Elevated horror

Elevated to the Gallows pt 3: Colonialism and New Zealand: Mārama (2025)

I have always loved the gothic subgenre. Its dark and twisted nature has held me in a chokehold since I was a kid. Horror, romance, whatever larger genre the word “gothic” attached itself to…I’ve always been 100% here for it. That said, through the years I have certainly asked myself whether or not my attraction to this subgenre was…healthy. While the Magic 8 Ball in my brain occasionally responded with a rather impolite “outlook not so good,” I never quit being interested in the gothic media landscape. Healthy or not, I was transfixed.
In fairness to gothic”ness”, it is a subgenre that shamelessly displays its dysfunctionality on its voluminous pitch black taffeta sleeves. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. I find that to be quite respectable.

Indeed, gothic horror, gothic romance, gothic “insert the larger genre here” doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact that its basic premise will always lie within stories about fucked up people with fucked up problems and a severe lack of control over their situations. To make matters worse, the viewer/reader will almost always end up hideously heartbroken for one or more characters due to the dramatic beauty and sadness that are par for the course within a gothic narrative.

Perfect examples of this can be seen in just about every iteration of Frankenstein that has ever been made, from literature to screen, every iteration of Rebecca that has ever been made, from literature to screen, and every iteration of The Haunting of Hill House that has ever been made, from literature to screen. Obviously, the quality of some versions are better than others and some exude more camp than others but the skeleton of gothic”ness” remains the same. And I love it all.
Dysfunction be damned.

But then I saw a film a few weeks ago that turned my world around and upended my conception of what was possible with gothic horror. This film took all my previously held concepts of gothic storytelling as a slightly damaging or damaged storytelling device and threw them out the window. I saw a film that was so genuinely important that it couldn’t be ignored or denied. This film was the New Zealand film, Mārama (2025).

Much like what I wrote about Blood Quantum, this movie takes horror genre tropes and clichés (specifically gothic horror in this case) and flips them in order to make bold and vital statements about cultural identity and the terror of colonialism.

Mārama (2025) was written and directed by Taratoa Stappard. A filmmaker of Māori descent, he noted that he made this film to honor and remember the women in his family. He has also spoken of plans to make more films on this theme, which delights me to no end. At the time of this post, Mārama is available to stream on Shudder, and I firmly recommend viewing it. Multiple times. Not only is it visually stunning, but the performances are phenomenal and the story itself is remarkable.
I’ve never seen a movie like this and doubt I ever will again (unless Stappard fulfills his movie-making promise).
It is horrifying, heartbreaking and infuriating. It is other level in its high caliber filmmaking and brutal honesty.

It does the British no favors. The manner in which it portrays their sheer indifference to cultural heritage destruction is wild. And completely on point. The best and worst thing about Mārama is how realistic it feels and comes across.

This film is challenging and a true horror film in every sense of the word.

Brief Synopsis:

A Māori woman named Mary Stevens receives a letter from a man in Yorkshire, England who claims to know something about her family. In true gothic fashion, once the lady arrives at said location, she is told by Nathaniel Cole, the master of the house, that the man who wrote the letter is now dead. She reluctantly accepts a position at Cole’s estate as a governess for a young girl living there, mostly based on the fact that this girl speaks te reo Māori, Mary’s native language. However…strangely…so does Nathaniel Cole. Mary soon discovers that this mysterious house is festooned with Māori cultural artifacts, including a wharenui (traditional Māori communal meeting house) that has been shipped all the way from New Zealand to Yorkshire and is simply sitting in the backyard.
It is by this building that Mary reveals her real (Māori) name to her young charge as Mārama.
While their relationship building is quite positive, the brightness of that moment darkens quickly and the story gets bad from there and a lot more bloody.

I hesitate to include too many spoilers as this is a film that needs to be seen and experienced.
The opulence of the gothic aesthetic plays monumental havoc with the savage flashbacks and psychic visions that Mārama experiences throughout the film. These images, seen only by Mārama and the viewers, lay bare the damage that British colonialism has caused the Māori people in no uncertain terms.


