While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.

After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.

Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.

Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.

Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.

Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”

Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”

Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.

The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”

Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.

Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.

But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.

All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.

The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism

The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.

Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.

Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.

In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.

The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later

Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.

In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.

But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.

After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.

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With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.

For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.

While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.

With that out of the way, onto the list!

6. The Arrival (1996)

Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.

It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.

5. Extraterrestrial (2014)

The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.

Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.

4. Alien Raiders (2008)

Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.

Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.

3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)

You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.

This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.

2. Communion (1989)

I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!

Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.

1. Altered (2006)

Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.

That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.

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It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.

For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.

Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.

The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.

As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?

Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.

Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.

Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.

There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.

In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.

Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.

Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.

A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.

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In the post-World War II era, Hollywood began to take science fiction seriously. This genre that was once relegated to low-budget serials and dismissed as “children’s fare” was beginning to be understood as a way to tell sophisticated stories while simultaneously making pointed social and political commentary.

Writers and filmmakers became acutely aware that they could discuss whatever issues they wanted—race, nuclear war, class disparities, the effects of mass media, environmental concerns, and much more—just as long as they told a great story along the way and kept audiences entertained. 1951 was a banner year for this new brand of science fiction, with The Thing from Another World, When Worlds Collide, and The Day the Earth Stood Still all hitting the screen.

The Day the Earth Stood Still taps into early 1950’s flying saucer fever while also examining who we are and, more importantly, who we could be. The premise of the film is simple. A flying saucer lands on a baseball field adjacent to the White House in Washington, D.C. A man named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) steps out of the vehicle and declares that he comes in peace but is immediately met by fear and violence. Gort (Lock Martin), the robot that accompanies him, vaporizes the weapons, including tanks and artillery, that the military has brought to surround the ship, a display that forces Klaatu into hiding. When he is finally able to deliver his message, it is a warning.

Klaatu and his people have observed that humanity’s violent tendencies are beginning to reach beyond the confines of planet Earth and threaten its intergalactic neighbors. “Your choice is simple,” Klaatu declares, “join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”

Connections Between The Day the Earth Stood Still and Disclosure Day

In the film, this obliteration would come at the hands, or vaporizing beam, of Gort, a kind of intergalactic enforcer, but in the real world, the threat comes from within. Though the film appears to be a “the threat is out there” picture at first blush, it is actually a “we are the monsters” movie. It makes this point in several ways, most of which remain shockingly relevant seventy-five years after the film’s original release.

Though The Day the Earth Stood Still was released at the dawn of the television revolution, it was practically prophetic in depicting the ways that mass media would be used and abused in times of uncertainty and crisis. News reports quickly evolve from reporting facts to spreading fear about the visitors and spinning out wild conspiracy theories. Newspapers print images of Gort attacking people as they run screaming, though up to that point, he had only destroyed weapons and left humans unharmed. A radio announcer declares Klaatu to be a monster that must be hunted down like a rabid animal and destroyed. Rumors quickly spread that he, though completely human in appearance, has tentacles and three eyes.

The film’s commentary on mass media personally made me reflect further on my recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026) and its depictions of media, which are surprisingly less cynical than those found in The Day the Earth Stood Still. In both films, there is a trust in the information sources, something that was largely true in the early 1950s, but Spielberg’s depiction that people would believe the evidence of their eyes and ears is viewed by some as naïve. I must admit my own reluctance to believe this would be the case in our age of deep-fakes and the barrage of A.I.-generated images that flood social media. I would love to believe that he is right, and the world would literally stand still in rapt attention as a major network reveals such long-hidden secrets, but I am doubtful.

Even in The Day the Earth Stood Still, there is a sense of this cynicism. Klaatu is told by Mr. Harley (Frank Conroy), the President’s special secretary, that gathering the leaders of the countries of the world in one place would be impossible. He produces messages in which the Soviet Premier demands the meeting occur in Moscow, while the Prime Minister of Britain refuses to attend unless it is held in Washington. Though the people of Earth seem to believe that an alien has in fact landed, proving that we are not alone in the universe, they still cannot put aside petty squabbles to hear what Klaatu has to say. I hate to say it, but I believe this still rings true in our increasingly divided nation and world.

In order to gain the attention of the world, Klaatu consults a scientist, Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), who admits that people are reluctant to listen to scientists, a point that has unfortunately become increasingly true in the ensuing years. Barnhardt suggests that Klaatu perform a display of power that does not hurt any humans to convince influential people from around the world to hear his message. Klaatu devises a plan to literally make the earth stand still by suspending power of all kinds—electrical, mechanical, combustion, etc.—for exactly half an hour at the same time across the entire globe. The exceptions are just as remarkable: hospitals, airplanes in flight, and other vital operations. But still, despite the care he takes not to harm anyone, the fear of Klaatu and Gort only increases.

Klaatu as Science Fiction’s Christ Figure

A powerful detail of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that the first visitor to our planet from another world is very much like us. After Klaatu is injured by a frightened soldier who thinks a gift to the people of the world is a weapon, he is taken for examination at Walter Reed Hospital. This examination reveals that he is essentially human in every way. His organs all function the same as a healthy young man’s, indicating that his planet has a similar atmosphere and pressure. The differences are just as striking. Though he appears to be in his mid-30’s, Klaatu is 78 years old, and his people have a life expectancy of 130 years along with a vastly superior intellect.

He is proof that humans are capable of bettering themselves by living in peace with one another. Rather than expending energy on war, destruction, and the pursuit of money and power, Klaatu’s people have focused on reason, mathematics, and sciences. Though not mentioned in the film, I imagine (or hope) that they also value history, the arts, and all those pursuits that we would call “the humanities.” To make this point inescapable, the film depicts Klaatu as an ideal to strive for, even a kind of Christ figure: a teacher of peace who is killed, resurrects, delivers one final message to those gathered to listen, and ascends back into the heavens.

To draw another Spielberg parallel, there are hints of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in The Day the Earth Stood Still, including these Christlike parallels. After escaping Walter Reed, Klaatu, posing as Mr. Carpenter (see what they did there?), befriends a young boy, Bobby Benson (Billy Gray), whose father, like Elliot’s in E.T., is absent, in this case, killed in the War. Klaatu eventually reveals who he is to Bobby’s mother, Helen (Patricia Neal), who assists him in escaping back to his ship. Klaatu, worried that Gort will destroy the city or even more if he is harmed, tells Helen to deliver the famous words “Klaatu Barada Nikto” to Gort if anything should happen to him.

Klaatu is shot and taken to a jail cell, where he is declared dead. Gort, sensing Klaatu has been harmed, vaporizes the two soldiers guarding the ship and is about to continue his rampage when Helen, though fearful, is able to deliver the words to stop him (it’s a good thing she wasn’t Ash Williams). Gort brings Helen aboard the ship before retrieving Klaatu’s body from the cell. Back on the ship, Klaatu is revived by a medical device and delivers his ultimatum to the leaders of the world.

Why Klaatu’s Warning Still Matters Today

There has been much discourse about the final word uttered in Disclosure Day by Emily Blunt’s character Margaret Fairchild—“Listen.” But I believe The Day the Earth Stood Still poses a similar challenge. After giving the option of peace or obliteration, Klaatu says, “We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you,” leaving humankind to rest in the conundrum.

Where Disclosure Day requests, The Day the Earth Stood Still demands, but I fear its demand has fallen on deaf ears. We have continued to seek power over peace, wars and rumors of wars have only increased, and as Klaatu says in the film, we have continued to “substitute fear for reason.”

The Day the Earth Stood Still does not come across as a cynical film, though I fear I have painted it as such. There is a great amount of hope in it. It is filled with characters like Bobby, Helen, and Professor Barnhardt who seem to truly believe that a better world can be achieved. But then there is also Tom (Hugh Marlowe), Helen’s fiancé, who believes turning in Klaatu will bring him power and political position. Mr. Harley, and by extension the President of the United States and the political powers of the world, believe that the systems are too entrenched and the problems of the world too complex for peace to ever happen.

Maybe the deeper question of both films is, can we evolve? If faced with the revelation of truth beyond ourselves, or with an ultimatum of peace or oblivion, can we finally believe that it is possible to unite and be one human family?

That is the ultimate power of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Science Fiction and its sister genre, horror (which practically blended into one in the 1950s), have an uncanny ability to, as I said before, show us who we are, but also who we could be. Day asks us if we are willing to make the hard choices to achieve something greater, to become the best version of ourselves. Not to achieve perfection but strive toward that mark as closely as imperfect beings possibly can.

The answers are not simple, and the methods are challenging, even divisive. The process has been and will continue to be long and difficult, but the ultimate goals may not be as disparate from our neighbors as they seem. Perhaps the first step in that process is exactly as Margaret in Disclosure Day says, “listen.” And even more, to make the conscious choice to listen.

As Klaatu declares, the decision indeed rests with us.

The post Revisiting ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’: The Sci-Fi Classic That Warned Us About Ourselves appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

These idiosyncratic details are precisely why I love Weird West movies so much, as I think strange stories about folks living in the aftermath of the Civil War and being confronted with speculative threats can often tell us more about the reality of those days than the familiar shootouts and train robberies that we’re used to.

In honor of Primitive War director Luke Sparke teasing the launch of a Kickstarter campaign meant to finance a unique Western that takes place in an alternate universe where humanity evolved alongside dinosaurs, I’ve decided to compile a list recommending six of the best Weird West movies for your viewing pleasure!

For the purposes of this list, “Weird West” is defined as stories taking place within the North American frontier from the Civil War to the early 1900s that also happen to deal with genre tropes like supernatural creatures and serial-killing boogeymen.

As usual, don’t forget to comment below if you think a particularly entertaining example of this extremely underrated genre was missed.

With that out of the way, onto the list!

6. Death Rider in The House of Vampires (2021)

Regardless of your stance on the existence of cinematic “guilty pleasures” and “so bad it’s good” movies, I think we can all agree that you need to be in a particular headspace in order to enjoy Glenn Danzig’s bizarre filmography. While the rock-star-turned-director may not boast the same filmmaking know-how as folks like Rob Zombie, there’s still plenty of entertainment to be had with films like Death Rider in The House of Vampires.

A horror-western as baffling as it is captivating, I’d only recommend this highly stylized romp to genre fans who don’t mind a fair amount of camp (and plenty of unmotivated zooms) with their vampire stories.

5. The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

Jim O’Connolly’s fantasy western opus may not be particularly scary, but this Ray Harryhausen-fueled romp is still one of the most entertaining monster movies on this list, despite (or perhaps because of) its marvelously lo-fi effects work.

Telling the story of an ensemble of cowboys and stuntmen who discover a Forbidden Valley populated by extinct creatures, The Valley of Gwangi was originally meant to be produced by stop-motion maestro Willis O’Brien (of King Kong fame) before the project was eventually passed down to his star pupil.

If the “cowboys versus dinosaurs” setup isn’t enough to hook you in, the film is also notable for being a major influence on Steven Spielberg’sJurassic Park!

4. The Burrowers (2008)

The small screen may not be the ideal way to watch movies, but there’s something to be said about the strange experience of stumbling into a late-night broadcast and being unsure of exactly what it is that you’re watching. I had the pleasure of first experiencing J.T. Perry’s The Burrowers in this fashion, and the added uncertainty made it all the more surprising when this dark western suddenly turned into a grisly creature feature.

Part Tremors and part forgotten John Wayne flick, The Burrowers may not reinvent the wheel for either westerns or horror movies, but there’s no denying that this atmospheric period piece is way better than it has any right to be – especially when Clancy Brown is onscreen!

3. Ghost Town (1988)

Following a 1980s deputy whose search for a missing woman leads to an abandoned settlement haunted by undead apparitions, Ghost Town may not be remembered as one of the best ghostly thrillers of the 80s (mostly due to its slow pace and some questionable effects work), but it’s still way more fun than most critics would have you believe.

In fact, it’s a miracle that the film turned out as well as it did, with the original director being fired halfway through production and the “final cut” of the flick actually being a temporary workprint that was never meant for public consumption. While it’s a shame that we’ll never get to see a “finished” version of Ghost Town, the movie we got is still worth revisiting nearly four decades later.

2. Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Bone Tomahawk is the most gruesome flick on this list by a wide margin, but it’s also – paradoxically – the most grounded. Playing out like an 1890s retelling of The Hills Have Eyes (albeit with a star-studded cast including the likes of Kurt Russel, Patrick Wilson, Sid Haig and even David Arquette), this gory debut feature doesn’t really deal with any of the supernatural elements that tend to define Weird West stories.

However, the extreme violence and overall terror behind the film’s premise place it firmly within the realm of western-inspired genre fiction. After all, I’d rather face ghosts, vampires and dinosaurs than the cannibals that populate this deeply unsettling feature.

1. Ravenous (1999)

Set in the 1840s Sierra Nevada, Antonia Bird’s Ravenous is one of my all-time favorite movies and a perfect example of a project becoming more than the sum of its parts despite a chaotic production.

On paper, a horror-comedy that reinvents the Wendigo myth as an allegory for manifest destiny while also indulging in homo-erotic subtext (and boasting a one-of-a-kind soundtrack co-developed by Gorillaz/Blur frontman Damon Albarn alongside award-winning composer Michael Laurence Nyman) absolutely should not work. And yet, Ravenous lives on as the gold standard for Weird Westerns precisely because of how weird it is!

The post Cowboys, Monsters, and Dinosaurs: 6 Essential Weird West Movies appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The unrivaled Master of Horror made a splash in 1974 with his debut novel Carrie and has been terrifying readers ever since. Two years later, Brian De Palma brought this shocking story to the screen with an equally electrifying horror film that remains a genre classic and a prototypical example of “Good For Her” horror. This dual debut seemed to open the floodgates, unleashing endless waves of Stephen King films.

From the highs of Misery, Cujo, and The Shawshank Redemption to the schlocky fun of Cat’s Eye, Creepshow, and Children of the Corn, the last five decades have seen just about every notable horror creator take a stab at the author’s massive collection. 

In recent years, this singular subgenre has begun to burst at the seams, expanding to include Stephen King-esque fare. In 2016, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer debuted Stranger Things, a sci-fi series heavily inspired by two of King’s most famous books. The Netflix series remixes Firestarter and It by following a little girl with psychic powers and an intrepid group of kids on bikes who must battle an otherworldly foe and a sinister government agency. With its clever blend of modern effects and comforting nostalgia, this gateway horror series paved the way for Andy Muschietti’s It adaptation which remains the highest grossing horror film of all time. 

Four years later, Mike Flanagan would create Midnight Mass, a spiritual adaptation of King’s second novel Salem’s Lot. Published in 1975, the book sees a tiny New England town torn apart by a centuries-old vampire. Though Flanagan’s story is perhaps more tender, both iterations of the classic horror tale follow close-knit communities shaken to their core by the presence of an  ancient evil. 

In addition to these recent hits, 2025 was a banner year for the Master of Horror. Audiences delighted in six mainstream adaptations, including the massively popular It: Welcome to Derry which chronicles earlier cycles of the titular clown’s reign. With this boost to King’s cultural cache, it’s no surprise that we’ve begun to see more unofficial adaptations of the author’s work and horror creators who build their own unique castles in King’s creative sandbox. 

So what defines a Stephen King-esque story?

For the past fifty years, the prolific author has dipped his toes in nearly every subgenre from supernatural stories and grisly gore to western fantasy and science fiction. Including his vast catalogue of short fiction, King has tackled ghosts, demons, werewolves, zombies, aliens, mutants, and self-driving cars, not to mention bizarre monsters of his own creation. But what truly unites this vast array of horror is King’s focus on relatable characters. In his 2000 memoir/instructional text On Writing, the prolific author describes the amusement he finds in writing disparate characters, placing them in horrific scenarios, then exploring the ways they try to survive.

An unofficial Stephen King adaptation may take place in the author’s native New England — bonus points if it’s set in Maine — and reference his well-known heroes and villains. But what makes the King connection unbreakable is a character-driven story about average people who band together in the face of abject terror. 

Weapons Captures Small Town Stephen King

Following his 2022 shocker Barbarian, Zach Cregger returned with Weapons, a sprawling story that begins in a doomed elementary school. On an otherwise ordinary day, Justine (Julia Garner) arrives at her desk to find that all but one of her students have disappeared. As the mystery grows increasingly violent, Justine and Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of a missing boy, find their way to the home of Alex (Cary Christopher), the class’ only surviving student. In some ways reminiscent of Salem’s Lot, Weapons swings wildly through the unfortunate town, introducing us to its flawed inhabitants as we watch their lives fall apart.  

Cregger’s setup nods to a pair of King short stories. Both “Suffer the Little Children” and “Here There Be Tygers” tackle monstrous presences in elementary schools, but as Weapons reaches its final act, Constant Readers may remember another Stephen King tale. Featured in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, “Gramma” introduces us to George, a little boy tormented by an aging witch. On an afternoon alone with his sickly grandmother, the frightened child gradually realizes that the imposing old woman has been waiting for an opportunity to cast a spell that will extend her own life by possessing his body.  

Alex finds himself similarly tortured by his aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), a garish witch who orchestrates a desperate plot to sustain her own strength. Transforming humans into mindless weapons, Gladys has taken over Alex’s family home and lured his classmates to the basement. Holding them in a comatose state, she syphons off their energy to extend her own supernatural life.

Vastly different in many ways, both “Gramma” and Weapons hinge on a sinister witch who uses horrific magical spells to sacrifice the bodies of her vulnerable prey. 

Hokum Echoes The Shining and 1408

It’s nearly impossible to watch a film about a haunted hotel without thinking of King’s third novel, The Shining. This icy story follows Jack Torrance, an angry writer struggling with his sobriety and a shameful incident haunting his past. Accompanied by his wife and young son, Jack has taken a job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook, a haunted hotel situated high in the Rocky Mountains. Snowed in, Jack finds himself tormented by dangerous ghosts who amplify his greatest fears. 

Damian McCarthy’s Hokum follows a similarly troubled figure. Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a surly writer who travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. Haunted by his own tragic past, Ohm finds himself trapped in the honeymoon suite, a decaying room that’s been permanently closed to protect visitors from a dangerous witch trapped within its walls. Visual nods to King’s text abound with woodcut figurines and an animated clock, mirroring ominous descriptions found in King’s text. 

Another terrifying sequence sees Ohm staring with horror at a closed door, the only thing separating him from the approaching witch. As the door knob slowly turns, Constant Readers remember Jack’s narrow escape from the ghostly woman in room 217. And Ohm’s popular Conquistador books directly reference King’s long-running fantasy series The Dark Tower which follows a gunslinger named Roland Deschain tasked with protecting the nexus of the universe. 

In addition to these thematic comparisons, Hokum bears striking resemblance to King’s terrifying short story “1408.” Collected in 2002’s Everything’s Eventual, the terrifying story follows Mike Enslin, a dejected writer who’s risen to fame penning essays about his adventures in haunted locations. Mike arrives at the Hotel Dolphin and bullies his way into the titular room, despite the manager’s dire warnings. McCarthy nods to this story with an ominously misplaced hotel room door, reminiscent of King’s entry to 1408, an unsuspecting portal that appears to move each time Mike looks away. 

However, McCarthy’s most direct reference lies in a minicorder Ohm uses to capture notes. Trapped inside the dreaded honeymoon suite, this device offers well-timed messages while sitting next to a decomposing corpse. Mike records his time in 1408 with his own trusty minicorder. Described for the reader, his tape has captured the man’s slow descent into madness as the room prepares to swallow him whole. With conclusions that differ wildly in tone, both Ohm and Mike find their lives irrevocably changed by encounters with the supernatural realm. 

Widow’s Bay Builds Its Own Version of Castle Rock

Katie Dippold’s Widow’s Bay has taken the idea of an unofficial King adaptation and turned it into an art form. The Apple TV series sees the residents of the titular island plagued by a curse that dates back centuries. Not only does the picturesque hamlet not accommodate wifi connections, those born on the island face certain death should they ever try to leave. Desperate to modernize the tiny town, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) draws in waves of tourists just as a new cycle of terror begins. 

Blending horror with deft comedy, Dippold makes cheeky references to King’s body of work. Tom warns that, “there’s something in the fog,” reminding readers of King’s 1980 novella The Mist. And Loftis’ own stay in the town’s haunted hotel sees him tormented by the ghost of a murderous clown. We even spy a vintage King hardback peeking out of a local book trade box.

In many ways Widow’s Bay feels like a new iteration of the author’s Little Tall Island, a tiny village off the coast of Maine. In addition to the 1992 novel Dolores Claiborne and a handful of harrowing short stories, this quaint fishing village is also the setting for King’s 1999 teleplay Storm of the Century. Premiering on ABC primetime, this tragic tale follows a terrified group of islanders who batten down the hatches for a dangerous Nor’easter only to find a more sinister threat lurking within. 

Constant Readers may also be reminded of Castle Rock, the author’s favorite fictional town.

First introduced in the 1981 novel Cujo, the charming village becomes the star of Needful Things, King’s satire about consumerism. After several Castle Rock stories, we’re reintroduced to its residents as they gossip about the arrival of Leland Gaunt and the grand opening of his curio shop. Anything their hearts desire can be found in his varied inventory, so long as they’re willing to pay the price. Pitting cantankerous neighbors against each other, Gaunt ignites a wave of grisly violence by exploiting long-held resentments and feuds. 

