Never After Dark follows Airi (Moeka Hoshi), a psychic medium who travels Japan and helps lost souls cross over and find peace. Airi meets her match and is forced to confront the traumatic truths of her past when her latest spiritual cleansing unearths a violent and malicious entity. Airi faces threats from both beyond the grave and hiding in plain sight as her paranormal investigation intensifies. 

Never After Dark is a masterclass in tension and pacing that evokes the patience and eerie atmosphere of J-horror classics like Ju-on: The Grudge and Noroi: The Curse. With Never After Dark’s release right around the corner, writer and director Dave Boyle breaks down the film’s reverence for the classics, the importance of practical effects, and Never After Dark’s unique approach to a ghost story and what it’s saying about the living.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: Why did you think that this story would be best expressed with Japanese characters? Was it always set in Japan or was that something that developed during the writing process?

DAVE BOYLE: I had just made a show in Japan, for Netflix, called House of Ninjas. My co-creator on that show, Kento Kaku, and I were talking about what to do next, and we wanted to do a theatrical movie. And we wanted to make another project in Japan. We had a great experience working together there. I had been kicking around this idea in my head for a while before that, just kind of like the central concepts, but it all started in Japan. When I told Kaku about the idea, he thought that it would make a lot of sense to set it in Japan. So yeah, it was always kind of where this story was going to happen. 

There are so many ways that you could tell Never After Dark’s story, but it works so well as this loving tribute to retro J-horror classics. How did you go about properly respecting that subgenre’s atmosphere, tone, and style of scares?

DB: I think part of the way that we tried to show respect for the genre, as well as the grander J-horror tradition, was by subverting some of their usual patterns. We talked a lot about the touchstones of not just J-horror, but traditional Japanese ghost stories — Kaidan. One of the patterns that you notice when reading these stories and watching them is that the ghost at the center of it is usually the vengeful spirit of a victim, who is typically a female victim, nine times out of ten. In this ghostly form, this female victim finds herself endowed with powers that she didn’t have in real life. So there’s this real poignancy to our approach that also engages in some inherent commentary on society.

We take a different approach with this movie and the fact that our ghost — he’s called the “Slit-Mouth Man” in Japanese — is part of a long-running children’s story in Japan, kind of like “La Llorona,” called the Slit-Mouth Man. So right away, for Japanese audiences, there’s a signal that we are going in sort of the opposite direction. We’re trying to take the structure of a traditional ghost story in a different direction. The theme that we’re digging into in this movie is also the exact opposite of many Japanese ghost stories. What we’re trying to show with our central character is that the living are much more terrifying than the dead. It was important to come up with a central — for lack of a better term — gimmick and a ghostly figure to help us express this idea.

That was the central thing that we wanted to play with and explore with this movie. And then, along the way, we worked with a lot of incredible veterans of the Japanese film industry, whether it was our lighting director or production designer; everybody just brings a real sense of history and experience to the genre. They understood that we were trying to do something that was a little bit of a twist on the usual. 

On that note, I love that with Airi you have this main character who is seemingly not afraid of ghosts. She’s such a complex character that feels like she has this fleshed-out interiority and backstory, even if it’s not all covered on screen. How was Airi developed, and was it a collaborative process with Moeka Hoshi? Did you do any research on mediums to better figure out her character?

DB: That’s a great question. Moeka and I had many, many long discussions about her character. We also prepared a lot of material so that she could understand the meaning behind all the things that she was doing and what all the pieces of her toolkit were for, where they came from, and that kind of thing. We made the decision early on that we wanted this movie to be relatively sparse in terms of exposition and to make it more of an experiential thing. There needed to be a sense of internal logic and a sense of weight behind everything that was happening. It takes a lot of discussion and teamwork in order to accomplish that. 

One of the great things that I like about working in the Japanese production system is that the assistant directors come on earlier than they would on an American production. They function as a sort of research department. The script, you know, was fairly bare bones, as most Japanese scripts are. In a Japanese script, usually half the page is left blank for the director to sort of put in instructions and everything like that. The assistant directors did a lot of great work interviewing people from various traditions and gathering a lot of information about traditions, including shamanism, some of which translated into strong visual homages that helped inform Japanese audiences about what kind of tradition she might be coming from. However, we also wanted to present the kind of practice that she does — or the belief system that she comes from — as something that’s entirely unique. We wanted a sort of “universe feel” to the movie. 

One of the most striking things to me about this film is that it’s largely a lonely, solitary experience for Airi. She just has the ghost of her deceased sister to interact with. Why did a spirit companion feel like the best foil for Airi, rather than another human medium? 

DB: Yeah, it was a real challenge. There was the practical challenge of just how do you get to know this person if she doesn’t have somebody to talk to, and how do you orient people on just the very basics of what’s going on with her without some sort of companion. From the very beginning, I pictured her as being somebody who was terrified of the living, but comfortable with ghosts. So there were these twin challenges. There’s the challenge of how do you make that scary for the audience when she, herself, is not scared. Then there’s the challenge of how do you hint at the interior life that she might have? Fairly early on, while in the discussion process, there was the idea that she had a ghost companion. I love unpacking sibling relationships in stories. An older sister who she has now outgrown felt like a potentially interesting relationship that wouldn’t take a lot of explanation to get across. It just came naturally out of problem solving.

There’s an emphasis on practical effects over CG here, which gives Never After Dark this old-fashioned tactile quality that makes it feel even more real. Was that an important element for you during production?

DB: That was a big deal for me. It’s one of those things where you kind of make a decision early on, and then the waterfall effect of it kind of affects everything and everybody. We just decided early on that if there was ever a possibility of getting it in front of the lens, then we wanted to do that, rather than doing it in post. There is actually plenty of CG work in the movie by my friends at Spade&Co., who also worked on my Netflix show. I also have to say that my experience of working on House of Ninjas was also affected because I had come from something that was very green screen-heavy with a lot of visual effects that were very, very well done. But there’s just something about getting it in front of the lens and giving the actor something tactile to interact with and react to. It’s just so much fun.

I also think it makes it a little bit easier for everybody to catch the vision of what you’re doing. I really saw this movie as a throwback. So every department, from top to bottom, I told them that this movie is set in the early ’90s and that I want to treat this production like it’s in the early ’90s, too. We’ll use the tools that were available then, whenever possible. If it’s something like a clock running backwards, then let’s rig the clock to run backwards, rather than replacing it in post. There were some things that were just impossible to do without CG, but I always wanted to keep the sort of hand-made and tactile feel to everything.

A film I thought about a lot during Never After Dark was The Changeling. That’s another film that does a lot with a little. It’s all about the character’s reactions, and it’s such an intimate story, like this one. 

DB: That’s funny because The Changeling is one of my all-time favorite movies and the one that I had everybody watch in preparation for this movie. It’s such a great movie and one that has sort of cracked the code on how to make a movie scary even if the central character isn’t scared. George C. Scott always seems like he’s mostly just peeved, yet the movie itself is very chilling and scary. That was definitely a big, big touchpoint. 

That vibe is definitely apparent. Teeth are a recurring motif throughout the film that is especially effective and conjures a creeping sense of dread. How did that element come about?

DB: I felt that in the construction of the film’s villain, I did not want to get inside that guy’s head. I did not want to have a movie where there was anything about him that was rational and made much sense. So in the writing process, I tried to be as free as possible to just put in everything that scares me. The teeth were part of that.  I tend to sort of think as I write, and this was reflecting on how you don’t always get the opportunity to just write a movie and then make it. There’s usually a development process where you have to rationalize every single one of your choices. In this, I had the very rare gift of a producer who just wanted me to be free and do whatever I wanted. The teeth motif was part of that because it was important to me to have a villain who was not totally understandable or rational. 

Those types of things have their own internal logic, you know? I tried to sort of thread the needle about why he’s doing all this, but I didn’t want to explain it. I didn’t want to get inside his head. I just wanted him to be the worst possible enemy for our protagonist to come up against. For some reason, it’s the teeth that were the thing that scared me the most. I had a really scary dentist as a child too, which is maybe part of that.

Have you been thinking about what you’d like to tackle in your next feature and if you’re sticking with horror? Are there other styles of horror that you’re interested in digging into now that you’ve covered exorcisms and spirits, or is this territory that you’d like to stay in?

DB: Yeah, I’m working on a few things and largely hoping to stay in the horror or horror-adjacent space. I’d love that. I’m working on a sci-fi/horror project for Paramount that I’m really excited about. It took me a long time to get my first shot at doing a horror movie. I’d written a lot of them, but never really gotten a chance to direct one. So I’d love to stay in this space for a while. Horror and mystery — like film noir — are my two favorite genres, so I’m hoping to do more in those spaces.

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Creep got under the audience’s skin in the best way possible, and Creep 2 managed to generate even greater acclaim and enthusiasm with a more subversive story. It’s been extremely satisfying to watch Creep confidently transform into an anthology horror series that distills “Josef’s” murders down to concise, economical horror stories. 

The Creep Tapes is the ideal outlet for Duplass and Brice’s duplicitous killer that doubles as an entertaining opportunity to deconstruct the found footage genre. Now entering its third season, the series tackles some of its biggest and most personal stories yet.

To celebrate the latest installment in the growing Creep franchise, Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice discuss the selection process for the season’s stories, finding new ways to raise the stakes and expand the universe’s scope, and figuring out their killer’s psychology and whether they know where his story ends. 

BLOODY DISGUSTING: What I love so much about this series is that all these episodes find different ways to deconstruct the found footage genre. This season features such an assortment of stories. What’s your process for planning out seasons and deciding on the final lot of six episodes? 

PATRICK BRICE: Well, we have a running document of ideas for this show that is just pages-and-pages-long at this point. So part of the process involves going to that and seeing what could work and makes sense for the season. But a lot of the time it’s just instinctual. It’s us either saying, “This is an idea that could work for this season. Let’s go for it!” or it comes from a guest star that we thought would be amazing and figuring out how to tailor the idea to them. 

MARK DUPLASS: Yeah, I think our best episodes happen with like a text at like 11:47 PM from Patrick or myself that says something like, “CUDDLE PARTY,” and that’ll be it. Then there will be an “!” And then there will be a “Yes.” We’ll get on the phone the next day and hash it out and talk it through. The document that Patrick is talking about is also very fun because some of those things are fully fleshed-out episodes and some of them are just small germs of ideas. You know, sometimes we’ll go on set with full scripts, and sometimes we’ll have as little as a page to work with. Every episode has its own DNA.

I love that and how ideas can actively evolve while you’re shooting. The show has such a raw feeling to it that conveys that energy. 

MD: Yeah, the idea is that rather than doing a full shoot where we shoot all six episodes in a row, we sort of shoot an episode anytime that we get three or four days free in our schedules. Sometimes we’ll build it around a weekend if we’re working on other projects. It helps you bring this fresh energy to it. So the season takes place over the course of a year, which also allows me to have different looks and things like that. We find that there’s something about — I guess what they call “The Beginner’s Mind” — by just hopping into all this. We’re always a little cold on the first day, and we’re still trying to find it. I’ll start acting, and Patrick will be like, “That’s not him.” It takes a minute to get back into it. But achieving that state of childlike creativity with it and a beginner’s mind is very much a part of the process. 

This season’s “Anisha” episode is set on a plane and builds to such a huge climax that almost feels impossible for such a small, intimate franchise like this. Can you talk a little about approaching that sequence, bringing it to life, and if you’re looking to push some of these stories to even bigger places?

PB: That came as a result of us saying, “How can we make this feel bigger than it’s ever been?” The concept for that one was sort of born out of doing something that we’ve never done before. It seems kind of scary, and we might not entirely know what we’re doing, but we’re going to figure it out on the day of the shoot. Then something like that is especially nuts when considering the shooting method that Mark’s talking about. It’s much harder to approach things with a Beginner’s Mind when you’re dealing with major stunt work and higher concept ideas. That was one of the most fun experiences I had filming this season just because we were so out of our depth and so out of our element, but still able to apply this shorthand that we’ve learned over the years from shooting this show and getting this franchise.

MD: A lot of the creativity from the show comes out of the function of shooting it on a lower budget. Years ago, when we were making this small independent film — The Do-Deca-Pentathlon — we wanted to get a shot of somebody on a plane. I called one of those stages in Burbank that has all these old, grounded planes. They pull out different sides of them so you can shoot in it. I was like, “It’s going to be ridiculous how expensive this is,” but then they told me the cost, and it was really cheap. As we were talking about expanding the show’s scope, I mentioned that I think it should be doable to get a private plane as long as we can shoot the episode in like two days. 

The Creep Tapes episodes that dig into the killer’s family and backstory are always some of the most fascinating. This season looks at his teen years and one of his first kills. Can you talk a little bit about pulling the veil back with this character, how much you want to keep a secret, and how much of this backstory was already known?

MD: That’s a good question. I mean, we really love how much audiences are enjoying the teasing of his backstory. That wasn’t initially part of our master plan. When we did the first episode with his “Mother,” people really responded to that. So we thought that it would be fun to do one episode each season that has a little bit of lore. I think that the fun of playing with a character like this is that we decided very early on that almost nothing he says is factual, but everything is true. So even if the skin and the details of what he’s talking about don’t necessarily make sense or add up — emotionally — everything you hear from him and feel from him is very, very true and honest. 

So, this season we thought it’d be really fun to do something on a VHS camera, similar to the one that my brother and I had growing up. I loved that camera because it was the first camera that shot on VHSC, the compact one, and you could do two separate audio tracks and put music on it. It was like its own little filmmaking machine. That got into my hands when I was about 16, so I thought it would be really funny to consider what our lead character would do with this camera if he had it. Immediately, we were like, “What if he made something like Blair Witch before Blair Witch?” The false mythology that he had gotten there first felt very funny to us.

Were you actually able to shoot it on older tech? 

MD: So we tried using the older tech and the problem with that is—

PB: It was unreliable. 

MD: It’s very cold where we’re shooting too, which can be a problem for the camera. We have used the same camera for almost everything we’ve done on the show, other than some of the more omniscient perspective things and the iPhone one in New York. It’s kind of been our talisman. It’s like our lucky camera. We’ve spent more money fixing that than if we had bought a new one, but he’s our little buddy. So we used that camera and then treated the footage afterwards. 

This season’s “Nobody” episode is one of my favorites from the series, and it feels like it’s a bit of a sequel to the first season’s “Brandt” episode, which is also largely this solo performance piece. 

MD: You get us, yes! You see us!

Was that episode particularly challenging to figure out? You do such a great job whenever these two sides of the killer and Peachfuzz are in conversation with each other.

MD: Yeah, that one felt harder to get right. I felt like we were talking a lot between takes.

PB: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we were setting ourselves up for this, but it entirely relied on Mark’s shoulders. It’s all his performance and the sort of the dance of it. That was one where, in the opening sequence, we had to really get the timing right. There were a lot of longer takes and sort of fewer cuts because it was just Mark and nobody else. 

MD: But we got to use your voice again! One of my favorite things is when Patrick comes in to play Peachfuzz. Also, our third brother in this, Chris Donlon, is executive producer and editor with us every step of the way. He was also able to play the body in the grave. There’s some excellent musical timing that you’ll see in the episode. It’s really fun when we get up there, and that one was just the four of us putting it all together. I think sometimes it brings out the best in us when we’re all a little afraid and a little nervous. “Is this going to work?” We have those down moments, too. “Why did we try to do this?” But sometimes the best stuff comes out of that. 

Creep works so well as an anthology TV series, but does that make it any more of a challenge to find your way back to it as a film franchise? Is Creep 3 still of any interest or seem like an appropriate way to conclude the series?

PB: I mean, we never want it to end. I think it will end in our actual deaths. Creep 3 is definitely something we still talk about. I feel like making the show just invigorates me to come up with ideas for what would make sense for a Creep 3. The show is almost like our sketchbook, in a lot of ways. We’re trying to play with different ideas that maybe could be smaller, that then maybe push us to what the bigger story would be if we were to make another movie after that.

MD: Yeah, it took us quite a few years between Creep and Creep 2 to figure out that idea and get it right. I think it’s taking us that much more time between Creep 2 and Creep 3 because it’s so important to us. We’re just so appreciative of the fans, who reflect to us that there’s integrity in the way that these stories are told. They feel that from us, so we don’t want to feed them anything less than an A+ breakfast burrito. When it comes to Creep 3, frankly, we just haven’t come up with it yet. When we do, we’ll bring it forward, and hopefully there will be a Creep 4 and a Creep 5 — there’s got to be a movie that’s just called Peachfuzz. We’re working on it, with the only limit being our own creative ability. 

The Creep Tapes Season 3 premieres September 15th on Shudder, with back-to-back episodes airing weekly.