Traumatic and unquestioningly cruel, what we see through Mārama’s visions leave us no room to wonder what the relationship between the British and the Māori ever was but it does leave many questions about why this mysterious house has so many Māori treasures in it, including the wharenui and the little girl who fluently speaks te reo Māori.

Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse…they do. And when I say they get worse? THEY GET SO MUCH WORSE.

This will be the only scene that I will spoil. But it’s a big scene to me and I sobbed and cheered and gasped. I’ve never had a scene in a horror film produce so many sounds from me in such a short span of time. To call it brilliant would belittle its sheer power. It might well be one of the most important scenes in modern horror cinema.

Up until this point the film had a slightly supernatural edge with Mārama’s various flashbacks and psychic visions (although most were clearly trauma-induced so not supernatural at all), but this scene introduced the stone-cold reality and barbarous nature of colonialism. Every shot, every line of dialogue was real as fuck, and as such…it hit HARD.

It is a party scene- the birthday party for Nathaniel Cole, the master of the house, Mārama’s employer- and her presence has been requested. She has even been told what to wear. When she comes down to the celebration she sees a friend of Cole’s, another British man named Jack Fenton. She is shocked at the meeting. Not only does he, like Cole, speak her language, but he has tā moko tattoos, traditional Māori facial tattoos.
At first she thinks he’s a just a drunk creep, but then he does the unthinkable and the absolutely unforgivable.

Jack stands up in front of the whole party and puts on a dancing and singing performance parodying the Māori people. He sings a song that begins by celebrating Captain Cook (without whom British colonialism of Indigenous peoples would have been impossible) and concludes by belting out lyrics centering on the rape of Māori women, all while wearing what appears to be a cartoonish version of Māori dress. It’s one of the most horrifying displays of misogyny and colonialism I have ever witnessed cinematically.
The crowd, all white mid-Victorian folk, laugh gregariously, enjoying the presentation immensely and cheering Jack on with drinks and huge applause.

But the tension in the room is real.
Mārama is standing in the corner, burning with emotion. She has fully divested herself of the Mary Stevens identity that she arrived to England with and it is clear that she now sees herself as the free and proud Māori woman she is. Not only is she disgusted with what she has just witnessed from this fetishizing exploitative white man, she is furious.

And so she does exactly what any proud Māori woman would do in that circumstance: she challenges him to fight by performing a haka, a Māori ceremonial dance. It is beautiful and arresting and I’ve never seen it matched in horror cinema. The closest thing I could think of that held that kind of vibe was the build-up to and unleashed fury from Sissy Spacek as Carrie White in the prom scene of Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976). And while this scene is certainly connected to that kind of energy it is also layered differently as it is not just coming from being a woman who has been done wrong systemically, it’s coming from being a colonized woman, who has been done wrong culturally and historically which brings in entirely different traumas and experiences of oppression.




As Mārama is concluding her haka, Jack understands what she is doing, as he has some cultural comprehension. So he looks terrified. But the rest of the partygoers think that her reaction, her haka, is simply “part of the performance” and they laugh even harder. At her. At her challenge to Jack. She has told him exactly what she wants to do to him in no uncertain terms but the white audience doesn’t understand as they speak only English.

Again, since watching Mārama, De Palma’s Carrie has been on my mind. The whole transition between Margaret White telling Carrie, “They’re all going to laugh at you” to the shots of the whole auditorium of teens laughing at Carrie…that humiliation. That pain. It’s so very real. And Mārama’s humiliation and pain after that racist performance and the laughter? That’s about as real as you can get. While I don’t see many analogies narratively between these two films, there are certain threads that run parallel. Certainly no one laughs at Carrie White as a result of her cultural expressions or her being an Indigenous person, but they do laugh at her because they don’t understand her, which is essentially what happens to Mārama in that room, both culturally and linguistically.

Thankfully, both movies end with (what I feel) is proper catharsis for our heroines.

I’m not going to expand upon the way Mārama concludes as I REALLY REALLY want you to watch it for yourself.
But I will say that it’s bloody and glorious and it’s a hellova revenge film.

