Editorials
Five Nyctophobia-Based Horror Movies to Stream This Week
Nyctophobia is an irrational fear of the dark, leaving many reaching for a night light. Horror, and the creatures that lurk within it, thrive on darkness. Light becomes a weapon against them.
The Boogeyman, releasing in theaters on June 2, presents the latest monstrous foe to terrorize unsuspecting victims from the darkest recesses of their homes. So, this week’s streaming picks are dedicated to supernatural entities and monsters with an extreme aversion to light.
Here’s where you can stream these five titles this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
The Hallow – AMC+, Tubi
This dark fairytale is part creature feature, part body horror, and all Irish folktale. Corin Hardy’s feature debut follows a British plant conservationist and his family as they discover the hard way what it means to ignore warning signs and invade the territory of fairies, banshees, and changelings. There’s nothing sweet or cute about these deadly creatures. As the beings descend upon his home and attempt to steal the baby, it becomes evident that one of the most significant assets in this fight for survival is light; the light repels these monsters.
Gremlins – Max
Breaking the mandates of the Mogwai transforms the sleepy little town of Kingston Falls into a chaotic battleground against a horde of menacing Gremlins in Joe Dante’s holiday classic. Inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) gifts his son, Billy (Zach Galligan), a strange new pet for Christmas. The adorable little Mogwai, named Gizmo, comes with strict rules for care but no explanation on why they’re so important. Sunlight will kill a Mogwai, which is both good and bad news, depending on the circumstances. And Billy manages to uncover them all in this darkly comedic gateway horror movie.
Nightbreed – freevee, Peacock, Plex, Pluto TV, Roku, Screambox, Tubi
In this Clive Barker film based on his novella Cabal, Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) dreams of a mystical city where monsters dwell. After being framed for murder, Boone travels to find the city, Midian. Nightbreed isn’t just a story about Boone’s new beginning as a citizen of Midian; his arrival changes everything for the monsters and those seeking to destroy them. For many in Nightbreed, death is only the beginning. Sunlight is lethal for many of Midian’s residents, but you’re rooting for them to survive this time.
Pitch Black – Netflix
After crash landing on a desert planet, the crew and passengers of a commercial freight ship soon discover why it’s been seemingly abandoned when a rare eclipse begins. As the world descends into pitch-black darkness, underground aliens erupt onto the surface for a feeding frenzy. Survival will be extremely tough for the humans. The sci-fi horror movie launched a Riddick (Vin Diesel) franchise, but the Bioraptors nearly upstaged him. These predatorial and often cannibalistic aliens’ only prominent vulnerability is photosensitivity. These aliens are built for ripping prey apart, and the overwhelming number of them on the attack makes them more deadly than anything else on this list, especially with so few places to hide.
The Power – AMC+, Shudder
Rose Williams as Val – The Power – Photo Credit: Laura Radford/Shudder
Writer/Director Corinna Faith uses the late 1973 rolling blackouts that plunged London into darkness every night, caused by a miners’ strike, as a backdrop for this hospital-set haunter. Faith uses a familiar period ghost story as a foundation to create a psychologically powerful tale full of claustrophobic dread and nyctophobia-induced scares. Rose Williams stars as the young nurse targeted by a malevolent presence that feeds on the dark, which is bad news considering the city is inundated by it.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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