Books book reviews Boarding School Trouble and Trauma: Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran Alexis Ong reviews “a must-read for boarding school fiction junkies.” By Alexis Ong | Published on March 23, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share If figure skating is competitive gender performance, then all-girls boarding school is a godless pageant where gender isn’t so much a rehearsed performance but an endless clown car of ordeals. Enid Blyton’s boarding school books—hello, St. Clare’s and Malory Towers—were a formative part of my preteen reading, and it is through this cloying miasma of midnight feasts and social grooming and stiff-upper-lip camaraderie that I went off to real girls boarding school where it became immediately obvious that Enid Blyton was full of shit. But that’s the beautiful thing about this very specific subgenre: If done well, it’s wholly transportive for the right reader. It can revive a powerful sense of escapist nostalgia for a time when these stories—trite and absurd (and in Blyton’s case, sometimes problematic) as they are to contemporary eyes—actually made you feel something.  Avery Curran’s debut, Spoiled Milk, is one of those books. The novel follows the recollections of Emily Locke, a precocious sixth-form student at Briarley, a small rural boarding school for girls in the late 1920s. It is with slight trepidation and sick glee that my eyes soak up the words “Church of England” and immediately flash back to the pastoral foundations of my own Anglican education—the smell of wet wool, cold chapel pews, our stone replica of Caedmon’s Cross that traveled from the bowels of North Yorkshire to Australia—because now Spoiled Milk is personal. Emily, though, loves Briarley. Hers is a tiny, tight-knit class—just six seniors—overflowing with all the hormonal neuroses and messy politics that drive teens at this age. Things start to spiral when Emily’s best friend Violet dies in a suspicious fall; Emily is convinced that the young French teacher, Mademoiselle, is the murderer. Cue foul omens like worm-riddled fruit, bad well water, and hallucinations. The girls visit the village medium, who gives them an ominous warning that some inexorable thing is coming.  I was initially wary of Spoiled Milk in that stupid soliloquial way where any story that overlaps with personal experience is always going to chafe against petty indignance and righteous exceptionalism; at one point my most petulant thought was, “these girls aren’t nearly shitty enough to each other,” as if there’s some real-life yardstick for “realistic” teenage spite. I sulked at Emily’s insights, either because she was being impossibly mature or because she reminded me of my high school’s interpersonal dynamics. This is, of course, a me problem, but getting jumpscared by these childish ancient feelings after 25 years felt like a weird meta bonus, given the themes and setting of the book.  Buy the Book Spoiled Milk Avery Curran Buy Book Spoiled Milk Avery Curran Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Curran takes time to establish the ritual and detail that this subgenre demands, because elaborate formalities and careful hierarchies are a defining part of the English institutional atmosphere. Generally speaking, this whole domain is an age-old petri dish of racist, sexist, classist monstrosities that rely on rather homogenous tropes. At best, it can be a magical realm where children are free to discover their inner potential among peers; at worst, it’s a grooming pit designed to sustain conservatism, trauma, and abuse. Armed with a strong understanding of this rich and miserable history, Curran injects fresh blood into the traditionally rigid paradigms of English girlhood narratives.  There’s a lot to parse in this book about gender and queerness and the dynamics of young women packed away like uniformed sardines; Curran taps into every trope and stereotype about boarding school girls while largely avoiding flat cliches. There is the idea that girls are meaner to each other than boys, wielding microdoses of spite and cruelty like a thousand hidden needles; there are countless shows and books and films about the complex cruelty and sociopathy of teen girls who play the long game. There is the age-old trope of Schrödinger’s lesbians, that an all-girl community must be a hothouse for sapphic deviance, and one can only really tell if one actually wants to look. It was hard for my mind not to drift toward Sophia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides; we have our very own Lux Lisbon in the form of Violet, whom everyone at Briarley is obsessed with.  It is this peer fixation and competitive infatuation that jumped out at me: the all-encompassing strain of teenage limerence that defines so much of high school. It was a huge part of my own experience, watching friends and enemies alike attach themselves to popular girls on a chaotic spectrum of queer desire and coming-of-age crushes—platonic and romantic—that seem to evaporate after graduation. Emily’s observations run from petty and childish, critical but peppered with self-doubt, to jarringly honest and relatably impatient; Curran does a great job of balancing the staid atmosphere of a period drama with a protagonist who stays sharp and light and appropriately stubborn and myopic (we’ve all been there). Everything about Emily is urgent and fierce in her hardheadedness, lending a useful momentum to the narrative; Emily’s friends are, in comparison, the voices of reason to her dogged need for answers. Then, of course, there’s prim, obnoxious Evelyn, the object of Emily’s disdain, who of course, evolves into something more. As for the spiritualist themes of the book, this is also something we did in my first year of boarding school, although ours was just a Ouija board scrawled on a sheet of A4 paper and a coin for a planchette. I can only say that had I been alive during the 1920s in an all-girls boarding school with superstition and religious hysteria coming out of the walls, I would have found new ways to scare myself to death (complimentary) on