Hysteria Archives

Mia Threapleton as Alma in a dystopian future in the psychological horror film Shadows (2020)

Review: ‘Shadows’

E.L. KingSeptember 15, 2025September 26, 202507 mins

Shadows (2020) is a haunting, character-focused exploration of trauma and survival. Slow-burning, suffocating, and quietly devastating, the narrative is less about surviving monsters than surviving yourself.

Michelle Smith and Larry Pazder on a 1980s talk show promoting their book, Michelle Remembers (1980) in Satan Wants You (2023).

PHFF Review: ‘Satan Wants You’

E.L. KingSeptember 5, 2025September 26, 202505 mins

Satan Wants You (2023) is a gripping and essential work of cultural horror, exposing how the Satanic Panic turned fiction into lived nightmare.

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a distraut mother in The Babadook (2014), she is looking into the camera, exhausted and ready to break.

Maternal Horror: Exploring the Societal Demand for Perfection

E.L. KingSeptember 4, 2025September 27, 2025013 mins

Horror cinema exposes the unspoken terrors of motherhood—films like Baby Ruby (2023) and The Babadook (2014) interrogate the cultural silence around maternal ambivalence, revealing how postpartum depression, paranoia, and identity loss, are pathologized, judged, and ultimately demonized by a society that demands maternal perfection. Horror challenges the cultural demand for maternal perfection by transforming women’s silenced realities into visible monsters.

Josephine and Spencer welcome their new baby girl, Ruby, home from the hospital. Spencer is wearing a red hoodie sweater with a gray shirt, cradling Ruby in his arms, while Josphine smiles and coos at her.

Review: ‘Baby Ruby’

E.L. KingSeptember 1, 2025September 25, 202506 mins

Baby Ruby (2023) is a stunning, nerve-shredding debut—an unflinching portrait of postpartum horror. Bess Wohl delivers a fearsome, beautifully unsettling film that captures the terror, pain, and paranoia of first-time motherhood with raw honesty and unflinching psychological horror.