Simon Abrams

The original 1978 shockumentary, and the mondo exploitation films like it, preyed on a fear that has been watered down over time.

It winks at its audience throughout, but its bloody violence and pandering laugh lines never go full-tilt SYFY Original.

It winks at its audience throughout, but its bloody violence and pandering laugh lines never go full-tilt SYFY Original.

A numbing succession of schematic set pieces empties the canopic jars, then runs out of ideas.

Renny Harlin's "airplane crash and also sharks" disaster movie benefits from a specific kind of earnestness.

Renny Harlin's "airplane crash and also sharks" disaster movie benefits from a specific kind of earnestness.

Backrooms brings liminal horror to the masses, and with it, a generation looking for a past that might not exist.

Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas front the devoted musical filmmaker's latest, weakest effort.

The funniest and most pointed joke in Scary Movie , the Wayans brothers' third title in the lowest-common-denominator horror parody series, is suggested in its modifier-free name.

YouTuber and visual effects artist Kane Parsons didn't create the Backrooms, but he did turn it into a viral sensation. On January 7, 2022, Parsons debuted “Found Footage,” the first short film in a series set in the Backrooms, a surreal and seemingly endless network of corridors and hallways. Parsons' video was based on an image posted on a 4Chan thread in 2019; the photo was a response to one user's request for “disquieting images that just seem off.” In the last four years “Found Footage” racked up 77 million views, becoming the model for the porous, mutation-prone “liminal horror” subgenre of media that ranges in length and ambition from YouTube and TikTok shorts to feature-length movies, like Parsons' own feature adaptation of