Resident Evil franchise’s mechanics serve its character rather than the other way around. The game references are fun. The weapons, keys and locked doors reward familiarity. The creatures provide increasingly grotesque obstacles. The first-person sequences place us directly inside Bryan’s panic. But beneath all that is a surprisingly coherent character study.

Bryan is a loser. He is unlucky. He is underprepared. He is perpetually one bad decision away from disaster. And yet we desperately want him to make it. That sympathy is the film’s secret weapon. Because when the inevitable happens, we are not watching a franchise protagonist fall. We are watching an ordinary man who has spent the entire night trying to get home. And he never does.

That is why Austin Abrams matters so much. Without his ability to make Bryan funny, frightened, irritating, vulnerable and ultimately tragic, the film’s elaborate game mechanics would remain mechanics. Abrams gives them a human pulse. Cregger, meanwhile, has reached an intriguing point in his development. Barbarian demonstrated his ability to destroy audience expectations. Weapons showed a filmmaker increasingly interested in structure, perspective and the emotional consequences of horror. Resident Evil demonstrates something slightly different: that Cregger can take an enormous piece of existing popular culture and impose a coherent authorial sensibility upon it without needing to dominate it.

He understands that the franchise’s real appeal has never been simply zombies and monsters. It is the feeling of being trapped in a place where every decision matters. Every bullet matters. Every door matters. Every object matters. And eventually, every choice matters.

Bryan spends the entire film trying not to choose. By the end, the choice has been taken from him. The courier finally stops moving. The game is over. And the man who could never decide what he wanted to become becomes something else entirely.

Saul Muerte

GOODY GOODY (2026): A Solid Birth of Horror

14 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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Colby Hollman, Colleen Foy, Raymond Creamer, Samantha Robinson, shudder, shudder australia, Zoë Renee

Horror does not always need to reinvent the machinery of the genre to be effective. Sometimes the value lies in how cleanly the familiar pieces are assembled: a confined location, a vulnerable group of characters, an increasingly hostile environment and the creeping suspicion that something is profoundly wrong. Goody Goody, the feature debut from writer-director Raymond Creamer, operates firmly within those parameters. It is not a film of radical invention, but it is a tightly constructed and consistently watchable piece of genre filmmaking, held together by a small cast capable of making its increasingly nightmarish circumstances feel immediate.

The premise is deceptively simple. An expectant couple and their midwife find themselves trapped inside an isolated home during a blizzard as a seemingly routine home birth begins to go badly wrong. What initially appears to be a matter of medical complications gradually develops into something more sinister, with the weather outside turning the house into a sealed environment and the suggestion of an unwanted presence transforming an already stressful situation into outright horror. Creamer understands the fundamental advantage of this setup: childbirth is already an experience built around vulnerability, uncertainty and the loss of control. The supernatural elements therefore have fertile ground in which to take root.

The film’s greatest strength is its economy. With a modest cast and essentially one primary location, Goody Goody has little opportunity to disguise structural weaknesses through spectacle. Instead, Creamer puts his faith in the performers and in the gradual tightening of the narrative. Samantha Robinson and Colleen Foy provide the film with its principal dramatic engine, their characters occupying opposing positions within the increasingly unstable birth. Robinson brings an unsettling ambiguity to Goody, while Foy gives the midwife a practical, grounded presence that provides the audience with someone to trust as the situation deteriorates.

That relationship is particularly important because Goody Goody works best when it treats its supernatural threat as an extension of the characters’ circumstances rather than simply an excuse for conventional scares. The medical reality of the situation provides the initial source of anxiety; the horror grows from the realisation that rational explanations may no longer be sufficient. It is a familiar progression, certainly, but the film understands that horror often derives less from discovering something entirely new than from placing recognisable fears into increasingly hostile configurations.

Creamer’s direction is similarly restrained. There is a welcome absence of unnecessary visual grandstanding, with the claustrophobic setting doing much of the atmospheric work. The house becomes progressively less like a place of safety and more like a trap, while the blizzard surrounding it removes the possibility of easy escape. This is classic contained horror architecture: the outside world remains visible but inaccessible, leaving the characters isolated with whatever is happening inside.

And yet this is also where the film’s limitations become apparent. Goody Goody is solidly made, but rarely feels as though it is pushing against the boundaries of its influences. Its ideas are familiar, its escalation follows recognisable genre pathways and there are few moments where Creamer radically reconfigures the material. The film knows precisely what kind of horror movie it wants to be, but it does not always demonstrate the appetite to become something more unusual.

That does not make it unsuccessful. In fact, there is something refreshing about a film that understands its scale and works within it rather than attempting to manufacture importance. The relatively small cast gives the story an intimacy that larger horror productions often struggle to achieve, while the contained setting allows the performances to remain central. The result is a film that feels assembled with care rather than inflated beyond its means.

