Tina Kakadelis
Horror movies serve many different purposes. Some are cautionary tales, others metaphors for the social issues that plague us, and some are for those beautiful teenage sleepovers when everyone is excitedly giggling about the prospect of being terrified. Some films, though, manage to straddle the lines of these genres and blend together two different filmic goals to make something new. Eight years ago, Ryan Polly and Matthew Black wrote and directed the short film Monitor. Eight years later, they have expanded it into a feature that saw its world premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film and TV Festival to screams, laughs, and gasps.
The short film version of the film centered on a tired gas station clerk who’s convinced he’s seeing an entity in the store with him, but only on the camera feed. That short is now a scene in this larger film that centers on a social media moderator, Maggie (Brittany O’Grady), who comes across a weird video that was flagged by her company. Nothing happens in the video that would make it be removed, like violence, sexuality, or abuse, but there’s something about it that Maggie can’t shake. After watching the video, Maggie becomes convinced that she and her coworkers, who also saw the clip, are being stalked by a violent entity.
The horror genre has long been a home for X object will curse the person who watches it. An entire generation was traumatized by The Ring and the VHS tape that could kill. Monitor is not new in this respect, but it has plenty of other attributes that make it a worthy entry into the genre. To start a film off with the nightmare earworm of a song “I’m Blue” is bold, but it’s also a swing that pays off. When you hear it a second time, it’s a jolt of fear that ripples into laughter. That’s pretty much how Monitor rolls throughout the film. A well-paced series of one-two punches without making it veer too far into pure comedy. This is still very much a horror movie at the end of the day.
If the crowd of the world premiere is any indication, Monitor is going to spook a lot of people. Admittedly, as someone that is rarely fazed by a jumpscare, there was a moment that stuck with me. It was less about the scare itself, but the overwhelming sense of dread these guys manage to simmer into numerous roiling boils. The design of this technology-based entity is quite freaky in its own right, and Monitor builds up a sufficient sense of foreboding before it reveals the creature in its full picture. There were quite a few gasps and an expletive or two thrown around when it rears its ugly face. If you’re looking for a series of uniquely new kills, you won’t find it here, but that doesn’t seem to be the film’s intention. While you may have seen deaths like this before, you haven’t experienced them in this way with an expertly managed feeling of dread.
Monitor is the best of both worlds between sleepover flick and horror-as-a-metaphor genres. It’ll be an instant classic for teenagers in their basements getting their feet wet in the world of horror, but it’s not all popcorn. There’s a reason why Maggie took the job as a social media moderator that mirrors some of the issues in another SXSW flick, Your Attention Please. We should be more critical of social media and its influence on us, whether there’s a demon of some kind living in the pixels or not. Monitor takes the horror beyond the screen, beyond the idea of a timeless entity, and shines the light on humans. How do they act when they think no one is watching? How some view their actions online as untouchable. If they didn’t do it, someone else would, y’know? Monitor is a horror about ourselves. The ugly bits we let take hold when self-interest is put against the common good. A stressfully executed debut feature, Polly and Black are an excitingly confident new voice in the horror genre.
