Reviews, interviews, and on-site reporting from Fantastic Fest in Austin. This selection shows my work across studio horror, international premieres, independent features, filmmaker interviews, talent conversations, and reported festival pieces.
Criticism written during the festival, ranging from a major franchise gala to international creature horror and a stylized literary adaptation.
A review of Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten's return to Raccoon City, focused on its ordinary-person perspective, survival-horror structure, and uncomfortable comedy.
Read at iHorror →A performance-driven review of Zachary Wigon and Virginia Feito's blood-soaked adaptation, centered on Maika Monroe's Winifred Notty.
Read at iHorror →A creature-feature review about scale, production design, and the value of a monster movie understanding exactly what its audience came to see.
Read at iHorror →Festival conversations shaped into stories rather than Q&A transcripts, with each piece built around a specific creative or thematic angle.
Jordan Downey, Deborah Ann Woll, and Jeffrey Donovan on performance, small-town horror, scientific curiosity, and why the quiet scenes were harder than the monster work.
Read at iHorror →Agata Trzebuchowska and her cast on the shared terror of growing up and growing old, and how the film refuses to treat its elderly character as horror furniture.
Read at iHorror →Mike P. Nelson and Kiana Madeira on photographing the Amazon as something older and larger than the people moving through it.
Read at iHorror →A conversation about vampire invitation lore, predation, audience complicity, and putting the least romantic possible vampire into a Santa suit.
Read at iHorror →James Cullen Bressack, Larsen Deane, and Lilly Van der Meer on shooting to secondhand VHS-C, leaving mistakes in, and using physical media as evidence in an AI-saturated culture.
Read at iHorror →Director Joshua Gratton and composer Aoife Josie Clements on Super 8, analog synthesizers, deliberate imperfections, and refusing to polish away the texture.
Read at iHorror →A conversation about returning a heavily fictionalized paranormal case to the woman at its center and approaching the real Doris with empathy rather than spectacle.
Read at iHorror →A reported feature about making a feature on an extreme deadline and choosing to preserve the relationship at its center when early feedback pushed for more horror.
Read at iHorror →Joko Anwar on prison horror, class, anger, solidarity, and a supernatural threat that does not care whether anyone deserves what happens to them.
Read at iHorror →A Fantastic Fest conversation that moved from belief and ghost stories into the director's own unexplained experience.
Read at iHorror →A pre-festival survey of the 2026 program, including studio premieres, international horror, restorations, found footage, queer horror, and the emerging filmmakers worth watching.
Read at iHorror →