What I love about Mārama (besides everything) is that it pays significant attention to colonial history, cultural detail and it doesn’t play around or make things soft. It’s a genuine horror film and stays true to it’s gothic horror roots. But it complicates gothic horror! It troubles the genre perfectly because gothic anything is historically a very white area and this film is very much not. I love that. We desperately need more films like this.

Finally, much like Blood Quantum, Mārama is yet another horror film that makes the wholly cogent point that English is actually the foreign language. It is pure historical fact. Just like Mic’maq in Blood Quantum, te reo Māori was being spoken in New Zealand far before English was. This may seem like a small detail, but it is huge.

Until next time…enjoy Spooky Season!





Elevated to the Gallows pt 2- Colonialism and North America: Blood Quantum (2019)

After Obsession left such a bad impression on me, I have decided to go a different direction with this series.

Instead of deconstructing why I dislike the term elevated horror (which has been done so many times already by plenty of good people), I have decided to use the term elevated in a different sense: to actually ELEVATE a collection of radically underseen and under-appreciated horror works that deserve discussion, exploration and recognition.

When it comes to horror, the bottom line has traditionally been set at “what is the scariest thing you can think of experiencing?” With very few exceptions, that award has gone to the realm of the fantastic. From undead slashers and invasive serial killers, from deep dives into the supernatural and/or the occult to your standard borderline scifi creature features, horror has provided plenty of good scares. And while there is nothing wrong with these categories and I love all of them, the hill that I will 100% die on is that colonization and its accompanying trauma is the most terrifying and horrific experience that a human being could possibly undergo.

This month I sit firmly on the side of highlighting a certain area of horror cinema that has (thankfully) entered the horror canon unapologetically without taking no for an answer. Using classic genre tropes and rhetoric, these movies explore critically important and highly ignored narratives while intentionally reappropriating horror elements much in the way that the cultures and peoples discussed in these films have had themselves and their own cultures reappropriated. These films fucking rule.

And it makes me so. Grateful. For. Horror. Horror is probably the only genre that allows for the full-blown no-holds-barred graphic nature of this historical experience to be fully explored without compromise. And when it comes to exposing colonialism, its hateful nature, players and behavior, there should be NO COMPROMISE. So that said…I will warn you: if you’re not ready for some pure unadulterated anger and perhaps some of the most horrific rage-driven violence you’ve ever seen, these are not the films for you. But maybe they are. And maybe you need them regardless.

So let’s start.

This week was Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the US so I want to discuss a genuinely striking film from 2019 called Blood Quantum. This film was written and directed by Jeff Barnaby, a First Nations/Mi’kmaq filmmaker who was born on a reservation in Listuguj, Quebec. Blood Quantum takes White Colonialism to task for its treatment of Indigenous peoples throughout the years via the classic horror tropes of zombies and their relationship to viral illness/plague. And when I say it takes White Folks to task…IT DOES THE JOB, PROPER.

In all honesty, I wanted to revisit this film before I wrote about it because it is so heavy-duty, layered and, frankly, concurrently violent and beautiful. But I also wanted to publish this as close to Indigenous Peoples’ Day as possible. So choices have been made. If this article doesn’t do Blood Quantum justice, I apologize. I just want people to watch it.

I had heard good things about this film for a long time. I don’t know why it took me…6-7 years to watch it? But when it was released, everyone I know was raving about it. I wish I had seen it then so I could’ve had some interesting conversations.

I genuinely wonder what your Average White Guy Horror Film Fan thought.
I hope he was uncomfortable. I hope he was REALLY uncomfortable. This does a lot of things that a film like Get Out kinda…was just too accessible and nice to do. This film is. Not. Fucking. Nice. It does not play. And that’s a beautiful thing. But at the same time, it made me cry due to its sensitive character portrayals and genuine investigations into human relationships. This is a well-written film and brutal as fuck. It’s 100% my jam.

So let’s start with the title because, well, it plays a huge role in the plot and has historical significance.

