#horror-film-influences

#horror-film-influences

The zombie was actually a Haitian Vodou metaphor for slavery. For enslaved Africans in Caribbean colonies like Haiti, the theft of one's autonomy was akin to a walking death.

Looking back from 2026, it's almost impossible to believe that video games were once treated as a flippant, dead-end hobby reserved for burnouts and social outcasts.

While John Carpenter's 1982 remake was initially dismissed as an empty, nihilistic gorefest, The Thing (née Another World) has since been reevaluated as one of the greatest science-fiction films of the '80s, and certainly one of the most influential.

A source told the Times that the idea had come from deputy director Dan Bongino, a cop-turned-right-wing-podcast-yapper, whose justification for the decision was as follows: "Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she's out of shape or overweight, that's going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they'd look good on a doorbell camera. He said it's the way these times are."

The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.

In 2006's Final Destination 3 the disaster is a high-speed roller coaster derailment, narrowly avoided thanks to a premonition experienced by high school senior Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). But as fans know, Death doesn't like being ghosted. One by one, the survivors are stalked and eliminated through elaborately staged "accidents" that turn mundane locations into Rube Goldberg-ian death traps.

This isn't your average pandemic thriller; here, the infected meld with inorganic material in their surroundings, until their outward contours and their personhood are gone. Thibault Emin's film starts with a little whiff of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen. After their one-night stand, hypochondriac Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and impertinent Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves bunkered up in one corner of a madcap apartment block.

I'm talking about Iron Lung, a self-financed film by a beloved YouTuber named Mark Fischbach, who goes by the handle Markiplier, and who has more than 38 million followers to his name. The movie, an adaptation of an indie horror video game, had a budget of approximately $3 million-an amount that Iron Lung has already earned back seven times over, with a box office of $21.7 million worldwide.