The post Mark Duplass & Patrick Brice On Expanding ‘The Creep Tapes’ And Why ‘Creep 3’ Still Isn’t Ready appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

This season sometimes struggles to articulate its points and can feel like more of the same. However, it provides a deeper dive into Peachfuzz’s character, which may be enough for some audiences. Season three is a mixed bag, but it still works hard to exceed expectations, push boundaries, and leave its comfort zone through more frightening character-driven found footage experiments.

Season two innovatively riffed on found footage’s many different styles, while this season is more interested in character archetypes and the act of connection. These constantly disarming performances leave each episode’s subject – and the audience – feeling incredibly vulnerable. The series explores these perpetual exercises in control and privilege as characters engage in tugs of war over authority and are left to litigate who really has the power in these sordid situations. Peachfuzz casually declares that “we contain multitudes” in the season’s premiere, which strongly resonates in each episode.

These new episodes explore how Peachfuzz’s killings are all repeated attempts to genuinely, truly connect with another human being, even if that’s by steeping his own backstory in lies, deception, and a creepy equivalent to kabuki theater. There’s some muddled commentary on the creative pursuit of being an artist and the grueling process of tirelessly pouring yourself into thankless work and how this artistic pursuit can change you.

Certain episodes do admittedly feel like they run out of steam and abruptly conclude in ways that some may consider to be underwhelming. That being said, it’s important to understand that The Creep Tapes is not about the kills, as gory and grandiose as they may be; it’s about human connection.

This season bombards the audience with some of Peachfuzz’s most wild and ridiculous character archetypes yet. This includes a Tommy Lee-esque rock star who is desperate for notoriety through a viral sex tape, an enigmatic billionaire who is eager to unload a confession that doubles as a budding journalist’s big scoop, and a voyeur living in a listless shut-in’s walls. These contrasting performances are all over the map in attempts to obfuscate Peachfuzz’s truth. However, they’re all connected by a desperate need for relevancy and a compulsion to not be forgotten that’s been present in this franchise since its very start. 

It’s a message that’s crucial to Peachfuzz’s legacy as a prolific serial killer, but one can’t help but feel this quest for relevance extends to the broader found footage genre as a whole. It’s a style of storytelling that’s never completely disappeared, but often feels like it’s one foot out the door and constantly at the risk of being disregarded. The Creep Tapes’ third season makes a strong case for why this genre is still meaningful and a valuable way to tell horror stories.

A lot of this season sticks to stripped-down, minimalist filmmaking that frequently utilizes a bottle episode-like framework. There are still opportunities for these episodes to go bigger and take some risks. There’s a particularly tense stalker story that sets Peachfuzz loose in New York City. There’s also a formative flashback episode in 1994 that chronicles one of Peachfuzz’s earliest kills when he was just a teenager. This season also features the franchise’s most extreme and creative death to date that deserves credit for the sheer audacity of the spectacle. 

This season also continues the tradition where one episode turns the camera onto Peachfuzz and attempts to unpack his own trauma and history. This season’s experiment is a one-man show from Duplass as Peachfuzz confronts and succumbs to his codependent demons. It doesn’t reach the same heights as the previous seasons’ glimpses into Peachfuzz’s dynamic with his mother and sister, but it’s still very rewarding and a real highlight of the season that helps demystify this increasingly interesting monster. 

Season three still retains the dark humor that’s always been baked into the franchise, which may work better for some than others. This heightened behavior and inappropriate sense of humor fit into Peachfuzz’s pursuit of throwing off and destabilizing his would-be victims so that they can’t tell where the truth lies and the performance ends.

The Creep Tapes is a series that lives and dies based on its guest stars. This season features some impressive and eclectic talent that includes Kate Siegel, James Earl, Chris Gethard, Rekha Shankar, It: Welcome to Derry’s Nicholas Hamilton, Terrifier 2 and 3’s Elliot Fulham, and Mark Duplass’ own daughter, Ora Duplass. Patrick Brice continues to handle all the directing duties and has only grown more confident in cultivating this franchise’s avant-garde voice. However, at this point it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring in some fresh blood. 

Like before, six episodes is the perfect length for this season so that Peachfuzz’s continuous kills don’t feel repetitive, formulaic, or blur together. It’s just enough time for The Creep Tapes to approach its central idea from complementary angles and still wrap things up so that the audience is left wanting more, rather than being exhausted by Peachfuzz’s schtick.

The Creep Tapes still has lots to say and plenty of tricks up its sleeve. That being said, this is the first time that the bloom is starting to come off the rose. While a very strong continuation of this concept and character, these are arguably the weakest batch of episodes from The Creep Tapes’ three-season run. This doesn’t mean that a season four would have even greater diminishing returns. However, it’ll need to bring something different to the equation.

As Peachfuzz would say, “You’ve just got to trust the creative process,” even if it makes a bloody mess. It at least helps keep the wolves at the door.

The Creep Tapes premieres September 15 on Shudder, with back-to-back episodes airing weekly.

The post ‘The Creep Tapes’ Season 3 Review: Peachfuzz’s Most Personal Season Is Also Its Most Uneven appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Horror’s revisionist history has made its way over to The Exorcist franchise, and fans have gradually come to the defense of rejected entries, like The Exorcist III and even Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. However, Exorcist II: The Heretic seems to be eternally razed and a scorched Earth title that’s beyond redemption. That being said, the most interesting film documentaries are the ones about failed productions instead of the winners. Hearts of Darkness, Burden of Dreams, Lost in La Mancha, and Lost Soul are remarkable works that some consider to be even better than the films that they’re talking about. Exorcist II’s reputation makes the aim of Boorman and the Devil so interesting and arguably a richer title than if it were focused on any other Exorcist entry. 

It feels like the world wants to forget about Exorcist II: The Heretic, almost as if it’s some shared delusion. It’s a more reviled sequel than any of the most polarizing Halloween or Friday the 13th entries. Made over the course of seven years, director David Kittredge’s (Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror) documentary is a sincere, impassioned breakdown of a disgraced sequel’s philosophy, production, and reputation. It will make you want to immediately watch Exorcist II: The Heretic, which is the greatest praise that one could give this documentary. 

A sequel to a film that’s as commercially and critically acclaimed as The Exorcist is such fascinating territory to explore. There’s a built-in expectation that a follow-up will pale in comparison to the original, but there’s also a built-in formula that’s easy to ride to success by not rocking the boat. There’s a very easy sequel that director John Boorman could have made with his Exorcist follow-up that wouldn’t have been creatively fulfilling, but likely would have made waves at the box office. Boorman takes a huge risk in doing an extremely unconventional Exorcist sequel that fell flat for most fans, but clearly has a point of view and is trying to do something original with this universe and its approach to demons. Boorman and the Devil doesn’t claim that Boorman’s approach is the best idea for an Exorcist sequel.

However, it does go to great lengths to explain his perspective and why he believed it was the right angle for the sequel. Boorman’s personal insight, boosted by testimonials from people involved in the production like Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, earnestly examines a layered sequel that’s often dismissed instead of dissected.

Boorman took such painstaking lengths to push the medium forward and make a sequel that was visually innovative, on top of everything else. Kittredge breaks down the film’s complex cinematography and the lengths that they took to secure certain shots, including the lost art of in-camera effects like “ghost glass,” matte paintings, and evolving camera technology. This is a film that Boorman poured himself into because he wanted to create a dense meditation that’s a layered response to the original and the questions that it asks, rather than some standard run-of-the-mill sequel. Despite these lofty goals, Boorman left the experience genuinely unsure if he would ever direct another movie again in his life. 

Boorman and the Devil has so much to say regarding Boorman’s psychology during the film’s production and the high expectations that this sequel faced. The film’s failure and the subsequent tarnishing of the Exorcist franchise as a whole is compelling territory for the documentary to unpack. However, the doc also benefits from just how many unbelievable disasters and setbacks took place during filming. This was literally a film where Boorman nearly died during production, the likes of which seemed to be plagued by curses as if they were personally being tortured by Pazuzu. 

There are ridiculous stories about filming hurdles and production woes that guarantee that Boorman and the Devil will keep the interest of anyone who is even slightly intrigued by film production. The documentary does so much more than just the bare minimum of “Did you Know?” and regurgitated tales that have filled endless sound bites. Kittredge builds upon these entertaining production woes and pushes them even further.  At nearly two hours, the documentary doesn’t belabor itself or overstay its welcome, but it makes sure to absolutely pack its runtime with as much insight and ephemera as possible. 

Kittredge’s doc digs deep into Exorcist II’s troubled production, but it’s also just as interested in its director, both as an individual and as the one at the helm of this out-of-control oddity. This perspective becomes the film’s secret weapon. At no point does Boorman and the Devil insult Exorcist II or try to humiliate its production. This is a documentary that’s all about understanding and trying to put the audience into the mindset of someone who entered this production with the best of intentions and the goal of truly innovating a franchise in a sequel that was already set up to fail, so to speak. It’s a deep meditation on dashed dreams and when reality fails to live up to expectations. 

Boorman and the Devil presents the necessary context to leave the audience feeling crestfallen that this sequel didn’t connect and find an audience, even if they don’t like it themselves. It presents Boorman as a true innovator, not a journeyman director who wanted an easy paycheck. In many ways, the position that Boorman was placed in feels comparable to where Mike Flanagan is currently situated with his follow-up to the legacy sequel, The Exorcist: Believer. Boorman and the Devil pays off this connection by including Flanagan as one of the many contemporary interview subjects, alongside Karyn Kusama and Joe Dante, who weigh in to defend Exorcist II. Honestly, everyone who you would want to chime in on the maligned sequel manages to pop up here. No stone goes unturned.

This emphasis on Boorman, rather than purely focusing on Exorcist II, lends itself to some enlightening reflection by including Boorman himself in the discussion. The filmmaker, who is now 92, reflects on what was arguably the worst experience of his professional career, which happened close to 50 years ago. Boorman and the Devil benefits from how it juxtaposes Boorman’s current self, who made peace long ago with the younger and scrappier version of him who had something to prove. Both of these versions are juxtaposed against each other and contrasted to great effect. It’s an enlightening deconstruction of how Boorman has grown since Exorcist II’s production and the symbiotic way in which the film changed him. He’s carried the weight of it on his shoulders for the rest of his career.

Boorman and the Devil is absolutely everything that you’d want from an Exorcist II deep dive reclamation. Kittredge’s thorough exploration of this title is evident, and compelling information is put together in an impressive, comprehensive package that avoids many of the standard talking head documentary pitfalls. It’s also surprisingly funny. Boorman’s liberated attitude towards Exorcist II creates the perfect atmosphere where he can joke about wishing that he had actually died during production so that he wouldn’t have to endure the film’s release. Boorman and the Devil goes above and beyond to be the definitive text on Exorcist II. This documentary will delight horror and Exorcist fans alike, but it also provides incredible insight for anyone who is just marginally interested in film production. The film is even accessible in an even broader sense when it comes down to the eternal pursuit of art versus commerce and why big swings – even failed ones – are so important. 

Exorcist II: The Heretic may have ruined Boorman’s career, yet there’s a poetic beauty to the fact that he’s responsible for some iconic cinema like Deliverance, Excalibur, and Point Blank, yet it’s Exorcist II that’s the only title from his filmography that’s the subject of an entire documentary. This speaks to the power of this ambitious misfire and the legacy that it’s left behind, not just as a vilified sequel, but a cautionary lesson in brand expansion and the perils of commerce versus art. 

Boorman and the Devil opened in limited theaters on August 28 and is expanding to additional cities on September 4.

Editor’s Note: This Brooklyn Horror Film Festival review was originally published on October 23, 2025.

The post ‘Boorman and the Devil’ Review: New Documentary Compels You To Appreciate A Much-Maligned Horror Sequel appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s a franchise that’s become permanently entrenched in pop culture and is largely analogous to modern ghost stories. They’re films that make a lot of sense in an age of rapidly evolving technology and means of surveillance. It’s a bold and brave experiment to adapt this sprawling supernatural found footage franchise into a stageplay. Horror, in theater, is a challenging feat to pull off in general, let alone with a title like Paranormal Activity that carries such expectations. 

Broadway’s Paranormal Activity doesn’t just come with the film franchise’s legacy, but its stage adaptation is being handled by an incredible creative team. Paranormal Activity is written by Levi Holloway (The Grey House) and directed by Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, who was behind New York City’s acclaimed immersive theater experience, Sleep No More. They’re both storytellers who know how to play with perception and highlight the slow dissolution of reality, which are both key components of Paranormal Activity’s sinister structure.

With Paranormal Activity’s Broadway run now officially in motion, Barrett opens up about translating the stylized horror franchise to the stage, the importance of challenging set and sound design, and how to create visceral terror that feeds off the audience. 

BLOODY DISGUSTING: To start things off, what was the biggest challenge of not just adapting a horror franchise into a stage play, but one that’s so steeped in the stylistic device of found footage?

FELIX BARRETT: Great question. I jumped on this because I loved the film. I immediately said yes to adapting it before actually really thinking it through. Then, as soon as Levi [Holloway] was on board, it was a discussion about the presentation style. Found footage works very well for the medium of film, but if we’re doing something live for the stage, then we need to adapt the medium for the stage. There was actually an earlier version of the script where we started inside the theater, and we were being quite literal about everything.

Very quickly we decided that we can’t have cameras everywhere because it will remove the audience from the experience and create some distance from the thrills, tragedy, and shock of it all. So we instead went back to the element from the films that this is a real couple. They weren’t famous actors. It was shot as completely truthfully as possible. So we took that plausibility and tried to apply it to the stage. We really wanted the audience to feel like they’re the camera and voyeuristically looking into this house. Nothing is played out to the front of the stage. It needs to feel quite intimate because you, as an audience member, are essentially in the same role. 

The multi-room cross-section set design I thought was the perfect way to kind of emulate the movies’ visual design. It slowly conditions the audience to watch multiple rooms at the same time. 

FB: Exactly! I got some of that from Sleep No More, where there were like a hundred rooms in the show. There’s a lot of empty space going on in this show. I love the threat that can come from negative space. You can’t quite see everything, which is the reason why the show is so dark. If you could see inside the rooms clearly, then there’d be no mystery there. If you can’t quite make everything out, then your eyes start playing tricks on you, and you don’t know what you can trust. It felt like an exciting way to approach all this.

There was actually a really early version where we did have much more camera stuff. We thought that Jimmy would be filming things, but as soon as we put it on the screen it undermined the whole truth of it. It starts to feel stylized. 

Interesting. So there were videos that were being shot that would then be shown on screen?

FB: Yeah, and we knew we didn’t want to do some sort of abstract stylized screen-heavy piece of theater because that’s having a bit of a moment right now on Broadway. I didn’t feel like jumping in on a fad. I also think that it would break everything if it becomes this Brechtian out-of-body experience. We wanted to be in the story with that couple and worry about them, what’s going to happen next, and how they’re going to cope. Screens have an amazing way of dislocating the audience. 

There’s a Zoom call at the top of a scene where Lou is just chatting to her colleagues. We shot a lot thinking that you’d see it, and if you could turn the screen around, then you would see it. But it’s better to just see the cast. It puts you inside their heads, and it really makes it feel like you’re actually spying on them. It’s this sort of Peeping Tom thing. There was another bit where we had Jimmy filming the nursery once all the writing is up on the wall, but it just starts to feel weird. It’s derivative and a bit clichéd.

What I think makes the Paranormal Activity films so special – and something that you capture so well in this production – is that they’re these gutting human dramas that also feature supernatural elements. Travis and Cher really do incredible work in these roles that’s just as powerful as any of the horror.

FB: Oh my gosh, their dynamic was so critical to the production from moment one. We talked about how this is essentially a love story. You’re seeing a portrait of a marriage and a couple who are pretty tight and solid, in the amazing throes of love. All that gets forced apart by an entity. In rehearsal, we talked about how we want the audience to look at this relationship and view it as this amazing display of love that hopefully everyone gets to experience at some point in their lives. We wanted their dynamic to be really infectious, in the same way that screams are infectious when they ricochet through a crowd. It’s the same when you watch a happy couple in love. 

We really wanted to be as truthful as possible to all that. It’s haunting when you reveal that this isn’t a beautiful safe space and all that happiness gets ripped open. Travis and Cher are so incredible because they are such genuine performances. It’s very much themselves up there. There’s no artifice. The characters are woven through the fabric of their own being, rather than implanted on top. It makes it really resonate for the audience. 

I was curious how their performances would come across because there can be a real theatricality to stage performances that’s antithetical to how the Paranormal Activity films work.

