Editorials
‘The Medium’ Is One of This Halloween Season’s Best Horror Movies You Might’ve Missed [Indie Horror Spotlight]
The content space is more crowded than ever, making it challenging to keep up with all of the genre titles available via streaming platforms, VOD, and theatrical releases. It can be overwhelming just to browse. To help prevent great indie horror from slipping through the cracks, we’ll spotlight our favorites every month.
True to form, October marked another insanely busy Halloween month in terms of horror releases. So much so that it became tricky to keep up, mainly thanks to the return of significant franchises on both the big screen and small. One of the most under-the-radar titles of October happens to be one of its most startling, the Shudder release of The Medium, a documentary-style nightmare hailing from Thailand.
The Medium introduces us to Nim (Sawanee Utoomma), a Shaman possessed by the spirit of Bayan in the Isan region of Thailand. Nim explains to the documentary crew that Bayan has been inhabiting women in her family for generations. She came to become the vessel for the deity after older sister Noi (Sirani Yankittikan) refused and turned to Christianity to ward off Bayan. The documentary crew decides to stay and use the family as the sole subject of their feature when Noi’s daughter Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) starts demonstrating signs of possession. What’s first suspected as Bayan choosing her next successor gives way to worries of something more sinister afoot.
Sawanee Utoomma as Nim – The Medium – Photo Credit: Sasidis Sasisakulporn/Shudder
Producer and co-writer Na Hong-jin first thought of creating a follow-up to his hit, The Wailing, with a story that would center on Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min), the shaman hired to help the village and exorcise the demon. It then evolved into Mink’s story, a narrative of someone’s first encounters with shamanism and the road to becoming a shaman, inspired by what Il-gwang’s origins might’ve looked like had he written the sequel. The Medium, which Na Hong-jin wrote with Chantavit Dhanasevi, ultimately isn’t connected to The Wailing, but it does bear some thematic resemblances stemming from its initial conception.
The Medium‘s lengthy two-hours and ten-minute runtime might seem intimidating, but it breezes right by thanks to its infectious and engaging cast. In an interview with Screen Daily, Na explained that this was achieved through a loose script that required improv. Director Banjong Pisanthanakun (Shutter) gave his actors scene objectives and let them improvise their dialogue. That direction and the mockumentary setup infuse authenticity, making for a more immersive entry point into this world. It puts the characters first, engendering rooting interest long before the real horrors arrive.
At first, the scares are subtle. The horror begins with tell-tale signs of possession in Mink, a young woman raised by a mother who long ago rejected her family’s spiritual beliefs. The more Nim and her brother Manit (Yasaka Chaisorn) try to intervene to help, the more Noi angrily rebuffs, choosing denial until Mink grows violent. The halfway point marks one of the most chilling moments involving a reflection in a vehicle window, but it’s so understated that it’s easy to miss.
Then it builds. Eerie found footage-style video of Mink’s nighttime activity grows more disturbing. Even still, it can’t prepare for the absolute insanity of the climax, an onslaught of spiritual exposition and gruesome horrors. It’s gory, shocking, and unpredictable.
Much like The Wailing, faith plays a prominent role in The Medium‘s events. Local cultural beliefs clash with Christianity, muddying the fight for Mink’s soul. But there’s a more personal tragedy underpinning Pisanthanakun’s film; this is the direct fallout of events that transpired so many years ago, before Mink was even born. Noi’s selfishness, her refusing her duties of accepting Bayan and purposefully shaping events for Nim to take her place, irrevocably altered the family’s future. Noi’s choices removed any for Nim and then Mink. The Medium dangles the question of whether Mink’s plight is Bayan seeking retribution, course correction, or abandoning the family altogether for the offenses committed.
The ultimate answer manages to break your heart regarding some of the characters we grow attached to, and leaves your jaw on the floor.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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