The town’s only defense against this supernatural threat is beleaguered sheriff Alan Pangborn. Still grieving the deaths of his wife and younger son, Alan struggles to connect with his older child and pick up the pieces of his shattered life. Also a widower, Loftis struggles to raise his own restless son and explain the strange details of his wife’s tragic death. Attempting to unravel the island’s dark secrets, Tom is aided by quirky residents including a surly fisherman named Wyck (Stephen Root) and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), an earnest Town Hall employee. King’s own novels feature many of these proactive alliances with disparate characters combining their strengths to overcome insurmountable odds. 

With Widow’s Bay renewed for a second season and Mike Flanagan’s Carrie series on the horizon, the future seems bright for new King adaptations, both spiritual and directly pulled from his catalogue. The prolific author also shows no signs of slowing down with two publications nearing release. His upcoming novel, Other Worlds Than These, is the long-awaited third Talisman book which teases direct ties to his Dark Tower world. Holly Forever will be a new installment of his crime series, offering a different kind of genre fare.

This embarrassment of riches spawning multiple worlds seems ripe for spiritual adaptation and will likely inspire horror creators for decades to come.

Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root and Matthew Rhys in “Widow’s Bay,” now streaming on Apple TV.

The post How ‘Weapons’, ‘Hokum’, and ‘Widow’s Bay’ Continue Stephen King’s Horror Legacy appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

This connection can be observed in everything from the cannibalistic serial killers of Frank Miller’s Sin City to the disturbing criminal plots fueling neo-noir thrillers like Stuart Gordon’s underrated King of the Ants. That’s why it came as no surprise when I finally sat down to watch all eight episodes of Prime Video’s recently released Spider-Noir series and was confronted with plenty of classic horror tropes.

What did come as a surprise, however, was how showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot approached these horror elements when compared to the 2009 comic book that the show is based on. From the heavily altered rogue’s gallery to an equally terrifying yet completely different origin story for Nicolas Cage’s take on the webslinger, there are plenty of changes here that I feel might be of interest to genre fans.

With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to take a closer look at all the adjustments that Spider-Noir made to the story in order to bring this incarnation of Spider-Man to life in all of its monochromatic glory (unless you watched the True-Hue color version of the show, in which case you’ll be treated to a surprisingly comic-booky palette that you don’t usually see on television).

The Dark Origins of Marvel’s Spider-Man Noir

Our first order of business should be to examine the origins of the Noir comics themselves. Originally published as part of the Marvel Noir alternate universe that reimagined several characters as hard-boiled crime-fighters, Spider-Man Noir became the most successful book in the entire run. This highly politicized story about Peter Parker coming to terms with the capitalist evils of the Great Depression seemed to have struck a nerve with audiences looking for a darker take on the wall-crawler, which is likely why we’d soon see several sequel stories as well as a video game adaptation of the character in 2010’s underrated Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.

Of course, it wasn’t just Spider-Man’s darker disposition that made this version of the character a hit, as 1930s New York City was depicted as being much more hostile than what we generally see in the standard Marvel Universe. From Peter’s powers coming from an Eldritch Spider God that spawns man-eating arachnids to Vulture being an ex-Freak-Show Gimp with a taste for human flesh, you can definitely understand why this Web-Head isn’t pulling his punches.

Unfortunately, this alternate universe was a little too popular for its own good, with each subsequent sequel/adaptation further diluting the political anger and classic horror influences that fueled the original comic-book run in order to appeal to a wider audience. Spider-Man Noir was nearly unrecognizable once we got to the Spider-Verse crossover that turned the character into a household name, though this would at least lead to an interesting adaptation in 2018.

The Classic Horror Influences Hidden Throughout Spider-Noir

Jack Huston as Sandman in ‘Spider-Noir’

When Phil Lord and Chris Miller finally translated Spider-Man Noir to the big screen, with Nicolas Cage bringing the character to life in an unexpected case of pitch-perfect casting, he was still mostly relegated to comic relief as his nazi-punching antics and over-the-top edginess were played for laughs. However, while this version of the character had little to do with the comics that spawned him, Spider-Noir’s newfound popularity eventually resulted in the announcement of a darker live-action spin-off – a spin-off that I was cautiously optimistic about.

While the showrunners ultimately decided to go in a completely different direction than the 2009 comic, the new team of writers appeared to understand Noir as a genre in ways that even the folks at Marvel Noir couldn’t quite grasp. That’s likely why 2026’s Spider-Noir boasts plenty of horror elements, just not in ways we’ve seen them before.

The series is obviously borrowing tropes and aesthetics from period-accurate monster movies, with Universal’s 1930s output being a particularly big influence. From the re-imagining of Sandman and Tombstone as tragic figures to The Spider even being operated on by a mad scientist with hilariously antiquated techniques, this bizarre collection of super-powered freaks could have easily shown up in a classic creature feature.

The scares aren’t all retro, however, as the showrunners also injected plenty of body-horror into the mix during their attempt at unifying the origin stories for all these larger-than-life characters. Hell, the Spider himself is now revealed to have gained his powers after being bitten by a half-mutated Man-Spider during World War I, and the aforementioned mad scientist keeps a disturbing collection of failed experiments in her basement, proving that not all of her patients were lucky enough to simply gain superpowers after being experimented on.

Nicolas Cage Reinvents Spider-Man Noir for Television

Ben Reilly/Spiderman (Nicolas Cage) in SPIDER-NOIR
Photo: Aaron Epstein/Prime
© Amazon Content Services LLC

I also really appreciate how Cage insists on depicting Ben Reilly as an arachnid trapped inside of a human body, with his uncanny physical performance and classic Hollywood impressions keeping your eyes glued to the screen while also providing some of the show’s funniest moments.

I still think it’s a shame that the character is no longer politically motivated, and I miss the detail about Uncle Ben having been cannibalized by Vulture after his social activism ruffled too many feathers, but at least this time our protagonist actually feels like someone who could have been written by Raymond Chandler if he were a fan of Superheroes.

In fact, the writers nailed the snappy back-and-forth that Noir authors like Dashiel Hammett used to refer to as the “riposte”, and it’s fun to see supervillains being depicted as horrific movie monsters instead of specialized henchmen – with The Spider feeling like just as much of a Freak Show attraction as the rest of them. Purists might be put off by the lack of reverence for the source material, but I think that’s a small price to pay when even the show’s most clichéd moments intentionally harken back to the golden age of Hollywood.

That’s why I’d argue that Amazon’s Spider-Noir isn’t really an adaptation, but rather an equally valid take on the same premise that inspired Marvel back in 2009. And in a world filled with recycled storylines that only serve to advertise future releases, I’d rather have two completely different visions of the same character than a straight-up retelling of the same handful of ideas.

At the end of the day, there’s enough space inside this comic fan’s heart for both man-eating Vultures and a Cronenberg-inspired Man-Spider. And if you’re also a fan of nostalgic creature features with comic book flair, I’d highly recommend this street-level superhero story with a spooky twist.

The post ‘Spider-Noir’ Comic Changes Explained: How the TV Series Reinvents Marvel’s Darkest Spider-Man appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Tyler MacIntyre is probably best known for the excellent slasher comedy, Tragedy Girls, but his feature debut came two years prior with his take on the Frankenstein tale. Patchwork is very much a low-budget affair, but its indie, genre-loving filmmaker heart beats loudly with a story about three lonely women brought together – quite literally – in death.

Last year marked its ten-year anniversary, and the fine folks at Terror Vision have celebrated it with a special edition 4K UHD/Blu-ray release packed with new special features.

Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…

Patchwork (2015)

Commentators: Tyler MacIntyre (director, co-writer, editor), Matt Donato (moderator, film journalist, lovable goober)

1. MacIntyre talks about the kinds of films that influenced his own love of horror as both a fan and a filmmaker, and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is obviously and rightfully towards the top of the list. He also refers to other “splatstick” movies like Evil Dead II and Dead Alive.

2. His manager, Allard Cantor, played devil’s advocate with MacIntyre, suggesting that maybe this wasn’t the movie he should make as his feature debut, but the filmmaker was adamant. Cantor immediately got behind him on the project, and his first call was to Gordon to set up a meeting with MacIntyre.

3. The film was shot over twelve days, which was “shorter than it probably should be.”

4. While it’s never actually said on screen, the collective “monster” is called Stitch in the script.

5. Jennifer, arguably the lead as the main body of Stitch, is played by Tory Stolper. She also co-stars in MacIntyre’s short film that Patchwork is based upon.

6. MacIntyre attended the American Film Institute with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, with the latter including Patchwork among his very first features. He went on to shoot movies like Hereditary, Midsommar, and The Woman in the Yard.

7. James Phelps plays Garrett, but the role almost went to Jack Quaid. Similarly, Sharni Vinson almost played Madeleine (Maria Blasucci).

8. McIntyre’s given at least some thought to a sequel, and he suggests it would include a setup about how this film’s owl-cat “had gone on and proliferated.” The result would be a series of animal-focused creations that create all manner of fun mayhem.

9. Stolper watched films with Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin to help with the physicality of her performance. MacIntyre also showed her films as varied as Oliver Stone’s The Hand and Carl Reiner’s All of Me.

10. They talk about having to prioritize and plan days that would involve stunt work, and that includes times when they took some risks and decided that certain scenes shouldn’t fall under that heading. They were budget considerations, and MacIntyre says those choices backfired on occasion, leading to minor issues, including one “stunt” that accidentally brought real glass into a scene. Thankfully, they never found themselves landing in truly dangerous territory with their non-stunt performers.

11. Donato shares a compliment from his friend, a self-described loud, angry feminist, who watched the film and said, “There are few men who can write women, and Tyler is one of them.” Having had the honor of meeting Amelia Emberwing in person, I can confirm that this is a pretty big deal endorsement of MacIntyre’s writing and characters.

12. There are various character traits and themes at play here among the three leads (Stolper, Blasucci, and Tracey Fairaway) that come, in large part, from the filmmakers being in their twenties at the time. From loneliness and the fear of being alone, two different things, to the kinds of predatory concerns that would eventually blossom into the “Me Too” movement, the film is very much the product of young people trying to find their way in Los Angeles.

13. MacIntyre’s second-favorite John Carpenter movie is Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Reader, trust me when I say that I was tempted to stop listening to the commentary right there. “I get a lot of shit,” he adds, and it’s entirely possible I may have muttered “clearly not enough” to an otherwise empty room.

14. The frat house rampage plays to a song by Generationals called “Ten-Twenty-Ten.” The band wouldn’t sign off on its use here until they saw the scene itself, and obviously, they were pleased with the results.

15. “It’s probably the weirdest thing we’ve done in our apartment,” says MacIntyre after the film’s rambunctious sex scene. Garrett’s apartment is actually MacIntyre’s own apartment in Koreatown, and this was the one scene that his neighbors complained about hearing.

16. Garrett is wearing a brown t-shirt at 1:00:24 with an 8-bit sprite image on it that’s actually the lead character from Dead Alive. It was made for the film, but MacIntyre really could have earned back some of the goodwill he lost after that Memoirs of an Invisible Man debacle by producing this shirt for sale. Missed opportunity there.

17. It takes until 1:10:32 for someone to mention Frank Henenlotter’s brilliantly weird Frankenhooker, and it comes when MacIntyre admits that he hadn’t seen that film yet when Patchwork went into production. He and co-writer Chris Lee Hill actually took a day in the middle of filming and made a point of closing that gap, and they were pleasantly surprised to see some similar elements to what they had found on their own.

18. The film ends with the reveal that the recently deceased Garrett has been Frankensteined back to life, and MacIntyre suggests that a follow-up would also have explored that the two bumbling lab techs (Eric Edelstein, Craig Anstett) are now part of him. Between that and the promised return of owl-cat, the commentary really leaves you wanting that sequel to happen.

Quotes Without Context

“I’m always amused by how dead Tracey managed to look in this scene.”

“We do not have the time to shoot any of these scenes right.”

“I’ve been, over the years, saddled with people I did not want to cast.”

“There’s a certain type of post-art school douchebag that this is channeling.”

“There’s a lot of amateur wig experts out there.”

“I cut myself out of the movie. That’s the first lesson of doing a director’s cameo.”

“Dating in L.A. is hard.”

Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.

The post 18 Things We Learned from the ‘Patchwork’ Commentary appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

There are tons to go through, but here are six that grabbed me if you’re looking for a place to start.

PENGUIN COLONY

We’ve seen the works of H.P. Lovecraft adapted in so many different ways in video games throughout the years. Whether direct adaptations or merely riffs on his themes, everything from the Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth to Bloodborne has given its take on cosmic horror concepts. What possible new perspective could there be for Lovecraftian fiction? How about a penguin’s perspective? Penguin Colony, the next game from Umarangi Generation creators Origame Digital, draws inspiration from stories like “At the Mountains of Madness“ and “The Shadow Out of Time“ to tell a tale of ancient beings hidden in the Antarctic seen through the eyes of a penguin.

It sounds like an odd pitch that’s extremely gimmicky, but after my time with the demo, it’s clear that they’re onto something. As a penguin, you waddle, slide, and swim your way through the desolate Antarctic landscape, running into remnants of an expedition that’s hunting for something in the ice. Aside from the environmental storytelling, narrative is delivered through voiceover, delivered by Lenval Brown of Disco Elysium fame, making for a moody trip through a barren world.

At its core, it’s essentially a walking simulator, but one with interesting movement options and oppressive atmosphere. In a clever touch, the wind effects act as your guide when you get lost, giving you a nudge in the right direction while also making your environment feel maximally chilling in the process. I love weird little experimental storytelling games like this, and I can’t wait to see how Penguin Colony explores Lovecraft from its unique perspective.

Penguin Colony is due out later this year.

ASCENDERS: BEYOND THE PEAK

While this game is also Lovecraft inspired, it couldn’t be further in gameplay from Penguin Colony. Ascenders: Beyond the Peak is a turn-based tactical mountain climbing game in which you face monsters and madness the higher you get. Mountain climbing has also been a popular theme recently, with games like Cairn or Jusant, but the turn-based approach feels wholly original, transforming the act of climbing into a board game-like experience. The clever gameplay is wrapped up in a roguelike structure that adds a lot of desperate decision-making as your journey goes on and supplies grow scarce.

The sheer cliff face you scale is represented on a grid, with various outcroppings that both block your way and offer places for you to rest. Each climb, you select three characters, who have different stats and abilities based on their class, and send them up the mountain. Their stamina is the most obviously important stat, which drains any time they are hanging from the side of a mountain. Resting on a ledge will recover one stamina, but time is always passing, and conditions are getting worse by the moment.

The most clever twist to your ascent is that your climbers are attached by rope, meaning you have to be smart about sending them through different routes to scavenge for supplies scattered around the map. As you run across creatures or mad climbers, combat comes into play as well, making the already dangerous climb even more deadly. I only did the tutorial and one run in my time with the demo, but I’m excited to see how the Lovecraftian elements come more into play when the game hits Early Access later this year.

ONIMUSHA: WAY OF THE SWORD

Capcom has been on a roll lately. Resident Evil games, Pragmata, Monster Hunter, the list goes on. It was only a matter of time before they started digging into their back catalog to revive beloved series of the past. Given the success of Sekiro and Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei, it shouldn’t be surprising that they are bringing back their samurai action-horror series Onimusha with an all-new entry. It’s been decades since I last played any of the games in the series, so while I don’t know if it replicates the originals exactly, Onimusha: Way of the Sword at least gives me the same feeling the old games did.

The demo itself is very action-heavy, sending you through a small village overtaken by demonic creatures. It’s a smooth combat experience that feels a bit more like a character action game a la Devil May Cry than a soulslike, which works fine for the tone it strikes. Enemies have both a health bar and a stamina bar, and breaking the stamina bar allows you to do a devastating attack that dismembers and kills them. There are also bonus attack windows granted with perfect dodges and parries, adding a satisfying timing element to the fights. While I found most of the standard encounters to be pretty easy, it did end with a slick boss fight that took me a few tries to get through, so it’s clear that Capcom likely has some more tricks up its sleeve to challenge the player more than this demo. It’s great to see the series back, and it looks like Way of the Sword is going to be a return to form. I’m very excited to see how it plays when it’s released on September 25.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword will also launch on PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series, and the Epic Games Store.

BLOOD DUNGEON

I liked Vampire Survivors enough when it came out, but it didn’t get its hooks in me the way its card-battling cousin did. It was a fun idea, but its gameplay complexity never really elevated to a point that kept me coming back after I started winning runs. Blood Dungeon, the latest game from the creator of indie hit Nidhogg, takes the autoshooting formula that Vampire Survivors made popular and puts it in a 2D platformer context, breathing new life into the subgenre.

At the start of the run, you pick a character that comes with a starting weapon, then you’re dropped into a 2D platforming level with waves of enemies coming after you. Right off the bat, you have access to a barbarian, who summons a sword to float around him, and a gunman, who shoots quick bursts of bullets. Just like Vampire Survivors, you kill dudes with these attacks that are on their own timers, collecting blood and selecting between random modifiers or weapon upgrades when you level up.

Not only does the new perspective add a lot more excitement to the genre, but I was surprised at the amount of movement options you had at your disposal. In addition to jumping around, you can climb on pretty much any surface, allowing you to scale walls or hang from ceilings as you attempt to avoid your enemies. There are also ladders and Super Mario World-esque chain-link fences you can climb on to aid your escape. I know this all sounds like pretty basic platforming action, but the dynamic ways you can escape make it feel so much more thrilling than your standard survivor-like. Jumping between bats only to hang from a ceiling over a knight while your sword slashes him, then leaping to a ladder to pursue a treasure chest, is exciting stuff, and that power curve you feel as you level up feels so meaningful.

On top of that, its Newgrounds flash game art style is unique and readable, making it easy for you to parse the chaos on the screen. I thought I was done with Vampire Survivor-likes, but this one might earn a place in my rotation whenever it’s released.

ENTROPY

I enjoyed my time with Lovely Hellplace’s Dread Delusion, a weird Morrowind-like RPG from a couple years ago, but it didn’t stick with it through the end. Entropy, their new tactical turn-based RPG inspired by classic JRPGs, seems to be a genre that’s a lot more in my wheelhouse, but still retaining the weird PSX-style visuals that give it so much character. You begin in a small medieval town as the sole surviving member of a theatre troupe after a horde of demons descends. After cleverly building the basics of your character by selecting options as you try to remember your lines in the play, you’re off to the races, trying to build a party that will fight back creatures and get you to safety.

The combat so far is fairly standard turn-based RPG mechanics, with two rows on each side that allow for a bit of tactical positioning. Attacks are emphasized with dynamic zooms that make them feel a bit more exciting, even if the animations remain pretty basic. You have one character that you control as you go through towns that cannot die, even if knocked out in battle, but every other member of your party has the chance of being lost if a battle turns south. Seems like the intention is for you to be thorough in your exploration, finding as many party members as you can to keep your ranks full, giving you incentive to do side quests.

After getting through the opening town, I was presented with a classic world map to navigate that brought me to some fun areas that had all sorts of strange inhabitants, like a band of mercenaries interrogating a head hanging from a tree. While I think I need to see more of the game to see if the combat has the tactical depth I need to keep me hooked, the vibe on display in the demo has me eager to dive in when it’s released in Early Access this August 16.

Entropy launches into Early Access on August 16.

VALOR MORTIS

Even though Ghostrunner was extremely my jam aesthetically, I couldn’t get into the punishing rhythm of precision wall running and one-hit-kill sword slashing as much as I wanted to. So when I saw the developer’s name on the reveal trailer for Valor Mortis, I was equal parts hopeful and skeptical. While the melee combat was a familiar aspect, the setting and inspirations were completely different. This first-person take on the soulslike genre casts you as an undead, supernaturally powerful soldier in Napoleon’s army trying to unravel a conspiracy that threatens all of humanity.

It’s a bold departure from Ghostrunner, but it’s easy to see the throughline if you look hard enough. They brought over the fast melee combat, but added some more intricacies that really bring to life the feeling of Bloodborne, but in first-person, which is no easy feat. You have all the standards of the genre – stamina, blocking, parrying, dodging – along with a pistol and magic options to round out your arsenal. Not only does it all come together and feel good in first person, but the setting feels really unique, with some grotesque soldiers-turned-monsters that test your mettle. At SGF, they announced a late September release date, but have since moved to October 13 to avoid release at the same time as some other heavy hitters.

Valor Mortis will also launch on October 13 for the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series.

Have you found any hidden gem demos for Steam Next Fest? Share your recommendation in the comments below!

The post Six Game Demos Worth Checking Out From Steam Next Fest appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

So while it might seem like Tales from the Crypt covered plenty of EC Comics’ works, a lot still remains unadapted.

These ten great stories would have made fine additions to the series.

“Bats in My Belfry!” (Tales from the Crypt)

When an actor named Harry began to lose his hearing, a friend put him in contact with a special “doctor”. After receiving the gift of super-hearing—a taxidermist implanted a bat’s auditory system inside of Harry—the protagonist learned about his wife’s affair. On top of that, she and her paramour were planning to kill Harry. Of course, they didn’t realize Harry had transformed into a humanoid vampire bat.

Something Tales from the Crypt didn’t do enough of, on account of whatever reason (budget and time restraints seem most likely), was stories about monsters. But Crypt once had the best contacts in the business, so you can bet that were-bat would have been in good hands.

