A rundown of horror movies of 2025: Nosferatu

This one was infamous before it was even out. The movie’s reputation preceded it and as a lover of vampires, clearly I had to make this one a field day.

Nosferatu (2024)

Newlywed Thomas is called to Transylvania to assist reclusive Count Orlok with a real estate deal. Against the warnings of his wife Ellen whose nightmares make her cautious, he goes. The horror he experiences there will end up following him home.

Spoilers

Nosferatu (2024) is a fantastic movie. Everyone acts their heart out and the lighting and cinematography are really something else. I found the sequences in Transylvania especially chilling. It’s all just so well made.

A young Ellen feels lonely and abandoned and calls out into the night for someone, anyone, and someone answers. Later she is in a relationship society expects from her but there is something standing between her and her husband, between them and marital happiness. That something is at once a repressive society as well as Ellen’s traumatic adolescent experiences. The relationship between Ellen and Count Orlok is sexually liberating in the same way it is obsessively predatory. The movie asks us to hold both of these ideas in our head even if it makes us uncomfortable, especially if it makes us uncomfortable.

Gothic fiction has us sit with discomfort and instinctive disgust and rejects a black and white interpretation. And judging by pearl-clutching reviews the movie succeeded in that beautifully.

I feel like I have to justify putting it at 3, because in many technical aspects it is better than the movie I put at 2. It’s just Nosferatu is a story I’m familiar with and while this movie was certainly worth making in my opinion, because it brought with it new perspectives, it didn’t surprise me so much; possibly also because I’d already heard many good things about it before I watched it. I was told it was excellent and it is. Expectations met.

A rundown of horror movies of 2025: Companion

 
I watched this one on Valentine’s day with a good friend. It is sorted under “science fiction thriller” or “dark comedy” more often than “horror”, and maybe that means I shouldn’t include it here. Genre is fluid, however, and mutable and to me the movie’s terror is central to the story.


Companion

Happy couple Iris and Josh join friends of his for a getaway in a remote villa in a sprawling forest. The cheerful if a little awkward atmosphere devolves into chaos after the death of one of them reveals secrets kept.


Spoilers from here on out


As the second trailer reveals, Iris is a robot Josh has purchased to be his girlfriend. She is unaware of this fact and believes both herself and her relationship with Josh to be real. It becomes clear very fast that Josh does not consider her real. He plans to have her kill a man and rob his house and ultimately blame it on faulty code within her.

Iris wakes up. Iris escapes. Iris fights for her life.

The movie can easily be read as an allegory for abusive relationships. Iris is there for Josh’s entertainment and enjoyment, is literally and legally an object. Sophie Thatcher does this great thing where her expression is empty whenever she isn’t actively smiling at him, which shows beautifully how she only exists in relation to what he wants from her.

When Josh set the parameters for her character and abilities, he set the slider for intelligence all the way down, showcasing how insecure he is and how much he doesn’t want her to be a partner. Later when Iris has control over her sliders and slides it to the top, she’s not even genius-level smart, just college educated, but he couldn’t even stand that.

After everything he did, Josh makes her sit at the table, unable to respond or move, forces her to light her hand on fire, and makes her listen to all his grievances. Ending with ‘you don’t know how hard it is for people like me’. (A line that made me say ‘says the conventionally attractive white guy’ out loud in the theater; but that’s the point, right?)

When she confronts Josh in the end, it is to tell him that he no longer controls her (a mechanic from the company removed the part of the code that makes her do what others say). She kills him in a way that is satisfyingly brutal; automatic bottle opener to the temple.

Josh’s whole attitude towards her is just the endpoint of how dismissive he is of those around him in general (dragging an unwitting friend into it, planning a murder in the first place). He is portrayed as self-centered and overestimates his abilities to such a degree that he doesn’t consider the consequences of his actions and thus gets everyone killed. Iris, on the other hand, starts out with manipulated memories and (programmed) rose-tinted glasses that get rudely ripped off her. During the movie she struggles with the realization that Josh never actually loved her, just what she could do/be for him. Only when she accepts that Josh could never see her as a person and would only ever continue to treat her the way he did, can she break away.