According to a piece from the Native Governance Center, blood quantum is

a concept created by white settlers that refers to the amount of so-called “Indian blood” that an individual possesses. Blood quantum appears as a fraction and is “calculated” based on an individual’s family tree. Rooted in eugenics, the concept lacks any scientific basis…Blood quantum is a stand-in device for lineage imposed by the U.S. federal government to disempower Indigenous people and separate them from their lands, resources, culture, identities, languages, and futures…

This may sound familiar to those who are familiar with US Colonialist history. If you’ve heard of the “One Drop” rule for African-Americans (having “one drop” of African-American blood automatically made you Black) it was a similar mythical instrument of racial identification. And, as we can rightly see, both were based on completely whacked out White People “Racial Science” and they were both weaponized as horrific tools of colonialism and White Supremacy, allowing for entire populations of people to endure more pain and suffering than can any white person could possibly imagine.

But blood quantum has become more complex as the years moved on and that certainly comes into play in the film. Many tribes still use this colonial construct to decide who is accepted as part of the tribe and gauge “Indianness” and lineage. But as this interview with Elizabeth Rule has noted, much like Barnaby’s film, many times it’s now used simply as a tool of endurance. Rule states,

The thing that I’ve found to be most interesting about both arguments — in support and against blood quantum requirements — is the language of survival. So, lineal descendant supporters think about high memberships through the lens of existence as a resistance right. And so there’s a desire to build up tribes’ numbers and capacity in order to survive and perpetuate the tribe. On the other side, those who defend blood quantum requirements also evoke this language of survival, and they look upon those blood quantum minimums as a way to preserve an already existing closed community that’s very close and … usually very culturally connected.

So, the film’s title.
It’s already loaded. Without most of the audience knowing exactly how loaded it is.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

The film begins, as horror films usually do, on a perfectly normal day…Until it isn’t. We are introduced to Traylor, a First Nations police chief sheriff on the Red Crow Reservation.

After encountering dead animals coming back to life and some serious chomping action from violent criminals and other random white people, Traylor gives up on passing this whole thing off as a Bad Monday. Naturally, the film escalates but not in a conventional manner. We jump forward to 6 months after this No Good, Very Bad Day and the Red Crow reservation is now an apocalyptic wonderland, looking quite a bit like something out of Mad Max or a George Romero film.


But it gets better. The big reveal comes next.
We discover that there have been no infections within the Red Crow tribe even though people like Traylor were bitten by the infected. As it turns out, the Indigenous genetics of the First Nations people made the Red Crow immune to the bites and the resultant plague that “turned” people. But other people didn’t get so “lucky.”
Most of the population (read: white people) do not have that genetic safety code. And these people periodically come to the compound begging and pleading for safe space and shelter.
What a conundrum.

AND WHAT A FUCKING PREMISE.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The interracial relationship between Traylor’s son, Joseph, and his white (very pregnant) girlfriend makes life very complicated for, well, everyone. She’s the only white person who lives there and is somewhat (and I do mean somewhat) accepted. I could write an entire blog just on her positionality, white privilege and non-comprehension of the whole situation.

Then there’s Traylor’s other son, Lysol, raised in foster homes and burning with anger at not only white people but the world in general. He’s a genuinely fascinating character and represents colonial damage and trauma in a whole different way (which I will hit on later) but ends up having a massive impact on the narrative and everyone in it.


Blood Quantum is an exquisitely layered and complex film bursting at the seams with the full-throttle gore and excitement of a proper zombie film. The FX are no joke and they do not cost the plot anything. While I would certainly be a bit annoyed if people only watched it for that and straight up ignored the immense dexterity with which Barnaby wove a properly intelligent anti-colonial narrative into an electrifying horror film…I guess I would just be glad people are watching it. After all, I don’t see how you could, in all seriousness, call Blood Quantum just a “zombie film.” Most of it is in Mi’kmaq. That linguistic jump alone is a massive shift and just as important as the title.

