The horror of getting what you asked for

Keep these traits in check the next time you find yourself in a horror film scenario: curiosity—the genre’s original sin—and dissatisfaction, its slipperier cousin. Corralling the former is as easy as ignoring the scraping sounds echoing from the basement and bolting the door shut. Whatever you think about doing when you hear something go bump in the night, don’t. That’s a surefire strategy for surviving horror, or at least outlasting everyone else.

The following article contains spoilers for "The Woman in the Yard"

Malcontentment is another matter. The heart wants what it wants, and people can’t help what they feel, but the sinister forces at the heart of all horror movies — man, manmade, natural or eldritch — have a dreadful knack for clocking existential malaise and reacting accordingly. In Danny and Michael Philippou’s 2022 smash hit "Talk to Me," for example, a grieving teenager reaches beyond death’s veil to communicate with her dead mother’s ghost; instead, she’s gulled by a cruel, duplicitous entity that cosplays as her mom and exploits her despair so thoroughly, it almost persuades her to roll her best friend’s little brother into traffic.

That’s called “effing around and finding out” in the parlance of our times; a succinct, coarse way to sum up one of horror cinema’s traditional functions. On Friday, director Jaume Collet-Serra and writer Sam Stefanak kept that tradition going with "The Woman in the Yard," the latest addition to Blumhouse Productions’ repertoire of contemporary campfire stories. The movie embraces the get-what-you-ask-for dynamic, centering on a fractured family – Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), her son Taylor (Peyton Jackson), and her daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha) – still recovering from the sudden and recent loss of David (Russell Hornsby), her husband and their dad.