FB: I appreciate that because we really tried. There’s such an amazing history to scary things on stage, particularly in this country. The Woman in Black played for 23 years here. When I saw it, it was so hokey. It’s exaggerated, theatrical, and operatic, but I didn’t find it scary at all. What’s scary is that sort of mundane part of life where something could be behind me. That’s the advantage of when something invades that safe, domestic space and gets under your skin. So I’m delighted that that worked for you. 

One of the most entertaining aspects of the Paranormal Activity films is how the sense of dread and danger progressively builds over time. Was it challenging to translate that to stage and build increasing tension with each scene?

FB: I think that’s my safe space as a director. When it comes to horror films, I’m drawn to the ones that have creeping dread. I don’t like gore. I don’t really like violence. But I love that sense of gentle unease when you feel the tendrils of doubt wrap around your body and leave you chilled. So it was actually a joy to do that in this show. We always knew it was going to have a false sense of security and then descend into the abyss. I just love all the tools as a director that you have, from light to sound, to actually thicken the atmosphere and tighten it. 

I was really blown away by the practical effects and use of visual tricks that are done here to bring the show’s scares to life. That trapdoor fall early on is so, so effective. Can you talk a little bit about workshopping these scares and figuring out the best way to bring these horror moments to life?

FB: Well, it’s interesting. We had a really early version of the draft at one point that was just Levi and I working on it. We were talking about the things that we would find the most frightening, like when someone just stops. Things that are uncanny and weird, but not schlocky. So that moment ended up in the script. We were speaking to various creative teams and trying to find the right alchemy of people. I remember a few who had said, “How the hell are you going to do that?” Well, if you’re asking that question, then you’re probably not the right person to do it.

We’re lucky to have the genius of Chris Fisher, who is the Illusions Designer, who also worked on Harry Potter & the Cursed Child and Stranger Things: The First Shadow. In Sleep No More, we had a couple of magic tricks, but the illusionist only came in like the last week before we opened. It was just like an extra cherry on the cake. For this process, we did the opposite. Before we’d even fully designed a set or had all our team members, we spent a week in London figuring out how to play with these tricks and how you can manifest a haunting. I told Chris that I don’t want to know how these things are done. We talked about all the things that we’re trying to do, but I came in as an audience member who was just blown away. Now, frustratingly, I know how some of them are done. But I knew that it could scare ourselves in the cold light of day, playing around with cardboard; then we were on to something. Chris is just a genius.

The reactions in the audience were bigger than the reactions I’ve experienced in the movie theater for the Paranormal Activity movies. It must have been so satisfying to just hear that stuff connect and know that it’s working.

FB: It’s an absolute privilege. With Sleep No More, everyone is in masks, so you don’t actually know how stuff has connected until you’re at the bar afterwards. So I’ve never experienced this where you get everyone responding as one. There are points in the show where we can gauge how raucous the crowd will be, and it’s very satisfying for the cast to experience. What I love is you get a scream, but then you also get a beat, and then you get laughter. And that’s so cathartic. We, oddly enough, talk about the show being quite joyous because of that. There are as many smiles and laughs as there are screams, which feels really important.

I was also really taken by the use of lighting and shadow in order to create even greater tension. The use of natural lighting from the flashlight and the cell phone in specific scenes is really effective. How did you approach lighting and figure out the right aesthetic there?

FB: Anna Watson, our Lighting Designer, is just the best. We’re blessed with the most incredible team where everyone is a master of their field. When we first spoke with Anna, we were talking about how we didn’t want it to feel like a play. We wanted it to feel real. We were quite restrained and doing less. Typically, in a play, you’d have someone pretending to use a flashlight, and you’d have a little bit of throw light. We wanted to embrace the things and make light and shadow our best friend. 

With darkness, you want the audience to have to color in details themselves. They have to fill that space in, and therefore they become more invested in it. That’s where the real fear lies in the audience’s minds. So we knew that we wanted things to be shrouded in darkness. It’s why the top room — the nursery — doesn’t have any natural light. It’s all deliberate choices so that the house is never fully lit. It makes you paranoid that something is going to come out from somewhere.

Sound design is also such an important element in selling scares, in both theater and cinema. You do such great work with the audio in this show. How did you figure out and refine things there?

FB: Oh my gosh, you should see the amount of time that’s been spent on the tech. It’s so meticulous. Gareth Fry, our Sound Designer, is also one of the most experienced people. He’s won Tonys and everything. He’s an absolute master. If you switch the sound off and there was no sound, I don’t think that the show would work. I think it would be interesting, but it wouldn’t have any impact. The thickness, the dread, and the trouble all come from the sound. I hope it feels quite effortless, but you should see the smorgasbord of sound cues and the level of detail that’s going on there. There’s so much layering and even moments where the inflections of single words have something audio-based to support them. 

The Paranormal Activity films always do such a good job of ending on these abrupt, unsettling, chaotic notes, and this show is no exception. Was it difficult to figure out the right energy for the show’s finish and how to go out?

FB: Yes, absolutely. That was the other thing that we took from the films. We wanted to honor their restraint, the plausibility of the couple, and I knew that we had to match the ending because that’s the bit that I loved when I saw the film. Those last few seconds where everything escalates like it’s an exponential crescendo. On day one, we were like, “How the hell do you do that on stage?” It’s been hard. I’ve got to say, we’ve actually changed that ending. We’ve changed it for this version from when we first did it in the UK. It had a different ending then, but it wasn’t brutal enough. So we’ve scaled it up and made it more abrupt. It makes it feel like there’s maybe some hope, but then it’s a sucker punch to the audience. It’s our way of paying respect to Oren [Peli] and the original film. 

This show had previous runs on the West End, Chicago, and Boston. You mentioned the ending being revised, but was there anything learned from those runs that led to any changes in the Broadway production?

FB: Yeah, there are multiple things. You learn so much of that by going back to the audience and their screams. We’ve been honing and perfecting everything for this Broadway version. There’s a bunch here that wasn’t in the past versions. There’s a bit at the end of Act One which is completely new. I don’t want to say what it is to spoil it for the audience, but it’s a whole new illusion. It’s a whole new bit of stagecraft that’s baked into it. And then there are also little changes, inflections, and tweaks throughout the show. 

So much of this stuff, in both film and on stage, comes down to timing. It’s been really interesting to speak with film producers. When you’re making a horror film, you do your first cut, and then you screen test it and work out the bits that don’t land how they should, and then you go back and reshoot it or re-cut it. It’s a very similar process for us as we explore different things in different territories. If the bits don’t land like we want them to, then we amend them. Sometimes you need that beat before something lands. You attack people when they feel like they’re in a safe space. It’s been so much fun to make the screams louder or the gasps more acute on Broadway. This is the definitive version of it.

After successfully tackling a stage version of Paranormal Activity, would you be interested in adapting any other horror classics?

FB: Absolutely. This just whetted our appetite for what’s possible. As a team, we’re definitely knocking on the door of some titles because there are some things that we would love to do. We’d also love to do a thriller, too. I hope it’s just the beginning.

I think of The Blair Witch Project as this formative found footage predecessor to Paranormal Activity, which had me thinking if it’s possible to do a version of that on stage.

FB: I’d love to do Blair Witch in like a Sleep No More fashion. The scale of Sleep No More and with that much autonomy. That would be absolutely terrifying and amazing to do in a forest. But for now, on stage, there are things that we really want to do.

The post Haunting Broadway & Beyond: Director Felix Barrett On Adapting ‘Paranormal Activity’ To The Stage appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

However, there have recently been some inventive anthology experiments that have earned The Simpsons the benefit of the doubt, like the Ray Bradbury-inspired “Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes.” 

The Simpsons developing their own sci-fi equivalent to Black Mirror is a no-brainer, and so it’s encouraging to see the concept receive its own Disney+ special, rather than simply being a segment in a “Treehouse of Horror” episode. That being said, with only two stories in the episode, it feels like “Yellow Mirror“ doesn’t fully commit to the bit. Past Disney+ specials have been double-episodes so that their concepts can cover more ground, like in “Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition.“

“Yellow Mirror” would be able to really thrive if there was a third story present. That being said, the two stories that are told – particularly the first segment – are solid enough to warrant “Yellow Mirror” becoming a regular tradition for The Simpsons that allows it to flex its sci-fi muscles more. It’s a successful proof of concept that leaves the audience wanting more.

The episode’s first story, “The Way We Wasn’t,” is an incredibly strong Simpsons story that returns to one of the series’ most celebrated episodes, “The Way We Was.” It’s a reality-shattering premise that deconstructs Homer’s relationship with the rest of his family and how they’re an essential emotional anchor.

Carolyn Omine is especially skilled at compassionate and bittersweet Simpsons episodes, whether it’s “A Mid-Childhood Night’s Dream,” “Ice Cream of Margie (with the Light Blue Hair),” and even “Halloween of Horror.” Omine doesn’t hold back in “The Way We Wasn’t,” and it reaches surprising emotional heights in only 12 minutes. 

It’s a painful meditation on regret where Homer mourns and is haunted by a life that he never had. It’s absolutely gutting and a reminder of how much pathos and empathy The Simpsons can have when it wants to dig deeper into its characters. “The Way We Wasn’t” gradually evolves into a meta commentary on The Simpsons as a whole. Homer transforms into a Matt Groening analogue who takes great lengths to recreate his “lost family” and their hundreds of adventures together.

Homer’s abject sadness is the story’s focus, but this is also an angry, cathartic analysis of The Simpsons’ legacy. “The Way We Wasn’t” is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s actually quite acid-tongued in its execution. It’s a compelling look at an alternate timeline that also feels like The Simpsons working through its own identity crisis and fleeting apathy. 

“Yellow Mirror’s” second story, “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream,” is a much more conventional take on what one would expect from a Black Mirror parody. Maggie’s growing reliance on an AI-fueled tablet triggers a toxic codependency that spreads throughout Springfield’s infants. “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream” is a decent commentary on tech addiction, targeted ads, and artificial intelligence that’s willing to go to some dark places. It’s a relevant story, but one that feels half-baked and predictable in its execution. 

The message in this story, while strong, has a lot of generic padding between its multiple musical segments that function as alluring siren songs. “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream” makes its point. However, there’s room for an extra layer of techno-paranoia that could have been explored or, alternatively, a condensed take on this story so that a third segment could be included. This story works in a vacuum, but it doesn’t help that The Simpsons has already tackled this topic in a more substantial manner in Season 31’s “Screenless.“ Sure, “Screenless” didn’t build to a potential AI apocalypse, but it had more to say and goes deeper on the subject. 

The most frustrating thing about “I Have No Tablet But I Must Stream” is that it drags down the genuine greatness of “The Way We Wasn’t.” It’s unfortunate that an equally compelling concept couldn’t be cracked for the second installment, which would make “Yellow Mirror” a real triumph. It makes sense that The Simpsons would turn to a sillier and more frivolous story to balance out “The Way We Wasn’t” gutting emotional depths. It still needs to bring more to the table.

“Yellow Mirror” is ultimately a successful episode that pulls at the audience’s heartstrings and is just as interested in leaving them emotionally wrecked as it is in pushing tech-based terror. It’s fun, if not fairly disposable, which is often the case with anthology episodes. In this sense, the episode is the perfect type of experiment for a special on a separate streaming service. It doesn’t necessarily justify its existence or why these couldn’t have just been “Treehouse of Horror” segments.

At the same time, I’d like to see what The Simpsons does with future “Yellow Mirror” installments. There’s lots of potential here, especially during a time in which sci-fi anthologies seem to have greater value than horror detours.

The exclusive episode of “The Simpsons: Yellow Mirror” is available to stream as of today, August 26, only on Disney+.

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Its charm is that it doles out tiny snapshots of slice-of-life mundanity through many separate vignettes. It’s a franchise that doesn’t squander its found footage format and specifically leans into it to punctuate its scares. A stage version of Paranormal Activity immediately loses the found footage artifice, yet this production brilliantly emulates the experience and creates something that’s just as powerful and even more creative.

The play, written by Levi Holloway (The Grey House) and directed by Felix Barrett (Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More), effortlessly and innovatively taps into the film franchise’s visceral fears and mounting dread that slowly reaches a terrifying fever pitch. This is all beautifully magnified through the raw theatrical experience that pushes the show’s greatest moments even further than what’s possible in the movies. It’s like you’re trapped in the house with these characters and spirits. It’s the scariest show on Broadway.

Paranormal Activity is wise to tell an original story with fresh characters, rather than simply adapt one of the franchise’s existing films with revised scares. The framework to these films is always rather simplistic. They’re movies that benefit from minimalism, and in this sense, this production certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Newlyweds James (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Álvarez) move to London from Chicago for a fresh start. However, strange activity in their new home begins to wear them both down and exacerbate existing vulnerabilities within their marriage. As reality breaks and trust becomes more important than ever, it’s unclear if James and Lou – let alone their marriage – will survive these paranormal attacks. 

It’s a solid enough setup that allows for emotional backstory and opportunities for these characters to be victimized by this demonic spirit both separately and together. Paranormal Activity’s intentionally pedestrian protagonists are meant to be conduits for unnerving set pieces and spectral events, which are in strong supply here. The show is two hours and ten minutes long, with intermission, which gives it enough time for its terrors to successfully evolve with pacing that’s on par with the films. It’s an incredibly economical script in which not a single line of dialogue is wasted. Seemingly innocuous digressions all connect together to serve the grander paranormal picture.

Knight and Álvarez have such natural chemistry and their performances are perfectly tuned to this tonal balancing act. They know how to ramp up the terror when it’s appropriate and then how to defuse that tension through affable everyday behavior. Knight and Álvarez never feel too theatrical, and the performances ring true to the more naturalistic work that’s done in the earliest Paranormal Activity films. Álvarez in particular delivers such a captivating, fragile performance.

There’s deep-seated trauma for both characters that bubbles up to the surface and makes sure that the play succeeds as a grief-stricken drama just as much as it works as horror. James and Lou are wading through dread even before anything supernatural strikes. Their story argues that life is just one big paranormal experience for some people. 

A stage version of Paranormal Activity could be tackled from all sorts of different angles. This production absolutely nails it with its inventive set design, which is presented as a multi-room cross-section that conditions the audience to be looking at several places at once. It’s a rather brilliant way to emulate the film franchise’s found footage surveillance aesthetic, only it’s the audience’s attention that dictates which room becomes their focus. It’s a visual setup that properly conveys the terrifying feeling that the entire house is constantly vulnerable.

A wide range of tricks bring sinister set pieces to life. Moving shadows and visual hallucinations are fun tools to creep out the audience. The same is true for the excellent sound design that amplifies every gesture and at times bombards the audience like an inescapable sonic explosion. There are other, more elaborate scares that truly feel like magic tricks. Paranormal Activity is such a remarkable accomplishment in practical effects, the likes of which really push boundaries here. The pacing and execution are no different than some big-budget horror movie.

There are certain stage plays that feature all these elements, but ultimately lack genuine scares. Paranormal Activity is brilliant on a technical level. It’s also deeply frightening and doesn’t hold back in this department. It’s the scariest production I’ve ever seen on stage (which includes the comparable, creepy poltergeist play, 2:22 A Ghost Story), and it’s a show that just works. The audience’s reaction to the scares was far bigger than I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater, which is really saying something. This production seamlessly translates the blockbuster horror experience to the stage, complete with standout jump scares and a pitch-perfect ending that stays true to the franchise’s nihilism.

Paranormal Activity is exceptional in every regard. It’s both daring and different, but also a faithful portrayal of what this franchise represents. It holds its own with the franchise’s best entries, and it’s not just some lazy attempt to cash in on one of horror’s most lucrative franchises. It’s the scariest that Paranormal Activity has been in well over a decade and such a satisfying extrapolation of this series that still has its own identity.

It’s a must-watch experience for horror fans that will hopefully continue to expand and reach a larger audience; as many people as possible need to feel like they’re being attacked by sinister spirits and to get lost in Paranormal Activity’s bone-chilling beauty. 

Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Stage opened on Broadway on August 25.

The post ‘Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Stage’ Conjures Up Something Special In Broadway’s Scariest Show appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

And yet, President Curtis excels with its supernatural “monster of the week” vantage point that’s already tackled vampires, werewolves, and leprechauns only three episodes in. This isn’t exactly unexpected for a series that exists in the same universe as Rick and Morty. However, it’s exciting to see President Curtis adopt more of a horror-centric perspective, rather than Rick and Morty’s science fiction obsession. In this respect, a Daniel “Candyman” Robitaille cameo isn’t so much a random reference as it is justified territory that’s par for the course.

There’s been a curious trend where animated comedies have embraced notorious horror icons, whether it’s Solar Opposites‘ tribute to the Crypt Keeper, Rick and Morty’s copyright-free Freddy Krueger analog, Scary Terry, Damien Thorn and Jason Voorhees showing up in South Park, or Death Note’s Ryuk wreaking havoc in one of The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” specials. Many of these genre crossovers can feel like style over substance and merely an entertaining Easter Egg for horror aficionados.

