Weekly visions - week 25, 2026

Door Into Silence, written and directed by Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1991 - ⭐⭐

After the successful experience with Don’t Torture a Duckling last week, I decided to watch another Fulci film, chosen at random. It turns out that this was his last film, so it makes perfect sense that it’s all about the idea - and the fear - of death.

The plot follows a man driving across the US, from New Orleans - where he attended the funeral of his father - back to Los Angeles. Along the way, he finds all sorts of frustrating obstacles, from road works to a hearse that doesn’t want to be overtaken. And a mysterious woman driving a red car.

If this description doesn’t sound very enticing, the film isn’t either. You’ll understand what’s going on twenty minutes into the story, and then you’ll have to wait seventy more minutes for Fulci to officially reveal it, just to end on a very silly shot.
For the record, I tried to watch another random film of his the following night, just to stop after a few minutes as a character was being very nasty towards a cat.

À l’interieur / Inside, written and directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, France, 2007 - ⭐⭐

One of the main French Extremity films I had not yet seen, this one disturbed me more than Martyrs did, because of the topic and the triggering violence that goes on. Béatrice Dalle, queen of the genre, is as deranged as ever as she home-invades, on Christmas eve, the house of pregnant woman Alysson Paradis (sister of Vanessa), with a purpose that soon becomes very clear, and terrifying.

So, part of my low rating is due to my personal taste about what is horrific but acceptable, and what goes too far.
But part of it is objective: the terrible interior, mother CGI shots of the baby reacting to what is happening à l’extérieur are totally unnecessary. And the required suspension of disbelief about some actions by secondary characters is just, itself, extreme.

Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, written by Will Soodik, US/Canada, 2026 - ⭐⭐½

And here’s another one of the ‘best-horrors-no-best-films-of-the-year’ that I went to watch with a lot of expectation and, finally, left me cold.
I haven’t yet seen Parsons’ YouTube series, but on paper, the whole idea of liminal horror was intriguing. In practice, not so much.

Maybe it’s because I have spent a lot of time, during my non-military service, walking around the semi-empty rooms of a former boarding school. But a series of yellow spaces with some furniture inside? Not scary, not even unsettling.
At least, not after it becomes clear that the topography is stable: weird as the architecture can be, if you can map a space for repeated visits, it’s no longer scary. If it’s repeatable, no matter how weird the rooms look, it’s not dream logic.

As I watched, I thought about Lost, and I told myself: ’the red room in Twin Peaks did it much better’.
Then of course a red room came up here as well, and I almost felt at home.

This is once again a ‘feature-length film based on a short film’, and, as such, it shows some struggle in reconciling what it once was, and what it aspires to be. The label ‘insert trauma here’ is still sticking out.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is a good actor, so why does he look so unconvincing here?

Anyway, not all is lost. We know that, with insomnia, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
The same for the backrooms: something is at work here, feeding on itself to create duplicates that are less and less faithful to the originals.
Is it AI? Is it obsessive rumination over guilt?
That is what Backrooms could successfully point to.

Maybe a future rewatch where I’m not in a room filled with teenagers constantly whispering to each other would help me focus on that.
For the time being, claims that this film will become as influential as The Blair Witch Project feel greatly exaggerated.

See How They Run, directed by Tom George, written by Mark Chappell, United Kingdom/US, 2022 - ⭐⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐⭐½)

My memory of this film was: a lot of fun.
This rewatch did not live up to the expectations. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are hilarious, as is the rest of the cast (second film in two weeks featuring Ruth Wilson); but the script, strong at the beginning, seems to trust too much in its meta premise (what if we wrote a Whodunnit inspired by The Mousetrap, the way Hollywood would?), while the insistence on using split screen is a dynamic, but unconvincing, choice.

undertone, written and directed by Ian Tuason, Canada/US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I thought a lot about Paranormal Activity during this film (so I’m not surprised director Tuason has been hired to write and direct the next instalment of that series), but it would perhaps be more appropriate to describe it as an audio version of Scott Derrickson’s Sinister.

America(Canada?)-based podcaster Evy (Nina Kiric) and Londoner Justin (Adam DiMarco, in a voice-only performance) host The Undertone podcast, which deals with unsettling paranormal stories. Although Evy plays the part of the sceptic in the show, she’s the one who’s affected more by a series of mysterious mp3s they received via email. But that’s because she lives alone in her family house with her terminally-ill and unresponsive mother, and because the timezone difference between the two hosts leads her to record the podcast at 3AM - and we know from The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson again) that that’s not a good time to be awake.

Objectively, I would have all the elements to complain that this is not a good plot: the worst accusations you can throw at late-stage trauma-based horror would be valid.
Tuason pushes as much as possible on audio horror, which unfortunately means nursery rhymes and the good old myth of subliminal messages hidden in popular tunes.

Still, I was tense for most of the running time, thanks to the vast, dark negative space that fills the frame in most scenes: who knows what is hiding in the shadows?

I know I will watch this film again. But I don’t know if I will like it more, or be bored by it.