the regular. Curran mostly keeps the supernatural elements of the story loose, focusing on the core group of friends; the idea of a Scooby-Doo ride-or-die squad was such a huge selling point of Enid Blyton’s stories for young me, at least before I was rudely shoved into a reality where I had to line up in a single file to go to dinner. This is the sort of story that would sink under the weight of over-exposition—the subtle fantasy of camaraderie in a place that actively worked to diminish it—and honestly the less we know about why and how Briarley became a bodysnatchers-style epicenter of eldritch terror, the better. At first blush, Spoiled Milk might feel like it offers neat analogies to teenhood and queerness and growing up: a story about a tortured, forced farewell to childhood and order. There is a lot to unpack about everything—Englishness, gender, western civilization, sexuality, patriarchy, class, and so on—but few concrete answers. There is nothing neat and clean about Emily’s journey, and there shouldn’t be. Later on in the book, Emily becomes a little more concerned with the end of England, or the world, but Curran keeps our focus on this small microcosm of terror to great claustrophobic effect. My biggest personal takeaway was how much Spoiled Milk made me reflect on my own experiences with (all of the things above) on a larger scale, and how well Curran’s style engages with the reader’s own history; it feels strikingly like a conversation, perhaps even a confession, that resonates with the present. It is a refreshingly self-aware debut, built on a rich tradition of gothic cultural capital as well as history, and a must-read for boarding school fiction junkies.[end-mark] Spoiled Milk is published by Doubleday. The post Boarding School Trouble and Trauma: <i>Spoiled Milk</i> by Avery Curran appeared first on Reactor.

News Starfleet Academy Star Trek: Starfleet Academy to End after Season 2 The show’s first season ended earlier this month By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 23, 2026 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ The first season of Starfleet Academy has just ended, and we got the sad news that while we’ll still get a second season (Paramount+ ordered those episodes before season one premiered), the show will end after that. “We’re incredibly proud of the ambition, passion, and creativity that went into bringing Star Trek: Starfleet Academy to life,” CBS Studios and Paramount+ said in a joint statement to Variety, who broke the news. “The series introduced audiences to a bold new group of characters, welcomed familiar faces, and expanded the Star Trek universe in exciting new ways. We’re grateful to Alex Kurtzman, Noga Landau, Gaia Violo, and the entire cast and crew who pushed storytelling boundaries in the spirit of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. We look forward to sharing the upcoming second and final season with everyone, and continuing to celebrate the cast, crew, and all that was accomplished with this series.” This, personally, is a huge bummer. The show was a fun addition to the franchise, bringing us new characters and bringing back beloved ones like Robert Picardo’s Doctor. I looked forward to seeing where the series would go with its young cadets. At least we still have a season two. We also have two more seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds coming our way, with the fourth expected to premiere later this year and the fifth and final season having just completed production. Other than that, however, there’s no announced Trek TV on the horizon. Landau and Kurtzman, who served as co-showrunners, shared a letter about the news as well, which you can read in full below: It’s been my and Noga’s joy and privilege to help carry Gene Roddenberry’s extraordinary vision forward with Starfleet Academy, thanks to the hundreds of hardworking humans who pour every ounce of their talents into the work daily with imagination and reverence. We are in post-production now on what will be the second and final season. We’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished together on this show, and the world will get to see the work of these extraordinary artists when season two airs. We will finish strong.Whether you’re working on Star Trek or part of the marvel that is Star Trek fandom—its very heart, soul, and conscience—the joy comes from adventuring across boundaries of time, space, and the humanly possible in service to Roddenberry’s transformative vision of the future. That incomparable vision was fueled by an inexhaustible optimism. Star Trek places its bet on the best in human nature. It dares to imagine a society of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations,’ free of war, hate, poverty, disease, and repression, and dedicated to the spirit of scientific inquiry and respect for all life, whether carbon or silicon-based, green-skinned or blue-skinned.But make no mistake: Gene Roddenberry wasn’t some starry-eyed dreamer. He was a decorated Army bomber pilot in the Pacific Theater. He had seen first-hand the grim consequences of the worst of human nature. And his vision of the future wasn’t just a promise of hope. It was also a warning. In a fraught, frightening time of intolerance and violence, Star Trek said: Look! We made it! But just barely. First, we had to put all those ancient scourges behind us. It said that what makes us glorious as a species, and gives us hope for the future and the galaxy is inextricably linked to what makes us dangerous to each other, to this one world we presently inhabit, and to ourselves. That dual message—of hope and of warning—isn’t just a pretty dream but a call to action, to think about who we are in a different way.Please don’t take our word for it. Take Gene’s:“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”With enduring hope that his vision of the future is possible, for our children, their children, and every future cadet in Starfleet Academy:Live Long and Prosper. [end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i> to End after Season 2 appeared first on Reactor.

Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “A View from the Gallery” Two maintenance workers take center stage as aliens attacks the station. By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 23, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “A View from the Gallery”Written by Harlan Ellison & J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Janet GreekSeason 5, Episode 4Production episode 505Original air date: February 11, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… In hyperspace, an alien ship destroys a probe. Corwin reports to Lochley that the probe was destroyed by the alien fleet that the Gaim warned them about. Lochley puts the station on alert and tells Corwin to set aside a lifepod for Sheridan and Delenn to escape in if necessary. Corwin points out that they won’t go, and Lochley says to leave that to her. Two of the maintenance crew, Mack and Bo, mutter about how they always have to clean up the messes made by the command staff. Lochley and Sheridan pass by Mack and Bo as the latter are working. As Lochley tries to convince Sheridan to use the lifepod if it becomes necessary, Mack and Bo comment on how much they appreciate that Sheridan gets his metaphorical hands dirty, always right there in the action with everyone else. Mack and Bo take their lunch break. Bo has salami, which impresses Mack, as that’s hard to get. Mack is having spoo, and convinces Bo to trade half his sandwich. Bo is revolted by the spoo, while Mack is in heaven getting to eat salami. Bo is sent to medlab to fix a console. He overhears Franklin giving instructions to the medical staff on dealing with casualties. Bo makes a comment about why he bothers to set up to treat the enemy. Franklin tells the story of when his father was a POW, and was treated by an enemy doctor—he would’ve died if not for that alien physician. That was when Franklin decided he wanted to be an MD rather than follow his family’s footsteps as soldiers. Ironically, that alien doctor was killed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Mack is sent to CnC to fix the secondary targeting console—just as the aliens come through the jumpgate. Mack fixes it—there was an insect inside the console—just in time for it to be needed in the firefight. That was the first wave, and Lochley tells Corwin to be ready for the next wave, while she goes off to yell at Garibaldi. Mack and Bo are riding the lift when Garibaldi and Lochley enter, the latter yelling at the former for the incomplete intel the Gaim provided about the aliens. Bo and Mack continue their maintenance work, and they notice a boarding pod attaching itself to the station hull. The two of them wind up in the middle of a firefight in a cargo bay, but Allan is able to cover them while they get to safety. Safety turns out to be with Byron and his gaggle of telepaths. At one point, Bo mentions that he wishes he was out there in a Starfury fighting the good fight. Byron telepathically links him with a Starfury pilot so he can experience what’s happening. Mack, freaked out by the telepaths, suggests they go to one of the shelters, and leads Bo away to one of the designated shelters. They share the shelter with, among others, Mollari and G’Kar. The former laments that the universe hates him. The latter says that this feels like home to him, as he spent most of his childhood in shelters like this while the Centauri bombed his homeworld. Mollari further laments that he didn’t have a childhood, he had too many responsibilities. They depart the shelter together. Credit: Warner Bros. Television En route to deal with a fire in Red Sector, Bo and Mack come across Sheridan and Delenn. The president orders to the two of them to escort Delenn to a lifepod—he can’t ask security, as they’re all too busy repelling boarders. However, Delenn is able to convince them to let her go with a combination of empathy for their positions and threats to sabotage the pod if they put her in it. The White Stars show up and rout the aliens. Soon it’s all over and the station is safe. Mack and Bo complain that they have to clean up all the messes now, but they pass by Franklin checking the many dead bodies of Starfury pilots, at which point they realize that there are other messes here to clean up that they’re not involved with. In CnC, Mack, while making repairs to damaged consoles, tells Lochley that she’s all right in his book. Later, the pair pass Delenn and Sheridan, and Delenn impresses them by remembering their names. Get the hell out of our galaxy! When Lochley asks Sheridan if he’d do anything different if their positions were reversed, Sheridan has to admit that he wouldn’t. But he also refuses to report to the lifepod when the fighting gets rough. Never work with your ex. Lochley runs the battle as best she can while waiting for the White Stars to show up. Ivanova is God. Mack and Bo discuss the rumors flying about regarding Ivanova’s departure, which is a bit of meta commentary on the rumors flying about fandom regarding Claudia Christian’s departure from the show. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is apparently just as mediocre at being the head of covert intelligence as he was as the head of security… Credit: Warner Bros. Television If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn likens Mack and Bo to the Worker Caste of the Minbari, and not only asks their names, but later remembers their names, neither of which Bo and Mack expected. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… As a member of a prominent aristocratic family whose father died when he was very young, Mollari didn’t get much of a childhood. Though it take a thousand years, we shall be free. G’Kar spent his youth in bomb shelters taking refuge from Centauri bombardment. We also learn that the Narn day is 31 hours long. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Byron is apparently a strong enough telepath to insert someone’s mind into someone else’s so they can experience what the other person is experiencing. Either that or he can put a very convincing illusion in someone’s mind… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. After Delenn remembers his and Bo’s names, Mack declares that he’s in love. When Bo reminds him that she’s married (indeed, they earlier discussed how much in love she and Sheridan are), Mack shrugs and says they can work something out. Welcome aboard. Joshua Cox—who has been upgraded to a billed-at-the-beginning-of-act-one guest star for this final season—is back from “No Compromises” as Corwin. Robin Atkin Downes is back from “The Paragon of Animals” as Byron. Both of them will be back in “Strange Relations.” Bo and Mack are played by, respectively, Lawrence LeJohn and my fellow Bronx native, the late great Raymond O’Connor. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Trivial matters. The aliens who attack are never identified and never mentioned or seen again. The White Star fleet isn’t immediately available because they were almost all deployed to the Enphili homeworld in “The Paragon of Animals.” One of the things that was promoted during the run-up to B5’s premiere in J. Michael Straczynski’s online campaign to create buzz for the show was the involvement of Harlan Ellison as a creative consultant, also with the likelihood that he would write some episodes of the show. Given that Ellison’s history includes plenty of teleplay writing (The Outer Limits, the 1980s iteration of The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Starlost, the original Star Trek), this wasn’t a real surprise. However, in the end, he only contributed to two episodes, of which this was the first, and in both cases it was only sharing story credit with Straczynski. According to Straczynski, the original concept was Ellison’s. (Ellison’s second story credit will be “Objects in Motion” toward the end of the final season.) Mack’s description of the White Stars as looking like plucked chickens was apparently Straczynski’s initial reaction when he saw the designs of the ship. Byron, for the second time in two episodes, quotes Hamlet, this time the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. Given that Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet spinoff play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was one of the inspirations for this episode, quoting that play is particularly apropos. The crawler Mack picked out of the console was a Madagascar hissing cockroach with fake wings and a crest. That Bo is, like Straczynski, tall, bearded, and speaks softly but intently and Mack is, like Ellison, short and more outspoken and glib, is probably a coincidence. The echoes of all of our conversations. “We spent our days in shelters we made ourselves. We sang songs, we prayed, we ate, we slept. I spent my life in one such shelter or another. I will tell you the truth, Mollari: this is probably the closest thing I have to a home.” “Yes, well, don’t start singing. You’ll frighten the children.” —G’Kar and Mollari bantering. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “It tastes like chicken.” This is a really promising first draft of what should’ve been a great episode. Which is frustrating to me, because this is the kind of story I generally adore, from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Data’s Day” and “Lower Decks.” J. Michael Straczynski has said that he wrote this script in a single eleven-hour period, and sadly, it shows. It’s possible to write well under pressure, of course, but it’s also very easy to not write well under that same pressure. Some of the dialogue here sparkles. The Mollari-G’Kar scene in the bunker is classic, as exchanges with those characters almost always are, but it’s Mack’s coda that really nails it: “So how long you figure they been married?” Bo’s line about how he understands Sheridan after seeing Delenn smile—“I’d claw my way out of hell and straight through ten miles of solid rock to see