That being said, President Curtis rises to the occasion and makes Candyman not just a key figure, but the hero. President Curtis’ “Ex” puts Candyman front and center in an episode that’s all about werewolf and robot rights that ties into a deeper commentary on rehabilitation that’s surprisingly in sync with the Candyman film franchise’s messaging.

“Ex,” the third episode of President Curtis, is built around the president’s lingering feelings towards his ex, Beverly Mills, who has worked her way to become governor-elect of Chicago. This is a successful enough premise for a series that’s still fleshing out its core cast and their relationships. However, it’s also quite appropriate to incorporate Candyman in an episode that explores tumultuous relationships, considering how flawed, toxic, and socially stigmatized romances are the catalyst for Daniel Robitaille’s execution and the birth of the Candyman legend. 

Candyman’s role in “Ex,” which is written by President Curtis’ showrunner, James Siciliano, isn’t just a gratuitous non-sequitur. He’s a pivotal piece of electioneering that ties together with Beverly’s past as Chicago’s mayor. Beverly views this urban boogeyman as an exaggerated talking point for reform that’s akin to unhoused individuals, data centers, or potholes. Candyman’s rehabilitation is viewed as a controversial gambit, albeit one that’s proven to be one of Beverly’s greatest accomplishments and the pivot that helped kickstart her career as governor.

President Curtis playfully exaggerates Candyman’s lore to take this vengeful, spiritual boogeyman and turns him into a friendly, neighborhood icon of optimism and rebirth. Beverly Mills’ campaign video explains that in Candyman, she “didn’t see a horror story. She saw hope.” It’s like using Freddy Krueger in a PSA about insomnia. This horror heightening reaches a fever pitch when Beverly moves beyond Candyman and starts running “Babadook Book Drives.” She stands tall as an icon in monster/crime relations and rehabilitation.

Beverly harnesses Candyman’s power to create CPEP — the “Candyman Perpetual Energy Project” — which involves a convoluted system of mirrors and automated “Candyman” chants. CPEP results in infinite energy that’s then used to singlehandedly power Chicago and solve its energy crisis. It’s a brilliant concept that leans into Candyman’s ludicrous lore and the circumstances behind his summoning, only to exploit its loopholes for good, rather than evil. It’s a deeply silly idea, albeit one that’s thematically poetic in the sense that this figure of urban reform and racial/social injustice becomes Chicago’s savior. President Curtis takes Candyman’s subtext seriously and uses it in a poignant post-modern context that’s not hard to imagine as the plot of some futuristic Candyman reboot.

There’s plenty to unpack in “Ex,” including an entertaining B-story in which Special Agent O’Doyle (Jim Rash) and Chief of Staff Banks (Stephanie Beatriz) are sent to “West Wing World,” a clever Westworld parody that involves a simulated society that’s populated by state-of-the-art robots for the purpose of re-educating government aides. By the end, it’s Candyman who is ultimately the one who saves the day, and with a creative use of his hook hand — which is now a champagne flute hand — and his signature bee ability, at that. This results in a top-tier kill that’s among the best set pieces from any of the Candyman movies. 

Somehow this 22-minute cartoon does justice to this legendary horror icon and gives him the redemption arc that many believe 2021’s polarizing Candyman reboot/legacy sequel failed to achieve. It’s the most interesting and intense that Daniel Robitaille has been in decades.

With any luck, President Curtis’ second season can deliver the Candyman vs. Leprechaun showdown that failed to materialize in the 2000s. They’ve already assembled all the right pieces and proven that they’re up to the challenge. Here’s hoping.

Candyman Vs. Leprechaun.

Candyman Vs. Leprechaun.

Candyman Vs. Leprechaun…

The post ‘President Curtis’ Resurrects Candyman As A Sweet Savior In Latest Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Prime Video’s Fallout, which pulls from the rich nuclear wasteland of Bethesda’s multi-billion dollar gaming franchise of the same name, has not only risen to the occasion, but completely surpassed audiences’ high expectations. Fallout’s emotionally-driven post-apocalyptic saga juxtaposes the parallel stories of a hopeful vault dweller, a mutated Ghoul bounty hunter, and a loyal soldier as they make their way in this unique wasteland.

In honor of Fallout’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design, Production Designer Howard Cummings gets candid on the surreal joy of bringing this acclaimed video game universe to life and expanding upon its canon, the joys of practical effects and grounding Fallout in a tactile world, Fallout’s unique use of greenscreen to magnify environments, and his promise that things are getting “even bigger and bigger” in season three.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: One of the things that fans loved most about the Fallout video games is the immersive, detailed worlds that they feature. You got to work directly with Bethesda, but what exactly was that collaborative process like?

HOWARD CUMMINGS: When we were first starting out, it’s like, “What do you do with this? How do you make this a film?” But then you get there, and you realize that the challenge with Fallout is actually doing it. Committing to it. In the beginning, it was cool, and Bethesda didn’t really come out with an edict. They don’t tell me what to do. They were waiting for me to show them something, and then they go, “Oh, wow, you’re just actually doing it.” I got into the Fallout universe, and I really appreciated it. Then I began to appreciate the people and all the fans online who are doing their different mods. I get the ultimate fan mod. I get to do my own mod. It’s so cool. 

But in terms of working with Bethesda, they’ve never told me I have to do something in a certain way, which is awesome. I have a lot of freedom. They share their models with me, and they have a point person that I talk to if I have questions about the game because I’m not an expert on the game. There’s a lot of research. My basic inspiration goes back to Fallout’s original artwork. There’s a great book about Fallout 4 (The Art of Fallout 4: Bethesda Softworks) that’s just loaded with beautiful concept art. When you take those concepts, you can turn them into a game, but there’s a certain loss to it. 

So it’s weird. If I want to enhance something that’s in the game, I kind of look back at the concept and consider where to take it. You know, because I love Fallout: New Vegas’ story. It’s so good and so engaging, but Obsidian — who I think developed the game — it’s not as finely or artistically done as some of the other games. So a big struggle at times is wanting to honor what people like about Fallout: New Vegas, but I also want to enhance it in a way. But I have to enhance it based on the game, not just to be cool. 

What’s fun for me to work on in the show is that we have our own — it’s not set in the same timeframe as the games, right? The writers get around all sorts of stuff. They know so much about the game. It’s insane, and there’s a lot of stuff I do, and then suddenly someone is telling me why the choices that I made are now canon. Stuff like that is hysterical to me. I always try to stay true to what fans really liked about the games and try not to break it. We have a producer, James Altman, who’s from the game. If I have big questions about whether I’m stepping on some lore that’s going to make everybody go insane, then he’s pretty good at helping me with that. He’s on set all the time.

Like you were saying, there are some really creative ways in which the production design and props expand upon the games’ lore. It looks like a lot of the terminals in the series are modified computers from the late ‘70s and the start of the ‘80s that reflect a wider range of companies that existed in this universe. It helps make this world feel bigger and that there were competitors beyond just General Atomics and RobCo.

HC: I tried to see what they were sourcing things off of and then kind of go do that in the same direction. As I said, this story isn’t within the walls of the game. Visually, it’s the same thing, but I get to pull more stuff into it. You could probably hire me to “Fallout your apartment” or something, you know what I mean? I know how to make choices now based on all this stuff. A lot of that, we source stuff for all the decorating. It ranges from real vintage to things from Wayfair even that you can buy yourself that have this stylized bent to it. We have an approach to it all. What’s cool is that we are doing flashbacks, which there are very few of in the games. It’s usually just in the games’ intros. The flashbacks are fun, but in those we are still tweaking things to be more period correct, especially the stuff around Cooper Howard. There’s a sort of reality to his whole family and the emotion to all that stuff. So we kind of lean into it so it’s not as stylized in the retro-futuristic look. It’s a little more vintage-y. 

You definitely feel all of that, too. This show is such a celebration of practical effects, which adds such a realistic and tactile quality to this universe. Why was it important to go that extra mile and make sure that elements like the Power Armor suits were actually functional?

HC: You know, we work with one of the Nolan brothers — Jonah [Jonathan] Nolan. He’s our exec, and he also directed the pilot. He, just like Chris, wants to make things practical as much as possible. It’s always better to have this real thing that you’re working off of, even if you ultimately replace it with visual effects. So, the Power Armor was actually the first thing that I did. I had never done something like that before. So we had to take the game model, remodel it, and proportion it to a person. It wasn’t really built to be functioning as a full suit. It sort of fudged in many ways. So we had to remodel it, re-proportion it. 

We have a lot of great vendors, like Legacy — who have done like Iron Man’s suits — who helped solve a lot of problems with an armature that’s built underneath the whole thing that helps make it move. There was a lot of back and forth like that, but it was super fun. It’s the very first thing I did on Fallout. I said, “Do you know how long something like this takes?” It’s like at least 18 weeks, and then you need to rehearse with it and make it work. But that’s how we do it. Even the creatures! The Deathclaw, for instance, was a giant thing that Legacy created. We were trying to figure out the rig for its head. There’s a person there, and it’s all about the movement. Having the person moving the suit gave it a greater reality because it feels grounded. That’s why we do as much as we can practically.

Similarly, the Gulpers are one of my favorite elements of the show, and they’re so much more effective as practical effects. What was the process like for bringing them to life?

HC: They each have their own challenges. With the Gulper, it needs to eat somebody, and then later on, it throws itself up and dies. With that, we had to make the whole innards thing with a bag, which would get yanked out and all the guts and everything flies out of it. It’s fun to figure that stuff out. This last season, we had things like Radscorpions — these giant scorpions — and trying to figure them out. I thought, “Well, they should have little babies because the babies can actually jump on people.” And then determining if the babies are just as bad. That was a puppet, like a big puppet, when it came to the full-size thing. I have a scale chart that we do for the season, and it’s just hysterical because it’s just of all the creatures and things. We’re in season three right now, and everything’s getting even bigger and bigger.

So for the baby scorpions, that wasn’t something that was necessarily scripted? It was just you figuring out what made sense for these creatures?

HC: Yeah, we had talked about doing the big one, but then figured it’s even scarier if you’re getting surrounded or something by little ones. So we talked to the showrunners, the director, to figure out our environment, and then we can bring it to life. We put these duct works in this space that was kind of like a hospital. So we thought, “What if they’re in the ductwork? What if they pop out and jump on them?” There’s a lot of back and forth where I’ll pitch an idea, cross-reference it with the story, and then consider how to handle it practically. Questions over how we reveal it and when it stops holding up and looking real. Because, you know, they don’t always hold up. You’ll have to figure out ways to hide it behind something, or it’s dark, but you still try to do as much of that for real as possible. 

Walton Goggins actually had that giant thing thrown on his chest and wrestled it around and stuff. He’s really cool about that kind of stuff. I mean, he has to go through the whole makeup thing. All of that is so cool, too. We have great makeup effects people who still want the performance to shine through beneath it. You’ve got to read that line between what’s a mask and what’s real when trying to get somebody’s performance. There’s a lot of subtlety to play around with there.

The Brotherhood of Steel is another part of the show that I was just blown away when I saw for the first time. That armor is just so amazing, and there’s such detail to it all. How did you make sure that this felt like a completely different corner of the Fallout universe?

HC: That was interesting to figure out because, in the game, that’s very East Coast-based. There wasn’t a whole lot of West Coast information. There is some, but then I kind of made up some of the lore regarding what all this is. I pushed it a little bit Catholic, actually. They’re not Catholic, to be clear. The Brotherhood is not religious in any way. It’s like, it’s there. It’s military, you know. They had scripted this whole anointing sequence with Max and, to me, it just felt like incense and all that. We talked about how in the game we’re not seeing all the Brotherhood organizations, and so why don’t they each have their own thing? We’re not saying that they’re all like this. It’s just this particular group. 

Then, later on, in season two, there’s a meeting where all the different Brotherhoods are present, and they’re all into different things. Some hate women, some are run by women, but they all have their own thing. So, to me, charting those differences helped give all this more of a reality. It’s not all cookie cutter because we have the freedom to not just replicate things in a computer. We have the luxury of being able to detail things in a different way, which I think makes the story even richer. 

I love that Fallout incorporates greenscreens and state-of-the-art LED technology with real-world environments and that you actually built sets to pull a lot of this off. It makes such a difference. How did you find the right balance there? What were some of the challenges with finding the right locations, building sets, and not just relying on greenscreen?

HC: We’re working with these big, huge sets, but we also use this thing called the Volume that’s digital. We actually use as little greenscreen as we can. With the volume, you’re seeing the actors in real-time, and lighting effects — it’s all about the lighting — are working differently. It’s getting all the right reflective light, and even the Vertibirds are things that we do in the Volume. It’s really fun. We got really lucky with the Vertibird. The construction or the steel guy in the first season started out his welding career building aircraft. He got his professor from high school to help us build it because it was all pieced together with little pieces. It’s actually made of aluminum. It’s all aluminum, but it’s all hand work that’s been riveted and stuff. 

You’ve pulled off such incredible things in Fallout, but what was the biggest hurdle that you faced and overcame during production?

HC: For season two, it was definitely just trying to get the scale of the strip in Las Vegas right. In the game, it’s massive. And we really went above and beyond here. It’s truly huge. It’s like we’re actually shooting in Las Vegas. We have a mandate to do as much for real as possible. There’s an abandoned shopping mall near where I live that’s been like that for years. But, to me, that building looks a lot like Gamora. So we built all that. There was enough there that we could have just built the bottom of the building — maybe 14 feet — and then just made everything else digital. That’s not our style, though. 

I transformed this abandoned shopping mall and added giant pieces to it. All that lighting was practical, too. All that neon lighting. It’s challenging. It’s a big undertaking that takes a lot of planning. There’s a lot to do there. We model everything, find the sun direction, and things like that. I work with all the directors and cinematographers, and they’ll be like, “Okay, four o’clock is where the sun should be. ” It’s actually really strategically plotted out how to do all that. It’s only because we have such a great group of people that can pull shit like this off. It’s great, and I think that’s part of trying to achieve the scale that we need to achieve is probably the biggest hurdle. Even at the beginning of this season, I told our location person that we’re going even bigger. They’ve found us some amazing places that are truly incredible. I’ve listened to all of the people reviewing and talking about the show, so I know where people want us to push things. We all care about this show so much. 

Finally, what are some of your hopes for season three? What’s on your wish list, production-wise, besides making everything bigger?

HC: This season is bigger, yes. But it’s funny. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have more money because generally that’s not the way it works. Season one, we shot in New York, actually. Season two, we moved the show to LA, which was great. That vault set was in New York in three different stages, and we moved it to one giant stage. I got to connect the vault into one giant vault, which was really super cool. I had to start with a whole new group in LA and try to educate them on what Fallout is and how this universe works. They’ve gotten all that by now. It’s kind of about halfway through the season you could sort of see it click and everybody just instantly had the same vibe. 

So this year, because weirdly almost everybody I worked with begged to come back because of how much fun they had, I was working with a really well-educated group of people. And now I can give them even bigger tasks. We’re tackling things that we couldn’t have before. People are always going “Oh my God,” when they see these environments. It’s so much fun to come to work because it’s all just there. I’m so glad we get to continue to do all this. 

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That being said, it’s only fitting to have Ryan Murphy return to high school, the very place where his television career began, for his latest ode to excess and emptiness. In fact, The Shards operates as a bizarro counterpoint to Murphy’s first series, Popular. The stark differences – and similarities – between these two programs highlight how much Murphy has and hasn’t evolved as a storyteller and filmmaker.

The Shards is certainly having a lot of fun with its detached take on 1980s Los Angeles, but it plays like a sarcastic sizzle reel of Murphy’s past triumphs. 

Murphy’s adaptations of other people’s works can be hit or miss and are never a guarantee that he’ll rein in his signature sensationalist impulses. However, Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis working together is a pairing that makes too much sense. It’s like the peanut butter and jelly of superficial societal satire. Murphy’s opulent extremism radicalizes Easton Ellis’ minimalist and detached storytelling. The Shards is an enthusiastic fetishization of not just the pop culture and fashion of the ‘80s, but also how it was a golden era for serial killers and new societal terrors. It’s the perfect marriage of Murphy’s past extremes as shallow prep school woes like parties and dances are juxtaposed against curfews, ritualistic sacrifices, and serial killer attacks. 

The series adapts Bret Easton Ellis’ autofiction of the same name, which chronicles a fictionalized version of Ellis (Igby Rigney) in 1981 Los Angeles as he juggles his prep school duties with a growing obsession over a local serial killer, The Trawler. The arrival of a mysterious new student, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), coincides with this string of killings. A darkness descends over Los Angeles, and Bret is left to wonder if Robert Mallory and these massacres are actually connected or just a symptom of his own toxic thought process.

