Reviews
[REVIEW] Another Perspective of ‘Coraline’ (2009)
After moving to a new secluded house, with a whacky cast of characters, Coraline (Dakota Fanning) finds herself isolated and [seemingly] on her own. On one particularly drab day, Coraline is transported to a magical world, where she is the star. Her new parents pay attention to her, and Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) joins her in her adventures; things seem too good to be true. And they are! Coraline soon finds herself in a battle of life and death. Or is this all just a figment of her overactive and isolated imagination?
For September, Horror Press wanted to look into the world of gateway horror. Those films that can capture the hearts of young filmgoers or those who get into horror at a later age. There are a plethora of films that fall under the category of ‘gateway’ horror, but what are they? To start, it felt important to look at an animated horror film loved by genre fans of all ages. Even though stop-motion, claymation, and animation films don’t do the trick for me, there’s no getting around the fact Coraline is a truly impressive film. (Author’s note: after getting into the process of writing this, and realizing who wrote the source material, there’s quite a sour taste in my mouth.)
Coraline’s Enchanting Yet Deadly Alternate World
After moving to a new secluded house, with a whacky cast of characters, Coraline (Dakota Fanning) finds herself isolated and [seemingly] on her own. On one particularly drab day, Coraline is transported to a magical world, where she is the star. Her new parents pay attention to her, and Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) joins her in her adventures; things seem too good to be true. And they are! Coraline soon finds herself in a battle of life and death. Or is this all just a figment of her overactive and isolated imagination?
Coraline is fascinating in a myriad of ways. It can be straightforwardly viewed and taken at face value or dissected frame by frame to reveal Coraline may be in a simulation! I say that as a lark, but there are countless theory videos on Coraline, including one that posits the question of a possible simulation. Many people, much smarter than me, have dug their master’s degree and doctorate brains into the spiderweb of theories that lurk below the surface. While I don’t have any groundbreaking new theories for Coraline, I do think it can be dissected as a gateway horror film.
The Film’s Core Theme: Perspective and Growing Up
The biggest idea that comes forth in Coraline is the idea of perspective. She finds herself longing for a connection of any sort. She’s forced to move to this new decrepit house. The walls are bare and in disrepair, her parents are working on individual projects, and Coraline is tasked with *checks notes* counting the windows. It’s easy to understand why she is frustrated with her current lot in life. Though as someone who grew up with parents who advocated for a “back when the streetlights turn on” type of childhood, part of me is jealous that Coraline didn’t explore the wooded areas around her house. But that point is moot.
By the finale, after Coraline has conquered The Bedlam/The Other Mother (Teri Hatcher), she’s transported back to her world where things seem to be better. Whether or not what she went through is real doesn’t matter. What matters is the lesson(s) she learned along the way. The main lesson is perspective. Things aren’t necessarily better by the film’s end, but it’s how Coraline perceives the world. Throughout Coraline, she is completely all about herself. Everything must revolve around her and what she wants. It’s not until her triumph over evil, refusing to conform with the button-eyes, that she realizes other people matter, too.
Coraline Blends Whimsy and Horror
Coraline is visually appealing in a way no stop-motion film has been for me before. It balances the visual horror with whimsy and charm. One of my favorite aspects is how a film like this appeals to such a wide array of demographics. I didn’t stumble upon this movie until about two years ago and I was truly upset I hadn’t seen it in 2009. Would it have changed my life if I did? Probably not. But something like Coraline would have piqued my interest to dive into more stop-motion horror films.
If you want to introduce a younger family member to horror, Coraline is a must-watch film. It’s not too childish in any aspect, but it still works as a film for kids. Very few films can do both and succeed. The films that do must be held in high regard, and Coraline is a one-of-a-kind film.
Hopefully, the Neil Gaiman stuff doesn’t tarnish the legacy of it.
Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a piece of visual candy that everyone needs to get a taste of. Fitting, considering candy is at the center of the film’s visual language, and even becomes a large part of its set dressing. It’s an aesthetic choice that might signal to some that the film is meant to be more sugary or cloying about what it’s trying to say. And while it has a streak of sentimentality over horror films and how they shape their viewers that borders on being maudlin, Camp Miasma is genuinely too clever and full of surprises to be that simple.
The opening credits, for one, hold a personal favorite of these surprises. The sequence is an extended montage of merch and material for the fictional Camp Miasma films at the center of the plot; it’s an ersatz Friday the 13th franchise with a Sleepaway Camp story, and a Halloween number of awful sequels.
