2026 Horror Reviews: Obsession, Faces of Death & Undertone

追加: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]I feel like we could do one of those movie husband reviews where you just do it yourself. How about that? Yeah, we could we could do that.

[00:00:09]Hey everyone. It is just Jeff here.

[00:00:11]Welcome back to Movie Husband. As you know, Matt sometimes does horror movies and sometimes doesn't, but I have watched quite a few of them in the past couple weeks or so. So, I wanted to make a video about where we are with horror in 2026 because I feel like as a massive fan of the genre, I've been less engaged with it in the past 2 years or so. The technical prowess of so-called elevated horror met this throwback atavism of new wave slasher films. Horror felt like there was something once inventive and prickly became kind of stale and unable to expand in new directions. That may still be where we are in some ways, but in just 5 short months, I feel like we've gotten some very strong horror films. I haven't gotten the chance to see Hokum yet, so that won't be represented here, but rest assured Matt and I will be reviewing Backrooms when it comes out, which seems poised to continue a trend of YouTube horror moguls hitting the mainstream theaters. Let's start out with Obsession since that just released in theaters. Obsession is Curry Barker's feature debut after making a variety of comedy and horror shorts on YouTube. I had seen Milk and Cereal before this and I really rather liked it actually.

[00:01:13]Obsession is essentially a Monkey's Paw be careful what you wish for type film where a man named Bear buys a magic shop souvenir that supposedly grants him one wish. In a moment of desperation and hardly believing in the supernatural in the first place, Bear wishes for a woman he likes to love him more than anyone in the world. And of course, because this is a movie, it happens. Obsession shows a lot of promise from a first-time filmmaker, especially in juggling many tones throughout its runtime. The film is clearly a comment on romantic insecurity like this human desire that we all have to be adored and worshipped by a beautiful person. But as you'd expect, this obsession isn't quite what Bear wished for. The film has a blissful 10-minute-ish segment right after this happens of the couple falling in love, and then things start to get a little weird. Nikki's demeanor shifts from adoration to obsession. She watches Bear sleep. She tries to honor his dead cat in increasingly odd ways. She has violent mood swings whenever he suggests space or even goes to work. And many, many other things happen that I will not spoil here. This part of the film finds balance between the dread of horror and discomforting humor. I was laughing pretty intensely at the middle portion of this film. I thought it was really, really funny. Like Nikki's obsession pushes social situations to the brink of madness. It often feels like a really off-kilter, very dark cringe comedy. And then the horror starts to kick in, and that becomes something else entirely. No spoilers here, but I really like the places this film went to in its final moments. What started to feel like a high-concept stretch pretty thin became increasingly violent and unhinged with two or three truly shocking sequences.

[00:02:50]Some of which are really impressively staged. Nikki's movements in the film appear really alien, like somewhere between love and menace, and her performance is responsible for most of the scares and most of the discomfort.

[00:03:00]The film is painfully aware that within everyone is this desperate need to be loved, and this film puts a masculine spin on it. Think of it like that meme that's like men will literally wish to be loved instead of go to therapy. It's easy to relate to Bear, though. He seems like a sweet, insecure guy who just can't get out of his own way. My only real issue with the film is it feels like 10 or 15 minutes too long. I think a bit of a trim and a more breathless pace could have propelled this into horror film of the year territory for me. And where it ends, even though it's really and devastating, feels like the only place it really can end.

[00:03:33]That being said, it's a really effective and quite funny and relentlessly perceptive film about insecurity in adult relationships. I'm going to give Obsession a B. Next up is Faces of Death. So, this is a supposed remake of the infamous Faces of Death film, which purported to show real grizzly deaths and proudly touted how many countries it was banned in on the VHS cassette. It's a legendary film that I've read about and never seen and I I really don't care to. It's conceit just doesn't interest me at all. However, this new film is more of a reimagining than a remake.

