Welcome back Spooktober fans! Did you miss me last week? I hope you don’t mind Mary filling in for me while I took some time off to vote early and celebrate my birthday. By the way, please vote! If you can, vote early! Let’s do this people. I believe in you.

Okay, on to what you’re all here for. Scary movies.

This week, we’re looking at Nocturne, a new move that is part of the Welcome to the Blumhouse Anthology. Currently, this anthology consists of four films, and I chose this particular movie because I had already heard from many reliable sources that Nocturne is the best of the four. On top of that, this movie was compared to Black Swan, Whiplash, and one of the movies I covered for last year’s Spooktober: The Perfection. So yeah, I thought, sign me up.

This movie fits squarely into a horror movie genre that I will call “Jealous Girl Horror.” There are a lot of movies that riff on this basic idea. There are two girls who are similar in a lot of ways. One girl envies something (or some things) that the other girl has. The envy becomes obsession. Obsession leads to bad behavior of one kind or another… and eventually things get horrific. Some entries into this genre are, as you would expect, somewhat misogynistic. Some are subverting that misogyny to a certain degree.

It all boils down to this. We live in a society that pits women against each other. With every movie in the “Jealous Girl Horror” genre, we have to ask ourselves this: Is the movie supporting the narrative that women are always in competition with one another, or is it subverting it/commenting on that in a thoughtful way? I would argue that a movie like Black Swan is definitely subverting that, and also adding a lot of other interesting body horror/werewolf-y horror elements just as the icing on top of the cake. I love Black Swan. It’s a wonderful movie.

But I guess we’re not here to talk about Black Swan. While Nocturne has been compared to that movie, these movies are super different. So what’s happening in this one? This is the story of two fraternal twin sisters: Violet (Madison Iseman) and Juliet (Sydney Sweeney). Both girls have grown up studying piano. Both have dreams of being world-renowned pianists. Both attend a boarding school for the arts. But only one of them has been accepted into Juilliard: Violet.

Juliet feels like she’s falling behind in more ways than one. Not only was she not accepted into Juilliard, but she also doesn’t have a boyfriend. Her sister Violet is a celebrated pianist and has a boyfriend that Juliet is also secretly in love with. Basically, everything Violet has, Juliet wishes she had. And then a girl at their school commits suicide, and Juliet finds the girl’s journal… and everything begins to change.

If you’ve seen other movies in the “Jealous Girl Horror” genre, none of this will be surprising. It’s all very familiar territory. The object of the protagonist’s envy is often much more sexually promiscuous and confident as well as just being seemingly better than our repressed protagonist in every way. I will not give away the ending or how the story unravels, but very little of it will be surprising to you either. It felt like this film was just going through a checklist of what’s supposed to go down in movies like this. This movie is getting compared to Black Swan for a good reason. It’s stealing a lot of the beats from that film, all the way to the very end.

What makes this movie work at all is the performance from Sweeney. Her acting is expressive but muted, which feels right for the character of Juliet. While this movie isn’t likely enough to make Sweeney a star, it is enough to promise she has star potential. And I do look forward to seeing what she does next.