“The Beast of the Full Moon!” (The Vault of Horror)

Tom and his girlfriend, June, were fearful of the werewolf who’d been on a recent murder spree in their area. Tom already suspected his brother Andrew, who may have been infected after a trip to Corocoa. And when Tom had an encounter with the werewolf, he stabbed the creature’s right paw before it could flee. Later, Tom’s suspicions were all but confirmed when he saw Andrew’s bandaged right hand.

So, Tom laid a trap for the monster—a pit—, and he waited nearby with a gun full of silver bullets. One thing led to another, and Tom ended up in the pit with the werewolf. Luckily, someone above shot and killed the beast. That’s when Tom saw Andrew above ground and June in the pit, the latter dead from her gunshot wound.

While Tales from the Crypt did have lycan episodes, like “Werewolf Concerto” and “The Secret”, there was still room for one more. With the comic having such a small cast, though, it may have been too easy to figure out the culprit. But surely someone on staff could have punched up the original story for television.

“Pipe Down!” (The Haunt of Fear)

Lila hated her older husband, Andrew. After beginning an affair with a handyman named Howard, Lila plotted Andrew’s death. She and Howard got away with Andrew’s murder, but now they couldn’t marry for a year; otherwise, it would look suspicious. In the meantime, Lila purchased a pet monkey that was born on the same day that Andrew died.

When Howard found what looked like evidence of Lila having another lover—he spotted a lit cigar and two half-empty glasses—Howard flew into a rage and murdered his girlfriend. That’s when the cops arrived, saying a phone operator reported the disturbance. However, all she heard on the other end of the phone was an animal’s shriek. Once Howard was arrested, Lila’s monkey went back into the house, picked up a book, and smoked a pipe. Just like Andrew used to do.

This story would have fit in with the wackier episodes of Tales from the Crypt. There are quite a few of those—especially later on as the series moved away from the more macabre material. “Pipe Down!” also spices up the typical adultery-and-murder plots that were so common in EC’s output.

“Swamped” (The Haunt of Fear)

Deep in the Okefenokee Swamp, a cannibalistic hermit fed on those who traveled near his shack built over the water. He fed on visiting hunters and then disposed of their remains beneath his home. Anyone who revolted or came after him only ended up in the quicksand. Finally, though, the hermit suffered the same fate as his victims; he, too, slipped into the muddy graveyard below his crumbling shack. Yet now waiting for him were the hungry souls desperate to get back at their killer.

It’s unclear who the writer was behind “Swamped”, but their work here is intense. The insight and colorful descriptions are unexpected for that mere tale of the cannibal who got his just desserts. That kind of writing, along with Reed Crandall‘s artwork, makes this one of the most engaging stories from EC’s horror run.

“The October Game” (Shock SuspenStories)

Mitch, a deeply resentful and growingly mad father and husband, hosted his young daughter’s Halloween party. Kids and other parents soon all piled into the basement. The night of fun then ended with one last parlor game: Mitch passed around the body parts of a witch (an arm, her heart, and so on). One of the young guests assumed these were really things like chicken innards.

Mitch’s wife, Louise, looked for her daughter among the crowd, wondering if Marion was scared. That’s when Louise realized the girl wasn’t there—or alive. She begged everyone not to turn on the lights in the basement, out of fear of them seeing what Mitch had done to her poor daughter. Unfortunately for Louise, her plea was in vain.

Tales from the Crypt usually refrained from child-endangered stories, and it much rather focused on adult characters. But the show also lacked Halloween entries, apart from Season Six’s “Only Skin Deep“. Perhaps the need for Halloween, as a validation of any eerie goings-on, was unnecessary.

This Ray Bradbury adaptation (originally a short found in Weird Tales) is well deserving of a read. It’s a glowing example of suspense storytelling. The comic also never shows a lick of violence, yet it feels incredibly violent.

“Strictly from Hunger” (The Vault of Horror)

A posse of men stood before a cave, awaiting something horrible inside. One of the men, Doc, explained the uncanny and dangerous creature; he’d seen it before. Doc told everyone about how his patient, Pete, was diagnosed with a malignant, cancerous lump on his arm. There was nothing Doc could do to help him. Pete then sought assistance from an old witch in the mountain. Using magic, she made sure Pete would never die, although his cancer remained intact and unhealed.

Over time, the cancer cells in Pete’s body consumed all his healthy cells. To keep living, Pete turned into a giant blob that ate others’ healthy cells. Back in the present story, the posse fought the emerging creature until it retreated into the cave. The characters all finally blocked the entrance to prevent Pete from ever escaping again.

Obviously, Tales from the Crypt didn’t have the budget to support a story like this one, but imagine if it did. A body horror episode of this degree could have been fantastic, not to mention outright disgusting.

“Marriage Vow” (The Haunt of Fear)

Martin and Eva’s marriage was no longer a happy one. Eva, who’d become controlling and slovenly a few years after their wedding, refused to let Martin out of her sight. “Till death do us part,” she would always say. Eventually, Martin killed Eva; he loosened the wrought iron bars on the balcony where Eva liked to spend time, and she fell to her death. However, Eva didn’t stay dead, as she came back as a zombie intent on honoring the “till death” part of their vows.

EC did more than its fair share of stories like “Marriage Vow”, as did Tales from the Crypt. Spousal murder was pretty common. This comic, though, delivers a strong implication as the zombified wife tells her husband to “come to bed”. That line makes a reader’s imagination run wild.

“Dog Food” (Crime SuspenStories)

A prisoner named Tom swore revenge on the warden, Lester, after a fellow prisoner was tortured and killed under his command. However, to get past Lester’s voracious guard dogs, so that he could enter his house and kill him, Tom started saving meat from his meals. The other prisoners also contributed to his collection.

Tom set off on his journey to Lester’s dog-guarded house, but he ran out of meat before reaching his destination. So, Tom did the next best thing and fed parts of his own body to the dogs.

Once again, Reed Crandall elevated a gruesome, vengeful story with his realistic style. It’s so lurid. At any rate, it was just too graphic for Tales from the Crypt to adapt—and that’s really saying something here.

“Master Race” (Impact)

Carl Reissman was on a subway, remembering his “bloody war years” in Germany. Even after a decade had passed, he remained paranoid. And as he spotted a certain other passenger coming his way, a man in all black, Carl became afraid and started running. His mind flashed back to the events of the Holocaust during this “chase”.

Finally, before Carl fell on the tracks and in the path of an oncoming train, he revealed he wasn’t a prisoner in a concentration camp; he commanded one. The stranger in black said to those onlookers, asking what happened; he didn’t even know the victim. This Carl had simply run from him on the platform.

While Tales from the Crypt did occasionally go beyond what was available in their more horror-centric source material—the war-themed Two-Fisted Tales, for instance—it didn’t ever go near Impact. This short-lived series is considered toned down for EC. Even still, that didn’t make “Master Race” any less shocking. It’s a potent entry that wouldn’t have fit in with the Tales from the Crypt show we now know, but nonetheless, it’s a thought-provoking piece of storytelling.

“Forty Whacks!” (Crime SuspenStories)

A twenty-two-year-old woman named Fanny was frustrated by her parents; they flipped out when she put on makeup. However, when the daughter discovered a mysterious hatchet in her attic, she became possessed by a strange power and did the unthinkable. One after the other, Fanny used that hatchet to kill her parents.

The detective assigned to Fanny’s case was interrupted by his wife and son. The former had an out-there theory: the hatchet belonged to the infamous Lizzie Borden, and it was now capable of causing children to kill their own parents. The detective didn’t buy his wife’s idea, but that was until his entranced son picked up the murder weapon and took a swing at his pop.

Here, EC dipped into historical crime for a ghoulish story that sounds like something out of Friday the 13th: The Series. Maybe it’s a bit in bad taste, but that has never stopped Tales from the Crypt—which is why we love it.

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I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.

Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career. 

SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!

Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person. 

The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house. 

A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession. 

Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways. 

This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.

Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.

It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?

On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her. 

But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.

This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.

Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.

On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.

In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.

Disclosure Day is in theaters now. 

Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.

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Now, I would be remiss to not bring up how very off that last season felt, in comparison to past ones. If not for the Crypt Keeper’s bookends, it was like a different show at that point. Essentially, it was when you assessed how much had changed. Producer Gilbert Adler was responsible for those divisive renovations; his moving production to England was an attempt to give Crypt “a shot in the arm”. What he instead did was create obstacles for both himself and the series. Some could be overcome, whereas others were less yielding.

Fans decry Season Seven, but in all fairness, Season Six wasn’t all roses, either. And like Six, Seven does have a few bright spots. The move to merry England couldn’t completely undo what we love about the series. Yes, there was a decline in gore; the dial had especially been turned down on those big, bloody conclusions we all love. It must be said, though, that the final season was hardly the only one to be gruesome-lite. Plenty of past episodes also did without copious amounts of the red stuff. 

At the time, traveling abroad may not have been seen as a bad thing. The new season was off to a strong start, based on favorable reactions to the premiere. The Natasha Richardson-starring opener, “Fatal Caper” (Bob Hoskins, Colman deKay, A. L. Katz, Gilbert Adler), is as ridiculous as it is clever. However, it would soon become apparent that not everything to come in Season Seven was up to the same standards as that first episode. It was going to be a bumpy ride, to say the least.

Most will agree that the seventh season wasn’t a complete bust. The blood-soaked “Horror in the Night” (Russell Mulcahy, John Harrison) is atmospheric and trippy; there, a jewel thief (James Wilby) experiences a nightmarish evening while hiding out in a haunted hotel. Then there is what many consider to be the season’s standout, and perhaps even the last great episode of the series. In the gritty “Confession” (Peter Hewitt, Scott Nimerfro), a detective (Ciarán Hinds) suspects a screenwriter (Eddie Izzard) is behind a string of murders. Although it is a strange way to end things, “The Third Pig” (Bill Kopp, Pat Ventura) also has its admirers; this animated entry is a demented new spin on the classic fairytale “The Three Little Pigs“, as opposed to anything out of EC Comics‘ vault.

Another fine episode is “A Slight Case of Murder”, which I find a bit lighthearted for Tales from the Crypt. In spite of all the killing, of course. It also makes good use of the scenery change; an upside of the show’s relocation is the real estate. A Tudor-style home sits at the heart of this amusing episode, written and directed by Brian Helgeland (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, 976-EVIL). Cozy mystery lovers should be quite smitten with the story’s choice of venue.

A common complaint about Season Seven is its lack of star power. Gone were the days when anyone who was anyone in Hollywood stopped by and played a role. That said, it wasn’t as if the series was now just hiring nobodies off the street; the problem was that many American viewers weren’t as familiar with the new casts. “A Slight Case of Murder” was such a case, given how Francesca Annis, Elizabeth Spriggs, and Christopher Cazenove weren’t exactly household names in the States. Naturally, the English would have an easier time recognizing the leads of this and other Season Seven episodes.

“A Slight Case of Murder” is an example of a crabby author getting what’s coming to them. Generally speaking, the horror genre has never cared much for depictions of kind writers. And here, Annis plays that rather irritable novelist whose next bestseller is at risk of being published posthumously. After brilliantly insulting her neighbor, an aspiring author named Mrs. Trask (Spriggs), Sharon Bannister detects a prowler. She then takes no comfort knowing the intruder is just her ex (Cazenove). He’s not here to reminisce about old times.

The last page from “A Slight Case of Murder!”, as seen in EC Comics’ The Vault of Horror.

The episode, while amusing, feels like it belongs in another anthology. The one I’m thinking of, on account of the British actors and the story being centered around jealousy, is Tales of the Unexpected. That series, by the way, also eventually went overseas; some later episodes cast Americans and were set in the U.S. So, yes, “A Slight Case of Murder” isn’t a thing like classic Crypt, but it is awfully charming.

By now, no one should be shocked to learn that an episode of Tales from the Crypt is different from its basis. In fact, the “A Slight Case of Murder!” found in EC’s The Vault of Horror bears no resemblance to Helgeland’s adaptation. An old doctor returns to his hometown to solve a bunch of murders—the victims were all women. At each crime, there was no sign of a break-in, seeing as how the women’s doors and windows were locked from the inside. The sheriff says the only other way in, in one case, was a hot-air vent. He concludes no human could have fit through that, but the doctor suggests the culprit is “not an ordinary human”.

The doctor meets with the sheriff at an old house formerly known as the Bates Mansion. Yet before revealing the killer’s identity, the doctor tells a story about a local widow named Amelia Bates. After her newborn turned out to be—and I’m merely quoting writers Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein—a “misshapen monster”, Amelia asked the doctor to tell everyone her child was a stillborn. She kept that underdeveloped, slithering boy a secret from everyone; only the doctor knew.

Years later, that same child went on to murder a series of women. All of whom rejected his love. And who, pray tell, did that baby become? The town’s sheriff, that’s who! The last frame of the comic, one showing the sheriff’s hidden mechanical body, is so startling that it’s actually disappointing that Tales from the Crypt didn’t properly adapt this story. It would have fit in so well with the older seasons.

As they say in the biz, the show must go on—and Tales from the Crypt did just that, even when the quality had noticeably dropped. But like I always tell myself during the lesser episodes, any Crypt is still better than no Crypt.

Along with Seasons One through Six, Season Seven of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 12.

A delightful shot from “A Slight Case of Murder” suggests Elizabeth Spriggs’ character, Mrs. Trask, is more devilish than she first seemed.

The post Tales from ‘Tales from the Crypt’: Exhuming The Final Season’s “A Slight Case of Murder” Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Fast forward to June of 2026, and we finally got our first glimpse at Brian Duffield’s long-awaited adaptation of Whalefall, starring Austin Abrams as our unfortunate lead who gets swallowed alive by a sperm whale. While this two-and-a-half-minute teaser only covers the beginning of the story, it’s already been making waves online (and in-person at select 4DX promotional screenings) as one of the most stressful cinematic experiences of the year.

In fact, my own wife had to cover her eyes and exclaim, “You’re definitely not dragging me to watch this one” when we saw the whale’s jaws begin to close in on Abrams, with this incident alone already leaving me convinced that this will likely be one of the biggest genre hits of the year. With that in mind, I’d like to invite you to take a closer look at the teaser in order to break down interesting details and get a better idea of what’s in store for genre fans when the movie finally comes out this October.

Of course, as usual, don’t forget to comment below if you noticed something we didn’t!

Now, without further ado, here are five things we learned from the Whalefall trailer!

5. Austin Abrams Performed Many of His Own Stunts

Much like in his previous film, No One Will Save You, Duffield insisted that this visceral experience should be grounded by our main character’s believable reactions, regardless of the plot’s effects-heavy setup. That’s why the camera always makes sure to linger on Abrams through his diving mask, so we know that it’s really him going through this ordeal alongside the audience.

While plenty of CGI was used in order to bring this larger-than-life story to the big screen without killing our leading man, Abrams apparently insisted on performing many of his underwater stunts himself (several of which are visible in the trailer) – much to the chagrin of a worried Duffield and the flick’s stunt coordinator, Shauna Duggins.

4. The Film Seamlessly Transitions Between the California Coast and Underwater Sets

Duffield obviously wasn’t about to drag his crew out to the middle of the ocean and shoot inside a real sperm whale, but it’s reassuring to see the filmmaker blend on-location footage with the underwater tank segments and the literal belly of the whale set.

There may be plenty of CGI stitching these elements together, but the trailer shows us that only the truly impossible shots are completely digital, meaning that the filmmakers didn’t take the easy way out when it came to adapting this unique story.

3. The Whale is Only Part of the Story

Book adaptations tend to leave out inner monologues and the occasional flashback in order to streamline the narrative (which is one reason why it’s so difficult to translate Stephen King novels to the big screen), but a claustrophobic parable like Kraus’ Whalefall would get a bit dull after a while if the whole thing was entirely set within the creature’s stomach.

That’s why it’s such a relief that the trailer hints at how Duffield will also be adapting many of the book’s introspective moments chronicling our protagonist’s harsh upbringing under his troubled father. Not only do these inclusions give the audience some much-appreciated breathing room, but they also give Josh Brolin a chance to shine as a truly complicated character.

2. The Movie is Keeping the Book’s Scientific Accuracy…

While Kraus’ novel was inspired by a viral video of kayakers nearly being swallowed by a humpback whale, the writer ended up consulting with marine biologists about exactly what kind of situation might lead to a whale actually eating a human being alive.

The answer was surprisingly specific, as cetaceans are almost universally known to be friendly towards humans. However, even a gentle giant can make mistakes, and as we see in the trailer, Abrams’ unpleasant fate is more of an accident than anything else – with the massive sperm whale only trapping the poor diver in the first (and thankfully acid-free) chamber of its stomach due to a mix-up involving a giant squid.

Fortunately for the film’s special effects artists, they can now reference the first-ever footage of a real-life sperm whale chowing down on one such squid, as this freaky recording was released late last year.

1. …With a Catch!

Duffield may be doing his best to recreate the grounded (or is it submerged?) thrills of Kraus’ novel, but there are limits to what can be depicted onscreen while still guaranteeing an entertaining movie. That’s why it’s no surprise that Whalefall will take advantage of certain cinematic parlor tricks as the director tests the limits of both physics and biology so we can actually watch his movie.

For starters, the innards of the whale itself have been greatly exaggerated so there’s enough space to make out the action, and in the spirit of movies like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, there also seems to be plenty of non-diegetic lighting meant to show us what’s going on even if Abram’s character wouldn’t necessarily be able to see anything.

The post 5 Things We Learned From The ‘Whalefall’ Trailer appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

For instance, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation makes genius use of the analog gimmick in order to trap us in the titular rooms alongside our main characters before effortlessly switching back to a more cinematic language. In honor of these dynamic films that manage to combine the best of both worlds, today I’d like to share six other hybrid horror movies that successfully incorporate found footage into their scares!

For the purposes of this list, “hybrid” horror movies are defined as any flick that shifts between diegetic recordings and traditional filming techniques for a significant amount of time (or at least for pivotal scenes).

As usual, don’t forget to comment below with your own hybrid favorites if you think a particularly freaky one was missed.

With that out of the way, onto the list!

5. The Last Broadcast (1998)

Internet critics may have overstated the influence that Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast had on The Blair Witch Project, but the found footage subgenre still owes a huge debt to this underrated piece of avant-garde filmmaking. However, while the movie sets itself up as a documentary about the disappearance of a group of cryptid-hunters attempting to track down the Jersey Devil, things take a darker and much more grounded turn towards the final act.

I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that the jarring shift in perspective actually helps to sell the idea that everything we’ve seen before the finale was an attempt at using filmmaking to manipulate the public perception of a “real” incident.

Not bad for a movie with a $900 budget!

4. Cam (2018)

When you consider just how much the internet affects our daily lives, it’s strange that we don’t see Screenlife elements pop up in more movies these days. For instance, Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber’s highly underrated Cam only works as a freaky parable about online sex-work because it masterfully balances Madeline Brewer’s intimate moments with highly immersive segments within cyberspace.

While one might argue that the entire film could have been produced as a Screenlife experience, the hybrid approach allows the filmmakers to explore our main character’s life beyond the screens – with the duality of modern human existence actually becoming a recurring theme in the story.

3. Banshee Chapter (2013)

Most of H.P. Lovecraft’s popular stories were told in the epistolary format (where the text is presented as an in-universe compilation of letters or personal notes), so it makes sense that a spiritually faithful adaptation of his work would incorporate elements from the modern-day equivalent to epistolary fiction – found footage!

That’s why Blair Erickson’s Banshee Chapter is such an effective scare-fest, as this hybrid adaptation of From Beyond -retold through a conspiratorial lens as it references MK-Ultra and even secretive numbers stations- immerses viewers in a mind-bending tapestry of Cosmic Horror that blurs the line between fiction and reality.

2. The Deep House (2019)

The underwater setting does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House, with the film being especially uncomfortable if you’re already scared of tight spaces and being deprived of oxygen. However, even the universally unsettling elements of the flick only work because the POV often shifts into claustrophobic footage courtesy of our main characters’ GoPro cameras.

Telling the story of a couple of YouTubers who encounter a haunted house at the bottom of an artificial lake while vacationing in France, The Deep House’s first-person exploration sequences contain some of the film’s scariest moments. In fact, I’d argue that the movie didn’t even need ghosts, as becoming trapped in the titular House already sounds like a fate worse than death.

1. Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

My personal favorite instance of filmmakers successfully managing to combine traditional cinematography with POV filmmaking, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, is proof that the two formats can co-exist if the right story comes along.

After all, what better way to conclude a mockumentary all about reality getting increasingly more cinematic than by ditching the found footage gimmick altogether during the finale? Not only does this shift in presentation work on a conceptual level, but it also elevates Behind The Mask into a proper Slasher, which is probably why we’re so excited for that long-overdue sequel!

The post 5 Found Footage Hybrid Horror Movies to Watch After ‘Backrooms’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Known for excruciating violence and gore, what often distinguishes these visceral films is the depiction of emotional turmoil manifested as the destruction of human flesh. Few filmmakers make this comparison so literally as Marina de Van.

The French writer/director burst onto the scene in 2002 with her shocking In My Skin, a tale of self-discovery via grisly self-harm. Eleven years later, she would write and direct Dark Touch, the harrowing story of a traumatized girl who expresses her pain through telekinetic force.

Though they differ wildly in tone and subject, both In My Skin and Dark Touch deal with the horror of unexpressed agony and its tendency to break the skin, ripping and shredding through anything in its path.