Camp Miasma Has Surprises in Store for You
The collection we’re treated to is a rapid-fire barrage of proof for the film’s attention to detail, with painstakingly crafted props and artwork that feel very familiar. VHS tapes and DVDs across the decades. Action figures and arcade games, Topps style movie trading cards with a stick of bubble gum that has long since turned to dust. And most enjoyably, a series of negative reviews and scandalous articles depicting the rise and fall of Camp Miasma as a series.
By the end of that montage, I felt nostalgia for movies that I had not and would never see, and that hit like a Mack truck. While this does very effectively set the stage for a simple meta-horror film, plucking at the familiar chords of something like Behind the Mask, Camp Miasma really violently breaks the mold. What results is a cosmic horror romantic comedy drama slasher, and more importantly, it’s one of the best-looking movies you’ll see all year as it pulls off that wild balancing act.
(That is, if you’re close enough to a theater showing it to see it.)
What is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma About?
After entering a period of dormancy following a handful of box office bombs and dwindling popularity, the problematic Camp Miasma franchise has returned as a “zombie IP” decades later. The rights holders are hungry for a profitable reboot. And the necromancer they’ve hired for the job is the ambitious but green writer-director Kris (Hannah Einbinder). A critically acclaimed queer filmmaker, she’s begrudgingly tasked with sanding down its transphobic and sexist edges in favor of something cleaner and more palatable.
In search of inspiration, Kris visits Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress for final girl Squeak from the first Camp Miasma film. The reclusive Billy lives at the real-life camp the film was shot at, isolated from the world and crystallized into a horror movie museum. Immediately finding kinship in their love of the franchise, Kris’ fascination with getting Billy to star in the reboot quickly turns into romantic interest. But as that romance develops, the awkward Kris’s sexual awakening coincides with strange occurrences and hallucinations that suggest the film, and its killer, may be much more real than she bargained for.
A Wildly Fun Project That Changes the Pace for Jane Schoenbrun
It’s borderline criminal how narrow and staggered the theatrical release for Camp Miasma is going to be, because all the love it’s been getting on the festival circuit is not just critical buzz. It’s not an inside baseball sort of film, despite its myriad references to the horror genre on either side of the camera. It is, in fact, the director’s most accessible and fun film yet.
That was pretty vocally Schoenbrun’s goal; their third full length feature really does succeed with flying colors at feeling like “a conversation with a friend”, a sentiment they communicated during a Deadline interview at Cannes. It certainly feels lighter and more playful with the audience at the very least. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a noided, uncomfortable psychological endeavor about ARGs, internet culture, and isolated youth. I Saw the TV Glow was an expertly crafted but very harrowing thesis on the trans experience, dysphoria, and alienation.
But Camp Miasma, despite the dark places that it goes to for its characters, is a movie filled with so much cheer and humor, and made with so much care and love, that you can feel it in every single frame. The story it tells is inherently a happy one, despite the number of times someone explodes into a geyser of blood thanks to our film’s killer, Little Death. (Yes, they basically named him The Orgasm, but I said the movie was fun and made with love, not that it was particularly subtle.)
Expertly Exploring Sexuality and Filmmaking with Anderson and Einbinder
One also shouldn’t mistake the emphasis on how fun it is as an excuse for the film lacking substance either. Camp Miasma is heartfelt in its craft but really does boast a depth of character in its writing with how it explores desire and sexuality. It’s about sexual tension, sexual dysfunction, sexual trauma, and ultimately sexual liberation. And most importantly, it’s about how sex and sexuality inspires, informs, and shapes art on a fundamental level and vice versa.
The script is certainly thoughtful in this aspect but is especially carried by the two leads who fit their roles like they were poured into them. Even when Schoenbrun’s writing is heavy-handed and veers into self-indulgent territory (read: inevitable given the self-referential nature of the story), the two hold it down tremendously. Anderson is always a delight to see but is exceptionally charming here as Billy. The silky southern accent and the mellow Hollywood starlet appeal are all you really need to fall in love the way Kris does, but the charm masks a much more complex set of feelings that lie just below the surface.
More importantly, Einbinder’s captivating performance drives the film as much as the film drives her character. As Kris discovers more about herself, the breadth of emotion that begins to be unlocked translates to a really compelling unfolding of the material in Einbinder’s hands. It also culminates in the film’s funniest moment as Kris’ revelations about Camp Miasma and herself spill out at the worst possible time; it’s a scene that kills in a packed theater, and it’s worth the price of admission just to see it.
The Best Set Design You’ll See in A Movie All Year
Above all else, Camp Miasma deserves its flowers for its photography and production design. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue have concocted one of the most visually striking and texturally rich movies this year from a photography standpoint. The camera work, color grading, and lighting are all phenomenally visceral. Appropriately so, given the subject matter at hand.