This all amounts to harmless entertainment if it’s not taken too seriously. It still lacks the juice of something like Euphoria or even Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin. Murphy finds himself increasingly out of touch in this world of teens. It’s enormously heightened, because of course it is, but it doesn’t feel as special in this oversaturated genre that’s naturally become so exaggerated on its own. Murphy’s trademark hyper-maximalism barely leaves an impression in a world where Riverdale and Gossip Girl are the baseline for heightened high school dramas.

Bret is at the center of a group of vapid characters who just want to survive senior year, graduate high school, and get out of Los Angeles, which makes the prospect of a serial killer a real drag. The Shards argues that kidnappings, killings, and ritualistic cults are the greatest dangers faced by children as they head into adulthood. It’s like Ryan Murphy’s own twisted version of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, only it’s covering serial killers, cults, and stalkers. A lot of tangential clout-chasing frivolity is covered as the hypnotic pull between Bret and Robert acts as the nucleus to it all. 

The Shards is consumed with the death of the ‘70s and how this marks the start of a ruthless and vicious new generation of disturbing detachment. It’s drenched in tropes, cliches, endless ‘80s needle drops, and hard bodies. It is exactly what you’d expect from a joint collaboration between Murphy and Easton Ellis. At the same time, it’s also not trying to be anything deeper. Its superficial slayings and takedowns of society are all exceedingly surface level, but it’s sure sleek and pretty. Murphy wants the audience to get lost in the hollow hyper-sexuality. That’s the point. It just doesn’t touch on anything that hasn’t been done many times before, and better, including in Murphy’s own productions. There’s even a hamfisted riff on Shakespeare – specifically Hamlet – that argues that ultra-trashy camp is the new classic lit and theater.

The serial killer sequences with the Trawler, while genuinely disturbing, are similarly sapped of life. You know something is amiss in a Ryan Murphy production when gratuitous murder setpieces aren’t even properly crossing lines and generating enthusiasm. In the end, it’s The Shards’ moody score by Troye Sivan and Leland, alongside unhinged performances by Evan Rachel Wood, Jordan Roth, and Wes Bentley, that stand out as highlights. Bentley in particular chews – and snorts – the scenery. 

The Shards is content to languish among its flashy hedonism, the likes of which don’t even have the decency to provide its audience with closure or answers. These episodes feel like a piece of a greater whole that will inevitably become even more pointless if The Shards gets canceled or prematurely ends. This has increasingly become Murphy’s style with his latest horror programs. It doesn’t do The Shards any favors and only highlights the season’s narrative problems and how little gets accomplished across these nine episodes. A flashy finish that’s full of answers, but also sets up new terrors, would help The Shards feel more essential and complete. As it stands, it struggles to even reach the middling heights of Grotesquerie and The Beauty, and certainly has much less to say. 

The Shards is set in an empty world where adaptations have greater value than stories. It bombards the audience with fabricated boogeymen like The Trawler and the Riders of the Afterlife cult. It’s a series that’s full of derivative imitations of better and more iconic ideas. In a way, that’s exactly what The Shards is like. It’s a slap-dash amalgamation of what’s worked for Ryan Murphy in the past, without bringing anything new to the table. 

Self-aware meta commentary on ambivalence and diminishing returns aside, this doesn’t change the fact that The Shards is still guilty of the same things that it pokes fun at. It’s a fading Xerox of a once-interesting idea that struggles to stand out. There are fleeting moments of brilliance, like in most Murphy programs, but there’s not enough to cling to here once the shock factor and eye candy wear out their welcome. 

The Shards premiere on FX and Hulu on August 5 at 6 p.m. PT.

The post ‘The Shards’ Review: A Shallow Mix Of Sex, Sensationalism & Serial Killers appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Between Children of the Corn, Village of the Damned, Them, and most recently, Weapons, there’s a great deal of variety when it comes to creepy children fare. It’s a fun, frightening premise when it’s done properly and in the right hands, which is why Eli Roth is the right fit for this sort of exploitation horror. Roth has the proper background and genre passion to make this type of adolescent evil extravaganza excel, while also breathing fresh life into it at the same time. Ice Cream Man is a killer kid horror film that helps the subgenre mature into something more layered. 

The setup is incredibly simple: a mysterious ice cream man’s signature product turns the youth of Bayleen Bay into murderous minions. However, Ice Cream Man also provides a deeper look into the perversion of safety and what happens when Capra-esque institutions of purity become the very things that taint innocence. It’s a blood-soaked epic with zero filter that still manages to reflect upon coming-of-age catharsis, the destruction of the American family, and youth’s destiny to swallow their previous generation whole. It’s also, without question, the most gruesome film of Eli Roth’s career and easily the summer’s most brutal horror movie. Forget lactose intolerant. Ice Cream Man is elegance and sophistication intolerant.

Ice Cream Man, right from the start, preaches this gloomy idea of what happens when innocence and old-fashioned values are horrifically perverted once a toxic force of nature infects everything. It begins with an Amblin outlook on life and is knee-deep in splattercore by the time the end credits roll. There’s a wry tone that’s often dropping in disdain for zoomers and today’s current youth, which helps give the ensuing chaos a little extra bite.

Regarding said chaos, it takes Ice Cream Man a little too long to get moving. The first 15 minutes are a bit of a slog and had me worried. However, once Ice Cream Man goes wild, it’s off to the races and the rest of the movie is a propulsive burst of non-stop carnage.

In many ways, Roth turns Ice Cream Man into a macabre, modern reimagining of the Pied Piper parable. There’s even an alluring sing-song quality to Ice Cream Man’s murderous manipulation that’s very Silver Shamrock-coded from Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

Ice Cream Man features a threadbare plot, but honestly, story is largely irrelevant in a film like this, and it’s really just a conduit to kickstart the kills. What follows is basically a more gratuitous grindhouse version of Weapons, only the kids are turned into murderous monsters through tainted ice cream instead of some cryptic witch magic. The ice cream truck’s innocent jingle works as the trigger that awakens these sleeper agents and sets them loose.

Amidst this mayhem, a handful of unaffected kids come together, like a middle school Breakfast Club, as they attempt to survive — and solve — these troubling events. Some of Ice Cream Man’s child actors initially leave a little to be desired. They quickly find a rhythm and fall into naturalistic performances that ring true. None of this cast may emerge as one of horror’s next rising stars, but they get the job done and keep the film moving along. Ice Cream Man taps into the same heightened, B-movie energy that’s explored in Thanksgiving, which helps make these generic performances feel a little less awkward.

Ice Cream Man’s kids become much more compelling once they’re “activated” and go mad, rather than the restrained work they’re doing earlier. Ari Millen provides a distinctly creepy performance as the titular Ice Cream Man without saying a single word. The film makes the simple but inspired decision to have its children still be capable of conversations and seemingly act normal so that they can trick their parents into a false sense of security before they strike. They’re not always in murder mode, which is a much more interesting angle than these kids just being uncontrollable “rage zombies.”

Credit where it’s due, Ice Cream Man is a triumph in terms of its gore and practical effects. Those who are just looking for explicit and exaggerated kills in the same vein as Terrifier won’t be disappointed. There’s a lot to appreciate here even if many of the more muted moments fall flat. These exaggerated executions are more than enough to make Ice Cream Man a worthy standout in Roth’s filmography and one of the summer’s more satisfying horror films.

Eli Roth has described Ice Cream Man as his most insane and goriest film to date, and the film actually follows through on this promise and manages to top the vicious heights of The Green Inferno and Hostel II. There are 100 murderous, blood-soaked kids who are on the loose here and some exceptionally gory setpieces, including kids playing jump rope and Cat’s Cradle with intestines, plus a litany of incredibly creative kills that utilize school-based items in thoroughly deranged ways. 

Ice Cream Man just moves from one darkly hilarious and vicious setpiece to the next, with each one better than the last. This also isn’t a situation where it’s just kids that attack and wreak havoc on the adults. There’s plenty of child murder going on here. Ice Cream Man doesn’t hold back when it comes to a hefty body count of young boys and girls. There’s a simple but effective backstory for the ice cream man and his corresponding chaos that turns him into a bit of a Freddy Krueger-esque totem of vengeance. To this point, Ice Cream Man builds to a surprising and ambitious final act that seems tailor-made for a sequel and extends this gruesome gonzo massacre into a full-on franchise. 

Ice Cream Man is one of the summer’s bloodiest surprises. What it lacks in story, it more than delivers in gore, and Eli Roth fans won’t be let down. It’s a love letter to the ultra-violent B-movies of the past that delivers blood, guts, and grief with a cherry on top.

Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.

The post ‘Ice Cream Man’ Review: Eli Roth Serves Up Non-Stop Kidpocalypse of Carnage appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Spirits, serial killers, and gruesome grimoires put Widow’s Bay’s standing as a premier tourist town in jeopardy. The series has resonated with audiences through its exceptional writing, directing, and acting. However, its painstaking production design is the true secret weapon that’s helped Widow’s Bay become an instant hit and pop culture sensation that’s positioned to be the big winner at this year’s Emmy Awards.

To celebrate the series’ Production Design Emmy nomination, among many others, Production Designer Steve Arnold breaks down how he achieved the community’s timeless, creepy quality, drawing subtle production design cues from Jaws and The Shining, the obscure Easter Eggs that fans are still discovering, and his hopes of more period piece episodes in season two.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: Widow’s Bay is a contemporary series, but it feels removed in time in many respects due to the remoteness of the island. It’s almost like it’s a few decades behind, with things like the rotary phones and older TV sets. Talk a little on achieving that dynamic and figuring out what belongs and what doesn’t in this world.

STEVE ARNOLD: Some of it was driven by the script. Many things were pretty well indicated in the script. This is a situation where it’s so remote that people hang on to things for much longer than you would ordinarily, in most cases. These people don’t always have the latest and greatest things. It seems like if technology is not really up to date there, then maybe people have given up on trying some of those things and they’ve just managed to get by with less. It’s kind of an analog for the world, in many ways. A lot of those things are part of the set dressing. Some of the broader strokes, like the interior of the town hall, I wanted it to kind of seem like it was maybe an older building from the 1800s. Maybe they upgraded in the ’50s, but they haven’t done much to it since then, so the paint and paneling are very dated and out of a time that’s no longer contemporary even though it’s set in a contemporary time period. So elements like that help push that feeling a little bit.

Also, when you’re in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and some of those places, there’s a lot of hanging onto the old. There are many old structures, houses, and things like that, which are rare on the West Coast. They get knocked down after they’ve only been standing for a few years. In those places, they kind of cherish that history that is inherent in a place that was settled much earlier. We’re talking about an island that was settled at the turn of the 1600s to 1700s. This dated and not-contemporary look for the buildings and various structures just made a lot of sense.

What were some of the difficulties in finding the right locations to shoot in or to use for exteriors? They all still feel so connected and at peace with each other, but I imagine you’re pulling from all sorts of different places.

SA: Yeah, we had some very good locations people. We actually started out looking for a coastal village much farther north, but then decided to try to find something a little bit closer. We went to Rockport to do a bunch of the exterior stuff, but one of the most difficult challenges we faced was with the Breakwater Inn. It had to be kind of rundown and a little derelict, but it was written as a Victorian building. Everyone wanted to find the perfect building that had the perfect exterior and the perfect interior that worked wonderfully for the show. It didn’t happen.

I knew we were going to be building the Captain’s Suite. That whole corridor, the parlor, the lobby, and all that stuff was so specific about what it needed to do. We looked at all kinds of things back there, but we couldn’t find the right exterior. I knew we were building the interior. We couldn’t find the exterior. The director of photography was renting an apartment nearby in this small town and drove by the building that we ended up using for the exterior. We changed the front porch and the entry door and all of that for the action that we needed, and it worked out really well. Then, in post, I wanted them to add this little tower piece that’s on the top that we kind of borrowed from the house in Psycho, which has the same mansard roof element at the top. I think the shot looked really great the way they did it. 

That’s so interesting about the Psycho connection because I also noticed matching set design elements from Jaws and The Shining, some of which are so subtle and obscure. How did you determine when it made sense to include these fun visual nods and when it was more appropriate to do something else?

SA: We tried not to hit the audience over the head with it too hard, but we had a lot of fun just pulling things from classics. I was watching Jaws, and there’s a conference room space in its town hall that has these little framed letters or something on the walls, which are otherwise very vacant. So we copied things like that. There’s a shot in Jaws where Roy Schneider is walking down the town hall’s hallway, and he hits his head on one of these low-hanging little signs. So we copied that, dead-on. You know, we took screengrabs from Jaws and matched all these little bits and pieces.

The drapery in the Loftis’ kitchen matches the fabric from Roy Schneider’s house in Jaws that’s hanging over the table, too. The kitchen is really a pretty close match to stuff from Jaws. When I was reading the first couple of scripts and read about the Breakwater Inn, I just immediately saw elements from The Shining. We were maybe going to try to do that iconic carpet, with the geometric pattern. It’s very, very graphic. However, it just didn’t fit in with what we were doing with the whole Victorian look. So we kind of moved away from that, but there’s the scene in the Captain’s Suite bathroom where Tom goes and listens to the countdown on New Year’s Eve; that’s directly from The Shining. Katie [Dippold] had written that specifically as something that should match, so we had a lot of fun with all those things.

There is such meticulous detail going on in Widow’s Bay between the “Teeth” and “Daddy’s Home” board games, Patricia’s grimoire, and all the newspaper clippings and ephemera at the Historical Society. How do you determine the right balance between making these things feel unsettling and haunted, but still realistic and rooted in reality?

SA: We were lucky to have a brilliant graphic designer working with us who I’ve known and worked with for more than 25 years. With the games, they were delineated fairly clearly from the script, so we handed it off to the graphic designer, and she came up with a bunch of versions. I remember them. We had all kinds of versions for “Teeth.” I think that’s a visual joke that landed really well when this playfully fun character is the setup for this pair of rusty pliers.

With the board game that they play, we went through a bunch of different versions of that. The little pieces that move, if you look carefully, you’ll see that there’s a bat, a belt, a rolled-up newspaper. These are all elements of, you know, “Daddy’s mad and he’s going to take it out on somebody!” Those were little subtle things that maybe not everybody catches. The newspaper articles are interesting. The cannibalism in the church piece went through I don’t know how many versions before we finally came up with one that everybody was satisfied with. We made it much bigger so that you really get the impact of it. All the other elements in the Historical Society, like the graphics of the priest being eaten by a whale or whatever, were things that we were able to find in historical documents that were copyright free, we could get the rights to them, or we modified them enough so that they weren’t a legal problem.

That’s so interesting too, because that’s the show in a nutshell, right? It’s mixing these fabricated elements with things from reality that are still very dark. You feel that overlap, and it’s really well done.

SA: The one thing you might not notice unless you’re really paying attention is that when Tom is talking to the reporter, and they’re talking about cannibalism, if you look over the reporter’s shoulder, there’s a mannequin in a straitjacket. So, you know, just twisted things in the background like that. This was the kind of thing that Katie and Hiro [Murai] were both pushing for. They wanted to get these really graphic images in there.

The flashback episode to 1702 was a standout episode from this season that got a really positive response from fans. What were the joys and difficulties of getting to play in an entirely different century, and are you hoping for more of that kind of thing in season two?

SA: I love doing period stuff. I live for it. So I’m really, really happy with that material. We looked and looked and looked for the exterior of Richard Warren’s house, and luckily we found a fantastic house from the 1600s. It’s a real house. They took it all apart and moved it there, sometime in the ’80s. You may not be able to tell in the episode, but there’s a whole other house behind that house that’s also from roughly the same time period. People live in that house. They had told us previously they had an old house from the 1800s, but they really felt that that wasn’t old enough for them. They wanted something even older. Once we got in there, we were able to document what was there, how it was gone, how it was built, how the stairway went, and all those things. Little details like the trim around the doors and all that stuff. We were able to lift all of that stuff from an actual early colonial house, and so that was fantastic.

I love that the costuming also strongly reinforces the community’s eerie energy. Everything has this lived-in and foreboding aesthetic that’s conveyed, even by ordinary costumes that aren’t necessarily meant to be creepy. How was that accomplished?

SA: So we had a fantastic costume designer, Alex [Bovaird]. She’s British and had done a lot of research on what the real colonial people wore because a lot of it has been bastardized. When you see it in various shows, it’s not really right. So she was very, very particular about making sure that if this guy was from this particular year, then he would display these kinds of things, this kind of hat, this kind of shoe, waistcoat, whatever. She really got into it!

All that applies to Widow’s Bay’s contemporary timeline, too. Some of the stuff that Patricia is wearing, for instance, has an eeriness to it even when it’s just technically regular clothes.