In My Skin (2002): Self-Harm as a Response to Emotional Repression

This intensely personal film stars de Van as Esther, a corporate analyst on the verge of having it all. Her adoring boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas) is poised to move in, and she’s been targeted for promotion thanks to her diligent work. During a high-pressure networking party, Esther wanders outside and trips over an open construction site, ripping her pants on an abandoned tool. It’s only later that she notices blood on the floor and realizes that she’s torn the skin of her calf as well. Surprisingly, Esther has not felt a thing.

The surgeon who stitches up the wound marvels at this lack of sensitivity, wondering if the problem is not her shredded flesh — she’s still able to feel the lightest touch — but a misalignment in her head. This wound unlocks a disturbing pattern of dissociative self-mutilation as Esther begins cutting and gouging her skin to cope with moments of emotional stress. 

Her first intentional act of self-harm follows a minor mistake in a document. After noticing that she’s misused a word, Esther fixes the error, then sneaks away to slice her thigh with a stray piece of metal. Though she has caught the mistake herself, Esther anticipates punishment for imperfection. The subsequent wound on her thigh is proof that she has paid for her transgression and can now return to solid ground, having completed the cycle of shameful correction. 

As we peel back the layers of Esther’s life, we’re aghast at the toxicity of her environment. The inciting fall happens shortly after she politely declines a dinner invitation from her older colleague, an inappropriate sexual advance dressed up as an offer for mentorship. At another party, her male coworkers drag her towards the pool, threatening to pull off her pants when she screams that she’s not wearing a bathing suit.

Esther flees this disturbing scene, but not because of the men’s aggressiveness. She’s disturbed to find that her struggle to break free has reopened the still-healing wound on her leg, causing unsightly blood to seep through her pants. Like many women in the corporate world, she’s been conditioned to view her presence as an optional privilege and to create comfort for her male colleagues. Should she negatively react to their atrocious behavior, they may deem her “too emotional” and take away her hard-earned position. 

But this toxic environment only exacerbates Esther’s need to self-harm. At a working dinner, a wealthy client pressures her to drink expensive wine, then continues to refill her glass. Increasingly unmoored, Esther finds her hand creeping onto her dinner plate. After repeatedly dragging it out of her food, she notices the appendage lying limp on the table, completely disconnected from her upper arm. This surrealist moment in an otherwise grounded film is a turning point in her violent journey. Esther sees how desensitized her body has become and the lengths she will go to perform unobtrusive compliance. 

Desperate to regain control, Esther gouges her forearm with a steak knife stolen from the table, hiding the carnage under a napkin. Humiliated, she concludes the evening in a nearby hotel, where she indulges this dangerous new compulsion. For hours, Esther lovingly slices her arms and legs, gnawing on loose flesh and suckling blood from extensive wounds. She seems enamored with her ability to feel again without being perceived by anyone else. 

Disturbed by her scars, Vincent offers shaky support while contributing to Esther’s unexpressed pain. During an intense discussion about buying their first home, Esther forgets her PIN at an ATM and bursts into tears on the street. Vincent offers an easy solution, only showing his frustration behind closed doors. He lashes out at his stunned girlfriend, conflating her emotional stress with his own inadequacy.

Clearly destabilized by her tears, Vincent baits Esther into soothing him, an echo of the cycle she performs at work. We see that even at home, her emotional needs come second to men who are unequipped to handle their own feelings. Esther has internalized the responsibility of managing Vincent alongside the message that any break in her calm demeanor will lead to more suffering later on. 

In the wake of this argument and a rebuke from her boss, Esther suffers a panic attack while walking to work. In a daze, she buys another knife, then takes a hotel room for the day. Blood runs over Esther’s face as she again luxuriates in self-mutilation. De Van finds an uneasy juxtaposition between gruesome carnage and euphoric escape. Alone again with her exquisite pain, Esther seductively runs the knife over her face, digging into the skin around her eye. She chemically preserves a severed piece of flesh then lovingly tucks it inside her bra, a keepsake to honor this violent vacation.  

The next day, Esther prepares for work, pulling office attire over her blood-stained skin. De Van does not follow her out the door, leaving us to imagine how she will be received by the men in her life. Will they finally see what they’ve put her through, or will life continue as before, with Esther pretending that nothing is wrong and performing perfection until her body gives out? De Van ends the film with the striking image of Esther lying on the hotel bed, fixing the audience with a knowing stare. Though she carefully hides her fragility, we alone have seen the true cost of survival in this destructive world. 

Dark Touch (2013): Trauma, Abuse, and Supernatural Revenge

In many ways, this shocking story of catharsis through violence feels like a thematic response to In My Skin and Esther’s unexpressed pain. Also written and directed by de Van, Dark Touch follows an Irish girl named Niamh (Missy Keating) who becomes the sole survivor of a massacre.

 We first meet this little girl screaming from her bedroom window, then running through the stormy night to the house of family friends Nat (Marcella Plunkett) and Lucas Galin (Pádraic Delaney). Niamh’s parents smooth over the incident, presenting the illusion of a happy home. It’s only when the doors are closed that we realize something is dreadfully wrong. De Van implies the worst as the sinister couple creeps into their daughter’s room, commanding her to be a “good girl.” But Niamh is saved from horrific abuse by furniture that seems to move on its own. 

De Van leans into her French Extremity roots in what will become a gruesome execution. Niamh’s mother is crushed by a splintering bureau, a loose screw driving itself into her face. Her father watches his wife’s grisly death, then falls on the blades of an ultra-modern light fixture. Flames spread through the house as Niamh cradles her infant brother in a tiny cupboard. When rescuers arrive on the scene, we learn that the baby boy has died, mysteriously smothered by an inhuman force. Now an orphan, Niamh goes to stay with Nat and Lucas, who struggle to meet her emotional needs. Unable to explain her traumatic past, Niamh finds that things move whenever she cries, an outward manifestation of her silenced rage. 

Though Nat and Lucas offer support, they only seem to make things worse. Lucas volunteers to stay in Niamh’s room when she has a bad dream, oblivious to the discomfort his presence might cause. Growing impatient when she can’t fall asleep, a snide comment betrays his empty concern. Niamh finally finds solace in photos of the couple’s older daughter, who died from cancer years ago. She clings to an image of the little girl blowing out birthday candles while covered in bruises, drawn to the familiar juxtaposition of a child suffering through visible pain while going about life as if nothing is wrong.

But this too enrages Lucas. When he finds the pictures under her bed, the weeping father shakes Niamh and demands to know what gives her the right to bring up such a devastating memory. While perhaps understandable, Lucas’ reaction tells the traumatized girl that his comfort is the true priority, and she is not allowed to soothe herself. 

Niamh’s only friends in the tiny town are young siblings from a similarly violent home. Whistling to them in the night, Niamh uses her emerging telekinesis to kill their abusive mother in an attack similar to the one that destroyed her own family. When Nat arranges for Niamh to attend a birthday party, she bristles at the other girls’ treatment of their baby dolls. They slap and rip at their faux children’s hair, seeming to process their own quasi-abusive upbringing. As she bursts into tears, Niamh spreads fire through the party and melts the faces of the mistreated dolls. That night, she lures the children to school and then destroys the building, violently disrupting what she interprets as a continuous cycle of child abuse. 

Next, Niamh turns her attention to her foster parents, telepathically trapping them in her former home. For hours, she puts them through a series of torturous humiliations we assume she endured at her own parents’ hands. Now, Nat and Lucas must suffer in silence as Niamh finally reveals the extent of her misery. Forced to sit with their tormentor at a dinner table, Nat and Lucas quietly weep as flames spread throughout the home. Like Naimh once did, they go through the motions of a happy family, unable to protect themselves. Their foster daughter smiles as the fire consumes them all, finally putting an end to her tragic life. 

Despite this murderous conclusion, Niamh is not a traditional villain. She’s a horrifically abused little girl who can’t find a way to express her pain. Though she’s managed to remove herself from immediate danger, every attempt to heal is met with stigma, resentment, or the burden of caring for someone else. When her trauma becomes too uncomfortable, she’s advised to simply stay out of sight.

Like Esther, Niamh exists in a world that expects her to create comfort for everyone else, regardless of the suffering it causes her. But Niamh’s agony can no longer be contained. Abandoning all hope for a happy life, she channels her rage and destroys anyone who crosses her path. Perhaps this is not fair to Nat and Lucas or the children of this tiny town. But what happened to Niamh is also unfair, and her trauma can no longer be ignored. 

Though they do not narratively connect, Dark Touch feels like a spiritual successor to In My Skin. Both Esther and Niamh try to swallow their pain, but find it too great to be contained. We leave Esther struggling to stay afloat in a world of male toxicity. Picking up Niamh’s story at a similar moment, we watch the child escape her own abuse only to find that the world doesn’t really care. Her community will only offer support if it doesn’t disrupt their own lives.

Though de Van does not offer us hopeful endings, there’s grim satisfaction in revealing the world as it is, one built on the expectation that women will suffer in silence. Both In My Skin and Dark Touch seem to argue that a society built on women’s pain does not deserve a second chance. 

The post How Marina de Van Uses Body Horror and Pain to Explore Trauma in ‘In My Skin’ and ‘Dark Touch’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

For instance, years ago, I remember scoffing at Silent Hill: Shattered Memories due to its initial disclaimer promising that “this game plays you as much as you play it,” only to later go through unexpected heartbreak once the developers used the game’s personalization mechanics to make the ending even more impactful. This is just one example of interactive experiences reaching through the screen in order to affect gamers, and in honor of eerie fourth-wall breaks and haunted game folders everywhere, today I’d like to recommend six other meta horror games liable to melt your brain (but in a good way).

For the purposes of this list, I’ll be defining “meta” as any game that incorporates/addresses the fact that you’re playing a game into the overall narrative. That being said, this is far from a definitive guide to the meta horror genre, so don’t forget to comment below with your own favorites if you think I missed a particularly spooky one.

With that out of the way, onto the list!

6. Bubbaruka!

I was fascinated by virtual pets as a kid. Pokémon Yellow was always my favorite entry in the franchise because you could look behind you and check in on Pikachu, and you’d never find me on the playground without my trusty blue Tamagotchi. That’s why it felt like Benjamin Schade’s Bubbaruka! was made for me, personally.

A survival horror throwback where you explore an unfinished version of a nostalgic virtual pet game that a friend of yours found hidden inside a used laptop, this surprisingly lengthy title will soon have you questioning the limits of virtual life and death. Just remember not to lower your guard just because of the game’s cutesy retro graphics, as Bubbaruka! has a lot more up its lo-fi sleeves than you may initially realize.

5. Inscryption

Roguelike deck-building may no longer be the novel game mechanic that it once was, but when it works, it really works. If there’s one of these randomized titles that still hasn’t been beaten despite years of competitors attempting to one-up its card-based thrills, it’s Daniel Mullins’ infamous Inscryption.

What starts as a supernatural haunted cabin story soon with folk horror aesthetics soon evolves into a mind-bending exploration of the terrors of programming itself, though I won’t get into details as this is one genre narrative that is best experienced firsthand.

While the latter half of the game isn’t quite as mechanically engaging as that memorable first act, Daniel has since updated the title with an infinite tabletop mode so you can continue battling Leshy to your masochistic heart’s content.

4. SIMULACRA

Despite smartphones being such a crucial part of modern-day life, there isn’t a lot of media that explores this virtual aspect of our online selves in any meaningful capacity. That’s why I was originally compelled to try out Kaigan Games OÜ’s SIMULACRA – a mystery game where you find a lost phone and attempt to unravel the secrets of a missing young woman named Anna.

From fully functional apps to authentic-looking Found Footage videos detailing Anna’s life and social group, SIMULACRA will leave you feeling like a reluctant detective that can’t help but get involved in a missing persons case that only gets stranger the more you learn about it.

If you like this one, don’t forget to check out the mechanically superior sequels.

3. A Dark Place

XerStudios’ A Dark Place may be controversial due to its malware-like approach to messing with your computer systems as you play, but I’d argue that this experimental form of interactive art makes the game that much more fascinating – especially since the story behind the title is interesting enough for it to be worth dealing with what some fans jokingly consider to be legitimately cursed game files.

While this 2018 title is best experienced blind, I’m a big fan of how the game uses extremely simple mechanics to tell a complex story that lingers long after you’ve (hopefully) managed to uninstall the curse.

2. MyHouse.wad

Adding MyHouse.wad to this list is kind of a cheat since it’s technically a Doom II mod instead of a standalone release, but there’s no way that we could discuss fourth-wall-breaking meta horror experiences without bringing up the videogame equivalent to Mark Z. Danielewski’s iconic House of Leaves.

I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers, but Steve Nelson’s bizarre creation starts out as an architectural tribute to a deceased friend before quickly evolving into a freaky example of liminal horror and the limits of virtual obsession.

If you’ve ever felt like living through a Creepypasta, this is the game/mod for you!

1. Forbidden Solitaire

The most recent release on this list, Grey Alien games and Night Signal Entertainment’s Forbidden Solitaire, may not be a technically complex title, but it’s certainly one of the most entertaining interactive horror romps of the past few years.

This tongue-in-cheek project presents itself as an eerily authentic piece of screenlife horror where you try out a mysterious card game from the ’90s while your sister attempts to warn you about the title’s allegedly “cursed” history. While poking through the protagonist’s desktop screen and receiving fascinating FMV footage from Emily is entertaining enough, using the power of Solitaire to destroy demonic entities is terrifyingly addictive.

The post 6 More Meta Horror Games That Play You as Much as You Play Them appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.

Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.

A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References

Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.

Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.

Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.

Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.

Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.

Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?

“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.

Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.

We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.

It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.

Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody

Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th

Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.

Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.

Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.

Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.

The post Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.

However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.

For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.

The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).

While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!

That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).

At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.

The post Meet the Actors Who Brought the ‘Backrooms’ Still Life Monsters to Life [SPOILERS] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.

“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.

What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.

Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.

Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.

Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.

Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.

How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.

A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.

While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.

As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…

Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.

For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.

Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.

Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.

Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.

The post Tales from ‘Tales from the Crypt’: Exhuming Season Six’s “Only Skin Deep” Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Yet, despite being based on Parsons’ existing ARG/Webseries, the A24-produced film is more of a standalone tale exploring the personal implications of the titular rooms rather than a traditional examination of the hard sci-fi elements present in the source material.

This less lore-reliant approach was a genius move, as the resulting film ended up being equally accessible to both existing fans and newcomers alike. That’s not to say that Backrooms doesn’t engage with the existing mythology in new and interesting ways, however, as the film heavily expands on the Async Research Institute and the cryptobiology of the rooms themselves.

With that in mind, I’m diving a little deeper into these connections in order to help fledgling Backrooms enthusiasts find their way around the yellow labyrinth.

As is to be expected from this kind of article, there are major spoilers ahead, so proceed at your own risk if you’ve yet to see the movie…

Who is Async Research Institute in the Backrooms Movie?

Backrooms. Courtesy of A24.

Of course, if we’re going to discuss the connections between the series and the film, a good place to start would be Async itself. The California-based Foundation plays a brief yet pivotal role in the film as outside observers that only really interfere with the main plot during the final act. While the Foundation is the main focus of the ARG, they’re mostly hinted at in the film. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark runs into several Async-built “anomaly lures” during his exploration of the liminal space (mostly in the form of human-shaped cut-outs accompanied by audio recordings inspired by the 1977 Voyager Golden Record), as well as surveillance cameras and evidence that at least one of their agents has become trapped in the rooms – though we’ll get to this last detail later.

It’s only towards the end of the flick that Foundation agents finally show up in their iconic yellow protection suits and “rescue” Renate Reinsve’s Mary by pulling her back to “reality” through a familiar portal, though it’s heavily implied that they might not be all that concerned with her well-being.

After all, long-time fans are aware that Async has been researching the “Complex” (their official name for the Backrooms phenomenon) since at least the late 1980s, with their Threshold experiments being based on a Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System prototype developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1982.

Unfortunately, their experiments have likely resulted in hidden portals appearing more frequently in the outside world, which consequently leads to more people accidentally “no-clipping through reality.” And that’s not even mentioning the occasional earthquake caused by unstable Thresholds!

Where the Backrooms Fits in the Original ARG Timeline

Kane Parsons’ “The Backrooms” horor short

Though the film takes place in 1990, the ARG’s timeline actually begins in 1996, with the original found footage upload and the ensuing research sparked by the video serving as sequels to the A24 production. Not only that, but film’s Still Life monsters (“misremembered” versions of real people who wandered into the rooms) appear to be precursors to the Lifeform from the series.

In the original videos, it’s speculated that the humanoid predator inhabiting the Complex is the result of a novel strain of hay bacillus forming a human-shaped colony, though the addition of the Still Life mythology may very well mean that the mutated hay bacillus itself is a Still Life reproduction of an existing bacteria that somehow fell into the Complex.

The film also offers us an interesting clue into the history of the Foundation when Mark Duplass’ Phil talks about how the company used to work with MRI machines. This seemingly innocuous origin for the secretive organization implies that the Complex itself might be the result of some advanced form of neural imaging – as if the Threshold is somehow opening a portal to the universe’s -or even God’s- subconscious mind.

Who is Naren Warne and Why is He Important to Backrooms Lore?

Async researches in “Backrooms” web series

One of the more direct connections between the film and the series happens to be Avan Jogia’s Naren Warne, an unfortunate Async Institute scientist who shows up in the movie’s found footage prologue. A now-deleted Discord post by Kane Parsons himself suggests that Warne was originally a part of the Missing Persons survey team that discovered a dead body taken over by “mold” (the aforementioned hay bacillus).

At some point during the expedition, Naren appears to have been separated from the rest of the team and wound up wandering alone in the Backrooms. The film opens with the desperate scientist’s VHS footage as he records his attempts to contact his superiors and is ultimately chased down by an unseen Lifeform.

While this prologue mostly serves to establish that the Backrooms contain more than empty hallways, it’s fun to see Parsons include a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to the lo-fi source material even when working on such a high-profile production.

Naturally, there are other curious connections to be found here, such as a faithful recreation of the original photo that spawned the Backrooms creepypasta in the first place, as well as audio cues harkening back to the various TikTok musical trends that often accompany liminal horror content.

However, half the fun of engaging with lore-heavy material comes from discussing theories with fellow fans, so I’d like to invite readers to comment below with your own favorite additions to the lore/references to the ARG! Just be sure to watch out for suspicious-looking furniture salesmen – especially if they’re dressed up like a pirate.

The post ‘Backrooms’ Lore Explained: Async Research Institute, the Complex and More 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!.

Schools are emptying, beaches are filling, and it’s a great time to pack a tote full of brand-new books and get some reading done in the shade. But even if the sun is bright, your fiction can still be dark, because June is absolutely packed with great new horror releases from rising stars and genre icons.

From a Psycho retelling to a dark twist on Peter Pan lore to a new book from a Pulitzer Prize winner, these are the horror titles we can’t wait to crack open this June. 

The Children by Melissa Albert – June 2

A blend of dark fantasy, Gothic family saga, and horror novel that’s received rave reviews from Stephen King and more, The Children follows the adult children of a legendary fantasy author who died when a fire consumed their home. Now, living their own creative lives, Guinevere and Ennis must revisit the secrets from the night of the fire, the darkness surrounding Ennis’s new art installation, and the truth of their family legacy in both fact and fiction. It sounds like a wonderful twisted nest of secrets and magic, and I’m eager to dive in. 

Marion by Leah Rowan – June 2

Just when you thought we’d run out of interesting ways to riff on Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Leah Rowan comes along with Marion. As the title suggests, it’s the story of the Bates Motel’s most famous victim, but this time, she doesn’t die in the shower. She takes control of the knife and the narrative in this daring retelling of a proto-slasher classic. The story we know is just the beginning, and I can’t wait to find out the end. 

Headlights by CJ Leede – June 9

Through her first two novels, Maeve Fly and American Rapture, CJ Leede emerged as one of the most exciting new horror voices of the 2020s, and she’s just getting warmed up. Leede’s third novel follows an FBI agent on the brink of retirement, running from his past and from the unsolved case that haunts him most, as he’s slowly pulled back into a gruesome serial killer narrative. Victims start turning up again, wearing someone else’s skin like a cape, with no memory of how they got that way, or how they got a lone strand of unidentified hair tied around their tongue. Both a riff on The Shining and a journey into the dark Colorado night, Headlights is one of the year’s most exciting horror lit events.

It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo – June 9 

Cynthia Pelayo‘s novels have always felt like dark fairy tales, and with her latest, she’s taking things into the realm of one of the most famous children’s stories ever. It Came From Neverland follows a version of Wendy Darling who, while working as a schoolteacher and as an aid to rehabilitate World War I soldiers, finds old fears returning when a student goes missing. It seems that an entity Wendy knows only as “Peter Pan” is back on the prowl, and unlocking her memories might be the only way to stop it. That’s right, it’s a dark Peter Pan retelling as only Pelayo can do it, and you know you want a piece of that. 

The Other by Annie Neugebauer – June 9

Annie Neugebauer’s The Extra ranks as one of the most clever and frightening horror novellas in recent memory, but that was only the beginning. This June, Neugebauer returns with the next book in what’s been dubbed “The Outsiders Sequence.” This time, Neugebauer’s strange world of doppelgangers and mimics turns to a couple on a hike who run into their exact duplicates, setting off a chain of events that will test their understanding of each other in terrifying ways. Neugebauer’s one of horror’s finest rising stars right now, so if you haven’t jumped on board The Outsiders Sequence yet, pick up The Extra and get ready for The Other.

