‘Obsession’

With a reputed budget of $750,000, Obsession has already taken $374 million at the box office. 2026 has seen this film and Backrooms provide an antidote to mainstream Hollywood’s big budget superhero ‘IP’. Years of Disco produced Punk. Could years of the special effects dominated superhero movie 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, with cringe-horror 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, creepy, and violent confrontation. Each mode is spliced together with a deliberately jarring jump-cut. There’s also a kind of reset. He forgives her 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 to immediately backing away from her, judging her to be crazy (before she’s actually done anything). But, every time you question the story, the pace keeps pushing ahead, moving you on and producing some scary 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.

The overnight story

Eyes Wide Shut

The overnight story is a journey into a strange land. It’s the same place as the daylight world but magically transformed by darkness into a new reality. This shadow world has its own rules and possibilities. It’s a place where the protagonists will face their fears. They will encounter wonderful, strange – and often terrifying – characters. They will be forced into a new understanding of reality. The compressed format of the overnight story works perfectly in films. It’s less optimised for the expansiveness of novels.

Time is ticking. As surely as day turns to night, dawn will arrive in the morning. The protagonist must survive the night. And, if they have a quest – they must achieve it before sunrise.

In the overnight story, adolescents will find meaning, love and friendship in films like The Myth of the American Sleepover, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, and American Graffiti. Monsters will emerge in Night of the Living Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn. A hostage crisis will be resolved in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Die Hard. A traitor will be avenged in The Long Goodbye. An unpalatable truth will emerge in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Enemies will be defeated in The Warriors. A safe middle-class existence will be turned upside down in After Hours and Eyes Wide Shut. The occupants of a police station will survive the night in Assault on Precinct 13.

When morning comes, the world will be the same again, but the protagonists will be changed forever.

‘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.