SA: If you look at it really closely, you will see that Shelley Duvall from The Shining is in a lot of the stuff that Patricia wears. There’s a connection there with the styling. The wardrobes aren’t dead-on copies, but it’s the same style, the same feel, and everything else. When you watch her, and then you watch Shelley Duvall in The Shining, it’s just eerie, and you see that there’s a kind of connectivity there.

Speaking of Patricia, one of my favorite things from the season is everything between Patricia and the Boogeyman. The Boogeyman has such the perfect look that’s both familiar and feels ripped out of a slasher movie, but still different and original. How was that design figured out, and was anything else considered?

SA: We went through many, many versions. They had many, many different versions and props. Morgan [Kling], our props master, had various sculpts made of all these different kinds of slasher faces. We went round and round before we finally narrowed it down. It took quite a while to come up with that final slasher boogeyman face.

This show is absolutely filled with production design Easter Eggs that fans are still continuing to discover. Do you have a favorite and are there any that seem to have gone undetected so far?

SA: There’s a lot of things. I mean, it’s quite amazing what we were able to cram in there. When I got the job, I was in Los Angeles, and I knew I was going to go to Massachusetts to shoot it. We were already thinking about things that we were going to need, like graphic artwork on the walls and things like that. I knew we needed a map of the island, and I had the first three scripts and outlines for the rest of the show, basically. There’s a scene in Episode 5 where Tom’s on mushrooms and all that. There had been a bit in there where he’s drawing around his hand, like the hand drawing that the shaman shows him. You know, it’s the whole “kid’s turkey drawings” where you put your hand on a piece of paper and draw around it. 

So, I thought, I need a shape for the island. I drew around my hand, and I made it sort of very jagged and primitive and rough. So the island shape, when you see the maps, the brochure, the satellite imagery, and all the other graphics that have that in it, that hand drawing is my original hand drawing that I gave to the graphic designer. From that, we figured out where the town would be on the hand and all those other things. But beyond all that, this hand or this island has a grip on people. They can’t escape. They’re caught. They’re being held sort of against their will, in a way. That whole hand subtleness, I think, is an interesting connection. 

This is a show where there are just so many cyclical callbacks and ideas that echo through generations. The fact that the map is a hand and Tom is going through that same process with his own hand, on its own, is a really cool thematic connection. 

SA: And I was surprised at how many people, as you said, are taking screengrabs and figuring all this stuff out. People actually noticed this and called it out! They were like, “It’s a hand!” I thought it was pretty abstract and unrecognizable, but they still got it!

You’re going to have to trace your foot next season or something! Lastly, what’s on your wishlist for season two? What would you like to see or do more of next year?

SA: We built 25 sets, at least, on stage. I love building scenery. I love designing and building real things. So any new ideas that they come up with there would be great. Again, I love period stuff. If we can do some more things from the 1700s, or whenever, that would be a dream.

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Batman: Caped Crusader’s first season was an artistic masterstroke, albeit one that left some general audiences wanting more. Season two is a satisfying extension of its predecessor that also fills in some of its gaps and does even more with the series’ mission statement. It’s a soothing blend of Saturday Morning Cartoon nostalgia and hard-hitting supernatural detective noir that feels very much in line with Matt Reeves’ recent take on Gotham and Batman.

This season fully embraces the overall theme of duality and how not to let one side overpower the other. This may seem a little on-the-nose for a superhero series, let alone a take on Batman, but it fits well with the retro 1940s alternate Gotham City that’s been meticulously cultivated. Additionally, this season repeatedly explores codependency and the ability to put trust in others, whether it’s Nygma’s bond with Thorne, Bullock’s partnership with Flass, Renee’s ties with Barbara, or Bruce Wayne’s camaraderie with Alfred or even Carrie Kelley.

There’s also a lot to unpack on the subject of belief and faith, which informs this season’s storytelling in creative ways that also chip away at Batman – and Gotham’s – image. It’s one big sprawling crime saga in a hyper-stylized noir world where nobody is beyond betrayal or corruption if the price is right. This feeds into the season’s grander storyline where Rupert Thorne’s trial provides a strong introduction to this universe’s Eddie Nygma (Ronan Raftery). Thorne and Nygma are the season’s central antagonists as the latter takes advantage of the massive power vacuum that’s opened up after Thorne’s incarceration.

Batman: Caped Crusader has plenty to say about its heightened, masquerading criminals, but at the core of all this is Gotham’s internal corruption, and if it’s reached a point in which it’s too far gone to be saved, who is responsible for its desolation, and the people who want to take advantage of this vulnerability and own the city. Gotham, and its festering nature, becomes the true main character of Batman: Caped Crusader. Its ability for redemption or the possibility that it sinks deeper into the abyss are integral to each of these ten episodes.

This season adopts a propaganda angle that’s critical of the GCPD and Batman that feels particularly appropriate and timely. There’s a vilification of Batman and a compulsion to turn him into a dangerous vigilante who is feared, rather than the antidote to Gotham’s crime. It’s a take that’s been presented plenty of times before, but in this case there’s a sliver of truth to this budding Batman’s early crime-fighting efforts that helps it hit harder and connect. This also leads to one of the season’s strongest and most disturbing episodes in which Mad Monk (Blythe Melin) leads a team of Batman impostor acolytes who are determined to further tarnish the Dark Knight’s name.

These episodes are also having so much fun with the obscure corners of Batman history that it’s pulling from. There’s a great Matches Malone undercover episode where Bruce Wayne has to infiltrate a prison as an inmate in order to get intel. After the first season provided creative takes on many of Batman’s more noteworthy rogues, season two has the freedom to dig into considerably more fringe figures, such as Barbatos the Bat-God and Roxanne “Roxy Rockey” Sutton, a Bruce Timm and Paul Dini deep cut from 1994’s The Batman Adventures comics and The New Batman Adventures.

This season uniquely tackles Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, and Calendar Man. There’s also an extremely chilling version of the Joker whose presence heavily looms over the season’s events. Matthew Needham gives such an unusual interpretation of the Clown Prince of Crime that’s borderline Shakespearean. It’s a really effective restrained subversion rather than some of the Joker’s broader and more jovially unhinged renditions. It feels more like Moriarty’s dynamic with Sherlock Holmes, if anything.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Batman: Caped Crusader absolutely excels with its animation, art design – the lighting and shadows in particular – and the 1940s Art Deco aesthetic that permeates through every frame. Each episode features sublime action sequences, many of which showcase a shocking degree of vicious brutality and a hefty body count. This includes one of the most gruesome Christmas fatalities this side of Batman Returns.

Batman: Caped Crusader features some incredibly moving, thought-provoking storytelling that’s on par with some of the most memorable episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. In some ways, Batman: Caped Crusader is even better than its ‘90s counterpart because it’s been allowed to ground itself in time and grow up. Batman is one of DC’s most popular and reimagined characters, with even more iterations on the way.

Batman: Caped Crusader still makes a strong impression and shines brightly – like the Bat Signal on a dark night – to give fans hope and let them know that they’re in safe hands. This hopefully isn’t the end of Batman: Caped Crusader, but if it is, then it can rest easy knowing that it’s created such a special, passionate love letter to this iconic character.

Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 premieres on Prime Video on July 31.

The post ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ Review: Season Two Daringly Deconstructs the Dark Knight & Gotham appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.

His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.

To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?

ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.

There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down? 

ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.

Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”

Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.

On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?

ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.

Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.

It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.

The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.

I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?

ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?

Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.

But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”

That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.

Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.

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Englund has a long and storied career as a performer that’s covered far more than horror alone. However, there’s such a sublime, sinister synergy between Englund and this heightened genre that’s made him one of horror’s most revered names.

Englund is set to scare audiences again as a malevolent reimagining of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio Unstrung, but he’s also been responsible for many more macabre monsters.

The Cricket (Pinocchio Unstrung)

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has somehow spun a morbid experiment in public domain exploitation into its own cinematic universe, the Twisted Childhood Universe. There’s been increasing promise in the TCU’s various films, which has also led to a growing list of capable horror guest stars, such as Roger L. Jackson, Richard Brake, and now Robert Englund. Englund is by far the most impressive name to attach himself to one of these movies, and Pinocchio Unstrung certainly doesn’t squander the opportunity to have him on board as its terrifying take on Jiminy Cricket. Englund’s performance as “The Cricket” in Pinocchio Unstrung becomes a sinister subversion of the classic character who is meant to function as Pinocchio’s conscience and moral compass. 

Englund’s Cricket is instead the ultimate instigator who perpetually pushes Pinocchio into greater violence that condemns humanity and its many misgivings, rather than idolizing all the “real boys” in the world. Pinocchio Unstrung is a love letter to practical effects and old-fashioned animatronics and puppetry. This means that Englund just provides the voice for Cricket, but it’s still a deeply sinister performance and one of the most unnerving characters to appear in the Twisted Childhood Universe. Once again, Englund is careful not to just repurpose his Freddy Krueger persona, and he instead develops an original voice that plays into past renditions of the character. There’s a palpable rage and disdain in Englund’s Cricket that turns him into a threatening loose cannon and makes the audience forget that he’s only a few inches tall.

The Phantom of the Opera (The Phantom of the Opera)

The Phantom of the Opera is a foundational horror story that’s still being explored over a century later. 1989’s cinematic adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 classic doesn’t always get the respect that it deserves, despite it containing one of Englund’s most nuanced horror performances. Directed by Dwight H. Little, who previously helmed the underrated Halloween 4, The Phantom of the Opera operates as a gorier take on Leroux’s source material that feels like a lost Hammer Film picture. The titular Phantom is the perfect role for Englund following A Nightmare on Elm Street, and his participation in the picture was initiated by Englund promising his agent that he’d do another horror project after Elm Street’s success.

Englund was excited to tackle an iconic character who had previously been portrayed by formative horror legends like Herbert Lom, Claude Rains, and Lon Chaney. Englund beautifully fits the mold and is sublime casting for this ‘80s take on the character. Englund taps into a powerful dichotomy between the Phantom’s brutal and tragically sympathetic nature. It’s a role that’s significantly deeper than Freddy Krueger and better explores Englund’s range as an actor, which helps get him away from cheesy one-liners. It also doesn’t hurt that Little concocts a uniquely twisted take on the Phantom’s disfigurement, which was achieved by sewing human skin onto Englund’s face. The modern-day sequences that bookend the film were meant to tie into a planned sequel, The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan, which unfortunately never came to fruition.

Victor Creel (Stranger Things)

Love it or hate it, Stranger Things assembled some impressive guest stars that took advantage of their respective legacies as ‘80s genre legends, such as Linda Hamilton, Matthew Modine, Cary Elwes, and Robert Englund. Englund’s turn as Victor Creel in the streaming hit’s fourth season is one of the series’ best performances and a role that rises above the mediocrity around it. Victor Creel is an opportunity for Englund to actually subvert expectations and play against type. It’s brilliant casting that initially conditions the audience to be wary of Creel and view him as a frightening threat. This perception is reinforced when Creel is encountered in a psychiatric ward and horrifically blinded. 

Creel’s disturbing eye-gouged appearance is revealed to actually be a symptom of his tragic life and the psychological torment he received from Vecna. Creel is hard to look at, but there’s nothing to fear about him. He’s led a sad life that’s filled with inescapable guilt. He’s more like one of Freddy Krueger’s victims than Freddy himself. Englund goes above and beyond as Victor Creel, and the emotional monologues that he delivers are among some of the actor’s best work and proof that Englund’s still got it.

Marquis de Sade (Night Terrors)

Tobe Hooper’s Night Terrors is a particularly forgettable ’90s horror film that faced a litany of production problems and changes that certainly didn’t do it any favors. The story is a mess, even for a Cannon Video production, but it provides the novelty of Englund pulling double duty as the cruel Marquis de Sade and his modern day descendant, Paul Chevalier. Night Terrors banked on the novelty of Hooper directing Englund as one of history’s greatest monsters, and his performance is easily the best thing about this movie.

There’s an unabashed glee to Englund’s work as the Marquis de Sade that’s reminiscent of Freddy Krueger’s twisted jubilation over his creative murders, yet it doesn’t just feel like a carbon copy of Englund’s iconic role. There’s an appreciated degree of restraint going on before the film goes off the rails and incorporates supernatural elements and abstract dream sequences. Chevalier and his modern cult worship the Marquis de Sade as a deity of torture and liberation.  The nightmare sequences that involve the Marquis de Sade are the most chilling and make this figure look as frightening on the outside as he is on the inside. There’s enough to latch onto here, even if the film as a whole is a mess, and Englund doesn’t squander the opportunity to play two sides of the same creepy coin.

Scarecrow (Injustice 2)

Robert Englund is no stranger to voiceover work, and he’s voiced his share of macabre and memorable characters over the years. That being said, one of his most inspired roles is the work that he did in NetherRealm’s dark DC Comics-based fighter, Injustice 2, where he plays Jonathan Crane, better known as the Scarecrow. There’s a certain tongue-in-cheek brilliance to having Englund voicing the Batman rogue who is the self-appointed “Master of Fear.” There’s certainly a meta quality to Englund’s casting here, right down to how some of his dialogue explicitly references Freddy Krueger one-liners like “Welcome to your nightmare” and “Now I’m playing with power.”

Englund doesn’t just phone in this performance or replicate his work as Freddy. The actor cultivates a unique voice for Scarecrow that cuts to the core of this character in a menacing manner. Englund’s Scarecrow is raspy, erratic, and honestly one of the better takes on Dr. Crane. It makes one wonder what he’d be able to accomplish if he were playing the part in live-action. He takes a simple role and breathes fresh life into it. Curiously, it’s not his first time playing a Batman villain. He does comparably interesting work as The Riddler in The Batman and the more obscure sorcerer, Felix Faust, in Justice League.

Evil Bloodthirsty Brian (The Hughleys)

There’s a surprising relationship between horror icons and sitcoms, with Robert Englund being no stranger to adding a devious dose of terror to a farcical comedy. Englund shows up as a playful take on Lucifer in Married…with Children, but he also provides a genuinely chilling performance in the first season of The Hughleys. Season one’s “Storm O’ the Century” is centered around the Hughleys and Rogerses getting stranded at a seemingly haunted hotel during an intense blizzard.

“Storm O’ the Century” functions as a proper love letter to horror fans, with genre guest stars that include The Addams Family’s John Astin, The Shining’s Shelley Duvall, and Robert Englund as the comically-named Evil Bloodthirsty Brian. The episode certainly prioritizes its comedy, but it manages to also be legitimately creepy thanks to a locked-in performance by Englund. He’s used sparingly, but always to punctuate a particular scene and function as a jump scare. Evil Bloodthirsty Brian sports a ghastly scar and has a look that’s just frightening enough to be included on a ’90s sitcom. Anyone who is curious about Englund’s performance can check it out for free on Tubi.

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Its message is still evergreen, and the reason that two separate big-budget Pinocchio films by auteur directors were released in 2022. And yet, it’s a story that also has creepy enough bones to fuel a really potent horror film when properly executed (please watch Pinocchio’s Revenge if you’ve never seen that piece of dark, gonzo filmmaking before).

The Twisted Childhood Universe – or TCU, if we must call it this – has largely been more hits than misses. That being said, Pinocchio Unstrung isn’t just a surprisingly entertaining horror film, but it’s a genuine love letter to practical effects and old-fashioned animatronics instead of being some cheap CG slog. Rhys Frake-Wakefield has crafted a disturbing reimagining of Pinocchio that doesn’t get its strings tied up in knots.

In Pinocchio Unstrung, James (Cameron Bell) loses his mother and best friend, so he’s sent to live with his grandfather Geppetto (Richard Brake, 3 From Hell), who seems detached and isn’t necessarily the best role model for this grieving boy. There’s actually a fairly interesting idea here by having both Pinocchio (Jude Evan Lloyd) and a real boy living with Geppetto, while Pinocchio forms a frightening attachment towards James.

Geppetto built Pinocchio for James so he can have a friend, rather than it being a creation to heal his own sadness and loneliness. This heads into even more tragic territory for this vulnerable boy that feels like something that’s more akin to The Boy, Child’s Play, or even the later Puppet Master sequels, rather than Pinocchio. This Pinocchio wants more than to just be a real boy. He wants to be James’ “best mate” and a real friend, which is achieved by killing the various people who have wronged him in life and gotten in James’ way.

Going against Geppetto’s wishes, James brings Pinocchio to school and chaotic carnage ensues as the student body – particularly James’ bullies – become casualties in this macabre learning experience. The messaging is very heavy-handed, which is not unexpected for a film of this nature, especially one that’s pulling from such a moralistic fairy tale in the first place that’s designed to teach lessons.

