I usually write this column from my couch with a blanket and a strong opinion. This week I wrote part of it from a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue, because the genre decided that June was not allowed to be quiet and neither was I. We have a summer camp opening in Manhattan, a $750,000 movie that is currently eating the box office alive, a violinist with bad instincts on Peacock, and a Weasley raising something that should not exist in the Finnish woods. I am tired. I am thrilled. Let us get into it.
I Wrote About CAMP. Then I Went to Camp.
Avalon Fast’s CAMP opened at the IFC Center on Friday, June 26, and I made the trip to New York to be there for it. This is the part where I admit something. I already reviewed this film and sat down with Fast for iHorror earlier this year, so showing up to the opening felt a little like watching a friend’s band finally play a venue with a working sound system. Winner of Fantastic Fest’s Best Feature prize in the Next Wave Competition.
The film follows Emily, a young woman carrying guilt over two early tragedies, who takes a counselor job at a camp for troubled girls and finds something out there in the trees that knows her name. It is dreamy and mean and shot like a fever. Dark Sky Films is handling the U.S. release after the movie already opened in Canadian theatres on June 19, and the cast (Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore) plays the whole thing at a pitch somewhere between a slumber party and a séance.
The opening week ran a string of Q&As with Fast, and I caught the Wednesday, June 24 event, where the post-screening conversation was moderated by Jack Haven of Atypical and I Saw the TV Glow. Watching a movie you have already lived with play to a full house of people meeting it for the first time does something to you. The whole week of New York screenings carried that charge.
If you are in the city, this is the one to leave the apartment for. I left mine in Ohio. I would do it again.
Obsession Hit $200 Million, and It Cost Less Than a Used Car
Curry Barker’s Obsession crossed $200 million at the domestic box office this week, which would be a great story for any horror movie and is an absurd one for this horror movie. The thing was shot in Los Angeles in late 2024 for around $750,000. It is now Focus Features’ highest-grossing release ever, passing studio titles with budgets you could not fit in the same zip code.
The numbers keep doing things horror numbers do not do. As of June 24 the film sat above $200 million in North America on its way past $339 million worldwide, and its fourth weekend dropped only 7 percent, the best fourth-weekend hold a horror film has ever posted. Earlier in the run it actually grew in weekends two and three, which is a trick no movie had pulled since a small picture called E.T. It is the rare original horror hit, sharing that “no franchise, no IP, just word of mouth” air with Sinners.
Why should you care beyond the spreadsheet? Because every time a tiny original premise turns into a phenomenon, the people who greenlight movies remember that audiences will sprint toward something they have never seen before. We have been tracking Obsession at iHorror since before it was a sensation. Turns out the dangerous-romantic-fixation movie had a healthy obsession of its own. Staying in theaters.
Strung Brings the Strings to Peacock
Strung dropped on Peacock on June 26, and it marks Malcolm D. Lee’s first real swing at horror. Chloe Bailey stars as a naive young violinist who takes a private tutoring gig with a wealthy family and follows it straight down a hallway of violence, greed, and very bad decisions.
The reviews are a mixed bag, and I mean that with affection. Variety clocked it as a film that builds pressure slowly and then loses the thread somewhere past the halfway turn, sliding into glossy, campy chaos. Bailey commits fully, Whitfield is the kind of screen presence you watch even when the plot is sprinting toward the exit, and the whole thing looks expensive.
This is a couch movie in the best sense. Free with a Peacock login, no ticket, no parking, no commitment beyond an evening. Sometimes the move is a stylish thriller that does not entirely hold together. Pour something, lower your expectations a notch, and let Lynn Whitfield carry you.
Leviticus Makes the Monster Out of Homophobia
While CAMP was casting its spell in arthouses, Neon’s Leviticus was busy being the queer horror story of the month in wide release. Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut opened across more than 1,000 theaters and is still playing this week, carrying a 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a premise that gets under the skin on purpose. Two teenage boys in a religious community are stalked by a violent entity that takes the shape of the person they desire most. Which is each other.
It comes from Causeway Films, the Australian outfit behind Talk to Me and The Babadook, so the pedigree for turning private dread into a monster is right there on the resume. Chiarella has been open that he wanted a horror film where the fear was homophobia itself, and Mia Wasikowska anchors the adult side of the cast.
Put it next to CAMP and you get a genuinely good week for queer horror in actual theaters, not as a niche programming note but as two films people are lining up for. I have spent a lot of years arguing that horror has always been the queerest room in the house. This week the box office is doing the arguing for me.
Shudder Is Adopting Rupert Grint’s Cursed Baby
Ron Weasley is in a horror movie, and it has a home now. Shudder set a streaming date this week for Nightborn, the new film from Hanna Bergholm, whose 2022 debut Hatching turned competitive gymnastics and a bird egg into one of the nastiest metaphors for parental pressure in recent memory. The follow-up lands on Shudder July 31, after a North American premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia on July 22.
Rupert Grint and Seidi Haarla play a couple who move into an isolated house deep in the Finnish forest to start a family. After their son is born, Saga becomes convinced something is profoundly wrong with the child, while everyone around her insists she is imagining it. If you have seen Hatching, you already know Bergholm is not going to make the comforting version of that story.
Grint has quietly built a real horror habit since leaving Hogwarts, and pairing him with the Hatching director is the kind of casting that makes me trust a project before I have seen a single frame. A “is the baby evil or is the mother unraveling” movie from this filmmaker is exactly my brand of bedtime story. Mark July 31.
I Know What You Did Last Summer Resurfaces on Blu-ray
Physical media corner, because not everything this week needs a megaplex. The complete I Know What You Did Last Summer series, the 2021 Amazon teen-slasher show that stranded a group of graduates in a town full of secrets and a killer with a long memory, landed as a full Blu-ray set from Sony Pictures on June 23.
It is the kind of release that exists for a specific kind of person, and I am that person. The streaming-original show that nobody quite finished, preserved on a shiny disc so it can sit on a shelf and outlive the platform that made it. There is something deeply funny and a little tender about a show about people haunted by their past getting a second life as a collectible.
If you bailed on it the first time, the complete run in one box is the lowest-effort way to find out whether it deserved better. Slashers age strangely. Sometimes the disc is where they finally make sense.