There is also a pleasing tension between the title’s almost aggressively innocent suggestion and the increasingly unpleasant reality contained within it. Goody Goody sounds like something benign, even twee; the film itself is considerably less interested in sweetness. That contrast gives the title a darkly playful quality, even if the movie surrounding it remains comparatively straight-faced.

Ultimately, Goody Goody is perhaps best appreciated for what it is rather than what it might have been. It lacks the formal invention or conceptual audacity that might elevate it into genuinely distinctive horror, but it is competently written, tightly woven and supported by a cast that understands the importance of selling the circumstances. Creamer demonstrates a solid command of contained genre filmmaking, even if the film occasionally feels content to walk paths that other horror movies have already travelled.

There is enough here to recommend it, particularly for viewers who appreciate slow-building, character-driven horror and the pressure-cooker mechanics of a contained setting. It may not leave a particularly radical mark on the genre, but it doesn’t need to. Goody Goody is a sturdy piece of horror craftsmanship: modest in ambition, dependable in execution and ultimately an enjoyable watch.

The Prognosis:

Goody Goody is not going to redefine supernatural horror, but it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its familiar ingredients either. Raymond Creamer’s film succeeds through construction, atmosphere and a small ensemble that gives its contained premise credibility. Solid rather than spectacular, familiar rather than inventive, but thoroughly watchable.

Saul Muerte

BACKROOMS: LOST IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR

14 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Movie review

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backrooms, Chiwetel Ejiofor, horror, kane parsons, Renate Reinsve

Kane Parsons has built Backrooms around a wonderfully simple cinematic proposition: what if you could walk through the wrong wall and discover that the world behind it was infinitely larger than the world you thought you knew? It is the kind of premise that sounds almost childish when reduced to a sentence yet becomes profoundly unsettling once given physical space. A doorway appears where no doorway should exist. A basement gives way to an impossible architecture. Rooms lead to rooms, corridors fold into corridors and the familiar becomes subtly, irrevocably wrong.

For a filmmaker barely out of his teens, Parsons demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of why such spaces disturb us. His feature debut, adapted from the online phenomenon he helped develop through his Kane Pixels YouTube series, does not treat the Backrooms simply as a monster’s playground. Instead, it approaches them as a psychological landscape, a physical manifestation of memory, regret, failure and the human need to impose meaning upon spaces that refuse to provide it. The result is an ambitious piece of conceptual horror that absolutely lived up to the enormous expectations surrounding its transition from internet phenomenon to feature film — and yet, somewhat paradoxically, not always in the ways one might expect.

The mythology of the Backrooms began with an image rather than a narrative: an apparently empty, yellow-walled interior illuminated by fluorescent lighting, a space that seemed both completely mundane and profoundly unnatural. Parsons understood the potential of that image early, transforming it into a series of increasingly elaborate short films before expanding the concept into this feature. The achievement of Backrooms is that it retains the essential strangeness of the original idea while giving it human beings to inhabit.

That distinction is crucial.

Because an empty room can be unsettling, but an empty room inhabited by someone carrying the weight of a broken life becomes something else entirely.

At the centre of the film is Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect whose professional and personal lives have both collapsed into a kind of stagnant middle age. Separated from his wife, drinking heavily and working in a furniture showroom that feels almost comically disconnected from the life he once imagined for himself, Clark is already living in a psychological backroom before he ever discovers the literal one.

That is one of Parsons’ smartest ideas.

Clark is an architect who has failed to construct the life he wanted, and he subsequently finds himself trapped inside an impossible architecture. The metaphor could easily have been unbearably obvious, but Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik understand that the Backrooms do not need to function as a simple allegory. Their power comes from existing simultaneously as a physical impossibility and a psychological possibility.

Clark’s first encounter with the Backrooms therefore carries an unusual mixture of fear and fascination. The space is terrifying, but it is also liberating. Its infinite corridors offer something that the world above cannot: possibility. Here is a place without conventional boundaries, a space where the rules of reality have become negotiable. For a man whose existence has narrowed into disappointment, the infinite can initially look like freedom.

That makes Chiwetel Ejiofor such an inspired choice.

Ejiofor has always possessed an ability to communicate enormous amounts of emotional information without appearing to perform it. Here, that quality becomes essential. Clark is not simply frightened by the Backrooms. He is fascinated by them, frustrated by them, angry with them and, at times, almost seduced by them. Ejiofor allows those contradictory responses to coexist.

There is a weariness to his performance that makes Clark’s predicament feel much larger than the mechanics of the horror story. He is a man who has already become trapped before the film begins. The Backrooms merely give that condition architectural form.

It is one of the film’s most impressive pieces of psychological construction.

Renate Reinsve is equally effective as Dr Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist, and her presence gives the film another layer of psychological inquiry. If Clark represents someone trapped inside his own resentments, Mary represents someone who has built a professional life around helping other people navigate theirs. Her decision to enter the Backrooms after Clark therefore becomes more than a conventional rescue mission.

