Dancing With the Stars season 35 is turning to horror movies for week seven, and Entertainment Weekly has reported the reveal of the evening’s songs and dances. The attraction is immediate: familiar screen terrors, music with unsettling associations, and partnerships asked to make fear visible through movement. The revealing question is what happens after viewers recognize the reference.
The individual song titles, dancer assignments, and film pairings are not independently confirmed here, so this article does not present a complete lineup. What follows is a spoiler-free critical preview of the theme’s possibilities, rather than a review of performances. A song-and-dance announcement establishes the ingredients; the finished routines still have to give those ingredients dramatic meaning.
Why the song and dance need to tell the same story
A horror-themed number has several jobs. Its music must support the choreography, its movement must communicate a relationship, and its movie reference must remain legible within a short performance. Those demands can reinforce one another. They can also compete, especially when a recognizable recording has an atmosphere that is easier to imitate than to develop.
A track associated with a frightening scene brings an emotional memory into the ballroom. That recognition is useful, but it is borrowed suspense. The routine needs its own progression: an invitation becomes uncomfortable, a pursuit changes direction, or apparent safety begins to feel like confinement. Without that shift, the music supplies a mood while the dancers merely occupy it.
My preference would be for pairings in which the dance form helps explain the characters’ predicament. A circular movement can suggest entrapment; a repeated approach and retreat can suggest mistrust. These are potential choreographic choices, not descriptions of announced routines. Their value lies in making the horror understandable even to someone unfamiliar with the movie.
Start with the frightened character
Horror is often marketed through its monster, but a performance can become more involving when it begins with the person who has something to lose. What does that person want from the figure approaching them? Protection, affection, escape, or proof that nothing is wrong? Each answer changes the meaning of the same outstretched hand.
Consider a hypothetical duet that opens with one partner accepting the other’s support. If that support gradually restricts movement, the relationship develops without a line of dialogue. The audience sees trust becoming dependence, then recognizes the difficulty of leaving. A sudden threatening expression would communicate less than that sustained physical change.
This approach also gives the threatening figure a purpose beyond looking sinister. A character who wants obedience moves differently from one who wants intimacy. A pursuer who enjoys being seen creates a different tension from a presence that stays just outside another person’s awareness. Specific intentions make stylized movement feel consequential.
The same attention to agency informs our character-focused reading of Pan’s Labyrinth: interpreting an uncanny world becomes more rewarding when we ask what choices its inhabitants can make. For Horror Movie Night, that question offers a useful alternative to judging every routine by the accuracy of its costume.
Music can create dread without becoming louder
The most productive distinction for this theme is between surprise and suspense. A sharp musical accent can support a sudden reveal. Suspense requires an expectation that lasts long enough to become uncomfortable. Choreography can create that expectation through a delayed turn, a repeated gesture, or a separation whose resolution keeps being postponed.
Listen for whether a musical change produces a change in behavior. Does a softer passage make a character relax too soon? Does a repeated phrase become more oppressive because the dancers return to the same position? Does the climax resolve the relationship, or simply announce that the number is ending?
An arrangement can also complicate an apparently reassuring melody. The interpretive interest comes from the gap between what the music seems to promise and what the bodies reveal. That gap needs careful handling: if every gesture signals danger immediately, there is little room for discovery. Restraint gives the eventual rupture somewhere to go.
The camera has to preserve the tension
Televised dance shares a storytelling tool with cinema: the frame decides what viewers can see. A close-up can reveal hesitation, but it can also hide the distance between partners. A wide shot can make an approaching figure unsettling while allowing the audience to follow the dance itself.
For this theme, spatial clarity matters. Viewers need to understand where the apparent danger is and how the vulnerable character responds to it. If the editing repeatedly resets that geography, pursuit can become a collection of dramatic images instead of an intelligible encounter.
My critical standard would therefore include whether the staging remains readable. Darkness, smoke, and rapid cuts can establish atmosphere, but the decisive action should still be visible. A horror-inspired routine becomes more persuasive when its menace emerges from timing and proximity rather than from obscuring what the performers are doing.
What to watch for in each performance
A useful viewing checklist can keep the film references from overwhelming the actual storytelling:
- Identify the relationship. Look for who initiates contact, who resists it, and whether those roles change.
- Follow a recurring gesture. A movement that returns with a different meaning can communicate an entire character arc.
- Separate recognition from interpretation. A familiar costume establishes a reference; the performance must establish why that reference matters.
- Notice the ending. The final image should clarify what happened between the characters, even if their future remains uncertain.
These questions leave room for humor and theatrical excess. Horror can be playful, and a ballroom adaptation does not need to reproduce the intensity of a feature film. It does need a coherent tone. A knowingly exaggerated performance can succeed when its wit grows out of the relationship rather than interrupting it.
The deeper appeal of fear inside a familiar format
Horror Movie Night places unsettling imagery inside a reassuring ritual: music begins, partners take the floor, and a performance reaches an ending. That combination helps explain the theme’s appeal. Viewers can enjoy instability while remaining oriented by the structure surrounding it.
Our commentary on why seasonal movie rituals offer comfort approaches a related pleasure from another direction. Familiar forms create expectations that an individual performance can fulfill, delay, or disrupt. Here, even a small disruption could become dramatically effective because the ballroom usually makes coordinated movement look secure.
That is the most promising tension in season 35’s week-seven premise. Partner dancing makes trust visible: one person reaches, another responds, and both depend on shared timing. Horror asks what happens when that trust becomes uncertain. The routines worth remembering will make the audience feel that uncertainty in a hand withheld, a step interrupted, or an embrace that changes meaning.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 26, 2026 at 05:51:10 PDT (Los Angeles time)