The majority of viewers will view this as a “foreign language” or see this as qualifying as a “foreign language” title, but I would like to correct this. English is technically the “foreign language” in Blood Quantum. Mi’kmaq is a living language and has been spoken in North America (primarily in Canada’s Atlantic Provinces but going all the way down to Maine) for thousands and thousands of years. Far longer than white settlers have occupied Canadian or US soil. There is a mix of English and Mi’kmaq in the film but Mi’kmaq carries clear dominance. As I watched Barnaby’s film and it became more and more apparent that Mi’kmaq carried more power than English, I cried. I love horror films so much but to have a genre film actively rip apart the horrors of colonialism in a language that has actively survived the terrorism of white supremacy was a very emotional experience. This wasn’t the only time I cried. It brought out a lot of feelings, even amidst the blood and guts.

Most zombie media (especially that which directly references plague and sickness) facilitates ruminations on the self, identity and relations to community and future survival. That’s kinda a no-brainer, pun intended. And, of course, Blood Quantum is no different. But meditations on survival and community from the perspective of a colonized population do not hit the same way as a the frightened bleatings of privileged white folks. It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for General Zombie Film People, it’s just that white privilege exists all day every day and when hordes of white zombies are trying to invade a First Nations reservation? It changes everything. Not only does everything go up to 11 in terms of socio-critical relevance, but it becomes a different film. It becomes a re-imagining of past trauma when white people did the exact same thing just…without zombie-ism as an excuse. And bless Barnaby for this.

There is a lot of discussion amongst the Red Crow about whether the compound should allow white people in and whether they should save white people. Watching this conversation happen on film was incredible. But it was also gut-wrenchingly sad. That it should take a zombie invasion to revert proper agency and power to the very people whose land it was to begin with just gutted me (also pun intended, I guess).

And yes, these conversations about human decency and survival were real, especially when they dealt with children. But for me, I kept thinking: this is a First Nations community that has worked like hell to make themselves safe in the middle of an unsafe time and they are able to be safe from white folks for the first time in history. Why should they help white people?? If situations were reversed, what would have happened? Would white people have helped the Red Crow? I doubt it. As many zombie films/tv shows have shown, white folks are very much out for themselves in survival situations. But I guess that was part of the point.

Charlie, Joseph’s pregnant girlfriend, is white and (as such) tries to plead for “everyone” to survive. But it’s hard to watch her do that. Knowing that just outside the walls there are thousands of hungry and detrimental beings who are part of a population that has been trying to kill the people within the walls of the compound since the day they arrived on North American soil. White people in this film are zombies and diseased but…haven’t we always been? Even if we don’t have an actual “plague”? Isn’t colonialism a sickness? And, yes, I do say “we” because I am white and I cannot remove myself from this problem just because I am against the kyriarchy and am a fundamentally anti-colonialist individual.

I’m spending a lot of time on this because it hit me hard. Especially since it discusses land/space/property and safety so explicitly, things that First Nations people have never had the luxury of. The eventual allowance of a few white people in to try to save them was done out of altruism but it ultimately felt suspicious to me and echoed the history of white people taking advantage of Indigenous people and their kindnesses.

Ultimately, however, the story doesn’t go wrong because of the centuries-old obvious hate from white people, it gets undone by someone on the inside. Which is the most frightening aspect of the film. The hatred and rejection that Traylor’s son Lysol (given name Alan) has internalized (from all sides) causes him to act out in the most violent of manners, primarily against his own tribe, destroying everything and everyone in his wake.

I couldn’t help but think that this was also a comment on colonialism as well. Lysol, the product of foster homes, was did not receive the same sort of care and love that Joseph got, turning out bitter and fiercely angry. He was not the same kind of person as the rest of the people on the reservation. A troublemaker, into drugs and drinking, he comes off as a genuinely unhappy and hateful person, becoming more hostile as the film goes on. He vigorously repudiates Charlie for being white and vocally rejects her interest towards saving anyone outside the tribe, defending himself by saying that it was only to keep the Red Crow reservation safe.

