In The Midst Of Barbenheimer, One Of The Year's Best Horror Movies Is Being Overlooked

I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? 

Barbenheimer.

When the dust settles, no matter which film wins the box office, the word "Barbenheimer" will probably stick with us. Dictionaries will eventually have to adopt "Barbenheimer" into the official linguistic canon as a reference to two seemingly diametrically opposed pop culture events debuting simultaneously.

For you see, two of the most anticipated and publicized movies of 2023 — Greta Gerwig's comedy "Barbie" and Christopher Nolan's biopic "Oppenheimer" — come out the exact same weekend. Some folks are looking forward to just one film, some folks the other, but many avid cinephiles are planning to see both. And they're taking those plans so seriously that the question of which movie to see first is literally making headlines.

Yup, it seems like everyone in the world is planning to see "Barbie" and/or "Oppenheimer" this weekend. They're the only two movies getting any buzz, that's for certain.

It sure would suck if some other movie came out this weekend hoping to find an audience. It'd suck even more if it were one of the best horror movies of the year, and it might get completely overlooked in an era when movies that don't find immediate success are quickly swept under the rug or even removed from circulation altogether.

Gosh, can you imagine?

Oh wait, you don't have to imagine. It's called "Cobweb."

"Cobweb" scared the bejeezus out of me. The film stars Woody Norman ("C'mon C'mon") as Peter, a sensitive young boy whose overprotective parents, Carol (Lizzy Caplan, "Fatal Attraction") and Mark (Antony Starr, "The Boys"), refuse to believe when he claims to hear knocking noises on his wall at night. And they're getting really sick and tired of hearing about it. The kids at school hate Peter. Nobody listens to him. Except maybe whoever is behind his wall.

What "Cobweb" does that this summer's other kids-in-peril horror movie, "The Boogeyman," struggled to do is put us inside the mind of a psychologically tormented child. Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Samuel Bodin, written by Chris Thomas Devlin ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), and photographed by Philip Lozano ("Blood Machines"), the film portrays Peter's world as a non-stop episodic nightmare featuring adults who cannot be trusted, children who ostracize him, and an empty house with no distractions, no entertainments, and oblique angles where evil surely dwells.

Without delving too deeply into the plot, it's clear that Peter's childhood fears are not entirely in his imagination, and that he truly is in serious danger. Danger from who, or what, is revealed gradually, evoking harrowing real-life tales of abusive family members, psychological terror ripped straight from Edgar Allan Poe, and eventually a bizarre catharsis that reverses itself, then reverses again. 

"Cobweb" is the full package, a serious horror movie with a satisfying supernatural punch, simultaneously subtle and overbearing. It's exactly the kind of horror film, like "Skinamarink" or "Malignant," that could easily find an appreciative audience willing to spread word of mouth and make it, if not a blockbuster, at least a respectable sleeper hit with enough acclaim to help it find a bigger audience in the future.

Or at least, it could if anyone knew about it. 

Sometimes it's a film critic's responsibility to say when a movie's marketing is lying, either by obfuscating the real content of the film or by just making it look better than it really is. (Because let's face it, some movies really do stink.) As such, the industry often makes critics out to be the bad guys, as if we ruined the good buzz or altered the narrative the studio painstakingly attempted to craft, instead of the movie's quality doing all of that, which we simply pointed out.

But frequently the opposite is true. It's up to people who love movies to speak up when films that deserve a lot more attention can't, for whatever reason, crack into the mainstream. And it would be hard for any other movie to get noticed on a weekend like "Barbenheimer," when two films with huge marketing budgets and excitement that's been building for over a year are getting gigantic wide releases.

Would "Barbarian," a surprise horror hit from last year, have been a huge sleeper success if, instead of opening on September 9 opposite no other wide releases, it opened the same weekend as not just "Elvis" but also somehow "Top Gun: Maverick?" And in limited release with hardly any advertising? It could happen, but the odds would have been against it.

"Cobweb" is an impressive, creepy film. I'm sure eventually people will point out little flaws in its narrative, overlooking the film's dreamlike quality that largely forgives minor inconsistencies. But I do hope people see it. If they ever can. I just want to be able to talk about this film with somebody because I saw it, I thought it was really freaky, and I want other people to have that experience too. That's what movies are all about.