The therapist enters the patient’s nightmare.

And once she does, the distinction between observer and participant begins to collapse.

This is where Backrooms becomes particularly inventive. The film repeatedly toys with the idea that the environment may not simply be an external supernatural space but something connected to the characters’ memories and emotional histories. The rooms appear to contain fragments of lived experience, distorted approximations of reality that resemble memories reconstructed by someone who cannot quite remember them correctly.

The result is architecture behaving like trauma.

A corridor does not necessarily lead somewhere.

A room does not necessarily contain anything.

A familiar object may have no explanation.

And the deeper the characters travel, the less useful conventional geography becomes.

Parsons is exceptionally good at this kind of spatial uncertainty. He understands that horror does not always require darkness. In fact, Backrooms demonstrates how effectively a filmmaker can make fluorescent lighting frightening. The sickly yellow interiors and endless artificial illumination create a world that is permanently exposed and yet somehow impossible to see clearly.

There is nowhere to hide because there is nowhere that feels safe.

The cinematography and production design deserve enormous credit for creating this sensation. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox transform the supposedly mundane language of commercial interiors into something oppressive and almost cosmic. Walls, carpets, ceiling panels and furniture become components of an endlessly repeating visual vocabulary. The repetition is essential because it gradually erodes the audience’s confidence in their own spatial memory.

We have seen this room before.

Haven’t we?

That corridor looks familiar.

Or perhaps it doesn’t.

The film understands that the human brain is constantly trying to map its surroundings, and Backrooms weaponises that instinct against us.

This is where the film’s connection to liminal-space horror becomes more than a fashionable aesthetic. The liminal space is frightening because it is a location without a clear purpose. It is the hotel corridor after everyone has gone home. The office after the workers have disappeared. The shopping centre before opening. The school after the final bell.

These spaces are recognisable but stripped of their social function.

Backrooms takes that idea and removes the endpoint entirely.

There is no closing time.

There is no final corridor.

There is no obvious outside.

There is simply more.

And more.

That is conceptually brilliant.

It is also where the film begins to reveal its greatest weakness.

Because once the audience understands the central conceit, the question becomes what Parsons can actually do with it for almost two hours.

The answer is frequently impressive.

But not always frightening.

Backrooms is an exceptionally inventive film, yet its inventiveness does not consistently translate into shock appeal. Parsons is more interested in unease than conventional scares, and that decision is understandable given the material. The original Backrooms concept was never particularly dependent upon jump scares. Its power came from suggestion, emptiness and the sense that something might be waiting just outside the limits of the frame.

The problem is that a feature-length film eventually has to provide some escalation.

And the middle section occasionally feels as though it is wandering through the very architecture it has created.

The endless rooms are fascinating to explore, but fascination and fear are not identical emotions. The film’s central conceit is sufficiently compelling that simply moving through the Backrooms can remain interesting for quite some time. Yet there comes a point where the viewer begins to anticipate the rhythm: another corridor, another room, another strange object, another distant sound.

The film starts to experience its own version of spatial fatigue.

This is not a failure of imagination. Quite the opposite.

There is almost too much imagination and not quite enough dramatic propulsion.

The film’s psychological ideas are considerably more successful. The Backrooms become a kind of externalised interiority, a landscape in which characters confront versions of themselves that have been distorted by memory and regret. Parsons is interested in the way people become trapped inside narratives about their own lives, particularly the stories they tell themselves about why they failed.

Clark is an especially compelling example because his professional identity has collapsed alongside his personal one. He was supposed to design spaces. Instead, he finds himself working in a furniture showroom, surrounded by representations of homes that he no longer possesses.

The irony is beautifully constructed.

He sells people the fantasy of domestic stability while sleeping in the store himself.

Then he discovers an infinite series of spaces that seem to exist behind reality.

The Backrooms therefore become both escape and punishment.

That duality gives the film its emotional weight.

And it is why Ejiofor’s performance matters so much. Without him, Backrooms could easily become an elaborate exercise in production design. With him, the corridors acquire emotional significance.

He makes the film human.

There is something particularly impressive about watching an actor of Ejiofor’s calibre respond to a premise that could so easily have remained trapped within internet horror. He doesn’t treat the Backrooms as an excuse to perform fear. He treats them as a psychological event.

That difference elevates the material.

The supporting performances contribute to the same effect, particularly as the film moves away from Clark’s solitary exploration and begins introducing other characters into the labyrinth. The Backrooms become more threatening when they are shared because their presence introduces conflicting interpretations of what the space actually represents.

Is it a supernatural dimension?

A psychological projection?

A manifestation of memory?

A place that exists outside conventional reality?

Parsons wisely refuses to provide a completely comfortable answer.

That ambiguity is one of the film’s strengths.

Yet it also contributes to the sense that the horror never quite lands with the force it could.

