Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: 21st Century Horror
Something inherently sacred and terrifying about a horror movie born from real, lived grief. When an indie filmmaker takes the literal walls of their childhood home—the very rooms where they watched terminal illness slowly consume their parents—and turns them into a chamber of aural horrors, you aren’t just watching a ghost story. You’re watching someone bleed onto celluloid.
Undertone uses negative space and diegetic sound to go past being another expected “coming home to take care of dying parents” genre. Trust me, it’s a genre.
The setup is deceptively simple: Evy Babic (Nina Kiri) and her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco—who stepped into the role for the theatrical re-cut with pitch-perfect vocal sync) run The Undertone, a paranormal podcast where Evy plays the steadfast skeptic to Justin’s true believer. Everything changes when an anonymous email—its address a devilishly clever reverse-text cipher spelling out “come in, Abyzou”—delivers a series of audio files recorded by a doomed couple, Mike and Jessa. What follows is a descent into audio apophenia, where sleep-talk recordings and childhood nursery rhymes like “London Bridge” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” play backward to reveal skin-crawling, malevolent messages.
Tuason, whose background includes immersive virtual reality horror shorts, treats sound as 80 percent of the film’s storytelling. Working with sound designer Dane Kelly, the film was built from the script stage around directional acoustics. When you wear headphones or sit in a theater with the Dolby Atmos mix, every dripping tap, every floorboard creak from the upstairs hallway, and every distant, blood-curdling child’s cry feels like it’s happening right behind your left shoulder.
As for me, I watched this on a pitch-black red-eye flight from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, probably the only person awake other than the pilot. It was a strange and uncomfortable place to watch a movie that was ready to do the same.
Shot on an Alexa Mini LF inside Tuason’s actual childhood home in the Toronto suburb of Rexdale — the same place he took care of his own dying parents — Undertone leans hard into the claustrophobia of its single location. Production designer Mercedes Coyle stripped the house down, drowning it in oppressive old lady wallpaper, religious iconography and stark vertical design. Downstairs represents the warm, fading light of rational logic; upstairs represents death’s domain.
Cinematographer Graham Beasley frames Kiri relentlessly on the edge of the screen, forcing our eyes away from her stressed face and straight into the dark, yawning hallways and staircases behind her. You know something is waiting in the shadows—especially with Michèle Duquet lying motionless downstairs as Evy’s comatose mother, pulling off a masterclass in physical stillness by studying the actual muscle atrophy of the dying.
As if caring for a dying parent wasn’t enough emotional baggage, Tuason layers an unwanted pregnancy into the mix, forcing Evy into a corner where all psychological escape routes are systematically demolished. This vulnerability summons Abyzou, the ancient Near Eastern and European demon of miscarriages and infant envy, brilliantly foreshadowed by the protagonist’s own name (Evangeline “Evy” Babic serving as a phonetic nod to Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP).
When the film’s chilling final acts unfold—punctuated by frantic calls from a distressed mother named Abby and walls covered in nightmarish crayon drawings made by the director’s own nephew—Undertone stops feeling like a standard haunting and starts feeling like an invocation.
It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and sure, it has problems. When do I get some of that sweet podcast money every movie person seems to get? None of the nursery rhyme ideas are really based in reality. But it’s well told, has a beginning, middle and end, and has some pretty frightening moments, even if you’re not on a plane.