Marla by Jonathan Janz –  August 18 (Editor’s update: Release has now shifted from initial June 23 publication date)

Speaking of rising stars in the horror world, we’ve got Jonathan Janz, whose work has hit another level in recent years thanks to work like Children of the Dark and Veil. Now he’s back with Marla, the story of a local woman surrounded by urban legend, and her possible connection to a string of crimes in the community of King’s Branch. Is Marla a witch, a killer, a victim, a helpless child? We’ll have to read and find out in what feels like a perfect jumping-on point for new Janz readers.

The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus – June 23

Daniel Kraus has long been a favorite among genre readers, but thanks to his recent Pulitzer Prize win for his brilliant novel Angel Down, he’s more visible than ever, and all that visibility comes as he’s about to unleash a space epic with all the hallmarks of epic sci-fi and horror alike. The Sixth Nik promises everything from a sentient spaceship to a rogue planet full of plague to a nine-year-old “cultist” with an enhanced brain. This is Kraus playing in a brand-new sandbox, and genre readers everywhere won’t want to miss that. 

Slasher Summer by E.L. Chen – June 23

E.L. Chen‘s latest novel is described as a love letter to ’80s slasher films, and anyone who’s taken a dive into the meta-horror of Scream or My Heart is a Chainsaw will want to sit up and take notice. The book follows a group of friends who grew up in a town famous as the location of a slasher movie, where they frequently played the characters during midnight shows. As adults, they return to their hometown, and to the location of the slasher movie, only to find that someone’s out to get them, someone wearing a very familiar mask. This sounds like a blast, and the latest in an ever-growing strand of slasher novels reinventing the genre on the page. 

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay – June 30

Modern horror master Paul Tremblay‘s latest novel sounds like his most ambitious yet, and that’s really saying something. Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep follows Julia, a former pro gamer who gets an offer she can’t refuse: For a hefty payday, she must pilot a man named “Bernie” across the country for her mother’s tech company. The catch? Bernie’s in a vegetative state, and his mobility comes from the AI chip in his head. As Julia moves Bernie’s body, Bernie’s mind moves through an unfathomable nightmare world, but where are they heading, and what’s Bernie really meant to find? Every new Paul Tremblay book is an event, and this one feels particularly special. 

Red X by David Demchuk – June 30

This one’s technically a reprint, but David Demchuk’s Red X is so revered among the horror community, and particularly other horror authors, that it feels worth highlighting, especially during Pride Month. Complex and metatextual, Red X is about a series of disappearances and a demonic entity plaguing the gay community of Toronto, but it’s also an autobiographical sketch of an author navigating death, survival, queer culture, horror as a means of expression, and more. In short, it’s an essential, and this new edition, complete with fresh writing by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Anthony Oliveira, is a must-have.

The post Urban Legends, Serial Killers, and Space Epics: 10 Horror Books We Can’t Wait to Read This June appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s a programming series that suits horror well; Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and Funny Games (1997) were among the initial films featured in the inaugural Bleak Week, after all. Not only is death the ultimate leveler, and mortality well-suited to horror, but the genre excels at holding up a mirror to unpleasant truths. It yields raw empathy as a result, as we wince with sympathy for the grueling pain inflicted. 

The human condition has never been as despairing as with the films that qualify for Bleak Week. Whether padding your local Bleak Week screenings, from NYC to Houston and beyond, or symbolically participating from home, here are five ultra-despairing and grim dark horror movies that’ll turn your sunny summer disposition upside-down.

Read on for where to watch; you can also find less nihilistic options here.

The Golden Glove – Kanopy

The Golden Glove presents one stomach-churning watch based on notorious German serial killer Fritz Honka, impressive in its unwavering goal to force viewers to confront the darkest corners of humanity. Nestled in the red light district of Hamburg, set during the ‘70s, Honka (Jonas Dassler) is a socially awkward loner who spends most of his evenings getting drunk at the Golden Glove.  It’s greasy, skin-crawling, and extremely bleak. But it’s also a deeply fascinating study of how someone so vile slipped through the cracks of society as they commit unspeakable acts of violence.

Hounds of Love – Darkroom

Writer/Director Ben Young draws from true crime for his sobering feature debut. Set in the ’80s, it centers around sadistic couple John and Evelyn White as they kidnap teen girls to viciously assault, torture, and then murder them.  Their latest victim, Vicki, must drive a wedge between the couple if she has any hope of surviving. Stephen Curry is downright frightening as John, but it’s Emma Booth’s portrayal of the broken Evelyn and the heartbreaking vulnerability of Ashleigh Cummings’ Vicki that make this as gripping as it is. If it’s not already clear, the subject matter is harrowing and intense, making for a discomforting but powerful watch.

Martyrs – AMC+, Shudder

Writer/Director Pascal Laugier’s extreme horror film follows Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi), a young woman shattered by childhood abuse, as she drags childhood friend Anna (Morjana Alaoui) along on her violent quest for retribution. Of course, there’s no predicting how this journey will wind up, but it’s guaranteed to induce maximum discomfort and leave jaws on the floor. Its visceral examination of pain elicits such a strong physical response, made worse by its ultra-grim outlook. This one is soul crushing.

Threads – Fandor, Fawesome, Hoopla, Kanopy, Midnight Pulp

Mick Jackson’s made-for-TV cautionary tale, broadcast on BBC Two in September 1984, terrified viewers with the harrowing depiction of the devastating effects of nuclear war. It tracks the escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union until a bomb is dropped. The fallout is intensely terrifying, as looters get murderous, disease and radiation sickness spread, and food grows scarce. Cannibalism, famine, disease, and the regression of civilization into a more barbaric period. It’s harrowing, bleak, and unflinching, made even more so by its sense of realism.

We Need to Talk About Kevin – Fawesome, Hoopla, Kanopy, Midnight Pulp, Mubi, Peacock, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Screambox

Told from the perspective of Kevin’s mother, Eva, We Need to Talk About Kevin plays with the concept of nurture versus nature as Eva struggles to bond with her son throughout his life. The film toggles between the harrowing present and the disturbing past, and no matter the age, the creepiness of Kevin remains a constant. Both Eva and the viewer watch helplessly as Kevin grows from defiant to stone-cold sociopath, exploding into a terrifying climax made even scarier by the realism in its possibilities. 

The post Bleak Week: 5 Despairing Horror Movies to Stream This Week appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

New to Tubi June Horror Films

Alien Vs. Predator (2004)

• Premise: During an archaeological expedition on Bouvetøya Island in Antarctica, a team of archaeologists and other scientists find themselves caught up in a battle between the two legends. Soon, the team realizes that only one species can win.
• Why Watch It? Nothing says summer like a trip to Antarctica, right? The reality is that Alien Vs Predator is the perfect popcorn flick: it’s completely mindless fluff. No real characters of substance. No philosophical lore or mythology building. It’s just classic Paul W.S. Anderson action nonsense, featuring two iconic horror franchises coming together with a lot of Red Shirt collateral damage in between. Oh, and poor Sanaa Lathan, doing her best to inject some characterization into Alexa. To be clear: Lathan is great, but there’s just nothing in Anderson’s screenplay for her to work with, though she acquits herself well in the action sequences.
• Streaming: June 1

All Of Us Strangers (2023)

• Premise: A screenwriter drawn back to his childhood home enters into a fledgling relationship with his downstairs neighbor while discovering a mysterious new way to heal from losing his parents 30 years ago.
• Why Watch It? Celebrated queer writer/director Andrew Haigh‘s loose adaptation of Taichi Yamada‘s novel features a deeply affecting pair of performances from leads Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. On the surface, this is a sad drama about a pair of men struggling to connect, and the difficulties of loving someone when you don’t love yourself. It’s also <spoiler alert> a secret ghost film, albeit more in the “curl up in a fetal position crying” than in the “scary boo” sense. Which is to say: perfect for Pride season!
• Streaming: June 1

Blink Twice (2024)

• Premise: When tech billionaire Slater King meets cocktail waitress Frida at his fundraising gala, he invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. As strange things start to happen, Frida questions her reality.
• Why Watch It? Actor Zoë Kravitz made her feature film directorial debut with this twisty thriller that features a criminally under celebrated lead performance by Naomi Ackie. The film isn’t an easy watch, especially when you figure out what Channing Tatum‘s Slater and his cadre of shitty dudes are up to, but it’s brilliantly shot and features one hell of a cathartic finale. Plus, said shitty dudes are played by Christian Slater, Simon Rex, and Haley Joel Osment in the best against-type casting since Promising Young Woman.
• Streaming: June 1

Brightburn (2019)

• Premise: An alien that looks like a human boy uses its powers in sinister and destructive ways.
• Why Watch It? The simplicity of Brightburn is arguably its biggest selling feature: what if a child with Superman’s powers was bad? Writers Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn don’t really do much more than that, which may be why the David Yarovesky film was considered something of a disappointment at the time of its release. (In the film’s defence: it made $33M worldwide on a $6M budget). Still, if you’re looking for some cool sequences, a solid performance by Elizabeth Banks as a perturbed mother, and a super dark ending that begs for a sequel, this is an easy way to kill 90 minutes.
• Streaming: June 1

Congo (1995)

• Premise: When an expedition to the African Congo ends in disaster, a new team is assembled to find out what went wrong.
• Why Watch It? There’s no denying that this is a bad film. Made at the height of Hollywood’s enthusiasm for all things Michael Crichton, this adaptation of the 1980 book was always doomed to be a silly mess. But guess what? It’s partially filmed on location and has a totally solid cast (come for Laura Linney, try not to focus on bland Dylan Walsh, and yearn for more of whatever Tim Curry is doing). Also: do you like gem-powered lasers and men-in-suit gorillas? Because the climax features our intrepid humans laying waste to a cacophony of the latter using the former during a volcanic eruption. It’s extremely dumb…and very fun.
• Streaming: June 1

Independence Day (1996)

• Premise: The aliens are coming, and their goal is to invade and destroy Earth. Fighting superior technology, mankind’s best weapon is the will to survive.
• Why Watch It? Leave behind your pedantic definitions of what constitutes a horror movie and embrace the disaster flick, everyone! This is the grand-daddy of contemporary examples, helmed by out gay director Roland Emmerich at the height of his destructive powers. Seriously: name another director with a greater appetite for making movies where things go BOOM (my kingdom for a reality show pitting him against Wolfgang Petersen). The film turns 30 next month, and the titular holiday is similarly on the horizon, so what better time to revisit Will Smith at the height of his box office prowess? “Welcome to Earth” indeed.
• Streaming: June 15

I Saw The TV Glow (2024)

• Premise: In late-90s suburbia, a lonely teenager meets a girl at school who introduces him to a mysterious late-night T.V. show. As time goes on, however, questions begin to arise about why the show sometimes seems more real than their own lives.
• Why Watch It? Where to begin: this is arguably one of the most important pieces of queer (horror) media produced in the last few years. It features incredible performances from stars Justice Smith and Jack Haven. It scratches the nostalgic itch for Buffy the Vampire Slayer while also gently reminding us that making fandom our personality can have dangerous implications. It’s also a stunningly gorgeous film that’s filled with evocative and unsettling imagery (trigger warning for body dysmorphia). Oh, how about this reason: writer/director Jane Schoenbrun‘s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, debuts in August, and it’s Pride month!
• Streaming: June 1

The Last House Of The Left (2009)

• Premise: After kidnapping and brutally assaulting two young women, a gang unknowingly finds refuge at a vacation home belonging to the parents of one of the victims: a mother and father who devise an increasingly gruesome series of revenge tactics.
• Why Watch It? There’s no denying the fact that this is a tough watch. The sexual assault scene more than merits a content warning, but for audiences who can stomach a rape/revenge film, this brutal remake is worth checking out. By this point in the 2000s, horror audiences’ enthusiasm for remakes was waning heavily, which unfortunately means that this redo of the Wes Craven original doesn’t get talked about much. This is another title with a stellar cast, though: Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn are the parents; Garret Dillahunt, Rikki Lindhome, and a pre-Breaking Bad Aaron Paul are the baddies. Just overlook the very stupid closing scene, and you’re good to go!
• Streaming: June 1

Overlord (2018)

• Premise: A small group of American soldiers find horror behind enemy lines on the eve of D-Day.
• Why Watch It? Overlord is one of those wild adrenaline horror movies that feels like the creative team brainstormed a bunch of gnarly FX, tense set pieces, and a variety of subgenres before blitzing them all in a blender. I’d be lying if I said I remembered much about the plot of Julius Avery‘s revisionist history Nazi experimentation/infection film, but I do remember thinking that the action and the violence go hard. Plus: the cast is composed of a ton of now recognizable folks, including Wyatt Russell, Agents of SHIELD‘s Iain De Caestecker, IT: Welcome to Derry‘s Jovan Adepo, Interview with the Vampire‘s Jacob Anderson, Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn, and Bokeem Woodbine.
• Streaming: June 1

June Tubi Originals

Stepfather (2026)

• Premise: After years of eradicating any family that falls short of perfection, Darnell (Taye Diggs) believes his new wife, Asia (Tamar Braxton), and her daughters might finally be the real deal. That is, until tensions rise and they uncover his deadly pattern. Now, getting rid of them won’t be as easy as he planned.
• Streaming: June 19

What’s your favorite from the list above? Will you check out the new Original? Sound off in the comments below

The post The 10 Best Horror Movies Streaming on Tubi [June 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Not only did he co-write, direct, edit and star in the first truly successful adaptation of an independent horror game without bowing to any of the major studios, but he also managed to secure worldwide distribution for his passion project by enlisting the fans themselves as part of the flick’s marketing – all the while opening doors for fellow industry outsiders to develop their own “impossible” videogame adaptations.

The best part? The Iron Lung movie actually kicks all kinds of ass, with Mark intuitively understanding the inherent differences between film and video games as unique artistic mediums.

That’s why the adaptation features a series of (mostly) minor discrepancies when compared to the source material, despite the game’s creator, David Szymanski, being heavily involved in the screenwriting process. With that in mind,here are five of the biggest changes that the Iron Lung movie made to the original game and why they improve the viewer experience.

For the purposes of this list, I’ll be focusing on major story elements that actively alter the narrative rather than smaller details like how the titular submarine’s design was altered in order to feel more realistic. That being said, don’t forget to comment below if you think I missed any important changes that you think are worth discussing.

One more thing: major spoilers ahead!

With that out of the way, onto the list.

5. A Bloody Ocean of a Threat

In the original game, the blood ocean served as more of a thematic detail than an immediate threat, especially since the SM-13 vessel operated as if it were in regular seawater once it was submerged. The movie changes this up a bit by exploring why researchers are interested in this inexplicable mass of human blood in the first place, while also depicting the liquid itself as a corrosive and possibly mutagenic substance with a mind of its own.

As the film goes on and blood begins to trickle into the vessel, Simon’s body and the submarine itself are altered in increasingly horrific ways, with the final act leaving our protagonist painfully disfigured – though no less willing to face Eldritch terrors in order to complete his tragic mission.

4. The Siren’s Call

Both the original game’s “Frog” monster and the film’s enormous “Elli” are heavily inspired by real-life Anglerfish, so I found it appropriate that Mark decided to depict the antagonist here as more of a Lovecraftian siren luring explorers to their death through lights and sound rather than a mere animalistic predator.

While it’s entirely possible that Simon is hallucinating his interactions with the beast, he may very well be communicating with a god-like entity linked to the Quiet Rapture itself, which is why I think this was a worthwhile addition to the lore.

3. Radiation Exposure

The Iron Lung game never explained why the submarine’s pictures looked so freaky or how the camera was even operational despite being immersed in literal blood, so it makes sense that Mark would decide to correct this oversight by expanding on the technology behind the device itself while also using it to add extra tension to the story.

In the film, Simon accidentally discovers that he’s actually operating a giant nuclear-powered X-ray machine, with the constant exposure to radiation explaining why the vessel continuously overheats. Radiation might also have something to do with Simon’s altered mental state in the latter half of the experience, an idea that leads into my next favorite change…

2. Carbon Dioxide Poisoning

It’s entirely possible to finish watching Iron Lung and accept its story as a literal sequence of narrative events, but I think it’s far more interesting to take the experience with a grain of salt due to the flick’s repeated hints that Simon is slowly losing his mind due to a combination of radiation and Carbon Dioxide poisoning.

Hell, one could even make the argument that the entire second half of the feature takes place almost entirely within our protagonist’s mind, with this alternate interpretation feeling just as (if not more) impactful as a traditionally literal reading of the script.

1. A Glimmer of Hope

I’ve always been a defender of mean-spirited stories about grimdark futures and existential terrors, but while the original Iron Lung could afford to end on a sour note due to it being a gameplay-focused experience where the players themselves provided character backstory and motivation, the adaptation needed something a bit more concrete in order to turn its bleak finale into a satisfying conclusion.

That’s why I appreciate how Mark and Dave decided to turn the original ending on its head by having Simon defy fate and actually achieve something with his suicide mission despite the source material clearly stating that the SM-13 expedition retrieved nothing of value. While there’s no guarantee that Simon’s heroic efforts will lead to humanity’s salvation, the implication that there’s still hope turns Iron Lung into a humanist parable critiquing the cosmic horror narratives that inspired it.

The post Five Key Differences Between Markiplier’s ‘Iron Lung’ And The Game appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Homages, mimicry, and good-natured borrowing (or cheap rip-offs) will forever be a part of the filmmaking process, while concepts can easily overlap. I say that, specifically, because Paul Matthews’ Breeders (1997) (aka Deadly Instincts) goes a step above all that, to the point where its remake ties are unignorable—whether intentional or not.

As of today, the film is regarded as a loose remake of ex-pornography director Tim Kincaid’s 1986 sleaze-o-rama flick of the same name. But only a few pre-Internet interviews with Matthews made it online, and the writer-director does not claim any such intention (to my knowledge). He doesn’t deny them, either. Yet, anyone who’s seen either Breeders might have trouble believing Matthews pivoted off penning a sequel to his darling Grim to make what he dubs “a different type of alien” … that happens to reflect much of what Kincaid’s Breeders puts forth.

It’s a strange predicament. Can a movie be a remake by accident?

For this analysis, I reckon, “yes.” If only because Kincaid’s Breeders sure is begging for an upgrade in all areas … not that Matthews succeeds.

The Approach

Breeders 1986

Let’s stick with the “loose remake” mindset for the rest of this article, for argument’s sake. Kincaid’s production is authentically New York City, even filming in the same Brooklyn Bridge catacombs seen in C.H.U.D., another Big Apple sci-fi freakshow. But it’s not very accomplished. We’re talking about a movie Charles Band ultimately distanced himself from, citing Breeders as the type of “poor pickup” that killed Empire International Pictures. Matthews wouldn’t have to try hard to produce something more engaging, visually appealing, and coherently paced. And yet!

In Matthews’ Breeders, a meteorite crashes near a Boston all-girls school, unleashing not only a hulking extraterrestrial killer, but also a PVC-clad “Space Girl” (Kadamba Simmons) under the beast’s imprisonment. Art teacher Ashley Rowe (Todd Jensen) investigates the strange scene with the help of his teaching assistant-turned ill-advised fling, Louise (Samantha Womack). The monster prowls beneath the campus, using cavernous tunnels to stay out of sight, while sky-bluish crystal shards from above become a popular yet dangerous accessory that reveals the invader’s real plan: copulation.

Kincaid’s “original” is a loose concept of a sexploitation creature feature. There’s a serial rapist—an alien shapeshifter—who traps and impregnates vulnerable virgins … with plenty of gratuitous nudity (Kincaid assures proper monetary compensation for any naked persons). Actresses are asked to flail around naked on camera as the bug-eyed entity approaches, which we see up close as we would Norman Bates’ victims in Psycho.

That’s essentially the entire premise until a doctor and a detective find hypnotized women splashing spunk in an underground reptilian semen pool. (Not the grossest thing you can stumble upon in New York City, I guess?) It’s all perverse and leery in a get-your-rocks-off way, as Kincaid attempts a half-cocked examination of rape-revenge without catharsis, but does so acting as egregiously as the filth he’s trying to condemn. That, at least, is never replicated by Matthews … despite Ashley’s predatory hot-for-teacher schtick.

Does It Work?

Breeders 1997

Frankly, Breeders is one of the better use cases for a remake’s existence. Once, during an interview with Elijah Wood for the Screenlife thriller Open Windows, I asked, “What would your dream remake project be?” His response is one I think of often: “1985’s Explorers,” because, in his words, the best justification for a remake is to find something lesser known and share it with new audiences. That’s what Matthews’ Breeders feels like to me. An update on a loudly imperfect midnighter that tries to refine certain ideas and produce something more marketable and cohesive.

In that regard, Matthews does accomplish … well, part of that mission. Breeders (1997) is hardly a skin flick, despite moments of heightened arousal. Simmons might be playing a cosmic damsel in tight-fitting clothing, but she’s hardly stripped down like Kincaid might demand, given his proclivity for toplessness (and bottomlessness) as often as possible. Matthews attempts a semblance of a story that involves this Rawhead Rex-y, massive ogre of a lifeform, and the innocents who try to solve the mystery of the missing girls. Sure, it’s not very competent beyond “space rock crash, baddie stalks, shotguns save the day,” but at its most basic, it doesn’t have to be. What’s sold on the tin is delivered.