There are certainly disturbing images. Parsons has an excellent eye for grotesque shapes and unnatural movement, and when the film finally reveals some of the entities inhabiting the Backrooms, they are strikingly designed. But there is something almost academic about the horror. We observe it. We analyse it. We wonder what it means.

We don’t necessarily recoil from it.

And that distinction is perhaps the key to my response to the film.

Did Backrooms live up to expectations?

Yes and no.

It absolutely lives up to the expectation that Kane Parsons would bring something inventive and visually distinctive to the big screen. It demonstrates a remarkable understanding of atmosphere, spatial design and psychological horror. The performances are considerably stronger than one might expect from a film originating in internet creepypasta culture, with Ejiofor providing the emotional centre and Reinsve offering an equally compelling counterpoint.

But it does not always live up to the expectation of being genuinely frightening.

There are moments of terror, but the film is ultimately more interested in the uncanny than the shocking.

That is not necessarily a criticism.

In fact, some audiences will consider it the film’s greatest virtue.

But for a horror film built around such an inherently disturbing concept, there is a nagging feeling that Parsons could have pushed the material further into genuine nightmare territory.

The middle section in particular could have benefited from greater narrative urgency. The Backrooms are fascinating, but the film occasionally mistakes movement through an interesting environment for dramatic progression. The characters continue exploring, the mythology expands and the psychological dimensions deepen, but the narrative momentum periodically stalls.

When the film finally accelerates towards its conclusion, it becomes considerably more effective. The space suddenly feels smaller, despite remaining physically enormous. The threat becomes more immediate. The characters’ movement through the environment gains urgency.

And for a brief period, the film achieves the perfect marriage between its conceptual and visceral qualities.

This is what makes Backrooms so frustratingly close to greatness.

You can see what Parsons is capable of.

There are sequences where the film stops feeling like an adaptation of an internet horror phenomenon and starts feeling like the emergence of a genuinely distinctive cinematic voice. The imagery, sound, performances and psychological ideas converge into something that feels strange and original.

Kane Parsons has clearly spent years thinking about how spaces can frighten us.

Now he has to learn how to make stories frighten us just as effectively.

That is an exciting prospect.

Because Backrooms may ultimately be less significant as a fully realised horror movie than as a statement of intent from an extraordinarily promising filmmaker. At just twenty, Parsons has taken an idea born from internet folklore and translated it into a feature that possesses a visual and conceptual identity of its own. That achievement alone is considerable.

The film’s greatest success is perhaps that it makes the Backrooms feel cinematic rather than merely viral.

The internet created the mythology.

Parsons has created a world.

And it is a world worth getting lost in.

Even if, occasionally, the journey takes a little too long.

The Prognosis:

Backrooms is an inventive, psychologically rich and beautifully performed piece of liminal horror that proves Kane Parsons has far more to offer than an expansion of his viral YouTube phenomenon. Its middle section occasionally loses momentum, and its strange, unsettling imagery rarely delivers the visceral shock one might expect from its premise. But the intelligence of its ideas, the extraordinary production design and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s superb central performance make it an intriguing and often hypnotic debut. It may not always frighten as much as it fascinates, but there is no question that Kane Parsons is a filmmaker worth watching.

Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Geisha War

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by surgeons of horror in Sydney Underground Film Festival

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cinema, film, horror, movies, reviews, suff, Sydney Underground Film Festival

There are filmmakers who make films, and then there are filmmakers who seem to have wandered into a film laboratory, knocked over several shelves of chemicals and decided to see what happened.

Yoshihiro Nishimura was very much the latter.

With Geisha War, the Japanese cult filmmaker delivers one final eruption of blood, absurdity, political provocation and gloriously impractical visual effects. It is a film that frequently appears less interested in whether its story makes sense than in whether the next image can possibly be more outrageous than the last.

The answer, more often than not, is yes.

Set in the historic pleasure district of Yoshiwara, Geisha War pits an American gangster and his associates against the local community, led by Kiki, a ramen vendor who finds herself caught up in the struggle to protect the district from outside control. The basic premise provides Nishimura with an excuse to stage a collision between American gangster mythology, Japanese popular culture and his own particular brand of cinematic insanity.

And insanity is certainly the operative word.

Nishimura’s cinema has never been particularly interested in restraint. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films transform bodies into weapons, flesh into sculpture and practical effects into a kind of gleeful visual assault. Geisha War carries that tradition forward with an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, outrageous transformations and fountains of artificial blood. FilmInk describes the film’s visual approach as a combination of solid practical gore and cartoonish digital effects, with everything from chainsaw weaponry to giant scissors entering the fray.

It is less a film than a fever dream with a production budget.

Yet beneath the carnage is something considerably more pointed.

The conflict between Carmine and the residents of Yoshiwara is essentially a battle over cultural ownership. The American gangster sees the district as something to acquire, exploit and reshape for his own purposes. Nishimura responds by turning that clash into an exaggerated piece of exploitation spectacle, where cultural imperialism is answered with severed limbs, weaponised geisha and enough blood to repaint the streets.

