Comrade Courant Culture Critic

The Blair Witch Project (1999): A Found-Footage Landmark That Changed Horror Forever “What happened to them is real.” — And for a while, we all believed it. — 3/5 Stars In the summer of 1999, a marketing campaign unlike any before it began seeping into the cultural bloodstream. Posters appeared in record stores and video rental shops showing a grainy black-and-white photo of three missing students, their names printed beneath like a police bulletin. A cryptic trailer—aired without context on late-night TV—presented shaky footage of screams in the dark, sticks snapping in the trees, and a voice whispering, “I’m so scared.” And then there was the website: www.blairwitch.com . Now preserved only in the Internet Archive , the original site listed Heather, Mike, and Josh as missing persons, complete with police reports and “recovered” video tapes. There was no mention of actors. No studio...

Sinners (2025): A Southern Gothic Vampire Epic Rooted in Tradition "A maximalist horror musical that honors every vampire rule—and weaponizes them against Jim Crow." — 4/5 Stars Sinners (2025) review: Vampire movies often punish those who stray from the rules. Holy water, garlic, stakes through the heart—these aren’t suggestions. Sinners , Ryan Coogler’s operatic Southern Gothic horror musical, doesn’t just follow the rules—it worships them . This is a film where vampires need permission to enter a home , flee from sunlight , recoil at holy water , and fall to wooden stakes . The mythology is classic, even reverent. The revolution is elsewhere. Set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta, the film follows twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans who return to their Black hometown to open a juke joint for their community. But thei...

  Bring Her Back (2025) – A Harrowing Descent Into Grief and the Occult With Bring Her Back , Australian siblings Danny and Michael Philippou—fresh off their breakout hit Talk to Me —deliver a sophomore feature that’s less a ghost story and more a full-body immersion into maternal grief turned monstrous. Clocking in at a lean 104 minutes, Bring Her Back wastes no time plunging its audience into emotional and visceral chaos. The story centers on Andy (Billy Barratt) and his visually impaired stepsister Piper (Sora Wong), orphaned after their father’s death and placed in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a foster mother whose warmth quickly curdles into something cultish and cruel. What begins as a tale of fractured family dynamics soon spirals into a grotesque resurrection ritual involving preserved corpses, demonic possession, and a mute foster boy named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) whose physi...