To the film’s credit, there are some genuinely creepy and unnerving scenes during the film’s first act when Pinocchio bonds with James and demonstrates a fascination with his anatomy and how they’re different. Pinocchio also acquires a checklist of body parts, skin, teeth, hair, eyes, and items to become a real boy. This, while formulaic, is the right style of creepy for this film. It provides a clear focus and trajectory for what’s to come, but also facilitates a lot of gruesome gore.

There are actually some decent gore effects that are well-executed, even if some of them have weak and unearned setups. Obviously, a film like this is trying to be tongue-in-cheek and doesn’t strive to be taken as high art, but it could work a little harder to build to its gory setpieces instead of just throwing them out there and making it seem like it doesn’t care about anything else. A second pass could have helped refine a lot of these elements and turned this into something truly great, rather than operating like a clunky series of poorly written scenes that are designed to string together exaggerated deaths.

These vicious kills are very Terrifier–coded and, on their own, aren’t bad and should please the gorehounds in the audience. There’s an inspired “nose kill” that Pinocchio Unstrung holds off on, but is worth the wait. Pinocchio Unstrung is arguably the goriest of the TCU films, which is a step in the right direction, even if other elements are lacking. In the end, there’s effort here, and director Frake-Waterfield is genuinely trying, even if some of his instincts are misguided or need to be sharpened. For instance, there’s a running throughline where Pinocchio wishes that he had had a penis.

Robert Englund delivers a committed and satisfying performance as Cricket, Pinocchio’s de facto conscience. However, Frake-Wakefield also includes a ridiculous “Wood Mother” concept, which is another wooden abomination who is there to get in Pinocchio’s head. The Wood Mother is presumably meant to be a Blue Fairy analogue, but she just feels extraneous and an excuse to show off more animatronics. Somehow all this leads into a story about rebirth and immortality as the film broadens its scope, which doesn’t always work in its favor. There are plenty of ideas here that are interesting, but ultimately half-baked.

When it comes to Pinocchio himself, the titular puppet’s design initially feels a little lacking, albeit still creepy. Fortunately, it actively improves throughout the film as Pinocchio builds upon his anatomy and “becomes” more human. It also doesn’t hurt that Jude Evan Lloyd is actually a competent actor and a worthy foil for Pinocchio.

Most importantly, it looks like a real movie and features some compelling lighting, which is more than what some of the earlier Twisted Childhood Universe films can claim.

To this point, Pinocchio Unstrung proudly boasts that the film is all done with practical effects and puppetry, which makes such a difference. There’d be no point in even making this movie if it didn’t commit to this practical authenticity. It’s not just a better movie because of this, but it reflects a respect and passion for the craft that’s lacking in other TCU entries. It’d be very easy to cut corners here, and so it’s appreciated that it puts in the effort and goes the extra mile. There’s also a really effective shadow puppetry introduction that’s reminiscent of 2021’s Candyman and a great way to kick off the movie.

Pinocchio Unstrung gradually finds its rhythm and confidence as it goes on, just like a young boy who is figuring out his way in the world. It develops a genuine personality by its end, and there are some weird, unique scenes that really unexpectedly go off the rails and transcend anything from the other TCU films. The place that the film ends is legitimately shocking and feels completely different than the type of movie that’s initially teased. This sort of radical pivot is worth it and turns Pinocchio Unstrung into something weird and wonderful, even if a lot of it still doesn’t work. It deserves credit for taking such big swings, even when they’re unsuccessful.

Those who were left empty from Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and its various offshoots may be pleasantly surprised by this. It actually manages to say something about identity, morality, autonomy, and rising above the expectations that are placed on us, which seems like an insane thing to say for a film like this. It’s a morbid, mindless way to spend 80 minutes.

By the end of this experience, Pinocchio Unstrung transforms from a wooden concept into a real horror film.

Pinocchio Unstrung releases in theaters on July 24, 2026.

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However, it’s still largely a slasher franchise that actually has something to say. Mileage varies regarding the Scream sequels’ reception, but 2011’s Scream 4 — Wes Craven’s final film — is right up there with Scream 2 as far as I’m concerned. Arriving a decade after Scream 3, Scream 4 has plenty of new material to pull from and sinks its claws into the whole horror remake craze that was ramping up during the 2000s. 

Not only does this give Scream 4 more to do than its predecessor, but the film’s grander message about destructive clout chasing and gaining fame through infamy in a social media-obsessed age is wildly ahead of its time. It’s a motivation that rings even truer 15 years later and a sequel that’s only gotten better in the context of the following decades of horror and the subsequent Scream films that have followed in its wake.

Scream 4 is available in Ultra HD 4K for the first time in a Lionsgate Limited 4K Steelbook, a Standard 4K Edition, and even a VHS release. It’s the perfect way to celebrate the franchise’s black sheep sequel before your next franchise binge. 

How Does Scream 4 Look in 4K?

The big reason to pick up this new set is that it’s the first time that Scream 4 has been available in 4K. The film is presented in Dolby Vision, 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and compressed as HEVC (H.265). From what I understand, Scream 4 was finished on a 2K digital intermediate and that a native 4K master was never created. This indicates that this 4K release is an upscale, but it’s well-handled, if that’s in fact the case.

There’s a clear difference in the crispness and details of this new version in comparison to 2011’s Blu-Ray. The colors, reds in particular, pop much better and there’s a greater sense of contrast and depth when dealing with darker tones and blacks. To this point, Scream 4 is a film that’s full of scenes that take place at night and in dark rooms. It’s crucial that the 4K’s black levels aren’t compromised and this transfer doesn’t disappoint. This is definitely the best way to see Scream 4 at this point.

One of the biggest sticking points with Scream 4 fans is the “vaseline filter” that gives the film a bright and hazy soft-focus effect. Some people absolutely hate this effect and were hoping that it would be removed in the 4K. The filter does in fact remain, but this look was always intentional on Craven’s part and an additional meta touch on the glossier look of the decade’s many horror remakes. It wouldn’t be right to remove this filter, yet, an alternate option on the disc that’s without the glossy look – or the ability to toggle it on or off – might have been a welcome alternative.

Audio Gets a Surprise Bonus Inclusion

Lionsgate Limited’s new 4K release also features Dolby Atmos, which rises to the occasion and provides solid audio design throughout the movie. There are no struggles between the broader surround sounds and the more precise and directional effects, the latter of which are boosted so that the simplest of sound effects cut right through a scene. There’s a lot more going on in the background of scenes that are evident in the mix’s rear channels, too.

It’s definitely an audio mix where you’re going to potentially notice new elements that you’ve never noticed before. Speaking of surprises, a bonus inclusion is an additional English 5.1 TrueHD audio track, which is the infamous “UK Version.” While largely the same, this audio track features a few line changes that were dubbed over in ADR and worth checking out for hardocre fans.

Scream 4 4K Release Comes Loaded with Features New and Old

Lionsgate Limited Extras (4K)

In addition to this new release including all the “Legacy” Special Features from the 2011 Blu-Ray, there are a handful of new extras that clock in at about 50 minutes of new material. These features include:

The Meta of Scream 

A 15-minute breakdown on the various ways in which Scream 4 is meta. There’s a playful nature to this, but it really doesn’t feel necessary, especially for an audience who is likely not buying Scream 4 for the first time.

Rebooting the Franchise: Scream 4 Revisited 

A 15-minute discussion with a handful of Scream 4’s actors (David Arquette, Marley Shelton, Nico Tortorella, and Erik Knudsen) while they talk about the film and share some stories. This is also a pretty light feature that’s full of anecdotes that you’ve probably heard before. It’s also too bad that such a small portion of the cast is assembled here.

Ghostface Revealed!

This segment is around eight minutes and gives the voice of Ghostface, Roger L. Jackson, his flowers. A feature on what Jackson brings to the Scream franchise is a decent idea and there’s a certain novelty to seeing Jackson do the voice on camera. While this is the 4K’s shortest feature, it surprisingly has the most depth. 

Wes Craven: The Maestro of Scream

A special feature on Wes Craven feels like a given, but this ten-minute segment does the bare minimum. About half of the feature is made up from archival interviews with Craven, with the rest featuring the cast from “Scream 4 Revisited” weighing in on the director. It’s sweet to hear these actors talk about Craven’s impact, but it’s a rather brief tribute.

In the end, all these new features are fine, but they come across as padded filler instead of anything that actually adds real value to the film’s legacy since its last physical media release. A special feature on how Scream 4 has been reappraised over the past decade, a breakdown on the legacy of Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts), or even a discussion on what the original sequel trilogy plan was for the next films. Roberts might not have been available, but it’s hard to imagine that Kevin Williamson couldn’t have chatted for 15 minutes, especially after he was back in this universe for Scream 7. Even a new audio commentary by Williamson or the Radio Silence team would have been appreciated.

These new features are not some treasure trove of undiscovered Scream 4 intel and they’re not the reason to buy this new set. That being said, the 2011 Legacy Special Features remain robust enough. 

Legacy Special Features (Blu-Ray)

Also included in this set are all the previous special features from the 2011 Blu-Ray release. These special features include: 

•     Feature Commentary with Director Wes Craven and Cast Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, and Neve Campbell (via telephone)
•     Deleted and Extended Scenes
•     Alternate Opening
•     Extended Ending
•     Gag Reel
•     EPKs: B-Roll, Soundbites, Junket Interviews
•     Trailers
•     TV Spot

All of this is pretty much what you’d expect and likely footage you’ve encountered before, at least in the case of the alternate opening and deleted/extended scenes. The Deleted and Extended Scenes are the most substantial of these features with around 30 minutes of material. There’s also optional commentary from Wes Craven on all these sequences, which honestly provides some enlightening context. The audio commentary occasionally sees Roberts and Hayden Panettiere dominate the conversation. It’s still a good reservoir of knowledge from Craven and two up-and-coming talents who clearly respect the hell out of him.

Conclusion

Lionsgate Limited’s 4K Ultra HD remaster of Scream 4 is easily the film’s best release and a must-buy for anyone who has never owned the movie before. Anyone who already has this chapter of the Woodsboro murders in their collection likely doesn’t need to upgrade if they’re purely interested in new supplemental features. However, video and audio hounds, plus hardcore Scream enthusiasts, will want to spring for the improved presentation and upgrades. 

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It’s a difficult balancing act, but one that’s magical when it’s properly executed, and this claustrophobic structure connects. Hugo Ruiz (One Night with Adela) rises to the challenge with Dante, a chaotic experience that’s pumping adrenaline, burning rubber, and snorting drugs from frame one and then rarely lets up. It feels like it starts in the middle of a film’s third act and then pushes itself to go to even more radical and exciting places.

Ruiz’s Dante is even more confident and accomplished than his freshman feature. It feels like a spaghetti western that’s trapped in a slaughterhouse. It’s Bringing Out the Dead by way of Quentin Tarantino after he’s come off a giallo binge session. It’s a white-knuckle, blood-soaked ride into hell that keeps its audience on edge until the credits roll.

Ruiz accomplishes something quite remarkable with Dante, a subversive take on Dante’s Inferno in which a paramedic ambulance driver, Eduardo (Chino Darin), gets embroiled in a vicious crime caper that pushes everyone involved closer to salvation. Dante, as its title suggests, isn’t exactly subtle with its allusions to Dante’s Inferno. That being said, none of the film’s efforts to match its source material’s themes and tone ever feels forced. It’s a bold, risky adaptation of the classic 14th-century epic poem, but it’s also a distinct film that stands on its own and becomes an incredibly satisfying sophomore entry in Ruiz’s career. 

Eduardo innocently responds to a standard emergency call, only to find himself tending to a crime boss’s wounds and caught in the middle of a deadly feud between two erratic rival kingpins. Dante digs into an impossibly tense situation with a small cast of larger-than-life characters who really feel like they’re trapped in some layer of hell. Every minor victory is met with yet another physical trial and morality test for Eduardo to overcome. It also distills this harrowing encounter down to its most exciting elements so that Dante is a fast, easy watch that’s beautifully paced and always finds the right moment to heighten its mayhem.

There’s a shocking brutality here. It’s a visceral, gross, oozing horror film that’s often hard to look at. It’s a movie that lingers on not just pain, but how the human body can become such a disgusting mess. Ruiz lingers on gross visuals that reduce people to raw meat and emotion. However, this screaming, bloody mess is also an intimate chamber piece and character study. All this extreme subject matter serves a grander purpose and builds to a sweeping salvation rather than purely existing to be sensational. Dante is vicious, but it’s the film’s heart that stands out the most when everything is said and done. 

Among the criminal capitulations is a deeper commentary on faith, passion, and identity. Eduardo is repeatedly confused for a doctor throughout, which is just one of several instances that reflect its themes regarding duality and labels. Eduardo’s wild night highlights life’s transactional nature and how everyone is the same in death. It’s the ultimate equalizer. Alternatively, Dante looks at the weird, unpredictable places in which people can find humanity, connection, and purpose in life, even if it’s surrounded by death and darkness. Everyone is looking for that spark and light that helps us heal. 

In a film full of strong performances, Darin’s work as Eduardo is really spectacular. It’s a performance that’s so deceptively layered that it makes you want to immediately watch the film again as soon as it’s ended. Ruiz’s film is also really smart in response to when it digs deeper into Eduardo’s life and personality. It’s easy to picture Dante beginning with Eduardo carrying out several normal rounds to get a better sense of who he is before danger strikes with Mario. The film also excels as it asks the audience to make their own conclusions on this blank slate before the film begins to pull back the curtain on him. 

Eduardo is a compelling moral compass throughout this dark night of the soul, albeit a character who is hardly infallible. Some of Dante’s strongest moments are when Eduardo’s mental state is unclear, and the audience is left to wonder if he’s actually getting a rush from this on some level. Eduardo is left to process many heightened emotions on his own. However, there’s also a real camaraderie between Eduardo and Mak (Ester Expósito) that’s genuinely sweet and progresses in a very natural, effortless manner. Their chemistry helps power the second half.

At one point, Eduardo muses that “a director must take risks.” This is a film that certainly adheres to its own advice.

Dante reaches a satisfying conclusion that feels like the natural endpoint of this story, only to then launch into such a wild turn that transforms the film into something considerably darker and a powerful meditation on the pervasiveness of pain and suffering. The ending guarantees that this is a movie that’s destined to be debated by both its lovers and haters.

There’s thankfully a lot more going on here so that Dante doesn’t live or die based on its ending alone. It’s just a brave step forward that reiterates why Hugo Ruiz is a filmmaker to look out for. 

Dante made its world premiere at Tribeca 2026; release info TBD.

The post ‘Dante’ Review – A Paramedic’s Night Shift Turns Into A Blood-Soaked Nightmare [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

As much as pregnancy and childbirth are a period of vulnerability, it’s also an act that creates a remarkable bond that’s also ripe material to exploit in the horror genre. Turkish filmmaker Alphan Eseli’s Mutter: The Diary of a Mother is a modern folk horror film on motherhood that’s reminiscent of titles like Hatching, Lamb, and The Brood that explore separation anxiety, legacy, and transformative grief through a surreal lens that also succeeds as a one-of-a-kind creature feature. 

Mutter becomes a powerful examination of the unbreakable bond between mother and child. Gül (Hazar Ergüçlü) refuses to separate from her offspring, even if it’s more monster than man. It ultimately makes no difference. It’s hers, which is more than enough for Gül. Motherhood is painful and torturous, but an ordeal that’s worth all the trauma. Mutter: The Diary of a Mother is an equally distressing experience that tells a powerful, poignant story that dares to be different.

It bluntly highlights the beautiful and brutal horrors that surround the natural extremes of childbirth. However, this storytelling expands into a broader commentary on not just motherhood, but also the judgmental prejudices and corresponding misogyny that accompany single mothers. Mutter moans that this sweeping disrespect is entrenched in every aspect of the world as Gül cycles through transactional relationships in her life, yet it never feels preachy with its messaging. Occasionally on the nose, yes, but never preachy.

This is a movie that wastes absolutely no time, and it begins by throwing Gül and the audience into chaos. It’s not even a few minutes in and Gül has already given birth to some inexplicable monster and just as quickly been left by her partner. Gül begins this story abruptly, abandoned and afraid. Mutter’s fantastical dream logic makes it feel even more like it’s some kind of folk horror parable. It tragically presents motherhood as this all-encompassing force that takes over Gül’s life and is literally draining her dry. Beyond motherhood, Mutter also explores the fine line between love and hate, good and evil, and how these extremes are always at war and in flux. 

The messaging would be potent regardless of how it’s conveyed, but it’s appreciated that the film opts for old school practical effects for Gül’s inhuman offspring. The larval creature that comes out of her and struggles to exist is truly disgusting, while more instances of gruesome body horror reflect upon motherhood’s sacrificial nature. Mutter is a slimy and gross story that showcases especially disgusting sound design. There are frames that look like they belong in a Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna film from the ‘80s.