Subtle it isn’t.

But subtlety was never particularly high on Nishimura’s list of priorities.

The film’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous. A conventional action film might introduce a weapon and expect us to accept it as part of the world. Nishimura introduces something completely absurd and then seems determined to make it even more absurd. The result is a cinematic universe in which rickshaws become vehicles of lunacy, weapons emerge from unexpected places and characters can transform into things that would be difficult to describe without sounding like the result of a particularly feverish drinking session.

This is Gallows Horror stripped of the gallows and given a flamethrower.

There is also something strangely poignant about watching Geisha War as Nishimura’s final film. The director died in May 2026, making this an unintentional farewell from one of Japanese genre cinema’s great visual anarchists.

It is certainly an appropriate final statement.

Nishimura never seemed particularly interested in behaving himself. His cinema was messy, confrontational, juvenile, political, horny, grotesque and frequently hilarious. He understood that practical effects could be more than technical achievements: they could be jokes, provocations and punctuation marks. A severed limb wasn’t merely a piece of gore. It was a punchline.

Geisha War occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its own excess. The narrative is skeletal, characterisation is largely functional and the film’s relentless barrage of ideas can become exhausting. For all the visual invention, there are moments when it feels as though Nishimura has several films fighting for space inside the same one.

But perhaps that is part of its charm.

This isn’t polished underground cinema. It isn’t attempting to disguise its seams or convince us that its world is realistic. It is handmade, excessive and proudly artificial. The practical effects have weight; the digital effects deliberately flirt with cartoonishness; the action seems designed around the question of what could possibly make an audience yell what the hell was that?

And then, just when the film seems incapable of slowing down, it finds an unexpectedly reflective note beneath all the bloodshed.

That contradiction is what makes Geisha War work.

For all its ridiculousness, there is a genuine sense of resistance running through the film. Its grotesque spectacle becomes a weapon against the forces attempting to commodify and control its world. Nishimura takes the familiar machinery of exploitation cinema and turns it back upon itself, producing something that is simultaneously crude, playful and politically mischievous.

It is not his most accomplished film.

It may not even be his most outrageous.

But it is unmistakably his.

And as the final film from a director who spent decades proving that there was still room for strange, handmade, bloody and completely unclassifiable cinema, Geisha War makes for one hell of a final curtain call.

Underground Horrors is a series of reviews exploring the strange, confrontational and boundary-pushing films emerging from the underground of contemporary horror cinema.

Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Jump Scare

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

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There is something wonderfully rebellious about a film that seems to have been assembled from equal parts heavy metal, grindhouse cinema, 1990s music videos and a complete disregard for good taste.

Donnie Hobbie’s Jump Scare is that film.

The feature debut from Hobbie follows the all-female metal band Jump Scare as they retreat to a remote cabin to work on their new album. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to escape the pressures of everyday life and find some creative inspiration.

Unfortunately, their neighbours are cannibals.

It is, admittedly, a familiar horror premise.

But Jump Scare has absolutely no interest in behaving like a familiar horror film.

Instead, Hobbie takes the cabin-in-the-woods template and runs it through a neon-soaked, blood-splattered analogue nightmare. The result is a deliberately scrappy collision of comedy, gore, animation, psychedelia and heavy metal attitude.

It looks like a horror movie that escaped from a late-night music-video block.

And that’s a compliment.

There is a tremendous amount of visual personality here. Grainy imagery, saturated colours, stylised lighting, graphic overlays, practical effects and bursts of animation give Jump Scare the feeling of something excavated from a particularly deranged corner of the VHS era.

The film wears its influences proudly.

There are obvious echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, grindhouse cinema and the splatter-comedy tradition, but Hobbie isn’t particularly interested in disguising those influences. Jump Scare is closer to a mixtape than a traditional horror film: take something from here, something from there, turn the volume up and see what happens.

And, for considerable stretches, it is a hell of a lot of fun.

The band themselves are one of the film’s strongest assets. Their camaraderie gives the early sections a loose, lived-in quality, and the chemistry between the performers provides a welcome sense that these characters actually enjoy being around one another.

That matters.

Because once the cannibals arrive, the film could easily have become another disposable exercise in slaughterhouse horror.

Instead, the personalities keep it moving.

Hobbie also demonstrates an obvious affection for practical filmmaking. There is a joyous physicality to the violence, with blood, guts, creatures and assorted bodily misfortune given an appropriately handmade quality. Some of the effects are deliberately rough around the edges, but that imperfection is part of the film’s aesthetic.

Jump Scare isn’t trying to convince us that we’re watching reality.

It wants us to enjoy the artifice.

That gives the film a particularly punk-rock quality. It is less concerned with polish than with energy.

The problem is that energy can only carry a film so far.

At 102 minutes, Jump Scare occasionally feels as though it has run out of ideas before it has run out of runtime. The same jokes, stylistic flourishes and conversations can begin to repeat themselves, while the middle section lacks some of the momentum generated by the film’s opening.