It’s a revitalization of spotlight themes, still as overt, but without the debasing of performers for the audience’s delight. Kincaid’s working title was Rapists from Outer Space, if that paints a clearer picture. Matthews tackles the same idea of women imprisoned for pregnancy purposes, this time caught in salty or snowy powdered coccoons, and does so with a harder line on action-horror elements. There are some explosive shootout sequences between gunned-up task forces and the space creature, with cheesy late-night beats replacing lewd peep-show material.

Dare I say Matthews is more about making a complete movie versus Kincaid’s fetishistic fantasy?

The Result

Breeders 1997

In no stretch is Matthews’ Breeders an awards-worthy endeavor, but it’s a step up! The British shock-salesman exhumes the bones of a tasteless and terrible affair to make something more watchable, if only because Matthews understands how to insert plot milestones into a script or hire halfway decent actors.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a reason why RiffTrax has a downloadable audio track for this one. The Irish Sea’s Isle of Man doubles as Massachusetts, dialogue is cringy as hell, and Matthews operates on an excitement-first model that doesn’t always make sense. However, it’s got that flabbergasting MST3K quality to everything, which, brutally, Kincaid’s lacks.

Thankfully, the creature costume in Breeders (1997) is Fangoria cover-worthy. Decorated BAFTA award winner Neill Gorton and fellow Image Animation alum Steve Painter create a snarling, head-to-toe baddie that recalls seeing Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead for the first time. Amphibian qualities bring this tactile terrorizer to life with outstanding results, far more menacing than Kincaid’s hilarious attempt to use what looks like a black leather jacket fitted with microfiber cleaning nubs and a spray-painted helmet—at least when hidden in the shadows. Matthews decimates Kincaid in the practical effects category, no matter how comically weird the latter’s scaly kiddie pool incubator looks.

Here’s the difference. Matthews’ Breeders is a bad movie, but you can have a decent time with it in the right mindset. Kincaid’s Breeders is one-note exploitation garbage that rightfully lets any rape be implied, not shown, yet fails to understand how mixed its messages become. Breeders (1997) is undeniably hammy in its own right, falling into its own strange pattern of gendered behaviors, although, in comparison, it’s a remake darling. Some might argue there’s nothing a whole lot better between Matthews’ and Kincaid’s hormonally-driven Alien riffs—I’m not one of ‘em. I’m with Mr. Band on this one, over here trying to reclaim the memory space Kincaid’s Breeders is currently wasting in my brain.

The Lesson

Breeders 1986

As a filmmaker, if you honestly believe you can turn a dumpster fire into modern art, that’s a valuable starting point. Breeders (1986) doesn’t boast a dedicated cult fanbase. It’s one of those oddities that collectors and VHS traders might cherish, but there’s no cultural imprint. For Matthews to (allegedly) take a crack at refurbishing a dusty ol’ bottom-shelf dud shows why remakes have a place in cinematic history. Breeders #1 and Breeders #2 are unavoidably tethered, yet distanced enough where Matthews could try (and fail) to make a case claiming no remake intentions.

But nah. You (eventually) named it Breeders. You know exactly what’s up.

So what did we learn?

• Remakes based on little-known titles offer the best chance of scoring a win (at the very least spreading awareness of the original).
• A heaping helping of practical effects goes a long way (especially when they’re a standout addition compared to the source material).
• Sex might sell, but it has its time and place in horror movies.
• The only downgrade here is swapping New York City for Boston. Fuggedaboudit.

The whole situation is fascinating. How many people know a single Breeders release exists, let alone two? I wish there were more archival conversations available with Matthews on Breeders, because there’s such an interesting conversation to be had about the merits of repurposing B-movies on the same level, but with suitable tweaks. It’s not like Blumhouse got a hold of Breeders’ rights and unleashed it in 3,000 theaters. Indie lunatics remaking each other’s movies puts a smile on my face … raises too many damn questions.

The post ‘Breeders’ vs. ‘Breeders’: The Strange Case of an Unofficial Horror Remake appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

I’m in the minority, I know, but Boyle’s return to the franchise is a disappointment, thanks in large part to that little shit Spike, who I was hoping would bite it at every turn. (Don’t get me started.)

My feelings towards that film left me a bit apathetic towards 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, so I skipped it in theaters (along with most audiences, apparently)… only to absolutely love it when I finally watched it on VOD. This makes me part of the problem, I know, and I’m very sorry. Nia DaCosta delivers an incredibly beautiful and thrilling entry into the franchise – that’s also one of 2026’s best films – and I’ve already watched it three times.

Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Commentator: Nia DaCosta (director)

1. While previous films in the franchise opened with scenes that led to the title chyron, they decided to go with an audio soundscape here instead. It builds to a single word, “Hello?” which is taken from Jim (Cillian Murphy) in the first film. “That’s Jim’s voice from 28 Days Later when he’s holding his little plastic bag and looking for people in the streets of London.”

2. The sign saying “No children beyond this point” was added for a laugh.

3. Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) was scripted to be wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit, but O’Connell suggested the purple velour one instead.

4. The opening scene with Spike (Alfie Williams) fighting for his life was filmed in a leisure center that had shut down during the pandemic. “But when you go in there, it felt like it had been shut down for 28 years.” It was chosen because DaCosta wanted it to feel whimsical and childlike on the outside but rotted and dying within – just like the Jimmies.

5. She doesn’t typically employ whip pans in her films, but their Trinity camera operator, Simon Wood, had made some modifications to the rig that allowed for pans that “slam to a stop really directly on either side of the whip.” She felt the madness of a whip pan met the madness of the Jimmies.

6. It was important to DaCosta that this be the only sequel in the series (so far) that doesn’t start with a scene featuring the infected. “It shows we’re sort of shifting what we’re saying about this world, which is that the infected, at this point, are just part of the flora and fauna.”

7. She had asked O’Connell to do something to mark Jimmy Shite’s (Connor Newall) death by doing something with his soul, and he came up with this bit at 6:01, where he takes it and releases it into the air above. Between the added sound effect and Jimmy Jones’ (Maura Bird) look upward, it’s one of her favorite beats in the film.

8. The scene with Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) cleaning bones only to find a moth on one came about because Fiennes found it and added it himself. DaCosta loves it as “moths made me think of death and renewal, so it was a nice thematic little guy.”

9. DaCosta and Fiennes discussed the scene in Kelson’s bunker where he strips down, and they agreed that “him being completely naked and alone and vulnerable, it just shows how sad it all is. This is all he has, and he’s just a man.”

10. She often kept the camera running during Kelson’s scenes because Fiennes would often add little beats. One comes at 18:24 when Kelson touches Sampson’s (Chi Lewis-Parry) shoulder after darting him. “So much of what you see between them in the film that’s action or them interacting” is stuff that was captured off script.

11. DaCosta really only knew Duran Duran for the songs “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Girls on Film,” but she’s since become a big fan. “Ordinary World” is a new favorite of hers and one she sings all the time.

12. She names a character Jane Ji in all of her movies, as it’s the name of one of her best friends.

13. DaCosta was entertained but initially confused when she first read Alex Garland’s script pages for the scene at the 32:00 mark. “Alex, what are you talking about, babe?” she recalls thinking before getting it. “It’s really fun to see, in a movie like this, something so strange happening that has nothing to do with violence.”

14. They made gradual changes to Samson’s look as the film progresses to highlight his shift back towards humanity. He becomes less monstrous on the surface to mirror the changes within.

15. “My jaw dropped when I read that in the script,” she says after Samson utters “moon.” The scene is about mercy and loss, leading Kelson towards surrender, but that one word renews his drive and the connection between two people.

16. She’s impressed by everyone on her production team, but she’s especially wowed by the stunt performer who does the fire gag in the barn. He had to be lit on fire three times, each time getting lathered up with the gel, putting on the costume and mask, and getting lathered up again. One thing DaCosta learned was that performers have to hold their breath while they burn so that they don’t inhale the flames.

17. “And that’s the last we see of Cathy (Mirren Mack) for this movie, but she will return,” says DaCosta with absolute certainty that we’re getting the third film of the trilogy. (I hope she’s right!)

18. Samson is nude throughout the script, but DaCosta wanted to show those visual hints of his re-awakening humanity. One was him turning his palm up to the rain, and another was turning cloth into clothes and wiping his berry-stained fingers on it.

19. She made sure to find moments that highlighted just how much of an idiot Crystal is “because that’s how I feel about these kinds of leaders.” “Usually with a cult leader or a garbage president or prime minister,” she adds, “the way that they get people to follow them isn’t necessarily that they’re intelligent in any way, shape or form. It’s charisma and power, and when you look at those people outside of that context, you also see how silly they are.”

20. DaCosta is a big fan of how Garland’s script “continues to explore the infection and what it means.” The scene where Kelson explains and administers his hopeful psychotropic concoction to Samson touches on the distinction between zombie films and rage-virus stories like this – the people are still inside the infected, and while death can’t be cured (sorry, Herbert West!), a virus possibly could be.

21. She sees the train in the film as similar to the mall in Dawn of the Dead. “Where do I go? Back to the thing that I have the strongest memory of?” For Samson, that thing is a train like the one where he was first infected.

22. DaCosta cameos very briefly as a train passenger during the flashback at 1:20:20. “I’m in this movie for some reason on the left there.”

23. She recalls reaching the point in the script where Kelson puts on his devilish show to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast,” and thinking, “How the hell is this gonna work?” She figured it would either ruin her career or become a defining scene, and happily, it instantly became the latter.

24. The sequence saw them using the Lensbaby during Kelson’s show. “It’s just a lens that is so inconsistent, and you just get that blurriness that you see there.” She said she wanted it “to feel like kids moshing at a concert,” an experience that is wholly new to them, given the situation of the world, but here it’s them communing with the devil.

25. That’s a performer named Otto doing the end bit in the protective outfit and fire-spitting barbell. DaCosta worried at first that it might be too much, but she ultimately realized it fit both the scene and the song perfectly.

26. Williams was a minor during production, meaning they only had three hours per night to film with him. So, pretty much anytime you see him from behind or in the mask, it’s actually his stand-in, a young woman named Jess Bell.

27. “At whose expense do you enjoy your freedom?” is something she asks and sees as a theme here, as Kelson realizes what letting Crystal go could mean for others. Fiennes does great work showing that internal dialogue, and it’s only when he realizes Spike is there that he falls completely on one side with his answer. “And that’s why Kelson’s a really good person.”

28. She sees Spike’s journey as part coming of age as he ends the first film thinking he needs to be on his own, but ends this one knowing that he needs other people to survive. He’s basically the prodigal son who goes out to see the world but eventually returns home, “so maybe we’ll see some of that in the third film.”

29. “Nothing is, no one is, there’s just us, is also my belief system,” she says regarding Kelson’s reply to Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) asking if he’s Satan. “That’s beautiful.”

30. The music from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was something of a reference point for her in conversations with this film’s composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir.

31. They went back to the exact same house from the finale of 28 Days Later. “It was so cool. The same people live in the house, the house is exactly the same.” She was equally excited to be the one who got to bring Jim back for the first time.

Quotes Without Context

“Thank you, Sony, for your money.”

“I really like special effects, especially when they have to do with cuts or blood or gore, I think it’s really fun.”

“I really hate VFX blood cause it looks so fake.”

“Ralph Fiennes is an icon of our times and a national treasure.”

“That shot before was the real woman, and this is the dummy, obviously, because we can’t just be throwing women off of cliffs anymore.”

“Seeing all that brain in his beard is truly… I can’t look at it.”

“We see him in the first movie, and he seems like this whimsical sort of kook who’s like ‘I’m gonna kill your mom.’”

“Since he’s so lonely, he’s like ‘Let me go talk to that one guy I met,’ which I love for him.”

“One of several shots where we’re like, ‘Let’s just crop out the penis.’”

“Like what is up with their vocal cords, bro?”

“So much oatmeal water we used as vomit in this film.”

“It’s given her a bit of a hate boner for people who underestimate her.”

“Basically, this whole scene to me is like that children’s book, Are You My Mother? Where the baby bird’s talking to all these inanimate objects and other animals, looking for his mom.”

Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.

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By the 1990s, Curry had made a considerable transition to voice acting. His chops could be heard in a number of children’s shows, including The Pirates of Dark Water, Darkwing Duck, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, and The Wild Thornberrys. Of course, Curry didn’t completely stay off camera back then; one particular live-action role of his still stays with me and, undoubtedly, plenty of others who grew up on Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996).

Having first seen Season Five’s “Death of Some Salesmen” at a pretty young age, I didn’t invest a lot of thought into who played the characters in these macabre stories I loved. So I most certainly didn’t stop to notice that all three members of the Brackett family were played by Tim Curry. My awareness of this awesome triple play came later in life, but I also wasn’t surprised. By then, I had become much more aware of Curry’s skills as an actor.

Like other episodes of Tales from the Crypt, “Death of Some Salesmen” doesn’t exactly match up with its source material. The destinations are the same in either story; the door-to-door protagonist meets an untimely end during his travels. In EC Comics’ version, though, you may actually feel some sympathy for the main character. Here we find a man who was just looking for help, as opposed to his next sucker.

Mike Vosburg’s comic-style artwork for “Death of Some Salesmen”, as shown in the Tales from the Crypt episode.

In a story written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Jack Kamen, “Death of Some Salesmen!”—EC loved its exclamation points!—began with Stuart Thatcher getting caught in a heavy downpour. His recent failed attempts at selling some mysterious item have led him to give up and go home. It’s only once Stuart’s car stalls that he goes knocking on the wrong door in the middle of the night. At a house on a hill, Stuart is taken in by a woman who bears a resemblance to the Crypt-Keeper, the hosting GhouLunatic of A Crypt of Terror (which was later retitled Tales from the Crypt). This Henrietta and her husband, Eban, don’t waste any time before they let their guest feel threatened.

Had it not been for Stuart mentioning his line of work, perhaps he would have lived longer. Mr. Thatcher wasn’t even there to pull a fast one on this gruesome couple, much less sell whatever he was selling. All he simply wanted was to use their phone (and understandably, they didn’t have one). Nonetheless, Henrietta and Eban have been burned in the past, so their mouths start foaming at the mere mention of “traveling salesman”.

Stuart, like Ed Begley Jr.’s character in the TV adaptation, learns what’s up early on. And that’s only because Henrietta and Eban give their unwelcome guest a ghastly tour of all their new appliances, as well as the salesmen who provided them. Mind you, not every one of those peddlers ripped them off, but alas, even the decent ones didn’t go unpunished. Henrietta and Eban killed them just the same as the dishonest salesmen. The couple also stored their victims’ bodies inside of said appliances (e.g., one corpse is found inside a freezer). More or less, this is what happened in the Crypt episode before Begley’s character is knocked unconscious by “Pa” Brackett.

Shifting into the adaptation, which was directed by Gilbert Adler and co-written by Adler and A. L. Katz, that salesman truly got what was coming to him. After all, he was selling fake cemetery plots to the grief-stricken. And after swindling Yvonne De Carlo’s poor character in a scene that really sold how unscrupulous this Judd Campbell guy is, there was no turning back. Thankfully, the episode also doesn’t disappoint by not delivering the most logical outcome for Begley’s role: to make him dig his own grave.

A page from “Death of Some Salesmen!”, as seen in EC Comics’ The Haunt of Fear.

Now, the comic showed Stuart getting what wasn’t owed to him; Henrietta and Eban were just taking out their grievances on whoever was available. That same story also ended more straightforwardly, seeing as how the couple didn’t bother to trick Stuart. No, they made their plan clear from the beginning. And after Eban retrieved that enigmatic piece of merchandise from Mr. Thatcher’s car—a handy-dandy meat slicer—these potential customers tested the product in the only way they saw fit.

Meanwhile, in Tales from the Crypt’s version, there was some attempt at deceiving the deceiver. The logic of that scheme isn’t especially brilliant, or even sound, but Curry’s presence more than makes up for the so-so writing. He disappeared into all three of his roles here—and not because of the heavy makeup and prosthetics. No, Curry got absolutely lost in his characters, and the outcome is as brilliant as it is repulsive.

Tales from the Crypt was never too apologetic about itself; that’s something its fans can attest to, as well as appreciate. And although “Death of Some Salesmen” does become an endurance test at times—it seemed almost hellbent on making the audience gag and squirm—that depravity, along with Curry’s total extraness, is its selling point. Above all, this episode is a shining example of bad taste done very well.

Season Five of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on May 29.

Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.

Tim Curry as Winona Brackett in “Death of Some Salesmen”.

The post Tales from ‘Tales from the Crypt’: Exhuming Season Five’s “Death of Some Salesmen” Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

I, for one, had been waiting for this announcement ever since experiencing that Psycho Killer needle-drop during the closing credits of the original film back when I was a teenager, but now that the dust has settled and we eagerly await further news about the follow-up that felt like it would never come, I’d argue that this is the perfect time to think about what a sequel to Behind The Mask actually means. The original movie was a love-letter to the Slasher genre and its complicated position in the mid-2000s media landscape, so it’s fair to assume that Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon will have a lot to say after two decades of cinematic silence.

After all, the 2006 production released during a divisive period in film history where it was generally accepted that the industry had become oversaturated with Americanized J-Horror, so-called “Torture Porn” and excessive remakes. This situation led to many fans becoming nostalgic for the horror titans of yesteryear. While the truth is that the 2000s actually had plenty of original genre filmmaking going on, the lack of easily accessible online distribution meant that genuinely memorable flicks like Laid to Rest and The Hills Run Red would only find their audiences years down the line.

Leslie Vernon was created as both an homage to our favorite Slashers and this new wave of underappreciated killers created by indie filmmakers attempting to carve out their own niche during a period when the best they could hope for was a straight-to-video release. By the end of Behind the Mask, however, Vernon had more or less ascended to legendary status, carrying out his first massacre and earning a spot among his murderous heroes (including Eugene, the mentor figure played by Scott Wilson who is heavily implied to be Billy from the 1974’s Black Christmas).

Back when a sequel was first announced, Glosserman and co-writer David J. Stieve explained that they wanted to continue analyzing recurring trends in 2000s genre productions. The follow-up was initially planned to poke fun at the Found Footage technique itself while also exploring the appeal of Torture Porn among then-modern audiences. Unfortunately, as time went on and the team failed to secure funding for their idea, this script became more and more dated. And with the filmmakers’ first attempt at crowdfunding ultimately turning into a flop (which makes their latest success that much more impressive), they ultimately decided to release this story as a comic-book.

Feeling like a comic adaptation of a movie from an alternate universe, Before the Mask: The Return of Leslie Vernon was conceived as a “Spreemake” – a simultaneous sequel, prequel and remake explaining how Leslie planned his initial massacre while also following up on the aftermath of his crimes when a movie studio attempts to adapt his bloody moment of glory to the big screen.

While this comic is an undeniably fun time and a must-read for fans of the original movie, it’s already been confirmed that the new sequel is completely ignoring this story in favor of a new script more in line with current horror trends. With indie Slashers having a much more prominent role in modern-day Hollywood (just look at the Terrifier franchise or even the absurd Poohniverse films), it would make sense for a sequel to reevaluate Leslie’s position as an icon.

Glosserman and Stieve have already explained that they imagine Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon taking place in a tongue-in-cheek reflection of the real world where Leslie is respected by fans after the orchard killings despite not being quite as feared as more popular criminals like Michael Myers. The idea here wouldn’t be to merely comment on the current state of Slashers, however, (though I imagine we’ll be seeing plenty of references to modern titans like Art the Clown), but also to explore how familiar archetypes have evolved into new forms that say more about how society views who is and isn’t expendable.

It’s easy to imagine the upcoming flick discussing the rise of the hardened Final Girl (like Jamie Lee Curtis in the recent Halloween trilogy) or even the complicated victim selection process now that hard labels like “jock,” “virgin” and “stoner” are no longer as useful as they once were. Of course, what I’m most excited to see is more screen-time by Robert Englund as our vengeful “Ahab,” Doc Hallorann – an underutilized part of the original movie that makes Leslie’s mythos that much more fascinating.

Of course, only time will tell exactly what kind of story the filmmakers have in store for us when The Return of Leslie Vernon finally comes out (hopefully in the next year or so). But, regardless of any meta genre analysis or potential cameos, I think the main takeaway here is that Glosserman and company have managed to create characters so memorable that we’re still dying to see them again two decades later. And if you ask me, that’s what really makes Leslie unkillable.

The post ‘Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon’ Wraps Up a Wildly Successful Fundraising Campaign appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Yet for A24’s buzzy Backrooms, age seems to be a sticking point. Much has been publicized about then 19-year-old Kane Parsons as the youngest to helm an A24 title, even sparking debate online as to how involved the director was on his own project. But cinema, and horror in particular, has a sturdy track record filled with maverick young filmmakers forging new ground in the genre.

So much so that Kane Parsons isn’t the first teen horror filmmaker, nor the youngest. 

It’s not remotely atypical or unconventional for filmmakers to develop their love of film from a very early age, where they hone their craft on home video, but some prove their ambitions remarkably early.

Such is the case with the horror movies on this list; these seven horror movies hail from directors who made them before reaching the age of 25. Moreover, these films marked the start of ongoing careers.