But what really steals the show is the set design. Designers Matt Hyland and Brandon Tonner-Connolly deserve praise in particular, having crafted the absolutely gorgeous glass matte backdrops that make up so much of the film’s exterior shots. They, like all of the set design here and Schoenbrun’s use of soft lighting and super-rich colors, are a good cross section of what makes the film tick: they are enticingly surreal, suffused with this almost visible dream energy. It’s all marked by glowing memories and the desire to return to them in a palpable way. There’s nostalgia in every brushstroke of those matte paintings, and every bit of the film’s composition.
I could go on, but the summary judgment for the best franchise that never existed is already in: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a kaleidoscope of pure emotion and creative passion that needs to be seen on the big screen post-haste. If you get the chance to see it on one, don’t hesitate to take it.
If film school wasn’t scary enough because of incel film-bros and awful thesis projects, a serial killer is now hunting down film students! As a former film student, that’s scary! Or is it? Urban Legends: Final Cut is decidedly not frightening. In fact, it’s barely quantifiable as horror. However, if you’re wanting some late 90s-Y2K slice-and-dicing, you’ve come to the right place.
More similar to the Scream franchise than the first Urban Legend, Final Cut maintains its academic setting, switching over this time to a film academy. A group of tight-knit co-eds are hard at work on their Senior projects. Each is vying for the prestigious Hitchcock Award, which would guarantee feature funding, alongside Hollywood stardom! However, when a fencing-masked serial killer starts taking them out one-by-one, it becomes clear someone would kill to make it big. The movie is a ton of fun, with really intelligent meta-humor and a surprisingly complex mystery.
Urban Legends: Final Cut is Meta-Slashing Done Right
Meta-slashers are old news in 2026-definitely no doubt about that! However, coming out the same year as Scream 3, one has to respect Urban Legends: Final Cut on its multiple layers. Making the first film basically an “urban legend” in this movie is a really fun concept.
Having our final girl, Amy (Jennifer Morrison), make a student-film version of the original Urban Legend is additionally really inventive. The movie has an awareness of slashers and horror movies like Scream, but its nerdiness feels like it overpowers the full-on story. It boasts a really complicated mystery!
The film works as a comedic, suspenseful whodunit, while having a lot of fun with its set pieces. Its setting is also not just a random change-of-pace. Its mystery (without spoiling) is intertwined with the concept of student filmmaking, with every little joke and jab having some connection to the overarching mystery. Understandable why horror fans may have been disappointed, but still, its mystery is top-notch, albeit with some predictable outcomes.
What is interesting is how tonally the movie feels much more in line with Scream than Urban Legend. It has no dark academia creeps, but visually it is a poppier, more pop-corny horror flick. The characters are all a little cartoonish, and its plethora of solid film industry jokes (that land maybe 60% of the time…?) make it really light viewing. For this critic, it’s a positive. However, that might not be a total positive for fans of the first.
A Franchise Done Dirty
Subjectively, this is a movie that really works. However, objectively, it is really frustrating as a franchise film. On its own, Final Cut sustains itself as a really fun meta-whodunit. However, as a sequel to Urban Legend? It’s totally baffling.
The biggest crime of this movie is that it is a sequel with no reason in being such. It only vaguely connects to the first film, and more importantly…HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH URBAN LEGENDS! The idea that the first movie is an urban legend is really clever! However, the first movie had nothing to do with the film industry! They could have at least played into some film urban legends, like with the skeletons in Poltergeist or the deaths surrounding The Omen or The Exorcist, but no. It really squandered this clear opportunity to make a throughline between meta film humor and urban legends.
Additionally, the movie is far from perfect outside of its franchise follies. For one, and this is a total nitpick and gripe, the killer mask. The fencing mask is pretty baffling, and feels really disconnected. Why not give him camera lenses for eyes? Or any kind of classic film monster mask? It’s a film school, so the opportunities should be endless for mask design. Additionally, a lot of the humor is kind of outdated, but that’s to be expected from an early-2000s horror flick.
Slasher 101
This might not matter at all to the casual viewer, but the film has a really good understanding of film school. It’s accurate in the production and environment of film school, even if it is heightened. This further lends itself to the commentary of the movie. Well, what commentary there vaguely is.
For all its silliness, the film covers a lot of issues of the film industry, particularly in academic spaces. Misogynistic film bros, toxic masculinity on sets, and nepotism are all topical social issues in the industry. The movie tackles social commentary as gracefully as a 2000s slasher-comedy can…which is just okay. But it still does it!
Urban Legends: Final Cut is definitely worth checking out. As long as you do not consider it a sequel. It is totally in a league of its own…for better or worse.