that smile again”—is a letter-perfect description of Mira Furlan’s radiant smile. And Franklin’s explanation of why he became a physician is one of Richard Biggs’ best bits in the show’s entire history. Others, though, fall completely flat, from the “grow bigger shoulders” rhapsody in clichés to the awkward colloquy on how the station is bigger than all of them at the very end, which just feels a little too self-congratulatory on the part of the scriptwriter. Sheridan’s convincing of Delenn to go in the lifepod also just rings wrong on every level, and Lochley and Garibaldi’s argument about intelligence providing just feels constructed and fake. Some manage both—for example, Mack and Bo’s discussion of Sheridan gets a little too precious, but it ends magnificently. “I heard he was dead once.” “Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.” The episode is still mostly watchable, mainly due to the usual suspects of Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik, as well as guests Lawrence LeJohn and Raymond O’Connor, who make Bo and Mack feel real. That “mostly” caveat is due to, once again, Robin Atkin Downes and Tracy Scoggins, who are completely ineffective as Byron and Lochley. This was Lochley’s first real spotlight as the new captain, and she managed to make it perfunctory and somnolent. The one exception, interestingly enough, was at the very end when she gives Mack a bright smile in response to his saying she’s all right in his book. It’s the first time Lochley feels like a person rather than an automaton. Next week: “Learning Curve.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “A View from the Gallery” appeared first on Reactor.

Column SFF Bestiary The Power of a Cute Animal Sidekick We all know who the real stars of KPop Demon Hunters are… By Judith Tarr | Published on March 23, 2026 Image: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Netflix KPop Demon Hunters is an international phenomenon. Just this past week, on top of numerous other awards, it won Oscars for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. The characters, the songs, the story, have taken over the world. It’s a great story. The king of the demons has been trying for centuries to conquer humankind and feed on their souls. There’s always been a trio of demon hunters holding him back with the magical barrier called the Honmoon, sustaining it with three-part harmony and the passion of their fans. Each group of hunters is a girl group, and they perform in whatever genre is most in vogue at the time. This time it’s K-Pop, Korean pop music, and Rumi, Mira, and Zoey set out to raise the greatest power of all, the golden Honmoon. That and that alone can drive out the demons forever. There are numerous complications and a number of reversals, some of them devastating, but we’re here for one beloved trope, and that is the Adorable Animal Sidekick (singular or plural). Walt Disney built an empire on it. Hero after hero, princess after princess, has a sidekick flitting around, cracking wise and offering advice and occasional chaos. From Jiminy Cricket to Mushu the teeny dragon to Sebastian the crab, no protagonist can be without this essential living accessory. KPop Demon Hunters gives us a pair of animal powers: a demon tiger and a six-eyed magpie. They’re not named in the film, but the creative team calls them Derpy Tiger and Sussie Bird. Both are very much a part of Korean folk culture, and they’re often seen together in lore and art. We first meet them in the demon realm, as ominous shadows attached to the demonic musician Jinu. As the film progresses, they emerge into the light. The bird is a geometric masterpiece in black and white with a tall-crowned hat, and the tiger is a vivid blue creature with enormous fangs set in a perpetual grin, and lambent golden eyes. Their primary function in the story is to serve as messengers between Jinu and Rumi. They can melt into the ground or the floor and rise up out of it, as they please. The tiger carries messages in a card on its tongue. The bird rides the tiger’s head or shows up on the sidelines, watching with its multiplicity of eyes. In spite of their dark origin and their foreboding introduction, neither the tiger nor the bird turns out to be evil. At worst they’re neutral. They have a job to do and they’re diligent about it. There’s nothing scary about them, though the tiger is huge—tiger-sized—and the bird is kind of weird. The power they wield is the power of cute. Cute is a great force in the world. Maybe the greatest. Disney knew. In Japan it’s an entire thing called Kawaisa, the Cult of Cute. Cute animals rule the internet and dominate social media. Cute doesn’t need to be small or fuzzy or harmless. It can be a tiny insect (jumping spiders, omg) or a big furry mammal. It can be a creature normally thought of as terrifying, like a shark or a snake. Humans can find cuteness in just about anything. It’s not without its dangers—hence the meme, “If not