'Spiral' is unapologetically gay horror | movie review

Spiral follows a gay couple that moves to the suburbs with their daughter in the 90s to find their neighborhood is more than meets the eye

Spiral is a mysterious act of dread and atmosphere that also taps into the inherent horror of being different in a world that isn’t ready to accept that.

▶︎ Streaming on Shudder

Chloé Zhao makes Nomadland‘s melancholic but hopeful story of nomads traversing the American West a stunningly complex character study of life on the margins of society.

“People don’t change… they just get better at hiding how they feel.” It only makes sense that horror, a genre about one of the most primal human emotions, is one of the best grounds to explore social issues—as recently as Get Out or as far back as Night of the Living Dead. For some of us, living day to day is a horror movie in itself. That feeling is what Spiral, a new horror streaming on Shudder, taps into.

Spiral follows Malik (Jeffrey Boyer-Chapman) and his boyfriend Aaron (Ari Cohen) as they move from the big city to a small suburban town to live out their dreams of a “normal” existence along with Aaron’s 16-year-old daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte). Though the initial reception is warm, especially from their new neighbors Tiffany (Chandra West) and Marshal (Lochlyn Munro), Malik feels the dread of being the one different person—in his case, a queer black man—in a town. However, his dread isn’t just because of a few homophobic micro-aggressions, something more is afoot.

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After more incidents begin to occur, including witnessing an odd ritual happening in the house across the street, Malik begins to dig into the town’s past with the help of a note slipped to him by an elderly neighbor who is found dead the next day. His research uncovers a pattern of death that makes him believe that his own family may be in danger, which is further evidenced by the lapses of time and fiendishly chilling hallucinations—or are they real?—he begins to experience.

Throughout the movie, we see flashes to Malik’s past where he was the witness to a hate crime. Those flashes pervade into his everyday life—a subtle hint at the PTSD caused by the trauma that queer people face. It’s in that juxtaposition between the overt homophobia and the microaggressions that Spiral thrives in its goal of creating real social horror. And though there are moments when Boyer-Chapman’s performance betrays the quality of the movie, it’s in those scenes that he taps into something deeply painful.

There is so much to appreciate in Spiral, in particular the well-wrought dark atmosphere of dread that director Kurtis David Harder achieves through Bradley Stuckel‘s well-thought out cinematography and Avery Kentis’ ominous score. It’s slow-burn horror at its finest, which makes the cheaper jump scares frustratingly out of place. Still, the balance of mystery to horror to character-rooted social commentary is impressive in John Poliquin and Colin Minihan‘s screenplay.

Though I wish it explored its a lore a little more—or at least allowed us to experience the horrors it brings about—Spiral a quietly impressive low-budget foray into social horror. The scares are genuine—both in relation to its potential supernatural elements and the experience of being different in a world that craves “normalcy”. Late in the movie, one character says, “it’s human nature… fear. We just exploit it.” And that’s the real horror. That someone will use that fear against us—they already are.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

‘Spiral’ is unapologetically gay horror | movie review

Spiral follows a gay couple that moves to the suburbs with their daughter in the 90s to find their neighborhood is more than meets the eye

More movies, less problems

Karl Delossantos

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