Everybody has an opinion. Not all opinions are created equally. This has always been true, but in this world of rampant social media, it’s been amplified to a deafening degree. Some of those opinions are poorly constructed by people who lack the skills for proper craftsmanship. Which is a pretty way of saying that a lot of horror aficionados, whether critics or influencers, broadcast a lot of bad opinions.
We all start somewhere. None of us spring fully formed from the womb armed with incisive, sharp, authoritative opinions on anything, after all. We learn through time, trial, and error. And from watching horror movies and reading good criticism. Good critics are sculpted like a bust from clay.
So are the bad ones, really, but the materials are lesser, and the effort is sloppy. Besides that, they don’t pose problems for the rest of us. Take the bad critics with the good. (If you can learn a lot about the movies by watching bad ones, and you can, it stands to reason that you can likewise learn a lot about criticism by reading bad critics, much as the prospect sounds decidedly torturous.) But a line must be drawn when it comes to jerks with megaphones who couldn’t hack it as insult comics and decided to call themselves critics instead.
This distinction is at the soul of Big Baby, the new film by writer-director Spider One (Little Bites). On the surface, it’s a slasher film. Beneath that, it’s a meta text about the creative process, how horror cinema functions, and last but not least… podcast assholes. The world has too many smug nitwits with microphones, condensers, audacity (the quality) and Audacity (the open-source audio editor).
In the movie, the hosts of the Bloodsoaked horror movie review podcast, Vampire Greg (Jordan Elsass) and Steve Strange (Radek Lord), are two such lads too many for protagonist Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott), a writer-director of horror films, and a poster child for the phrase “touch grass”. Big Baby opens with Adam listening to Bloodsoaked’s latest episode, in which Greg and Steve “critique” his latest film, The Blackest Moon.
To consider Greg and Steve’s work “coverage” is like comparing a neighborhood-wide inferno sparked by a gender reveal party with a controlled burn. Against better judgment, Adam locks into their shallow and vicious commentary as if in thrall to the Ludovico Technique. Greg proclaims Adam’s latest film, The Blackest Moon, “dogshit.”
“Come on, Greg,” Steve interjects. “I think I actually prefer dogshit.” Scintillating stuff. Neither of them knows who to credit for the film’s creation, and they have to look up Adam’s name as they hurl insults that would be right at home in a high school hallway. Ultimately, they conclude that Adam should “kill himself,” unaware that he’s listening, but obviously and eagerly hoping that he is.
It doesn’t take much legwork to denounce Greg and Steve as self-aggrandizing wankers, or Bloodsoaked as another noisy frequency in a media ecosystem resonating with them. Whatever motivations Spider One had for making Big Baby, the state of horror cinema and criticism thereof is certainly one of them.
As much as his last movie, Little Bites, met a generally positive reception, there’s always the chance that one or two reviewers with less flattering takes and a less professional approach got under his skin. Perhaps he conceived of Big Baby to speak up for his peers by speaking against the sort of faux-criticism represented by Greg and Steve. The movie successfully balances two different perspectives on Bloodsoaked and self-professed cinema experts, no matter the genre. Yes, these podcast bros are nuisances at best and a wen on the arse of film journalism writ large. But we don’t have to give them the time of day.
Greg and Steve are more or less footnotes in Big Baby. They drive the plot, then vanish until their necessary denouement. And it is necessary if only because they’re the characters most richly deserving of comeuppance. The exact sort of unpalatable dipshits whose demises we root for in slasher movies. Of all people, they simply can’t get off scot-free.)
After Adam encounters the duo at a coffee shop helmed by a familiar and very cool barista (Angel Melanson), the narrative contentedly lets Adam unravel. At first, he’s inspired to write a new film–which is, surprise surprise, titled Big Baby–and then is slowly compressed under both the weight of the tale he’s constructing and the routine visitations he receives from Big Baby himself: a prototypical slasher villain, hulking, silent, fueled by a murderous rage instilled in him via wrongs done to him by society.
Think Jason Voorhees, Big Baby’s clearest antecedent, or Leatherface. Or for a deep cut, Buddy Bacon from Rick Roessler’s Slaughterhouse: characters with an acorn of innocence tucked within their beefy frames and steeped in their victims’ arterial spray. They’re sympathetic types. Big Baby’s title maniac is, too, in the sense that he seems to have sprung into reality out of Adam’s subconscious, like Athena from Zeus’ skull or any among the several boogeymen to grace the screen in a Tales from the Crypt season 2 classic “Korman’s Kalamity.”
If Greg and Steve have gotten so far under Adam’s skin, then what else can we do but pity him? He’s suffering. Big Baby–both the movie One has made, and the one that Adam writes within the movie–is his inchoate reaction to abuses made against him. Greg and Steve do naught more than talk, sure. But words have meaning; they have power.
Big Baby wrestles with that power through Adam’s escalating breakdown, and with the attempts by his girlfriend, Kate (Krsy Fox), at assuaging his offense, because as much as words do have immense power, that power only impacts us if we let it. Adam chooses to fall apart over a couple of Neanderthalic knobs whose only qualification for rendering expert opinion about horror movies is watching horror movies.
Meanwhile, Kate has the cure to his ailment: “Who cares?” For the life of her, Kate cannot understand why Adam tunes into podcasts like Bloodsoaked seeking positive reinforcement from idiots. Granted, most writers (if not all of us) appreciate the occasional kernel of validation. To know that one’s work eventually finds its audience, by hook or by crook, is a tonic. But the best validation for a writer in 2026 is to maintain a home, pay your bills, feed your children, and live your life.
Big Baby doesn’t imply that Greg and Steve podcast full time. They’re hobbyists. Nothing against hobbyists, (once upon a time, I was one as well) but there are better ways to feed a passion than by casually goading strangers, for whom that same passion is actually their livelihood, into a dark, downward spiral.
Big Baby arrives following the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and, more importantly, Nolan’s own (completely correct) remarks about amateur film criticism: “To be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism.”
One doesn’t engage with dynamics like this, because Greg and Steve, the subjects of his fascination, aren’t refined enough to warrant the attention. Nonetheless, he and Big Baby hone in on a real problem with criticism in the self-platforming stage of the digital age: anyone can have a voice, but more voices crescendo to a din, and if we listen closely enough, we find that not every voice deserves to be heard–and when the worst of them are heard, they’re best left ignored.
Read our exclusive interview with Big Baby‘s Spider One and Krsy Fox in FANGORIA #32 on newsstands now. And if you're looking to satiate your bloodlust with more slasher goodies, check out our limited edition essential guide FANGORIA Presents: Camp Slashers in stores now.
