‘Obsession’

With a reputed budget of $750,000, Obsession has already taken $374 million at the box office. 2026 has seen two films – Obsession and Backrooms – provide an antidote to mainstream Hollywood’s big budget superhero ‘IP’ movies. Years of Disco eventually produced the backlash of Punk. Could years of the special effects dominated superhero moviez produce a return to the low-budget indie flick? Maybe. Maybe not.

Obsession is a contemporary horror. It’s Eraserhead meets The Shining meets The Exorcist meets Midsommar with cringe-horror moments and the magical premise of Big. Stylistically it’s dark, literally a dark aesthetic of shadows and silhouettes often with a deep focus.

When the weak protagonist makes a wish for his crush to love him more than anyone else in the world, her love becomes extreme, toxic, and violent. She turns into a deranged psychopath. The moral of the story is clear – be careful what you wish for.

The film moves through a series of tonally different modes. Normality mode (indie movie romcom), creepy mode (psychological horror), and violent confrontation mode (shock horror). Each mode is spliced together with a deliberately jarring jump-cut. Each one also provides a heightening of the tension followed by a reset at the start of the next section – the protagonist forgives his girlfriend and they makeup. It’s a partial reversion to normality.

In the first of these mode switches, the protagonist goes from almost instant infatuation with his crush (indie movie romcom mode) to immediately backing off from her (psychological horror mode). This poses questions about believability, but every time you question the story, the pace pushes ahead, producing some genuinely scary, shock horror frights.

‘Exit 8’

Genki Kawamura’s film Exit 8 (2025) is a psychological horror about a man who is stuck in an endlessly looping subway corridor. It’s David Lynch meets The Shining meets M C Escher. The film is based on the computer game The Exit 8.

Exit 8 is a so-called ‘liminal space’ horror. The sub-genre has become a meme in 2026 with the release Backrooms. A liminal space is a place that people pass through on their way to somewhere else. These are typically anonymous corridors in public areas. They operate as ‘portals’ into another reality. They are psychologically charged and present the protagonist with a surreal, labyrinth-like puzzle to escape from. They may be an ordinary place, transformed by time, an empty school during the summer vacation, a hotel in the off-season, or a closed down shopping mall. The atmosphere is one of claustrophobia and being locked in. The space symbolically expresses the protagonist’s mind, their memories, and inner trauma.

The liminal space has been around for a long time – the creepy swimming pool in Cat People (1942), the bombed city at night in The Third Man (1949), the zone in Stalker (1979), the empty streets of Vivarium (2019), the weird purgatory world of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), episodes of Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone, and Severance, computer games like Silent Hill (1999) and, perhaps most famously, the hotel corridors of Kubrick’s The Shining. These places all share the same surreal and uncanny psychogeography.

Exit 8 fuses multiple horror sub-genres, from surrealism, to the ‘locked in’ story and the repeated loop story structure of films like Groundhog Day (1993). It uses horror to expresses an experience of modern life – the doom loop of endless scrolling, the personal isolation of noise cancelling headphones – the anxiety of feeling disconnected from the world around us, and from ourselves.

‘Send Help’

Send Help is a survival horror, an underdog revenge story and an ‘eat the rich movie’, where the ordinary protagonist exacts punishment on ‘the elite’.

When an overlooked female office worker, in a cliquey, male dominated workplace, survives a plane crash and wakes up on a Pacific island with her douchebag boss, she sees the opportunity to take revenge and regain control of her life.

The story combines office politics with the outdoors, island survival narrative. The tone is a mix of horror thriller and dark comedy. The comic element is critical in binding the story together. It adds an extra dimension to the story as well as providing a framework that excuses the plot extravagances as well as the protagonist’s dubious morality. In terms of the one line pitch it’s Cast Away meets Misery.

‘The Housemaid’

Freida McFaddens’s The Housemaid is a tense psychological mystery with a great plot twist. It’s an accessible, fun read. The movie is out and it is equally entertaining.

The story plays with genre conventions – working with and also subverting them. It’s a fresh take on The Girl on the Train meets 90s psychological mysteries. There’s also a contemporary #metoo vibe.

‘The Dog Stars’

Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars has that rare quality of combining a literary fiction feel with genre style action. The story is a thematic mix of the American outdoors and survivalism contextualised with the protagonist’s inner reflection and his search for personal meaning in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s also a canine companion story.

The audio book’s narration is really great (it’s read by Mark Deakins). The film adaptation of The Dog Stars is slated for an August 2026 release. The movie is directed by Ridley Scott.