Editorials
1989’s ‘Celia’ and the Horrors of Childhood Innocence [Shudder]
The loss of innocence is a recurring motif in horror and cinema at large. A more niche subset of that motif explores the frightening transition from childhood into adulthood through a child’s perspective. Like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Reflecting Skin, these movies feature young protagonists grappling with a grown-up world’s harsh realities through fantasy, leading to disastrous results. The horror seeps in from both sides, squeezing out the innocence in often shocking ways. Celia, now available to stream on Shudder and Tubi, belongs in that same conversation. Its eponymous character dangerously uses dark fantasy and imagination as an emotional shield as she’s forced to grow up in a tumultuous period.
Also known as Celia: Child of Terror, the film opens with Celia (Rebecca Smart) coming to Gran’s small annex next to her family home to wake her. Celia crawls into Gran’s bed and finds her dead, eyes still open. The night after Gran’s funeral, Celia wakes in the middle of the night to an inhuman shrieking and the claw of a creature appearing at her window. She cries for her granny, and mom Pat (Mary-Anne Fahey) comes in to comfort her. When Pat takes Celia into the backyard to reveal the screeching sound came from a possum, the young girl still envisions a monster lurking in the bushes. This brief introduction to Celia clarifies that Gran was her most trusted grown-up and friend and that Celia prefers her imaginative world over the real one, even when confronted with the truth.
Set in 1957, Celia chronicles the young girl’s life in rural Australia as she attends school, forges friendships, and covets a pet rabbit. All of it is framed through a child’s eyes. The context for the world she lives in and how that shapes her comes slowly. As the children play in the background, conversations among adults reveal tensions and fears that kids can’t understand, yet they’re affected by it anyway.
Celia’s peculiar and headstrong personality makes her a bit of an outcast among peers until the arrival of a new family next door. She bonds with the three kids, Meryl (Callie Gray), Karl (Adrian Mitchell), and Steve (Alexander Hutchinson), immediately. None of them understand why the locals seem afraid of parents Alice (Victoria Longley) and Evan Tanner (Martin Sharman), no matter how warm and level-headed they are. It soon becomes clear, though, that the adult Tanners have communist beliefs and hold informal meetings. Celia takes place at the tail end of the second Red Scare, a period marked by its intense and widespread fear that national or foreign communists were infiltrating society. Fear and paranoia naturally lead to tension and hostility.
Writer/Director Ann Turner offers insights and context clues at every step of the way. Outside of the more overt scenes that clue the viewer in on the turmoil surrounding Celia, the filmmaker layers in subtle clues, too. A sweeping look through Gran’s old apartment reveals a book collection of communist material. Since this belonged to the woman who held the most substantial sway over Celia, the implication is clear. No matter how hard Celia’s parents, Pat and Ray (Nicholas Eadie), try to minimize exposure and preserve their daughter’s innocence, the world finds its way in. That includes the background but vital rabbit plague sweeping the country, prompting the government to ban them as pets to preserve the economy. Rabbits, of course, are what Celia loves most.
Like most films of this ilk, Celia slowly builds toward tragedy that creates a point of no return. Celia clings steadfast to her fantasy world of monster Hobyahs, creatures from a children’s book, and imagines Gran still can come out and play. The more life throws complications her way, the more the young girl loses her ability to distinguish fact from fiction. That the child is an assertive one willing to take matters into her own hands, well, she more than earns her “child of terror” moniker.
Turner incorporates historical context in this period tale, offering an added layer of authenticity to the horrific. She approaches her central character with sympathy, too, never rendering Celia as evil but instead lost. The filmmaker toys with horror elements, particularly in the Hobyahs and the psychological; ultimately, however, it’s more of a horror adjacent coming-of-age story. Celia disturbs as much as it breaks your heart, offering another powerful feature to examine how scary childhood innocence can be.
There’s a lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year.
To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.
If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.
Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one.
Dead First by Johnny Compton
Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down.
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey.
Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus
If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match.
Headlights by CJ Leede
A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.
Filth Eaters by Ito Romo
Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.
You must be logged in to post a comment.