Chad Collins

There are few things better than a deliciously crafted short film. At this year’s Panic Fest, the talent evident in the sundry shorts available is, quite simply, unmatched. Diverse in genre and approach, these filmmakers play with well-worn themes,…

Nick Funess’ Young Blondes, Stalked and Murdered certainly has an eye-catching title going for it. While it might seem conspicuously meta, an interrogation of the 1960s and 1970s, the slashers that, in key beats, amounted to just that title, Young…

Sorry, Carnage Radio, but you’re not the winning caller. Movies, broadly speaking, must transcend the sum of their individual parts, and for what it’s worth, James Fite’s Carnage Radio is composed of very, very good parts. The cast, across the board,…

Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting endeavors to be TV dinner horror. Warm, comfortable, familiar, and perhaps most importantly, accessible. Amblin-esque in sensibility (though considerably more violent), the broad brushstrokes of Roache-Turner’s…

After Tilman Singer’s (Luz) Cuckoo concluded at this year’s Sleeping Giant Festival, my partner remarked, “I liked that.” I liked it too, and broadly, that’s as clear a formal assessment as I can give. Cuckoo, Singer’s sophomore feature, is poised to…

I regularly go into indie films with an awareness that the filmmakers don’t have access to the resources the studio system regularly has. I’m more comfortable maligning The Exorcist: Believer (even though it wasn’t all bad) because, broadly, the…

Sharks on a plane is an indelible concept. When David R. Ellis and Samuel L. Jackson put Snakes on a Plane 18 years ago, the internet response was rabid. Resultantly, New Line Cinema commissioned five days’ worth of reshoots, changing both the rating…

I tried to die by suicide once. For readers of this site, that might not come as much of a surprise because I’ve written about it at least twice, maybe more. It was the springboard for my piece on I’m Thinking of Ending Things and the contextual…

Steven Soderbergh, a pioneer of the independent film movement, is one of the most innovative filmmakers of the modern era. No two films of his are alike beyond their almost primordial interest in pushing the boundaries of what film is and can be…

I was a huge fan of director Jane Schoenbrun’s lo-fi, melancholic odyssey We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. There, Schoenbrun successfully culled niche creepypasta obsession and applied it to a singular yet remarkably expressive, dare I say…

I use the word propulsive a lot. I always mean it, though I’d understand if the frequency with which I apply it to any new review of mine would be met with some skepticism. Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding is propulsive. Aggressively, diabolically so.…

Your Monster is liable to be the most fun you have at the movies this year, perhaps in the past several years. Writer and director Caroline Lindy’s feature debut is remarkably assured, ostensibly retelling Beauty and the Beast, though imbued with…

Back in 2021, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. I thought the folkloric eco-horror yielded promise, though Gaia was too overstuffed and too inconsistent in its genre demands, to resonate as strongly as I’d hoped. Making its world…

When titling the document I intended to take notes for Jason Arber’s Mary Had a Little Lamb on, the document name autocorrected from “Mary Had a Little Lamb Notes” to “Mary Had a Little Lamb Bites.” I feared that might be an augur of what was to…

T.W. Burgess’s Mister Howl is a groundbreaking exercise in found footage literature. A terrifying, meta-riff on Rear Window, Mister Howl is unease incarnate. Replete with stellar illustrations emulating the protagonist’s digital perspective, this is…

A book about Poltergeist, the 1982 haunted house movie to end all haunted house movies, could take as many shapes as its titular spectral force. A haunted clown, a possessed tree—an academic interrogation of Poltergeist’s legacy and mythos, or…

Meg 2: The Trench won’t win any The Meg holdouts over. If the first’s family-friendly approach to massive shark carnage and elevated Syfy Channel shlock didn’t resonate, Ben Wheatley’s long-awaited sequel (though you’d be forgiven for thinking the…

Help. Is anyone there? I’ve fallen in a hole and I can’t get out. Director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s #Manhole, which is having its Canadian premiere at this year’s Fantasia Festival, is the simple yarn of a salesman, Shunsuke (Nakajima Yuto), and his…

Til Death Do Us Part is dead on arrival. There is nothing to part because there isn’t an element left alive to work with. Director Timothy Woodward Jr., writers Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor, and star Natalie Burn all bring something distinct to Til…

There is a particular sense of grounded savagery audiences have come to expect from South Korean genre cinema. Melodrama and visceral bouts of violence often coalesce into a broader, grim portrait of humanity, and the fun regularly comes with…