Lysol’s past created him and, once again, I think we can turn to colonialism for an explanation. There is a tragically large historical precedent for First Nations children being removed from their families and getting placed in Foster Care. Blood Quantum takes place in 1981, putting Lysol smack dab in what is called the Sixties Scoop. This horrific collection of official policies in Canada forcibly took thousands and thousands of Indigenous children from their families and placed them in non-Indigenous homes, sometimes as far away as the UK, Australia or Germany. Suffice to say, they did not usually get treated well nor were they allowed to explore their culture.

While Blood Quantum takes place in Quebec, the Sixties Scoop affected all provinces and the discourse on Lysol as a foster child is real and so is the trauma he exhibited. Does it make his villain turn right?
No.
Does it make it understandable?
Hell yes.
Can we still look to and blame the horrors of colonialism and terrible whiteness for the terrifying conclusion to Blood Quantum?

ABSOLUTELY.

Blood Quantum asks a lot of important questions of the viewer and I believe that, unlike other, more mainstream horror works, postcolonial horror films give answers. Whether people are ready to listen is another story. I believe strongly that horror is the perfect genre to question and investigate difficult subject matter. I am so grateful for Blood Quantum.



Korean Obsession poster

Elevated to the Gallows, pt.1 : Why I’m Not Obsessed with Obsession

This past Sunday, I had a really nice dinner with my friend David after the worst week of probably both of our lives in a long time. Truth be told, we had both been through real life versions of a horror film as we both lost our longtime companion cats this week completely out of nowhere so the grieving has been real, here in Seoul. That kind of loss is simply unendingly painful and unspeakable and the experience is truly horrific so we needed a day to decompress and so we went out.

During our meal, as we are wont to do, we started speaking about cinema, more specifically, horror films. I had just finished catching up on a collection of titles on Saturday that I had been trying to watch and so we chatted about the Good, The Bad and the Ugly of these works. Annnnnnd, of course, the term “elevated horror” came up. We agreed on many points but the main one being that it’s a slightly condescending and/or silly term that has the unfortunate ability to undercut and undermine current horror cinema works but also disregards the caliber of previous work.

Thus I have decided to write a few pieces on “elevated horror” for Spooky Month, 2026. I’m going to start with a film that I had very serious issues with because some friends asked me to explore that in a larger setting than a simple Letterboxd review or Bluesky post. I am, of course, happy to do because there were many things about Curry Barker’s Obsession (2025) that I found not only objectionable but flat-out upsetting.

First I want to talk about what a sensation this film is here in Korea. It’s HUGE. And that alone is unsettling in a country where, statistically, young men do not play well with their ladyfriends. Stalking is massive here. I have had more women friends and acquaintances than I can count relay horror stories to me about having to deal with an ex who evolved into a horror-film-style stalking presence in their lives. Not that this doesn’t happen in the Western world but in my almost 7 years of living here, it’s one of the bigger negative issues I’ve noticed that stands out in a way that it never has in any other country I’ve visited or lived in.

So how does this relate to Obsession? Well, the popularity of this film here in Korea concerns me as a) not all the representations are positive (many are flat-out negative) and b) I think it’s a clumsy attempt at social commentary costumed in the gown of this whole Elevated Horror thing.

A film synopsis (SPOILERS AHEAD!): a young man named Bear has a hard-core crush on his friend, Nikki. She doesn’t seem to be returning his affections, so he makes a wish on a novelty item for her to “love him more than anyone else” and it becomes a Monkey’s Paw situation but worse (if I ever thought that to be possible). The horrors that reveal themselves after Nikki becomes possessed with the obsession are not only terrible to watch and manage to be so toxic that they leave everything and everyone in their lives and friend-group completely destroyed (and mostly dead). By the end of the film the person who is left to deal with literally all the consequences is the Real Unobsessed Nikki because the only way to break the wish is for Bear to die by suicide (which he eventually does).

So I do want to be clear that I think the film has had a lot of fascinating reactions, many of which are quite positive. But that doesn’t make it a good movie. In fact, I see these things as simply by-products of a film that is largely hateful towards women. There is an extensive discourse that has followed between couples and various men and women post-release that, in my eyes, is quite a good thing. Obsession has certainly created a space in which men can show their asses and women can reject them for being the asses that they have shown themselves to be. What am I talking about? Let’s do a bit of amateur sleuthing.