friend, then why friend-shaped?” It can be a hard lesson when humans fall for the cute but miss the real nature of a wild animal. But that’s getting away from the purpose of the tiger and the bird in KPop Demon Hunters. They’re there to show us that Jinu may not be entirely evil. The telling point for me is when Rumi asks Jinu why the bird wears a hat. “I made it for the tiger,” he answers, “but the bird keeps taking it.” A demon makes a hat for his companion animal. That’s such a human thing to do. There’s a whole subreddit of snakes in hats. (Also, cats wishing death on humans who try to inflict clothes on them, but that’s a different set of memes—and one of the underlying themes of another Korean genre film, The Cat.) It’s not just the sartorial choice that does it. It’s the way both Jinu and Rumi act around the tiger. An affectionate glance. A casual stroke of the hand. A purr in response. They’re showing us that they have the human impulse to bond with other species. It’s a form of empathy, and a manifestation of the capacity to love. That’s the heart of the film. It’s one of the things that makes it great, and an essential component of its success. The music and the characters could carry it on their own, but the tiger and the bird add that extra bit of something. I can’t imagine it without them.[end-mark] The post The Power of a Cute Animal Sidekick appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays horror comedy We’re in the Midst of a Horror Comedy Renaissance — Why Now? Horror comedies are seeing a sharp upswing — but why do we need them? By Ellery Weil | Published on March 23, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share A shiver down your spine… a giggle in your throat? Horror comedy may sound like a contradiction, but the genre is nothing new. In fact, some consider One Exciting Night, a film released in 1922, to be the first-ever horror comedy film. Other early examples of the genre include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 film that took a very straightforward approach to horror comedy by literally introducing a monster to a comedy duo. But horror comedy is no relic of the past—in fact, it seems to be everywhere these days. The only issue is, has anyone noticed? At the 2026 Academy Awards, four Oscars, including for Best Screenplay and Best Actor, went to the decadent Sinners, which can be fairly argued to be a horror comedy (and a costume drama, and a musical—it’s a very cross-genre film, which is part of its charm). Also in 2025 came winking killer-robot flicks Companion and M3gan 2.0. In 2026, the Scream movies are back yet again, while the delightfully campy Ready or Not (basic premise: what if the Parker Brothers, as in the board games, were a large family instead of a pair of brothers, and also in league with the devil) has an even campier sequel. Clearly, there’s a hearty appetite out there for horror comedy. But why? Well, maybe we all need an escape. We live in tempestuous times, and the gleeful excesses of horror comedy can let us forget that for a little while. Escapism is underrated, but powerful. In a college writing class, one question we were asked to grapple with was the purpose of fiction “beyond simple escapism.” Even then, the phrase struck me. Beyond? Simple? Escapism is vital; it wouldn’t be a tradition that spans all the way back to Homer if it wasn’t (and frankly, The Odyssey could definitely be played for horror comedy in bits, especially the parts about Circe and the animal transformations). It’s also difficult to do well. Watching some of the lower-budget 80s horror comedies, or Messrs. Abbott and Costello introducing themselves to yet another member of the Spirit Halloween Gang, it’s easy for your mind to wander. One reason I, at least, had such a good time watching Sinners was that, for the full two hours and seventeen minutes of its runtime, I wasn’t thinking of anything but these musicians and vampires in 1920s Mississippi. When Ready or Not premiered in theaters, I didn’t get around to it on the big screen—but watching it during a long flight, after an exhausting drag to the airport, I found myself captivated. Why is the horror comedy renaissance happening? Maybe we should be asking—why does it matter? Because it does matter. And it matters because, even as a genre that’s been belittled, and associated with corny gags and buckets of red corn syrup “blood”, horror comedy can be art. And when it is art, when the formula works, between the screams and the laughs and the gasps, it’s breathtaking. But maybe there’s a little more going on than that. To understand the current horror comedy renaissance, maybe you have to look at the appeal, more broadly, of horror comedy as a genre. While horror movies can provide things like social commentary and a way to reflect on our feelings, they can also serve another, equally important purpose: catharsis.  