Let us agree up top that scary doesn’t always mean spooky. While 2026 has been an unusually strong year for horror cinema, all it takes is a fucked-up situation, and little hope of getting out of it, for fear to bubble to the surface. Twice this year a popular engagement account on X asked, “What is the scariest scene in a non horror movie?” People named the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, the tunnel ride in Willy Wonka, the basement scene in Zodiac. Horror isn’t just possessed girlfriends and eerie shopping malls.
So it stands to reason why, while watching Whalefall, in theaters October 16, I spent all of its 106 minutes squirming in my seat, gripping the armrests as I filled with dread over what midnight-zone monstrosity might show up. I felt everything you should feel from a horror movie, and it’s damning that no actual horror movie from this year has done the same for me. Directed by Brian Duffield and cowritten by Daniel Kraus (adapting his 2023 novel), Whalefall is best known by how it’s been described by your friends: “The One Where a Guy Gets Eaten by a Whale.”
Austin Abrams—starring in his second film in which he endures a profoundly shitty day—stars as Jay, a college student reeling from the death of his deep-sea-diver father (a sun-kissed, dad-bodded Josh Brolin), whose hippie politics came bundled with abrasive child-rearing and a drunken stupor. Jay dives alone, his first mistake, to find any trace of his dad left in order to exorcise the ghosts of their strained relationship. So when a big-ass sperm whale shows up and swallows him whole, it’s a problem. And it thrusts Jay into a harrowing 45-minute (the approximate amount of oxygen in his tank) fight for his life, punctuated by hazy memories of how things fell apart. Think of it as the climax to Pinocchio, stretched out to resemble 127 Hours. That’s Whalefall.
For the second time in 2026, Austin Abrams stars in a survival thriller in which his everyman protagonist gets caught up in a life-or-death scenario.
Duffield’s lean and mean undersea thriller is anchored by the complicated grief between an estranged father and son, and it hits those beats effectively, even if it also stretches to the point of incredulity. (No spoilers, but if I told you the whale is a metaphor...) But the real appeal of Whalefall is everything inside the belly of the proverbial beast and watching in real time how the hell this landlubber can make it out alive. That’s what anyone shelling out for tickets and popcorn wants to see, and Whalefall delivers on all the gruesome spectacle of man faced with the depths of nature’s madness.
I can ramble about the movie’s many strong suits—Abrams, mostly—but the most remarkable is the film’s claustrophobic natural horror. Whatever you assume could happen to a guy caught inside a sperm whale’s fundic chamber, Whalefall reminds you in unambiguous terms that it’s so much worse. The air is toxic, there are pools of stomach acid, and there is a 42-foot-long giant squid stuffed inside the same cramped space, whose sole function is to break down organic matter into nutrients. While “body horror” as it’s traditionally understood is concerned with the horrors of physical transformation on the outside, Whalefall—whatever horror you want to call it—is rooted in the terror of what’s inside. It’s neither Cronenberg-esque nor Giger-esque; instead it’s its own thing that will give you pause during your next sushi dinner.
Throughout Whalefall I remembered Underwater, the overlooked Kristen Stewart vehicle from 2020 about scientists whose aquatic facility gets wrecked by monsters. It’s a remarkable creature feature, masterfully marrying ocean-disaster spectacle with horror’s suspense and rhythms. So imagine my delight when I learned that Underwater’s Brian Duffield was its writer. Whalefall is Duffield building upon language shaped by his past pictures in the genre, including 2023’s No One Will Save You and the 2020 teen rom-com horror Spontaneous. Whalefall may not be conventionally scary. There isn’t a single jump scare, and I’ll reiterate that it’s a sadder father-son story than one might expect going in. But watching Austin Abrams crawling in the pitch-black darkness of a whale’s throat and helplessly crying to a boat that can’t hear or see him is terrifying all the same.
I want to be clear that I liked a lot of this year’s horror movies. Backrooms and Obsession were showcases for new talent, while overlooked releases like Hokum, Undertone, and Onslaught brought plenty to the table. And only Sam Raimi could make a movie in which Rachel McAdams looks me in the eye and it’s unnerving. But no horror movie from this year chilled me to the bone and made me wish it was over—not out of distaste or boredom but because I was so enthralled to the point of discomfort—like Whalefall.
In 1975, Jaws promised a movie so scary you’ll “never go in the water again.” Whalefall posits that when you’re swallowed, the horror doesn’t stop.