There are moments when you can almost see the more tightly edited version of Jump Scare hiding inside the finished film.

And that’s frustrating because there is so much here to admire.

Hobbie clearly has an eye.

There are sequences that burst with invention, and the film’s visual confidence is remarkable for a feature debut. It understands that horror doesn’t always need to be dark, grim or self-serious. Sometimes it can be loud, colourful, stupid, funny and covered in blood.

In that sense, Jump Scare feels like something of a corrective to the more restrained tendencies of contemporary horror.

It wants to have fun.

Even when that fun becomes excessive.

The film also gets something right about its metal-band protagonists. Their world isn’t simply used as an excuse for a soundtrack. Music is woven into the film’s identity, with the aesthetic of heavy metal becoming part of its visual and comic language.

The result is less Texas Chain Saw filtered through a conventional horror-comedy structure than Texas Chain Saw dropped into a particularly unhinged music video.

And then somebody added puppets.

And animation.

And considerably more blood.

For all its rough edges, there is something admirable about a filmmaker arriving with this much personality. Jump Scare isn’t afraid to be ugly, ridiculous or excessive. It isn’t interested in sanding down its eccentricities in the pursuit of conventional genre polish.

Sometimes that works beautifully.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

But I’d take an occasionally overstuffed film with this much personality over something technically accomplished and completely anonymous.

Jump Scare doesn’t reinvent the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie.

It throws the old model into a blender, adds a metal soundtrack, pours in a bucket of fake blood and hits the switch.

The result is messy.

Loud.

Occasionally exhausting.

But undeniably alive.

SUFF #20

Jump Scare screens at 9:45pm on Friday 11 September in Cinema 2, with a second screening at 8:00pm on Saturday 12 September in Cinema 4, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20 at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For the full program and ticket information, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Bagworm

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

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There are few things more immediately relatable than stepping on a rusty nail.

The sudden stab of pain. The instinctive inspection of the offending piece of metal. The brief mental calculation of just how bad this might be.

Then there is Carroll.

When Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm introduces its protagonist, he is already a man seemingly determined to make his own life as unpleasant as possible. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman, conspiracy-minded malcontent and habitual misanthrope, Carroll has developed an elaborate worldview in which the world is broken, society is collapsing and everyone else seems to be conspiring against him.

Then he steps on a rusty nail.

It is, perhaps, the least surprising turning point in cinema history.

What follows is a grimy, grotesque and frequently darkly funny descent into paranoia, physical deterioration and self-destruction. Carroll’s body begins to break down, but so too does his already precarious grip on reality. The question becomes increasingly difficult to answer: is the world genuinely falling apart around him, or is Carroll simply becoming incapable of seeing anything beyond his own increasingly distorted perspective?

Bagworm is at its most effective when it refuses to provide an easy answer.

There is certainly a straightforward body-horror film lurking underneath all the grime. The rusty nail becomes the gateway to an infection that gradually consumes Carroll, providing Bernsen with ample opportunities for increasingly revolting practical effects. His deteriorating body becomes a physical manifestation of the rot already present in his life.

But the film isn’t really interested in asking whether Carroll is sick.

He’s obviously sick.

The more interesting question is whether the infection is responsible for his behaviour or merely giving physical form to everything that was already there.

Carroll is not an easy protagonist to spend ninety-six minutes with. That seems entirely deliberate.

He is petty, suspicious, angry and convinced of his own righteousness. His relationships with women, friends and strangers become increasingly disastrous, yet he repeatedly interprets the resulting hostility as evidence that there is something wrong with everyone else.

It is a particularly contemporary form of horror.

The world hasn’t necessarily turned against Carroll.

Carroll has simply constructed a worldview in which it must have.

This is where Bagworm finds its sharpest satirical edge. Its protagonist’s paranoia and resentment place him within the orbit of the modern manosphere, where personal failure can be transformed into political grievance and loneliness becomes evidence of a conspiracy rather than an invitation to self-reflection. Critics have similarly read the film as an exploration of toxic masculinity, male isolation and the tendency to externalise personal misery.

Bernsen’s achievement is that he doesn’t make this entirely miserable to watch.

Bagworm is often very funny.

Not necessarily comfortable funny, and certainly not always “laugh with the character” funny. Much of the humour comes from watching Carroll’s increasingly bizarre attempts to navigate ordinary social situations while apparently possessing no ability to recognise how thoroughly he is sabotaging himself.

The comedy works because there is something painfully recognisable beneath the grotesquerie.

We’ve all encountered some version of Carroll.

Perhaps not quite this version.

Hopefully.

Peter Falls gives the film an important centre of gravity. Carroll is repellent without becoming entirely abstract. There are flashes of vulnerability beneath the hostility, moments where the character seems less like a cartoon of internet-age masculinity and more like a desperately unhappy man who has spent so long blaming everyone else that he no longer knows how to examine himself.