 So Vam – Alice Maio Mackay

Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay was just 16 during production on her feature debut, a scrappy coming-of-age horror story that sees an outcast join rebellious vampires who feed on bigots and abusers. So Vam was released by Shudder after a successful festival run, but Maio Mackay was already hard at work on her next project and doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. The now 21-year-old has since directed five additional features, including this year’s The Serpent’s Skin.

Hell of a Summer – Billy Bryk & Finn Wolfhard 

This slasher comedy centers around a twenty-something camp counselor who feels deeply out of touch with his younger colleagues when a masked killer arrives to pick them off one by one. It’s co-written, co-directed, and co-stars Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard, who were 22 and 19, respectively, during the film’s 2022 production. The pair met and quickly bonded on set of Ghostbusters: Afterlife over their love of comedy and horror films, channeling that into their debut project that initially struggled to secure financing due to Wolfhard’s young age.

 Pathogen – Emily Hagens

Pathogen gives a unique spin on the zombie subgenre, centered around a 14-year-old and her middle school peers. The film’s writer/director/producer, Emily Hagens (Sorry About the Demon), was only 12 when she made it, even despite grownups trying to convince her to condense her script into a more manageable short film format. The Austin-based film premiered in 2006 at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and eventually received a Vinegar Syndrome release in 2022, while Hagens has kept busy in horror over the years.

The Evil Dead – Sam Raimi 

Legendary director Sam Raimi might be a household name now, but he wasn’t even 20 when he shot the short film “Within the Woods” as proof of concept to secure financing for The Evil Dead. He succeeded and turned 20 just before production began. And production on this ambitiously scrappy project ran long, with the young filmmaker working around various production delays, from weather to funding. Its eventual release, itself a winding road, would solidify The Evil Dead as an enduring horror classic and its director a horror master.

Phantasm – Don Coscarelli 

The cult classic that follows an orphaned teen as he faces off against the otherworldly Tall Man and his bizarre arsenal of weaponry was inspired by writer/director Don Coscarelli’s nightmares as a teen himself. Filming began in 1977, when Coscarelli was 23. Much like The Evil Dead, financing and production proved tricky and stretched on for a long while. His feature directorial debut, Jim the World’s Greatest, was made with co-director Craig Mitchell when they were 18.

Bad Taste – Peter Jackson

Like Sam Raimi and Don Coscarelli, Peter Jackson’s first feature was a DIY effort shot over multiple years thanks to production starts and stops. Bad Taste began as a 20-minute short film called Roast of the Day before Jackson’s ambitions ballooned the project into a practical effects showcase of a splatter film. He completed and sold the film, shot over roughly four years and primarily on weekends, at the age of 25, marking the start of his splatter era. The rest, as they say, is history.

Duel – Steven Spielberg

Four years before forever changing the summer blockbuster with Jaws, Steven Spielberg made his feature debut with a 1971 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s road thriller that sees a motorist terrorized by a road-raged tanker in the California desert. Not only is Duel considered one of the greatest television movies of all time, but it honed Spielberg’s craft as a precursor to Jaws. He was only 25 when the film made its debut.

The post 7 Horror Movies Directed by Young Filmmakers Under 25 appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

As The Boys concluded its epic run, an eerie sense of prophecy seemed to plague the fifth and final season. Based on the comics by Garth Ennis, the Prime Video series takes place in a world where superheroes are real, but must contend with all-too-human flaws. Over forty episodes, we’ve watched Homelander (Antony Starr), a sinister twist on Superman, bully and brutalize his way into the highest levels of geopolitical power.

As life continues to imitate art, the supervillain’s fifth-season arc features shocking parallels to our reality and a certain U.S. President, including a life-sized golden statue and a vision of the superhero as Jesus Christ. Surprised by these coincidences, series creator Eric Kripke insists he based Homelander’s dramatic fall on historical examples of authoritarian creep, quipping, “It’s just really hard to out-satire this world.”

The series finale features an epic showdown between Homelander and his mortal enemy, resistance fighter Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), who leads a ragtag team known as the Boys. Butcher and his partner in crime, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), find themselves aided by Homelander’s estranged son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), in an epic battle that nearly destroys the West Wing.

But strip away the superpowers, capes, and bombastic effects, and this climactic battle is a modernized version of another classic political thriller. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone features a similar face-off between an unexpected vigilante and a villainous politician destined to bring about the end of the world.  

The Dead Zone’s Greg Stillson laid the groundwork for Homelander decades ago

Martin Sheen during a campaign in a scene from the film ‘The Dead Zone’, 1983. (Photo by Paramount Pictures/Getty Images)

First published in 1979, King’s award-winning novel follows Johnny Smith, a doomed schoolteacher who spends five years in a coma after a near-fatal accident. He awakens with clairvoyant power and the ability to access anyone’s deeply held secrets through physical touch. Smith locates his doctor’s long-lost mother and assists the sheriff of a neighboring town in unmasking the identity of a serial killer by holding the hand of his most recent victim.

King parallels Smith’s mysterious journey with the career of an ambitious businessman. We’re first introduced to Greg Stillson as an enterprising bible salesman who kicks a barking dog to death after checking his surroundings for witnesses. 

As he rises up the political chain, Stillson bribes his way to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. With a biker gang working as his personal strongmen, he will stop at nothing to amass more power. We watch as he threatens his political rivals and arranges the death of an FBI agent investigating his many crimes. Perhaps most disturbing, Stillson knows how to charm an audience, enjoying meteoric political success thanks to his talent for deception and a mega-watt grin that effectively hides his villainy. David Cronenberg’s 1983 adaptation of the story casts Martin Sheen in this pivotal role, sixteen years before he would play the beloved President Josiah Bartlet in Aaron Sorkin’s long-running series The West Wing.

Homelander is also adept at this cleverly concealed dichotomy, hiding his own murderous rage behind highly orchestrated acts of heroism. We first meet the blonde superhero as he stops a dangerous bank robbery, then pauses for selfies with his adoring fans. Literally draped in the American flag, he constantly reminds the world that civilians and first responders are the true heroes, downplaying his own actions to maintain a humble facade.

It’s only behind closed doors that we see who Homelander truly is. While attempting to save a hijacked plane, he accidentally kills the pilots too, sending the commercial jet plummeting to the ocean below. Because he can’t let the world know that he has failed, the callous hero refuses to save anyone onboard and allows hundreds of innocent passengers to sink along with the plane’s wreckage, sacrificing their lives to preserve his pristine reputation. 

As the seasons go by, Homelander slowly becomes more powerful, eliminating or vilifying anyone who stands in his way. He’s surrounded by a loyal group of sycophants who enable his increasingly egregious acts through a complex system of propaganda and misinformation. But the psychopath’s ambition knows no bounds. When the sitting U.S. President balks at his desire to eliminate Congress and imprison or kill the opposition, Homelander crushes the politician’s head and installs his loyal fixer in the coveted role.

Both villains mask violence behind patriotic spectacle

Antony Starr (Homelander). Photo credit: Jasper Savage/Prime

Having injected a rare serum granting him immortality, Homelander plans an Easter address in which he will declare himself the second coming of Christ and order the world to fall to their knees. Fortunately, Butcher and the Boys force their way into the Oval Office, determined to stop him once and for all.  

King’s The Dead Zone condenses this epic saga into a single vision of the future, instead focusing on the veracity of Smith’s clairvoyant power. By the time he crosses paths with the sinister political candidate, we firmly believe that these outlandish visions serve as an iron-clad prophecy. Shaking his hand, Smith glimpses a terrifying future of Stillson’s presidency, the man’s angry temperament sparking a nuclear war that will bring about the end of the world. Burdened with this knowledge, Smith knows that his singular vision cannot combat Stillson’s benevolent facade and decides to take matters into his own hands. He buys a rifle and stakes out the setting for an upcoming political rally, hiding in the auditorium’s balcony. 

As Stillson delivers a well-received speech, Smith misses his first shot, allowing his target time to defend himself. Frightened for his life, Stillson grabs a nearby toddler and holds him in the path of danger. Unwilling to kill the child Stillson uses as a human shield, Johnny relents and is fatally shot, but not before a photographer captures a damning picture of Stillson in this unforgivable act. King stops short of killing the horrific villain, allowing him to suffer the consequences of his own cowardice. Though Stillson survives this climactic showdown, Smith’s final vision reveals a political career in tatters. The once-powerful man will never again be able to convince the world to see him as anything but a conniving fool.

The Boys’ bombastic series finale features a similar end for Homelander. As the world watches his live address, he announces himself as God before slipping into familiar rage, threatening death to anyone unwilling to worship his name. Butcher interrupts this terrifying speech, sending cameramen fleeing for their lives without thinking to cut the live feed. In a brutal fight, Butcher and Ryan subdue the struggling villain while Kimiko unleashes a radioactive blast designed to eliminate superhuman abilities.

When the dust settles, Homelander regains his footing only to find that his eyes no longer emit deadly laser beams. His attempts to blast off into the sky result in a series of pathetic jumps no higher than a few feet off the floor. With the cameras still rolling, the world can see that Homelander is no longer a superhero, but a flesh-and-blood human just like them. 

Why The Boys ending is more brutal than Stephen King’s original vision

Antony Starr (Homelander). Photo credit: Jasper Savage/Prime

Without his steel skin, lightning-quick reflexes, and super speed, Homelander finds himself easily outmatched by the seasoned fighter. Butcher effortlessly stops his feeble punch and begins pummeling the man’s now-fragile face. Terrified, Homelander begs for his life, offering Butcher the full weight of his obscene power. Denied mercy, Homelander debases himself at the man’s feet, offering to eat his shit on live TV.

We remember the eerily prescient words of another fallen hero, delivered in the season’s first episode. Just before Homelander snaps his neck, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) insists, “Take away these powers, and what are you, huh? A pathetic, weak, snivelling fucking loser.” With cameras still rolling, the world now sees the true nature of their self-professed savior. Like Stillson, he has been defanged and revealed as the weakling he truly is. 

Despite these similarities, Kripke has a more brutal end for his humiliated villain. In an interview with Deadline, he explained, “People have asked me, ‘Well, why don’t you send him out in the world powerless, wouldn’t that be the ultimate punishment?’ I’m like, it would, until he gets his hands on some more Compound V, and then you’re back to where you started.”

Thanks to this in-world serum, Homelander has been able to subdue his enemies with brute force and the ever-present threat of death. After all, the blue injectable allows him to instantly slaughter massive crowds with a simple flick of his laser eyes. Kripke continues, “So, he cannot walk out of that room alive, but we can spend time with him powerless to really reveal what everyone’s been saying all season, which is, ‘Take away those powers and you are nothing.’”

As the world witnesses their hero laid low, Butcher exacts his long-awaited revenge. He drives a crowbar into Homelander’s forehead, then cracks open the top of his skull. Homelander’s brains spill over the Resolute Desk while his body falls gracelessly to the floor. The camera lingers on the shocking demise before Butcher abruptly cuts the feed, leaving the world to grapple with the image of their former hero’s mangled body and proof that no one is indestructible. 

King wrote The Dead Zone in the aftermath of the Watergate Scandal and Richard Nixon’s unprecedented fall from grace. Explaining his inspiration for the novel in his 200 memoir On Writing, the author remembers wondering if a political assassin could ever serve as a protagonist. Though Smith fails in his stated mission, he ultimately succeeds in revealing Stillson’s true nature before he can bring the world to the brink of disaster.

But The Boys exists in a different time. Decades later, we’re now plagued by so-called “alternative facts” and a populace determined to believe anything that maintains their delusions of unrivaled strength. Nothing short of complete destruction will force Homelander’s devout followers to accept the truth: that their empire has been built on lies.

While Stillson could be allowed to destroy himself, we must see the mighty Homelander fall to understand that he has always been nothing more than a fragile man in an empty suit. 

The post ‘The Boys’ Series Finale Explained: Homelander’s Fall Mirrors a Classic Stephen King Villain appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

There’s something about the subversion of common areas, twisting something familiar into something surreal through the simple act of changing their context. Seeing spaces like malls and subways devoid of people immediately puts you on a back foot, making you wonder what’s wrong with it as your mind tries to fill the emptiness with imagined horrors. This feeling was ingrained in my brain after reading and falling in love with the classic novel House of Leaves.

With the new A24 film Backrooms, based on Kane Parsons’ series of YouTube videos, hitting theaters this week, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite horror games that manage to capture this vibe in the creepiest way possible.

P.T.

This one isn’t the most useful recommendation since it’s no longer available, but no game has captured the terror of a mundane space being twisted more than P.T. This “Playable Teaser” for a new Silent Hill game from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro was pulled from the PlayStation store after the project was cancelled due to the messy professional breakup between Kojima and Konami, but it stands as a fully experience on its own as one of the scariest experimental games, even without its relation to the iconic franchise.

The whole game takes place in one hallway that loops back on itself in impossible ways, becoming more and more haunted as you make progress. Even before things start getting wild, the feeling of unease comes from being in such an innocuous space under such strange circumstances. Many of the game’s puzzles involve trying to figure out what’s changed on your loop, causing you to intimately learn the layout of the hallway, making things all the more startling when you come across changes. While you can’t download P.T. anymore, there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had just from pulling up a Let’s Play on YouTube and following some poor streamer on their descent into horror.

THE EXIT 8

In some ways, The Exit 8 reminds me of an indie version of P.T., but on a much smaller scale. While not necessarily as narrative-focused, it’s got the same ideas of repeating spaces and seeing what’s changed. The difference here is that rather than to do it for solving puzzles, spotting the changes is the core gameplay mechanic. You find yourself trapped in an underground passageway, just a simple, stark white tiled hall with a few doors and some signage. The rules for progressing are simple: if you find an anomaly, turn back the way you came; if you don’t find any, continue forward. It’s a clear setup that will have you second-guessing everything you know by about the third loop.

Even before things start getting surreal, there’s something really unnerving about the passageway you repeat. It’s always empty, except for one guy who walks towards you on a set path, over and over again each time. Just that is enough to make you feel off, but the real secret sauce that makes it work is the variable scale of the anomalies that you’ll run into. Sometimes it’s as small as a slight alteration to a poster, but other times it’s bigger in a way that acts as a jump scare. It’s a real lean-in type game, where you are actively scanning for tiny details in the environment, which sets you up for a jolt when it’s a big one. Not only did this spawn a small anomaly hunting subgenre of games, but it was also potent enough of a concept that it was adapted into a feature film this year. It won’t last you more than an hour, but it’s a clever concept that has a great bag of tricks to scare you in non-traditional ways.

BACKROOMS

If you want actual Backrooms-related content, there are tons of options out there. Escape the Backroom and The Complex: Expedition seemed to be the biggest ones, but I wanted to highlight the Backrooms game from indie horror legend Puppet Combo, which was recently released on consoles. It’s presented with their low-poly, VHS-filter style, enhancing the vibes into something that feels so much more surreal. You play an office worker who, while taking the subway home, no-clips into the titular liminal labyrinth. You’re confronted not only with dreams of your past, but also with the dawning realization that you’re not alone in there.

While it may be a little too short to have the full narrative punch I was hoping for, the atmosphere it creates is exactly what I want from a liminal horror experience. There’s something distinctly eerie about staring at a fuzzy-textured, low-poly wall and trying to tell if you see a face in the gap or if that’s just your imagination playing tricks on you. Puppet Combo’s signature VHS- inspired style gives it a found footage feeling, making it feel very raw and immediate. Abrupt ending aside, this is a great little creepypasta-style short story that will do an excellent job of getting you in the right headspace for the upcoming film.

POOLS

The term walking simulator has often been used in a negative light, but there can be something intriguing about a game just about navigating maze-like levels, especially in the liminal space genre. POOLS is a game about wandering through hallways and rooms populated by pools. It takes familiar elements like locker room-style floor tiles and water slides and makes them feel abstract and strange with its layouts. It’s like it’s an alien space assembled out of building blocks that we’re meant to understand, but done without any understanding of what they are actually for. The stunning photorealistic art style brings it to life, but it’s the sound design that really builds the atmosphere.

There are no jump scares in POOLS, but the footsteps and splashes you make play tricks on your mind, giving you the uneasy feeling that you’re being followed as they echo through the empty hallways. It almost feels like horror ASMR, where the sound just tickles some part of your brain that doesn’t make rational sense. There’s nothing downright terrifying, but it does give you that eerie feeling of walking through an empty space completely alone, not sure if you’re hearing something just around the corner. At the same time, it has a very chill vibe to it, allowing you to alternate between feelings of relaxation and discomfort. Check out this one if you want a game with more of the liminal with slightly less of the horror.

ANATOMY

One of the best haunted house stories of all time, the indie masterpiece from Kitty Horrorshow is a game that puts you in a mundane, empty space and really makes you think about it. You explore it. You get familiar with it. You compare it to the human body. It’s a simple setup that has you fetching tapes from around the darkly-lit house, bringing them back to the kitchen to listen to the narrator clinically dissect the idea of what a house is. It’s almost impossible to capture that atmosphere of sheer dread it creates in its halls, stairways, and rooms, but it remains one of the scariest games I’ve ever played.

The combination of expert writing and perfect atmosphere makes efficient use of its mundane location. I’ll never forget the feeling of going into the basement the first time, worried that I was going to get forever lost in the sea of darkness if I strayed too far from the wall that grounded me. Even though it twists into something darker on subsequent runs through the game, it still feels like the horror of it comes not from a scary monster chasing you, but rather realizing that a house itself could be a scary monster. It’s an incredibly unnerving game, and with a price of $3 and a runtime of just under an hour, I recommend everyone check it out.

Are you revisiting any of your favorite liminal horror games to prepare for the Backrooms? Drop your recommendation in the comments below!

The post Get Lost in the ‘Backrooms’ With These 5 Liminal Horror Video Games appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

While Curry Barker’s film is masterfully written and directed, making audiences both fear and feel for Navarrette’s “Freaky Nikki” in equal measure, there’s no overstating the amount of tortured humanity that the actress brings to the table with this new horror icon.

However, just in case you still find yourself wishing for more Inde Naverrette once the credits roll (and who could blame you after such a memorable film?), we’ve decided to shine a light on a few of Naverrette’s upcoming projects.

Just keep in mind that Obsession’s success is still a relatively recent phenomenon, so we’ll likely have even more announcements regarding Naverrette’s future roles in the coming months.

Invertigo (TBA)

Pictured: 2022’s ‘Fall’

From the director of Cockneys vs Zombies and the producers behind 2022’s unexpected hit Fall, the upcoming survival thriller Invertigo follows a group of teenagers who sneak into an amusement park in order to try out a roller coaster before its official debut. Naturally, things go horribly wrong when a technical malfunction leaves the group stranded hundreds of feet in the air.

Inde Naverrette is almost certainly playing one of the reckless youngsters trapped aboard the coaster, with the movie appearing to be a less-wintery take on the isolated thrills of Adam Green’s massively underrated Frozen. That’s why I think horror fans would do well to keep an eye on this upcoming release!

Kids of the Black Hole (TBA)

Inde Navarrette as Emma in ‘Kids of the Black Hole’

A microbudget indie drama originally crowd-funded through Indiegogo, Dylan Ellis’ Kids of the Black Hole follows an ensemble of teenagers forced to reflect on their past mistakes after an attempted robbery goes horribly wrong.

Inde Navarrette is set to play a troubled teen named Emma in the film, with her role having been shot all the way back in 2018. However, while the flick appears to have been trapped in post-production hell, The buzz surrounding Inde’s performance in Obsession is likely responsible for the project finally getting off the ground – though there’s still no confirmed release date.

HOPEFULLY Curry Barker’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre ?!

Pictured: Tobe Hooper’s original ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

Given Obsession’s impressive box-office numbers and early studio reactions to the upcoming horror-comedy Anything but Ghosts, it makes sense that Hollywood would allow Curry Barker to use his particular brand of unhinged horror to revamp an existing franchise. And while nothing about this project is set in stone, it would make a lot of sense for Barker to capitalize on Obsession’s success by teaming up with Inde Navarrette once again in his as-yet-untitled addition to the Texas Chain Saw Massacre franchise.

As our own John Squires pointed out on X, Inde could just as easily play a terrified victim of Leatherface and company or a deranged member of the cannibalistic family itself. Barker is almost certainly aware of this as well, so I think it’s safe to say that there’s a big chance that this collaboration is being discussed as we speak!

The post Wishing for More Inde Navarrette After ‘Obsession’? These Are Her Next Horror Projects appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Not only would we have to say goodbye to our favorite heroes and villains, but considering the show’s ultra-violent playfulness, their ends would likely be unthinkable. And Kripke did not disappoint. 

From the first of eight final episodes, The Boys’ swan song has been a cavalcade of grotesque kills. We wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve watched the show’s US President have his head abruptly crushed in the Oval Office and a human guinea pig bled to death through his asshole, spraying blood all over his prison cell. But on a list of season five’s most horrific expirations, these don’t even crack the shocking top ten.

What sets this season’s death scenes apart is the weight of finality and a current of emotion running alongside the body horror. After all, we’ve run out of canon fodder, and most of the following kills cut deep, providing heartbreaking or cathartic closure for characters we’ve come to either loathe or love.   

