Infirmary Review: Shudder’s New Original to Kick Off Their 2026 Halloween Schedule Isn’t Scary Enough

I resubscribed to Shudder for the Halloween season mostly because I’m a sucker for the V/H/S franchise and look forward to every new edition of that long-running anthology series, with V/H/S/Mixtape continuing that tradition in a week. I had essentially been off the service for about a year after getting a new debit card and not updating my payment method because, frankly, I hadn’t found much of a reason to scratch that particular horror itch over the last 12 months. I’ve waxed poetic in a few of my Shudder reviews about how the quality of these movies tends to hover somewhere around a C- to C+, and for every Influencers or Dangerous Animals, there are plenty of trashier originals that simply aren’t worth the price of re-upping for the platform.

But! I’m back now, and it felt appropriate to start catching up with the first new Shudder movie of the 2026 spooky season: Infirmary. It is, at least, an appropriately titled movie. The setup follows a pair of security guards working at an old, poorly maintained psychiatric hospital, with the framing device established immediately through an opening warning label explaining that two bodies were found dead there in 2023 and that what we are about to see is supposedly an unedited compilation of the security camera and body-cam footage of that night belonging to the individuals who died.

It is Ed’s first day on the job, and he is exactly the sort of young, insecure, often frightened security guard you would expect to be thrown into a horror movie like this. Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), his more experienced coworker, immediately starts poking at him like a shark smelling blood in the water. He sends Ed (Paul Syre) into the darker sections of the infirmary to handle the dirty work while he hangs around monitoring the security cameras, and he even subjects him to a few impromptu hazing rituals, including telling Ed to climb inside one of the mortuary coolers before pretending the door has become stuck. It establishes the dynamic quickly enough, even if it also establishes how familiar nearly every character type and plot beat is going to feel.

And that is basically Infirmary in a nutshell. I was quickly reminded of what it is like to watch one of these lower-budget Shudder movies where the script doesn’t really have an ambitious or particularly unique engine, and the dialogue isn’t exactly sticking with you after the credits roll. But that’s alright if the scares eventually boil to the top. Horror can get away with a lot when the movie understands how to make you uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, Infirmary never quite pushes itself far enough. It firmly occupies the same pocket of horror as Grave Encounters and REC, where events escalate quickly and absurdly while the doomed protagonists realize there is essentially no one around to help them as the carnage circles in. Those movies were willing to commit much more fully to their own depravity, though. Infirmary seems to constantly approach the point where it might really get under your skin before pulling itself back. The jump scares don’t land hard enough, the gore doesn’t get particularly gnarly, and some of the movie’s most potentially frightening moments are literally swallowed by how dark the movie is. I kept wanting it to go just a little further.

Ironically, the moments that worked best for me were often the least complicated ones. The long, empty hallways. The flickering lights. The droning ambience. The enormous facility that feels almost completely abandoned despite the fact that there are technically people working inside it. There is something inherently unsettling about the scale of the place and how little of it we can see at any given moment. The movie occasionally finds a pretty effective sense of isolation simply by allowing its environment to sit there and breathe, rather than throwing another supernatural development or jump scare at us. If it had stayed more experimental and/or atmospheric, I think this could’ve really worked.

First-time director Nicholas Pineda also does some solid work stitching together all of these different found-footage perspectives. Security cameras, body cams, and whatever other pieces of footage are available could easily become visually incoherent, but there is a clear understanding of how to move between them and maintain the illusion of the footage being assembled after the fact. That is probably the most encouraging part of the movie for me.

Because ultimately, Infirmary feels less like a fully realized horror movie than a prototype and proof-of-concept for Pineda as a director. There is a competent filmmaker in here who clearly understands the mechanics of found footage and knows how to construct an atmosphere, but the movie itself doesn’t have a fully fleshed-out story or enough new ideas to make it stand out from the mountain of similar Shudder originals that have come before it. As my first stop back on the service for Halloween season, I suppose I could have done worse. But if this is the appetizer before V/H/S/Mixtape, I’m definitely ready for the main course.