The Final Girl collection prominently featured an array of gingham fabrics, with hand-embroidered embellishments of sequins and crystals dancing across luxurious silks, inviting onlookers to explore a colour palette that boldly oscillated between soft pinks, deep blues, classic blacks, and a show-stopping red.
Until recently, "liminal spaces" were only known to architects. But on the Internet, storytellers and amateur filmmakers have morphed these ubiquitous places you pass by on errand runs into caverns of cosmic terror. Now, a new A24 film from 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons is set to kick off the summer and christen it the season of liminal horror.
Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is following up their twisted tale with another story about how media can affect us, but this time the focus is on the silver screen. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, described as a "new kind of horror remake," follows a director (Hannah Einbinder) obsessed with the actress (Gillian Anderson) who played the "final girl" in a classic slasher movie.
Movies too have long exploited the idea, most notably in the 1960s and '70s, when a subgenre known as hagsploitation (aka "psycho biddy" horror) breathed new life into the careers of several classic Hollywood stars. Actresses like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Shelley Winters were no longer being offered conventional leading roles. Instead, horror directors began casting them as villains (and occasionally victims), in stories about toxic family relationships and campy crimes of passion.
It's dark outside, and teenager Casey Becker is home alone, making popcorn on the stove and preparing to pop a scary movie into the VCR while she waits for the arrival of her boyfriend, Steve. The teen, portrayed by actress Drew Barrymore, picks up the phone and hears a deep, ominous voice on the other end. It's one of the most chilling moments in horror cinema, and one that journalist and author Ashley Cullins has never forgotten.
If you're programming your own little horror film festival in the run-up to Halloween, and Tobe Hooper's stone-cold classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 is part of the lineup, then this would make a handy follow-up for a night's viewing. It's not a making-of movie, although there are snippets of insight into the production's process; nor is it a meta-commentary at the rather sprawling level of Room 237, the delirious doc about The Shining.
has impressively outperformed previous years (a 22% year-on-year increase for the UK and Irish box office: 83,766,086 in 2025, compared with 68,612,395 in 2024). Last year, no horror film reached 10m at the UK or Irish box office. This year, five films have, says Charles Gant, box office editor of Screen International. The big hits of the year Weapons (11.4m), Sinners (16.2m), The Conjuring Last Rites (14.98m) and 28 Years Later (15.54m) have all hung about the multiplexes and in the public consciousness.
One technique powerfully employed in the film has the incongruous name of "Mickey Mousing." Named after the manner in which classic cartoons were scored in tight synchrony with the movements of their characters, it had fallen into disuse by the nineteen-seventies, when a subtler cinematic style prevailed.