That distinction matters.

Because Bagworm isn’t particularly interested in redemption.

It isn’t a story about a troubled man discovering the error of his ways and becoming a better person. Instead, it watches him continue digging, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is holding the shovel.

And then it makes the shovel increasingly disgusting.

The physical deterioration is where Bernsen’s filmmaking becomes particularly effective. The film’s grubby aesthetic gives the horror a distinctly tactile quality, while Carroll’s deteriorating body increasingly resembles the physical embodiment of his internal state. The world around him feels just as diseased as he is.

His house is decaying.

His relationships are decaying.

His body is decaying.

And somehow Carroll remains convinced that the problem is everybody else.

That is the joke.

And the tragedy.

Bagworm isn’t always as controlled as its best moments suggest. Its deliberately abrasive tone can become exhausting, and its third act doesn’t quite sustain the same combination of psychological unease and dark comedy that makes the earlier sections so compelling. Even critics who responded strongly to the film have noted that its various stylistic and thematic ambitions don’t always land with equal force.

But there is something admirable about the sheer unpleasantness of it.

Bernsen isn’t attempting to make Carroll conventionally sympathetic. Instead, he asks us to look at a particularly ugly form of contemporary loneliness and watch what happens when isolation, resentment and paranoia are allowed to feed one another.

The result is body horror with a distinctly social infection.

The rusty nail gets into Carroll’s foot.

The paranoia gets into his head.

And before long, it becomes difficult to tell where the disease ends and the man begins.

That is what makes Bagworm considerably more than another gross-out horror film.

It is a portrait of a man rotting from the inside out — and a world that may not be quite as responsible for the smell as he thinks.

SUFF #20

Bagworm screens as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20, celebrating the festival’s 20th anniversary at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For the full program and ticket information, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Species

07 Monday Sep 2026

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There are few expressions more insidious than “the daily grind.”

It suggests something mundane. Something repetitive. A little unpleasant, perhaps, but ultimately survivable. Get up. Go to work. Put in the hours. Do it again tomorrow.

In Species, the daily grind becomes something considerably more literal.

Marion Le Corroller’s electrifying debut takes the familiar anxieties of professional burnout and pushes them through the meat grinder of body horror, imagining a generation so thoroughly consumed by work that exhaustion becomes a physical transformation.

Margot wants to be a doctor.

For an ambitious young intern working in one of France’s most competitive emergency rooms, however, the dream is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The pressure is relentless, the hours punishing and the stream of young patients arriving with mysterious symptoms linked to extreme burnout is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Then Margot begins experiencing changes of her own.

The harder she works, the more her body begins to betray her.

It is an appropriately grotesque premise for a film about workplace exhaustion. Rather than depicting burnout as a vague psychological malaise, Species gives it flesh, blood and plenty of opportunities for it to tear itself apart.

Le Corroller is clearly interested in the traditions of body horror, but Species isn’t simply an exercise in mutation for mutation’s sake. The transformations are an extension of the film’s social commentary. Margot’s body becomes the ultimate workplace casualty — an organism pushed beyond its limits by a system that expects productivity regardless of the consequences.

The horror is that nobody seems particularly surprised.

There is something darkly comic in the way Species treats this environment. The absurdity of professional expectations gradually becomes indistinguishable from the grotesque. The emergency room is already a pressure cooker before Margot’s physical transformation begins, and the film finds humour in the bureaucratic machinery surrounding people who are quite literally falling apart.

It is social satire with a viscous coating.

Le Corroller also demonstrates a clear affection for practical effects. When Species gets its hands dirty, it doesn’t hold back. Flesh stretches, ruptures and mutates with the kind of tactile unpleasantness that reminds us why practical body horror remains so effective. There is an immediacy to seeing physical matter behave in ways it absolutely shouldn’t.

The influence of contemporary French body horror is certainly apparent. There are echoes of Titane in its collision of identity, flesh and societal expectation, while the workplace anxieties inevitably invite comparison with The Substance. Yet Species is less interested in abstraction than in taking a very recognisable contemporary problem — exhaustion — and asking what it might look like if we could actually see it happening to the human body.

The answer is not pretty.

Nor is it subtle.

But subtlety isn’t necessarily the point.

Species operates at the intersection of visceral horror and social satire, and its best moments understand that the two can amplify one another. The more grotesque Margot’s transformation becomes, the more ridiculous the expectations placed upon her begin to seem.

The film’s central conceit also taps into something particularly recognisable about contemporary working life: the idea that exhaustion is not necessarily regarded as a warning sign, but as evidence of commitment.

You’re tired?

Work harder.

You’re struggling?

Push through.

Your body is changing?

There are patients waiting.

It is here that Species finds its most uncomfortable joke. The system doesn’t necessarily need to destroy you deliberately. It simply needs to keep demanding more until there is nothing left to give.

And Margot is very much a product of that system.