It’s easy to get caught up in the offensive practical effects. However, the best thing about this movie is the standout performance by Hazar Ergüçlü as Gül. She provides Mutter with a much-needed emotional anchor that gives the audience a reason to continue on this intense endeavor. Ergüçlü’s performance often channels Isabelle Adjani‘s haunting work in Possession, while still bringing plenty of original qualities to this role. When Mutter begins, Gül is left alone in the world, with no one, like a newborn. It’s a very lonely, isolating film that’s full of wide shots, barren spaces, and absent framing.

Gül’s compulsion to stay by her child’s side, no matter what, still manages to be inspiring even if it’s just as heartbreaking. Ergüçlü’s committed performance does a lot of the heavy lifting here, and she’s given many opportunities to convey a wide range of intense emotions. It’s a performance that’s vulnerable, fierce, inscrutable, and so much more. Gül transforms as much as her larval baby does, and it’s as if she’s in her own invisible state of metamorphosis throughout the film that mirrors her baby’s development.

Gül is dealt a bad hand, but the entire film conveys a brutalist aesthetic that’s meant to alienate. There’s bleak, drab lighting and sparse, cold set design that reinforces a depressing world that’s inescapable. It cultivates a heavy, crushing feeling where levity seems impossible. “There are so many sick bastards in the world,” is one of Mutter’s mantras, although this bleak statement is largely talking about men and how they’re this ongoing destructive force in Gül’s life. They’re the one constant that continues to let her down.

Mutter also addresses the concept of “God taking back his blessings” and if, perhaps, Gül actually deserves this cursed offspring for some reason, and that it’s a Biblical form of punishment. The whole film generates dread over a future for Gül that seems fated to fail. There’s some extremely dark messaging in the final act about the selfless nature of motherhood. “Nevertheless, she persisted” doesn’t cover half of it here. The fact that the film is dedicated to Eseli’s own mother is particularly wild and recontextualizes everything that’s come before it. 

Eseli delivers a fierce folk horror film that’s both familiar and disorienting. It checks many of the expected boxes for these types of maternal monster stories, and yet Gül’s plight never wears thin or grows repetitive. Eseli crafts a formidable film that doesn’t struggle to make any of its thoughts on parenthood known. If anything, Mutter’s pitch-black darkness is a little too much at times. The film would actually benefit from pulling back so that all this insurmountable sorrow never feels like parody.

Mutter never reaches this point, but it’s a melancholy exercise in extended sorrow that’s not an especially fun journey once it really locks in. Nevertheless, it is an effective meditation on motherhood and sacrifice that cuts deep despite tackling well-trodden territory.

Mutter: The Diary of a Mother made its premiere at Tribeca 2026, release info TBD.

The post ‘Mutter’ Review – A Mother’s Love Turns Monstrous in This Brutal Folk Horror Tale [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Breeder becomes the tonal and structural hybrid of Barbarian and Misery, but still uniquely its own thing. It’s one of 2026’s best horror surprises.

Goyette’s debut is such an impressive feature film that remains endlessly engaging because of its ability to keep one foot in reality, no matter how extreme the storytelling gets. It builds to a wild complication that actually feels earned because of how it preys upon the protagonist, Russell (Daniel Doheny), and his deep sense of desperation that’s rooted in the world’s grim economic state. Life-changing money makes it a lot easier for red flags to take on a greener hue. 

Russell is a brilliant college student who is at the precipice of a game-changing study that has the potential to prevent a rare bee species’ extinction. He just lacks the funding to make this dream a reality. Russell is cautiously optimistic when a particular poodle breeder, Patti (Dot-Marie Jones), who is a fan of Russell’s work, promises to be an angel investor if he can help her with an experiment of her own. It’s a sublime setup for what turns into a consistently surprising take on the perilous pursuit of perfection and a dark, post-modern version of survival of the fittest.

Breeder is the very best style of slow-burn storytelling that grows more uncomfortable with each act. There are shades of Dogtooth and even Tusk, to some extent, as this extreme ritual that’s against nature takes place in plain sight and becomes normalized. The blunt, matter-of-fact nature of Patti’s actions makes this all the more horrifying. It’s almost as if Breeder applies a dog trainer approach to a hostage situation. The film deconstructs the complex bond between pet and owner, particularly how this relationship can warp and become toxic. There’s a slipping sense of reality that’s absolutely chilling. However, the film uses this confusion to find the humor in this unsettling premise as it balances these two extremes. Breeder’s sense of humor is low-key its secret weapon, and always feels so natural.

The entire cast shines, but this is really a movie that lives and dies on the success of its villain. Dot-Marie Jones is a revelation as Patti. It’s electric every second that she’s on screen, and there’s taut tension from not knowing when the other shoe will drop. She’s played with such chilling, calculating intensity, even when she’s completely normal. Patti is like Misery’s Annie Wilkes mixed with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, and it’s absolutely unforgettable.

Alternatively, Russell’s layered character development and the arc that he experiences highlight the pressures that he faces in life over failing to realize his full potential. Breeder makes Russell feel helpless and establishes why this study is so important to him. It’s so easy to have main characters who make a slew of poor decisions and lose sight of themselves so that their karmic retribution almost feels justified and becomes a cathartic release for the audience. Russell never wavers, and he doesn’t read like any other idiot in a horror film who willingly puts themselves in a dangerous situation.

Most importantly, Goyette makes sure that the audience cares about Russell and that they’re actively rooting for his survival through all this. He’s put through the wringer, but it’s also fascinating to see how this harsh ordeal helps him grow and eliminate what he perceives to be weaknesses. Russell is a fun foil for every character that he shares time with in Breeder. However, there’s especially great chemistry between him and his girlfriend during the film’s first act. It helps establish a necessary baseline before everything falls apart. There’s a sardonic, dry energy to these scenes that’s such a stark counterpoint to the chaos that follows.

Breeder is such an original take on a low-budget “horror contained in a house” story that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s a unique story that intentionally avoids taking the easy way out, even if that’s occasionally frustrating. The film’s end, for instance, is likely to split audiences. However, it’s a decision that feels real and organic, rather than some gratuitous pivot that only exists to cause controversy. This strong, earned storytelling is lifted through fantastic performances and confident filmmaking that never fail to rise to the occasion.

It’s an excellent showpiece for Goyette, and it’s genuinely exciting to consider what he’ll do with more at his disposal, but it’s also a standout horror film in a year that’s been stacked with creative offerings. Breeder is headed to Shudder after a limited theatrical release, and it will hopefully find an audience and not get lost in the streaming shuffle. Survival of the fittest and all that.

Breeder made its premiere at Tribeca 2026 and is slated for release this fall. 

The post ‘Breeder’ Review – A Modern Horror Classic That Plays Matchmaker With Eugenics [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.

Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things. 

These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.

A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.

A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.

”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.

Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.

Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.

The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable. 

Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.

It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.

Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.

Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.

The post ‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.

Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations. 

This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.

On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.

Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.

It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film. 

Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.

Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.

Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.

What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.

This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.

These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when. 

Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.

Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.

If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.

The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.

The post ‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The entire experience is magic, but not because some supernatural thrall has been activated. What’s going on is even more special. It’s the power of the effusive fandom that’s been authentically assembled by AMC’s sublime Immortal Universe, namely Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, now, The Vampire Lestat.

The Vampire Lestat is far from the first Anne Rice adaptation, and it’s not as if there’s been a lack of erotic vampire material for audiences to sink their teeth into. On June 2nd, during a one-night-only spectacle, New York City’s prestigious Beacon Theatre shook from Sam Reid’s bravado performance and an audience full of adoring fans who had already memorized Lestat’s songs.

It’s clear that The Vampire Lestat just hits differently than its predecessors. It’s become more than just a TV series at this point, and this opulent display of ego, swagger, and pure sex is the perfect way to premiere the new season and give back to the fans who helped make Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat such a breakout success. It’s exactly the sort of hyperbolized hedonism that would make Lestat cackle.

For all intents and purposes, AMC has successfully created the illusion that this concert/premiere is just one of the many destinations on Lestat and his band’s 54-stop tour that is simultaneously playing out on this season of television. It’s such a sophisticated and thorough level of interactive fan engagement that the audience doesn’t just understand, but also manages to accentuate through its involvement.

It’s a level of seamless synergy that’s not unlike the give-and-take relationship of vampire and victim. 

Before the concert started, “LeStans” were sitting in the Beacon and flipping through a fake Rolling Stone issue with Lestat emblazoned on the cover, complete with interviews with the undead frontman inside. Other fans were admiring the vinyl pressing of Lestat’s EP as they walked past a section of undead band merch. Fandom and fantasy blur together, and it all becomes this elaborate, immersive experience. Fan celebration, erotic gothic fantasy, and a lavish rock concert transform into one beautiful thing.

To this point, AMC Global Media’s Chief Content Officer and President of AMC Studios, Dan McDermott, introduced the event by reiterating to fans, “You are the heartbeat of the series.” That’s abundantly clear on nights like this as that heartbeat collectively pulses to this performance. In terms of how AMC engages with The Vampire Lestat’s fans, it’s as bold a reinvention as the season itself.

This intuitive gamble speaks to AMC’s creativity in this department and a fandom that is eager to seize such opportunities. It’s the same innovation that led to zombie walks for The Walking Dead and real-life Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant pop-ups from Breaking Bad. It’s a great way to pump up the audience for The Vampire Lestat and then maintain that enthusiasm for the whole season.

For most series, a rock ‘n’ roll concert just doesn’t make any sense as a promotional tool. The Vampire Lestat finds itself in a very unique position where it can deliver an excellent concert at an iconic theater, but also use it to showcase The Vampire Lestat’s music by Daniel Hart (who was shredding on stage alongside Reid and the rest of their band) and, more than anything, Sam Reid’s endless charisma.

The way in which Reid feeds off of the crowd’s energy, modulating his performance and giving different sections of the Beacon life, is a perfect distillation of the series’ thoughtful relationship with its audience and how it’s become such a breakout success for AMC. AMC Studios President Dan McDermott emphasized that the fans are the reason that the show is still here and why an event like this is even possible. It’s rare to see a series in which every single cog in the machine is so perfectly attuned to its fans. Reid’s fans already cheer whenever they see him, so why not translate that to a concert setting?

It’s clear in this season of television that Reid was born to be a rock star, but it’s surreal to see him effortlessly command the stage — and the audience — at every step of the concert. He recites Shakespeare monologues and bitches out Armand between songs, all while the audience screams in support. For the duration of this concert, Reid is Lestat, and he’s given thousands of fans a memory that’s as immortal as any vampire.

Now bring on the encore and get this show on the road!

The post ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Concert Event Launches New Season With The Ultimate Expression Of Fandom appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Not just loss. Not just unsuccessful inadequacy. But true, all-encompassing, cataclysmic failure.

The Vampire Lestat, much like the two seasons of Interview with the Vampire before it, is a series that’s profoundly interested in failure. The type of failure that can only be understood by someone who has been making the same mistakes for over 250 years. The Vampire Lestat is utterly consumed by failure, but also temptation, regression, obsession, and evolution. It remains unparalleled when it comes to sprawling, epic love stories that endure for centuries. 

The new season reminds us that we’re all slaves to the past, whether it’s in terms of repeating it or trying to rise above it. This season is such a potent cocktail of pain, vanity, fear, and regret that’s shared between this sad collection of lost souls that culminates in such explosive bursts of tremendous emotion. Human, vampire; nobody wants to burn alone. It’s all too appropriate that a season that functions as a sweeping ode to failure is genuinely one of the year’s most perfect pieces of television, horror or otherwise.

At first, The Vampire Lestat’s transition to rock and roll may seem like a radical pivot. However, this is a series that continues to creatively mythologize and normalize vampires. It presents them as a crucial societal pillar and creates rewarding parallels between vampires and rock stars, right down to their parasitically adoring groupies. Lestat goes so far as to argue that vampires are the original rock stars, and it uses Lestat’s latest metamorphosis as a way to highlight these toxic, unbalanced relationships.

It’s a truly perfect setup that’s a beautiful extension of the previous two seasons as well as a sublime rebirth into a new “hedonistic pursuit of extremity.” It’s an inspired way to continue the franchise’s “interview” and unreliable narrator concept, while also doing something completely original with the construct. Each episode of this season takes Lestat’s traveling menagerie to a different city on his band’s 54-stop tour, while a foreboding sense of dread accumulates over the global catastrophes that are the consequence of this tour and its corresponding album.  

Lestat is like a virus that passes through these metropolitan cities, leaving them ravaged and changed by the time that he leaves. It leads to some stunning commentary and visuals of the New World Order that gradually sets in over the season. Additionally, there’s a powerful apathy to the idea that Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) published exposé on Lestat would fizzle out after a year and that humanity would move on and stop caring as they flock to the next big thing that they’re supposed to care about. It’s a cynicism that makes so much sense for this universe and individuals who have been around for centuries and seen it all.

That being said, those who are hoping for more of a direct adaptation of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned are going to need to be a little more patient. Much like how the series’ first two seasons are companion pieces and halves of a longer story, The Vampire Lestat leaves its Akasha (Sheila Atim) teases to its final episodes. These perfectly set up a hypothetical fourth season, which would presumably tackle the rest of Damned’s material.

It’s amazing that Letstat’s whole rockstar persona functions as a petty, egotistical response to regain control of the narrative so that his songs are the definitive text that usurps Daniel’s novel. It’s the perfect distillation of Lestat as a character and one that facilitates a deeply entertaining and even campier season of television that goes places that would have previously been impossible. The series’ evolution remains one of the most fascinating and impressive things about this season.

The Vampire Lestat’s rebirth is a reflection of life’s cyclical nature and how everything old is new again. This is highlighted both explicitly and subtly through not just the season’s messaging, but also through some clever and ambitious casting choices. Several actors pull double duty this season. This could easily be a disaster in less-skilled hands, and yet it’s never a distraction here. If anything, it manages to beautifully enhance the series’ obsession with duality.

The series digs deeper than ever into its characters, but the filmmaking artistry has never been better. It’s a self-indulgent display of aesthetic extremes that underscores how much care is put into every single frame. Much of this season is presented like a rock band doc that shifts between different film styles. It’s such a natural fit that meshes with the series’ broader tendency to be a cinematic magpie. There are so many different directions that The Vampire Lestat could take for its band material. The decision to explicitly pull from Madonna: Truth or Dare is so gonzo but perfect. It’s a strong way to put Lestat on a pedestal and simultaneously demystify him as his many sides are portrayed through the season’s fractured, nonlinear meta-narrative.

To this point, there’s so much effort going into Lestat’s music. These are immaculately written by Daniel Hart, and they all feel like actual songs that could top charts and get audiences screaming and dropping drugs, even without any vampire glamor influencing their opinion. It’s hard territory to authentically nail, and it makes all the difference that The Vampire Lestat knocks it out of the park in this department and features a season that’s full of genuine bangers, rather than one half-decent song that’s repeated ad nauseam. It also doesn’t hurt that this season Baz Luhrmanns the fuck out when it comes to these grandiose musical spectacles. 

Sam Reid embodies the rock star persona so effortlessly that it’s wild to think that this wasn’t always the role that he was playing. It fits him as snug as leather pants. Lestat’s fame becomes so intense that there are literally people cosplaying as him in crowds so that his ego can reach even more untenable heights. This artificial future is powerfully juxtaposed against Lestat’s past, including some key formative moments from his life. There’s also a heartbreaking confrontation that arguably hits even harder than season two’s best moments. It’s so encouraging and exciting to see that The Vampire Lestat continues to top itself and that its best work is not behind it. It’s still finding new ways to thrive.

The series’ narration has always been on point. However, it’s easy to forget just how precise every word is and how perfectly Rolin Jones sticks the landing with his interpretations of these characters and Anne Rice’s universe, while still making it his own. ”Serving cunt has its consequences” might also be the most Lestat line to ever Lestat. Alternatively, the new role Daniel takes on as the director of a Lestat documentary is such a fun position for him to slide into that it becomes another playful echo of the past. It all reinforces the idea that we filter ourselves through the company we keep and that there’s conflict when we’re confronted with the truth.

The Vampire Lestat is everything you could want and then some. It’s a moving meditation on fame, fandom, and legacy that pushes its characters and relationships to their most satisfying places yet. Admittedly, this season throws a lot of new characters at the audience, but this never feels overwhelming or that this influx of new faces is superfluous.

I genuinely don’t know how these seven episodes could be any better. It’s the best Anne Rice adaptation to date and a series that truly feels like it’s just getting started and has greater highs to hit. Bring on the Queen of the Damned.

The Vampire Lestat premieres on June 7 on AMC and AMC+.