The world might be dangerous for her, but that doesn't matter, because she is free.

A rundown of horror movies of 2025: 28 Years Later

Apparently this blog mostly gets used for seasonal posting. This year Halloween I will present to you a rundown of the horror movies I’ve watched in the theater so far this year. It’s been a glorious horror year and more’s to come. Let’s review!

Starting with my least favorite.

28 Years Later

 

28 years after the outbreak of a rage virus that turns humans into mindlessly aggressive beings, the UK is quarantined off from the world (a fact that leads to some hilarious moments with a stranded Swedish soldier). 12-year-old Spike grows up in this environment on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway only accessible during low tide. When his mother grows ever sicker and the relationship with his father strained, he decides to brave the mainland and its unknown dangers in order to find help for her. What he does find is more than he could’ve imagined.


Spoilers from here on out


This movie was a major letdown for me. Possibly because the trailer was so fantastic and promised atmospheric and deeply unsettling horror. Both my friend and I were unsure if the movie wouldn’t be too scary for us and both of us sat in the theater afterwards asking ourselves “that’s it?”. There’s many things to be said about this movie, but for brevity’s sake, let me summarize my thoughts compliment-sandwich-style where I start with something I like about the movie before I mention something I dislike, and so on before I end on something I like.

• Maybe it’s cheating to mention the trailer, but I’ve come back to it since and I still really like it. Having a recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots play over eerie visuals was an inspired choice. Despite the disappointment of the movie the trailer hasn’t been ruined for me.
• The last couple of minutes, when a gang of tracksuit-wearing weirdos gleefully kill the infected in a stylized action-comedy routine, came so out of left field and fully took me out. The rest of the movie is mostly somber and serious and this is something else entirely. I’ve since learned that this movie is just the start of the trilogy and these people will become more relevant in future installments but that knowledge doesn’t make their appearance feel any less disjointed for this movie.
• Alfie Williams, the actor playing Spike does a great job with what he’s got. He’s fully believable on screen, keeps the movie as together as possible and holds his own against seasoned actors. Good on him.
• On at least three separate occasions we see the "alpha" infected pull a spine out of a body by the head. By the third time it happens, you are fully desensitized to it. The whole gruesome display would’ve had more impact if we’d just seen the result before we see it happen once. I know this is probably the least issue with the movie but it bothered me because it was such an unnecessary waste of horrific imagery. 
  
• The bone temple is such an exquisitely macabre set piece. That doesn’t change when we find out that it is made not with ill intent but love and care for the dead as a funeral monument. Instead it becomes eerily beautiful. I enjoyed the subversion of expectation here, that something that looks so ominous is actually positive.  
• The fact that there are "alpha" infected now, for whom the virus acts like steroids making them stronger and bigger (their dicks too!) and giving them power over birds??? Seemingly?? Sorry, that’s just stupid. Stuff like that fits in with comedic movies like Army of the Dead but you want us to take this one seriously, right? Right??
• Big fan of how the community Spike is from is more than a little cultish with their training the kids to become killers and revering of killing and adherence to specific rules. I like how it first seems calm and homely to Spike but once he’s been to the mainland and comes back, it starts to unravel. Wish they would’ve done more with that.
• I understand that there’s a plan behind this. I get that Danny Boyle, the director, and Alex Garland, the writer, didn’t just throw stuff at the wall in the hopes something would stick. And still it felt like that to me. There’s references to this and that, violence and isolationism and trauma and coming-of-age and religion and Jimmy Savile of all things. Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t but the bigger problem, in my opinion, is that the whole movie lacks cohesion and ends up being somewhat of a nothing burger with at times wonderful moments.
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson was there. I always like seeing him in movies.