In the troubling HBO documentary Thoughts and Prayers, the $3bn active shooter preparedness industry shows the bleak reality of being a child in the US

Talking about changes experienced by kids today often runs the risk of sounding reactionary, not to mention naive. No, there wasn’t as much talk about autism, or transgender kids, or any number of topics growing up in the 80s and 90s, because they weren’t understood or discussed in the same way – not because they didn’t exist. But it’s striking, watching the new HBO documentary Thoughts and Prayers, the degree to which it shows a demonstrable change from the experiences of someone growing up 30 or 40 years ago versus today: the absolute universality of emergency action plans that go beyond the scope of the fire drills you might remember. Thoughts and Prayers surveys many of those lockdown drills, and the many supplements available to contemporary schools designed to offer further protection from an active shooter: bulletproof backpacks, in-classroom shelters and astoundingly elaborate real-life simulations, complete with stunningly realistic makeup for bullet wounds.

This change isn’t lost on directors Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock. “Zack and I have an eight-year-old daughter,” Dimmock said in a joint interview, “and the idea for this film came about because she was coming up in school, and we were facing the thing that basically every American parent faces. Almost every kid in America does drills like this, across the board. We definitely did not grow up doing this, either, and I think there will be a huge part of the audience that will look at this and be like, ‘wow, right, I knew this was happening, but [still surprised] to see it.’ And there will be this whole other part of the audience that will be like, ‘yeah, Mom, Dad, I do this three times a year and have since I was five years old.’”

Longlegs director Osgood Perkins takes us on a dark journey to the woods in a creepy and visually inventive nightmare with a killer lead performance

For the past few years, horror cinema has sometimes felt as fraught with toxic romance as a particularly cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it’s clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple going to a secluded location together is a fresh level of it.

So it’s not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we gather early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.