[00:04:03]Faces of Death felt extreme for 1978, but updating it to 2026 must account for violent deaths sad proliferation and accessibility. We live in a world of live stream terrorist acts and gore hound Reddit pages trading gross out pictures. What does Faces of Death look like in a modern environment? I think the film has a pretty clever answer actually. It follows Margo whose job is to regulate a site kind of like TikTok or Instagram and go through the flagged content to decide whether to keep a post up or to take it down. The whole thing seems like a pretty hollow enterprise almost as if management has this flagging department simply to combat criticism, but also prioritizes keeping smut and snuff on their platform for clicks. Margo encounters some violent videos that appear real and she finds that the killer is reenacting the Faces of Death movie from 1978. It's a pretty clever idea. Going beyond just a simple let's take the same idea and force it into the digital age, it shows a vicious killer emulating the original film.

[00:04:57]Margo begins investigating these videos and halfway through the film comes face to face with the poster himself played by Dacre Montgomery in a haunting and twisted performance. This film succeeds not due to the extremity of its violence, but the extremity of its ideas. Isn't the new Faces of Death basically our everyday reality? It's a haunting meditation on the desperation for attention in the digital age and the widespread availability of sickening subject matter. One whose stylistically ugly grit is matched by its formal choices. The killer is loud, disparaging, and heartless and Margo's intentions sometimes seem more self-serving than benevolent. By the time the film ends and our characters are splattered in blood and rolling around in bloody plastic sheets, I couldn't help but be impressed by how the film melded its clever premise with a true go for it slasher intensity. It's only flaw is that the character of Margo will sometimes make conveniently rash decisions that exist solely to complicate the plot mechanics. I'd say two or three character beats of hers feel pretty lazy in this film, but even so, I'm really surprised how critics just casually dismiss this. I think it's one of the more insightful and barbaric slasher films I've seen in the past few years. I'm going to give Faces of Death a B+. Finally, I want to talk about Undertone. All right, let me set the scene for Undertone. I missed this in theaters, which I was super bummed about, but on a night Matt was out, I put it on, making sure the whole house was trying to freak myself out, and freak myself out I did. Undertone got under my skin and creeped me out in ways I really didn't expect. I've found as I watch more and more films, I can usually deduce a film's trajectory fairly quickly, and my film criticism shifts more into how well it achieves an archetype comparatively rather than subverting that archetype. Undertone clearly follows a familiar structure.

[00:06:40]Trapped in a creepy house where things seem a bit off, a steady flow of events that gradually increase in intensity, and urban legend that points to where things are going. Until the last 15 minutes or so, Undertone really doesn't give you a lot, but I found with horror films that creepy suggestion often best showing you the monsters outright. The film follows Evie, one half of a podcast exploring the paranormal. She's the skeptic and her counterpart Justin is the believer. They're kind of like a modern-day Mulder and Scully. In this podcast, they listen to recordings and read about paranormal stories and essentially debate the validity of the claims. Justin receives an anonymous email of 10 audio recordings that they play through sequentially on the podcast. Amidst all of this, Evie is caring for her dying mother, who hospice says should be passing away literally any day now, and whether it's a fantasy or reality, she seems to be more mobile and menacing than Evie had imagined.

[00:07:30]Eventually, the sound recordings begin to fuse with Evie's reality, and her environment seems to be mimicking the events of the tapes. Undertone, as you can imagine from the premise, has unbelievable sound design. Like, not only in how it infuses scares through sound work, but how it also tells a story through it. Of course, creepy children songs get involved. There become hidden clues with playing messages backwards, and they sound demonic. Lots of these things we've seen before, and yet its execution just really creeps me out. The camera makes use of negative space just dim enough that anything could be hiding there in the darkness. And though there aren't really jump scares, you'll sometimes see something in the frame that just doesn't look right. Your enjoyment of Undertone will vary pretty heavily on your willingness to fill in the blanks with imagination. I could see some people telling me that I'm making too much of it, but I felt an odd mix of nerves and heebie-jeebies that I just like rarely feel in films anymore. If anything, I think Undertone's explanation in its final stretch is a little too on the nose, and I wish it hadn't made some suggestions without confirming the evil force at play. Either way, I really love this. It's an unnerving good time. I'm going to give Undertone a B+ also. And that's it for the films I wanted to talk about of horror so far in 2026. If you have seen Undertone, Faces of Death, or Obsession, I would certainly love to hear what you thought about those films in the comments below, and we will see you next time.