If you take a look on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram or even simply type in “couples breaking up over the film Obsession” there are now copious hits. You can find dozens upon dozens of videos, posts, rants, blogs and real-life internet horror stories about women who went to see the film with their partners only to discover, post-viewing, that said-partner (always a cis-male, usually white) was on the side of the character Bear and felt no sympathy (let alone empathy) for the character of Nikki. That part isn’t as interesting as the fact that these women are actively seeing this as a big ol’ red flag and ending their relationships over it. Over a movie. Which…I support. Because I do think this film kinda hates women. If it didn’t, it would have been far more meticulous and caring over the representation of Nikki. Even a horror movie has to love its characters. And the Obsessed “Freaky Nikki”? She did not get much love.

I understand that Barker likely never intended to demonize Nikki or make Bear the hero. But if you make a clumsy film, you get clumsy results. And, sadly, when you attach age-old misogynist tropes to a female character (even one who is “not herself” at the time of said-portrayal), it’s destined to backfire. While Nikki is clearly supposed to be a different person while she is Obsessed, Obsessed Nikki resonates far too well with areas of toxic masculinity that I virulently reject.

Haven’t we seen enough women acting like babies or being child-like for attention? This patronizing male fantasy made me physically ill. Nikki acts like she’s 7 not in her early 20s with her pouty-face, stomping and throwing tantrums. Barker makes the horror film-effort to take it to 11 and underscore Bear realizing that his fantasy is no longer so fantastic, but it’s the honoring and uplifting of a male fantasy nonetheless, while sacrificing a woman’s dignity.

Not only that, but clearly, with the film’s Wish Fulfillment (in the Freudian sense and the narrative sense), Nikki’s agency is not only denied but she becomes trapped in her own body which no longer belongs to her and also she cannot control. Even basic bodily functions like urination (which she does on Bear’s carpet, like an untrained animal), are no longer within her grasp. One might argue that this is a commentary about the patriarchy, but one might also be wrong. The kinds of suffering and humiliation that we watch this woman go through just because one dude was upset about being friend-zoned is just a bucket full of ladyhate. We see this everyday. Why exploit a woman’s body and soul just to show what a dick Bear is?

Literally, we get it. He’s not a good guy. He’s not the Nice Guy everyone thinks he is. Not every Nice Guy is a Nice Guy. Ok, fine. But I didn’t need to watch the woman protagonist/antagonist run through the litany of stereotypes that men have about “bad girlfriends”- I certainly didn’t need to see the nagging, screeching, needy cliché played out. That’s so old. And it’s not smart. This film certainly had potential but it missed the target with all the anger directed towards women. And boy howdy, that was a lot of anger.

I will freely admit that Inde Navarette, who plays Nikki, does a fantastic job. She plays the role perfectly. But it’s not a role that is meant to be liked. If anything she is meant to be pitied, and what woman wants to be pitied?

I think that Bee Dolores in her carefully considered critique of Obsession, said it best when she wrote:

The swell of the manosphere…has been devastatingly plastered inside Obsession in a way that’s neither cheeky (as good satire should be) nor poignant in deconstructing male rage against women. In 2026, I’m not advocating for subtlety (we’re long past that), but I do demand a far more careful and critical analysis of our culture, especially if you are a cis straight white man making movies.

So I ask- is this “elevated horror”? Is this what we are talking about when we are imagining this new “smart-scare” genre? I think not. It does not like or respect women and its inclusion in the new “elevated horror” continuum allows it to argue for its complexity and its social “responsibility.” Sure, it’s horror, but it’s ladyhatin’ horror. Which we certainly don’t need any more of these days.

A well-made film with great effects and great performances, but extremely problematic and emphasizes some of the issues in the “elevated horror” umbrella term. And sometimes you just have to call this shit out. Basically, in my eyes, if it looks like a duck, and it acts like a duck…well, fucking quack quack. It’s a damn duck.