The word catharsis comes from two Greek words; katharos, meaning “pure” or “clean,” and kathairein, meaning to purge, or purify. In ancient Greece, theatres were found next to temples because attending the theatre was considered a holy thing, in part because the emotional catharsis experienced by the audience was considered a form of purification, which Aristotle described in Poetics, praising the “purging of emotions” theatre could enable. Horror movies provide that same catharsis, a way of letting out shock and fear, and that same sense of relief when the film ends and the lights go up. Horror comedy, meanwhile, takes that feeling and doubles, or possibly even squares it. The ancient Greek theatre was famous for its tragedy, but also for its comedy, and the emotional catharsis provided by “a good cry” or getting your socks scared off you can also be felt by the kind of laughter that makes your stomach ache.  Horror comedy as a genre arguably predates horror comedy movies at all. Before there were films, or even cameras, there was theatre. And in theatre, there was horror, comedy, and horror comedy. In Paris, when the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol opened in 1897, they ran programs of double features, where over-the-top gore in the horror plays alternated with comedy shows, for an effect the theatre owners likened to bathing in hot and cold water. A visit to the Grand-Guignol could even be followed up with a glass of wine at a horror comedy restaurant, the Cabaret de L’Enfer, a Parisian hell-themed establishment that had guests enter through the mouth of a demon, only to be mocked by waiters dressed as devils who called coffee “molten sin.” It was certainly a memorable way to spend a night on the town. And it definitely didn’t leave you feeling underwhelmed.  Horror comedy may be the ultimate cathartic film genre, satisfying some of our most intense emotional impulses, and, when done well, leaving the audience with a satisfaction that’s almost like physical exhaustion from a good workout. There’s even a third layer, which comes from the element of surprise—you don’t expect to laugh at the monster, or be frightened of the jokes, so when it happens, it has an extra punch. Are people in any particular need of catharsis right now? Oh yes. Whatever your take on the current state of the world, it’s inescapable to note that times are tense. The heyday of the Grand-Guignol and the Cabaret de L’Enfer was a tense time too; these thrived in the leadup to World War I and in interwar years, as the world held its breath in the uneasy armistice, and as technology changed the landscape at an increasingly rapid pace. This may also be a reason that the 1980s saw an absolute outpouring of horror comedy—the height of the Cold War was another decidedly tense era. To scream, to laugh, to be transported—all of these are a release of tension. The Grand-Guignol closed in the early 1960s; the owners believed that witnessing the real horrors of the Holocaust had diminished public appetite for horror theatre. The postwar years in America saw horror comedy relegated to Abbott and Costello meeting an increasingly unlikely cast of classic movie monsters, the far end of the “silly and scary” scale. It would be over a decade before the genre picked back up; in the immediate postwar years, an era where everyone was already exhausted from the hard-won end of the war, people simply didn’t need it. As the Cold War tensions grew higher, the need returned. The 1980s were, in some ways, the golden age of an especially lurid, throw-your-popcorn-over-your-shoulder school of horror comedy, although the form had started in the 60s and 70s. Think Little Shop of Horrors—the original movie, not the movie musical, where there’s far less singing, more chomping, and a much darker ending. Today’s tense era is one where, at least in theory, we have more ways to vent and experience catharsis than ever before. Anyone who’s ever done time on a microblogging platform knows that getting into a low-stakes fight online is about as easy as falling off a log. But in a world of social media catharsis, which is fostered on mutual exchange (“like, comment, and subscribe!”), and live events which proudly, and sometimes erroneously, bill themselves as “immersive,” watching a film asks less of you. No one expects you to contribute to the experience; you’re doing your job by sitting and watching and screaming and laughing. And that’s just it—we are doing our job. The films keep getting made because we keep watching. Because like Aristotle looking to purge his emotions, we need this. We need the human experience of sitting, all of us alone together in the dark, with the screen illuminating our faces as our expressions shift from fear to glee. Amidst the ambient chaos that is being a person in 2026, we need a chance to laugh, and scream, and escape. And then the lights go on, and we stand up, feeling lighter, and having been purified.[end-mark] The post We’re in the Midst of a Horror Comedy Renaissance — Why Now? appeared first on Reactor.