Le Corroller’s direction is energetic and visually confident, particularly for a debut feature. There is an infectious willingness to push the material into increasingly strange territory, and the film’s mixture of blood-soaked practical effects, absurd humour and social commentary gives it an identity of its own.

At times, however, Species can feel as though it is operating at maximum intensity when a little restraint might have made its sharper ideas hit harder. Its satirical targets are rarely difficult to identify, and the film occasionally favours escalation over deeper exploration.

But there is something refreshing about a debut that would rather overreach than play it safe.

And Species certainly overreaches.

Thankfully, it does so with enthusiasm.

The result is an exhilarating piece of contemporary body horror that understands the grotesque potential of modern working life. Its monsters aren’t simply lurking in the shadows. They are sitting in fluorescent-lit offices, hospital corridors and examination rooms, smiling politely while asking you to work another shift.

Because that’s the real horror of the daily grind.

Eventually, something has to give.

In Species, it’s the flesh.

SUFF #20

Species screens Friday 11 September at 9:45pm in Cinema 1 as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For more information and tickets, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Lucid

07 Monday Sep 2026

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There is something inherently unsettling about a dream.

Not necessarily because of what happens within it, but because of the strange rules governing the experience. Familiar places become alien. People we know acquire unfamiliar faces. Memories surface without invitation. Cause and effect become slippery. And beneath it all is the uncomfortable knowledge that the nightmare is coming from somewhere inside us.

Lucid, the surreal art-punk horror film from Canadian filmmakers Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, takes that premise and runs headlong into the subconscious.

Set in the 1990s, the film follows Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student whose creative ambitions are beginning to collapse beneath the weight of a seemingly insurmountable block. With her place at art school under threat, Mia turns to a mysterious lucid-dreaming elixir in the hope that she can unlock the creativity she feels slipping away.

Instead, she opens a door that perhaps should have remained closed.

The resulting descent into dreams, memories and increasingly monstrous manifestations makes Lucid less interested in conventional nightmare mechanics than in the uncomfortable connection between creation and self-examination.

For Mia, the problem isn’t simply that she can’t make art.

It is that she may not yet understand what she is trying to express.

Milligan and Fendall approach this psychological territory with an appropriately handmade aesthetic. Shot on 35mm and Super 8, Lucid has a tactile quality that distinguishes it from the increasingly polished digital language of contemporary genre cinema. The imagery feels deliberately unstable, as though the film itself is slipping between waking reality and the fragmented visual language of a dream.

That is where Lucid becomes most compelling.

Rather than treating lucid dreaming as a convenient supernatural gimmick, the film uses it as a mechanism for peeling away the layers Mia has constructed around herself. The deeper she travels into this increasingly fractured reality, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between imagination, memory and emotional trauma.

The monsters, consequently, are more than things to be feared.

They are things to be confronted.

One of the film’s most striking ideas is that artistic expression cannot necessarily be separated from the experiences that produce it. Creativity may be liberating, but it can also be invasive. To create something genuinely personal may require confronting the parts of yourself that you would rather leave buried.

That makes Lucid an interesting companion piece to some of the more traditional forms of body and psychological horror appearing at SUFF this year. Where films such as Bagworm externalise transformation through the physical body, Lucid turns inward. Its battleground is the imagination itself.

And imagination proves to be a particularly dangerous place.

There is an undeniable influence of 1990s alternative and underground culture running through the film, but Lucid isn’t simply nostalgic window dressing. Its period setting becomes part of the film’s identity: a world of handmade art, subcultures and analogue imagery that feels particularly appropriate for a story about an artist struggling to discover her own voice. The filmmakers’ use of 35mm and Super 8 reinforces that connection, giving the film an aesthetic that feels deliberately tactile and imperfect.

It is also a film willing to take risks.

At times, those risks work against it. Lucid isn’t particularly interested in holding the audience’s hand, and its narrative can become as fragmented as the dreamscape through which Mia is travelling. There are moments when the symbolism threatens to overwhelm the story itself.

But that is also part of the film’s appeal.

Lucid isn’t particularly interested in behaving itself.

It wants to be strange.

It wants to be messy.

It wants to crawl inside the head of its protagonist and rummage around in the places where memory, fear and creativity become indistinguishable.

And for a film about an artist desperately searching for inspiration, there is something wonderfully appropriate about that approach.

The result is an ambitious piece of independent horror that feels less concerned with delivering a neatly constructed nightmare than with asking what happens when we deliberately surrender control of our own minds.

Sometimes the things we discover there are frightening.

Sometimes they’re grotesque.

And sometimes they are the very things we need to confront before we can create anything worth showing the world.

Lucid may occasionally lose its way inside its own dreamscape, but its willingness to embrace uncertainty is precisely what makes it such an intriguing piece of underground cinema.

SUFF #20

Lucid screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm in Cinema 3 as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For more information and tickets, visit Sydney Underground Film Festival.

Saul Muerte