10) A-Train’s Final Race (Episode 1)

As promised, season five begins with an excruciating death that takes us back to where we first began. After years executing Homelander’s violent whims, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) has finally broken with Vought and begun working with the Boys. Now going by Reggie, the world’s fastest man joins their mission to infiltrate an internment camp to free a handful of resistance fighters. As Homelander (Antony Starr) tries to prevent their escape, we watch in awe as a slow-motion sequence follows Reggie running through the chaotic scene, taking pins out of grenades and saving Hughie (Jack Quaid) from Homelander’s deadly laser vision. When the dust settles, he speeds off into the night with Homelander hot on his heels. But when a civilian steps into his path — a mirror to the grisly collision that kicked off the show’s first episode — A-Train proves that he has truly changed by moving out of the way to save her life. 

Unfortunately, this sends him careening through the dense woods, smashing into large trees at the speed of light. Homelander quickly catches up and snaps his neck, but not before the fallen hero delivers a blistering critique that will become eerily prophetic as the season unfolds. As Homelander holds him by the throat, Reggie laughs in his face, saying, “Take away these powers, and what are you, huh? A pathetic, weak, snivelling fucking loser.” It’s a painful yet redemptive moment for a character who’s finally found the courage to stand up for what’s right. 

9) Firecracker Freed (Episode 5)

As Homelander grows increasingly unstable, others begin to doubt their place in his army. Firecracker (Valorie Curry) has always been a loyal follower, but Homelander discovers that she’s been sharing her doubts with his father, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), in the afterglow of their secret affair. He confronts Firecracker about her faltering belief just moments after she’s publicly burned all connections to her former life. Yet even this self-destruction is not enough and Homelander asks her to pack her things and go.

Desperate to stay in her hero’s good graces, Firecracker professes her love for the caped crusader and begs to stay. But something in her sycophantic tone pushes the monster over the edge. After a gentle caress, he smashes her face into a nearby statue of a bald eagle, impaling her head with its outstretched wings. Blinking as her body collapses, Firecracker finally understands that no amount of devotion will ever fill the gaping hole in Homelander’s heart.

8) Oh Father, Where Art Thou? (Episode 8)

After five seasons, we’ve come to expect exploding heads in The Boys universe, but the disturbing death of Oh Father (Daveed Diggs) tops them all. The pastor-turned-superhero is not only known for his proselytising, but also for his forceful voice, strong enough to literally blow people away. The only downside is that his destructive screams can be quite dangerous in the throes of sexual gratification. So, to celebrate her ascension to the presidency, his wife Ashley (Colby Minifie) buys him a heavily reinforced ball gag designed to muffle the most catastrophic sounds.

When the Boys break into the White House, Oh Father attempts to stave them off and opens his mouth to pulverize Hughie. Spying Ashley’s kinky gift, Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) uses the gag to stop this deadly blast, reversing Oh Father’s power and popping his head. Once again, Hughie is covered with gore as brain matter splatters all over the room. On the other hand, perhaps it’s better that Oh Father’s life ends this way rather than his head exploding from vocal enjoyment of a sexual act. 

7) Adam Bourke Takes a Bow (Episode 5)

Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne) has long been a heel in The Boys’ universe. We first meet the problematic and foulmouthed director on the set of Dawn of the Seven, an in-world film designed to smooth over Homelander’s disastrous romance. But Bourke has finally left Vought Studios behind and is now helming an off-broadway play about the Bee Gees that just happens to star Justin (Nathan Mitchell), a.k.a. Black Noir II. Unfortunately, The Deep (Chace Crawford) discovers Noir’s secret gig and jealously sabotages his chance at fame.

While Bourke “drops a deuce,” Deep sends an eel through the toilet bowl to burrow itself into the director’s rear end. Coming to his rescue, Black Noir extracts the bloody creature, but rips out Bourke’s intestines as well. He dies a fittingly undignified death, bleeding on a dirty bathroom floor while quipping about how his asshole hurts. This grisly vignette not only allows Mitchell to pull off his mask and show his face for the first time in Boys history, but combines the series’ trademark irreverent humor with shockingly violent special effects.  

6) Karma Catches The Deep (Episode 8)

Thankfully, Deep does not get away with his atrocious acts. After five seasons of bro-ing his way around and blaming others for his own mistakes, the cowardly hero has finally run out of places to hide. In retaliation for Bourke’s death, Noir damages the oil pipeline Deep has just endorsed, creating a horrific oil spill that kills millions of fish. The so-called Lord of the Seven Seas is unceremoniously warned by a shark named Xander — hilariously voiced by Samuel L. Jackson — that if he dips a toe into any body of water, the fish will immediately rip him apart. Word has spread, and every aquatic animal now blames him for what they call the Pipeline Genocide as well as the death of Ambrosius (Tilda Swinton), Deep’s octopus lover, whom he betrayed to curry favor with Homelander.

Unfortunately, Deep finds himself far offshore after a grueling fight with Annie (Erin Moriarty). As cries of “justice for Ambrosious” ring in the air, a massive sea creature rises from the murky depths. Sharks close in while one giant tentacle encircles Deep’s waist and another juts out of his open mouth, paralleling the sexual assault he perpetrated in episode one. It’s a moment of long-awaited karmic retribution for a pathetic, yet all-too-familiar character.

5) Strangled by a Love Sausage (Episode 1)

Throughout the Boys’ audacious run, we’ve seen a variety of unusual powers, from a man burrowing through the earth by blowing the dirt out of his butt to a “hero” capable of duplicating himself to create a human centipede. But perhaps the strangest is Love Sausage (Derek Johns), whose abilities stem from a monstrous penis he controls like an octopus’ tentacle. Long tormented by this depraved supervillain, Mother’s Milk now finds himself held prisoner in a Vought camp where Love Sausage serves as a prison guard. But when Butcher and his crew infiltrate the bunker, M.M. sees his chance for revenge.

Warning, “I’m gonna chop that thing up like a party sub,” he tries to evade the lunging man who uses his elongated dick as a whip. M.M. is finally able to grasp the appendage, repeatedly stabbing the tip with a jagged stake. Finally subdued, he wraps the shaft around Love Sausage’s neck and slowly pulls it tight, marking the first time in mainstream television history that a man has been strangled to death by his own genitalia.  

4) Synapse Snapped (Episode 7)

As Homelander nears his strange announcement, the insecure supe begins wondering if the masses will actually accept him as their God. To weed out everyone but true believers, he’s assembled a team of devious psychics to read minds and identify any doubt. Synapse (Steven Yaffee) is a deranged psychic who receives a pardon for multiple crimes in exchange for running interference for Homelander. Holding Hughie and Butcher (Karl Urban) hostage, he digs into their subconscious thoughts and disguises himself as Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a painful figure from Butcher’s past. But Hughie turns the tables on this sinister man, recounting his knowledge of the villain’s first kill.

As grisly crime scene photos flash before our eyes, we learn that a young Synapse mentally forced his seven-year-old brother to eviscerate himself with their mother’s corkscrew. This bloody anecdote proves to be an effective distraction, and Butcher is able to free himself, impaling the psychic with two of his waspish tentacles. As he pulls them apart, Synapse’s body is ripped in half, his entrails spilling all over the floor. This peek into the mind of a murderous man reminds us just how devastating superpowers can be.

3) Jetstreak, Rock Hard, and Soldier Boy (Episode 2)

As the Boys search for Homelander’s Achilles heel, they replicate an experimental virus engineered to kill all supes while leaving humans essentially unharmed. Hoping to test the concoction’s strength, they plan to inject it into an indestructible hero known as Rock Hard (Andrew Iles) and observe the results. But when they arrive at his Vought-arranged home, they discover that the man has severely let himself go. Rather than a muscle-bound hero made of stone, he’s now a rocky head sitting atop a massive pile of molten lava created by untold hours of pleasuring himself to volcano porn.

Wearing a protective mask, Frenchie (Tomer Capone) opens the vial in the sealed basement alongside a teen supe called Jetstreak (Dylan Colton) and Soldier Boy, who’s been sent to retrieve the unstable substance. The Boys watch in horror as the infected heroes vomit black goo, their skin beginning to bubble and blister. Rock Hard’s face cracks open and crumbles, revealing brains and viscera underneath. They are the first victims of this dangerous plague, yet only two will remain dead.

2) That Was a Crazy Game of Poker (Episode 5)

The moment Jensen Ackles first appeared as Soldier Boy in season three, fans of Kripke’s long-running series Supernatural began clamoring for a larger reunion. Season five delivered in spades with a hilarious gore-fest also featuring several of Hollywood’s funniest stars. Searching for the elusive V1, Soldier Boy, and Homelander travel to the home of Mr. Marathon, a former member of the Seven, played by Ackles’ onscreen Supernatural brother Jared Padalecki. With Misha Collins in tow as Malchemical, the two have devised a plot to kill Homelander via Soldier Boy’s power-removing blast. This leads to a fantastic meta conversation in which Ackles, Collins, and Padalecki contemplate abandoning Kripke’s new characters and retreating to the comfort of old times. But Soldier Boy demures, setting up a chase-turned blood bath in the Hollywood mansion. 

As Soldier Boy crushes Malchemical’s throat, the famous men sitting at a nearby poker table panic and try to flee. First, the lightning-fast Mr. Marathon collides with Will Forte, splattering his body all over the washed-up athlete’s designer track suit. Next, Soldier Boy slows down his attacker by throwing Kumail Nanjiani, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Craig Robinson in Mr. Marathon’s way. Finally, he hurls Seth Rogen at the hero, his speed shearing the comedian’s body in half. Upstairs, Mr. Marathon slips on his own baby oil, giving Soldier Boy the upper hand. Demanding answers, he shatters both of the hero’s feet before Homelander stomps on his upturned head. By far one of The Boys’ most gory scenes, this gleeful vignette revives some of Supernatural’s most beloved tricks in delightfully wacky fan-service fun. 

1) Homelander Powers Down (Series Finale)

As the show’s final season barrelled toward its jaw-dropping conclusion, there was only one question on everyone’s lips: can anyone stop Homelander? Butcher has dedicated his life to this quest after the psychotic Superman raped and impregnated his wife, eventually leading to her accidental death at the hands of their superhuman son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). Now that Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) possesses Soldier Boy’s blast, Butcher and Ryan brawl with the monstrous hero, destroying the Oval Office along the way. As they hold Homelander in place, Kimiko unloads the full force of her power, knocking everyone to the floor. 

Homelander arises and tries to fly, only to find out that he has lost his superhuman abilities. Butcher wades in and begins pummeling the now-fragile villain again and again as blood sprays from his fracturing face. Brutalized and bleeding, the sniveling hero begs for his life, echoing A-Train’s prophetic final words. With the world watching on live TV, Butcher drives a crowbar into Homelander’s forehead then pulls up, cracking off the top of his skull. The audience watches in horror as their would-be saviour is revealed to be human after all. 

The post ‘The Boys’ Goes Out With a Body Horror Bang: Ranking the Gruesome Deaths of Season 5 appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Not only does A24’s Backrooms movie look like it’s going to be an unprecedented hit, but the success of films like Markiplier’s Iron Lung seems to suggest that mainstream viewers are ready for less conventional creators to make the transition to Hollywood filmmaking.

In honor of internet-based scares making their way to theaters, I’m highlighting five more ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) that Hollywood should adapt after Backrooms! While the film’s initial announcement inspired a similar article, there are now plenty of new options available, sure to entertain horror fans.

That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own online favorites if you think a particularly freaky ARG was missed that could impress viewers on the big screen.

With that out of the way, onto the list.

5. The Mandela Catalogue

The best part about engaging with an effective horror ARG is being able to immerse yourself in a creepy new world that feels like a warped version of reality. This is precisely why Alex Kister’s The Mandela Catalogue is so effective, as his alternate history narrative about shapeshifting demons slowly replacing the population of a small town takes place within a fully fleshed-out community.

Set in the fictional Mandela County, Wisconsin, The Mandela Catalogue may not boast a Hollywood-level budget, but that doesn’t make this apocalyptic story showcasing the eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell any less ambitious. From nightmarish imagery crafted from simple Photoshop edits to subtle storytelling that implies Eldritch horrors without actually having to show them, Kister’s project is a masterclass in making the most of limited resources.

4. Where is Everybody

Originally posted to TikTok in October of 2019, Alexander Nielsen’s Where is Everybody is one of the shortest horror experiences on this list. In fact, I’d argue that it’s easier to simply watch all of Nielsen’s videos than to continue reading this entry. If you don’t have the time, however, this fascinating TikTok account posts brief recordings supposedly made by a young man who finds himself quite literally alone in the world, with his post-apocalyptic exploration making for a fascinating series of lo-fi thrills.

While we’ve seen similar concepts before in minimalist ARGs like hiimmarymary, Nielsen’s flawless execution of a simple concept makes his work extremely easy to adapt to a feature film. In fact, studios could maintain the exact same found footage format and focus on expanding the lonely world surrounding our doomed protagonist.

3. Angel Hare

The cursed kid’s show is one of the oldest tropes in Creepypasta history, with similar horror stories having been told even before the rise of Kris Straub’s infamous Candle Cove back in 2009. However, Angel Hare stands out by having its fictional animated series be a bizarre Christian program with a sentient main character that appears to directly address our confused protagonist.

Not only is this a legitimately unsettling story about confronting your past, but Angel Hare also benefits from tight writing that makes it feel like a complete narrative with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and ending – a rarity amongst ARGs.

2. The Oldest View

Kane Parsons has already stated that he’s not yet done working with The Backrooms, and fans have been left to wonder if the filmmaker’s comments are hinting towards a possible sequel or perhaps even more videos in his long-running ARG. However, I’m of the opinion that, after the release of his hotly anticipated film, Parsons should instead focus on an adaptation of his most original work to date: the incredibly underrated The Oldest View series.

A surreal narrative about a vlogger who inexplicably encounters an abandoned mall at the bottom of an underground tunnel, the show appears to be a moody commentary on nostalgia and historical memory. It also happens to be bursting at the seams with Liminal Horror (while also featuring one of the all-time creepiest antagonists in ARG history). That’s why I’d love to see this found footage yarn make the leap to the big screen.

1. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Inspiration can come from anywhere, but even veteran storytellers will likely be surprised to learn that Trevor Roberts’ cosmic/body horror opus has its origins in a rotting cantaloupe that he discovered in the break room while working as an architect. Roberts would then edit a snapshot of the decaying fruit into an existing picture of a mine in South Africa, with the ensuing image becoming the basis of a long-running story about a massive superorganism buried in central Texas.

A gruesome satire of corporate greed and how human beings can quickly adapt to ridiculous situations, Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a multifaceted narrative told through in-universe writing, illustrations, and even a Tabletop RPG. Of course, a Hollywood movie would ideally take the form of a mockumentary following the creation of the park and the terrifying 2007 disaster that led to its closing.

The post Five More Horror ARGs That Hollywood Should Adapt After ‘Backrooms’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

So, is this puppet-themed story the most ghastly thing to come out of Tales from the Crypt? Hardly. “Strung Along”, however, understood how to use its time well, how not to drag out the violence, and how to shock the audience. Funny enough, though, this is an episode that, in spite of its haunting ending, feels tamer than the source material. The comic counterpart for “Strung Along” goes out on a note that is perhaps too disturbing, even for Tales from the Crypt.

Before going any further, take a look behind the scenes of “Strung Along”. This late Season Four episode might not have the directing pedigree of others in the series—this season alone had episodes directed by William Friedkin and John Frankenheimer—but it was helmed by the Crypt Keeper’s maker and handler. Special effects wizard Kevin Yagher, who was requested to create the show’s iconic host, was also responsible for getting John Kassir cast. After gaining experience in the director’s chair, beginning with Season Two’s “Lower Berth”, Yagher came back for an episode that felt right up his alley.

Mike Vosburg’s comic-style artwork for “Strung Along”, as shown in the Tales from the Crypt episode.

There seemed to be no one better to direct “Strung Along” than the person who brought Chucky into the world. Yagher was built for a story about killer puppets. Or so, that’s what this episode appears to be about (spoiler: it is). Initially, a murderer on strings looms over that plot of a faded puppeteer and his shady wife, until it’s time for the inevitable reveal. The show’s own “no batteries” scene, you could say. Smartly, though, Yagher and co-writer Yale Udoff (Bad Timing) didn’t allow their collaboration to be so routine. What you think will happen, most definitely does happen—just now in a different way.

This episode is partly in the vein of classic psychological thrillers—the kind where, bit by bit, someone is driven to madness by someone close to him or her. And here, the victim of such malice is a retired puppeteer (or marionettist) named Joseph Renfield (Donald O’Connor). Once a successful entertainer, Joseph is now deeply unhappy. A bad heart has ended his career, as well as caused problems in his marriage. With all this free time on his hands, Joseph’s mind also wanders. He’s become suspicious about his wife, Ellen (Patricia Charbonneau), as she spends every Tuesday night at her acting class.

It doesn’t take a detective to figure out what’s going on here, especially after Ellen supplies the assistant needed for Joseph’s sudden comeback; someone in her acting class, a guy named “David” (Zach Galligan), is quickly brought in to help organize the new show. That handsome stranger is actually more into mechanical, or remote-controlled, puppets, but he’s a fast learner. David is also the only person who looks to be supporting Joseph and his new project. Ellen lays it on pretty thick with her disruptions and open hostility, whereas Galligan’s role is a little less obvious. So much so that you’re almost disappointed once the ruse is over and the villains show their hand. Joseph is so pathetic that you wish David’s friendship had been genuine.

As for the “Strung Along!” found in EC Comics’ The Vault of Horror, there is no David character, or even any kind of convoluted plan to murder Joseph’s parallel. That even more depressed marionettist, Tony Zargano, feels the full anger of his money-grubbing wife, Nora, before she simply leaves him. Fed up with her husband’s blue period and no longer living the life of luxury, Nora gives up her long con, says words that could cut steel, and then storms out. It’s really more heartbreaking than horrifying.

A page from “Strung Along!”, as seen in EC Comics’ The Vault of Horror.

If not for its last two pages, the comic version of “Strung Along!” wouldn’t qualify as horror. Most of the story just shows Tony stuck in his bed, reminiscing about the past, and trying to figure out why things went so wrong in life. It’s that familiar sort of tragedy that’s been long associated with brilliant artists. Yet as a change of pace, it’s the comic, and not the Crypt adaptation, that draws a fuller picture of the character. Tony’s fragile heart keeps him immobile but also reflective.

The comic’s shift into horror occurs as soon as Nora has a supposed change of heart. The story’s remainder is largely saturated in blues and blacks, and apart from the last two panels, Nora’s face is never shown to the audience. She never speaks a word, either. Regardless, a reconciliation commences, and Nora makes Tony’s last night on Earth “complete”. The next morning, the cops show up to find both Tony and Nora dead; it’s safe to assume he had a heart attack. Nora, on the other hand, died before her reunion with Tony. Those marionettes, in their own twisted way, wanted to make sure that their friend would have one last night of happiness.

So, as you can see, Tales from the Crypt opted for a necrophilia-free ending. After serving up a plot twist that feels like it came out of an old Jimmy Sangster script, “Strung Along” delivers the comeuppance portion of the story. It just couldn’t end with Ellen and David/Rick scaring poor Joseph into another heart attack. No, the episode needed to make good on its promise of a killer Koko the Clown. However, instead of a drawn-out chase sequence, the episode spits out a conclusion that is both fulfilling and eerie. You’re left with a rather creepy last image.

While the comic ends up being more depraved, Tales from the Crypt’s “Strung Along” is more of a complete story. The latter also doesn’t skimp on the grisliness. Either way, you’ll be sure to get your fill of puppet horror.

Season Four of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on May 22.

Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.

A giant puppet made in Joseph Renfield’s (Donald O’Connor) image, as seen in “Strung Along”.

The post Tales from ‘Tales from the Crypt’: Exhuming Season Four’s “Strung Along” Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

This freedom has allowed adult stories like Preacher and even Invincible to be adapted in all of their bloody glory without the need to compromise the action in order to secure a profitable PG-13 rating. That’s also how we got Prime Video’s incredibly successful adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys, a satirical comic book that went on to become one of the most popular superhero deconstructions in media.

However, with the show finally reaching its conclusion after seven years of bloodthirsty setup, long-time fans are left to wonder where they’ll turn to for their next dose of horror adjacent comic book thrills.

So, here’s a list highlighting five ultraviolent comics that also deserve the The Boys adaptation treatment, as there are plenty of genre stories that would make for some riveting programming.

That being said, this is far from a comprehensive list, so don’t forget to comment below with your own comic book favorites if you think we missed a particularly gnarly one.

With that out of the way, onto the list!

5. Wanted

Yes, I’m very much aware that Wanted already has a reasonably successful film adaptation from 2007, but as much as I enjoy that batshit crazy movie about curving bullets and deciphering prophecies from textile mills, it has absolutely nothing to do with Mark Millar’s original story!

The real Wanted was actually about the son of a superpowered killer discovering that our reality is controlled by a secret society of supervillains who emerged victorious from a war against superheroes and wiped everyone’s memories so that they could continue their nefarious activities in the shadows. In a media landscape dominated by superhero stories and fantastical cinematic universes, I think a supervillain story taking place in a more grounded reality would be a breath of fresh air. That’s why Wanted makes it onto the list, though it’s a shame that Eminem is a bit too old now to finally play the main character who was clearly based on his appearance.

4. Brat Pack

Brat Pack is probably the most controversial book on this list, with this dark satire of superhero sidekick stories delving into uncomfortable territory in order to condemn child abuse and the underlying fascism behind vigilante justice. However, despite being a frequently unpleasant read with divisive story beats regarding homophobia and sexual assault, enough time has passed that I believe a new generation of writers could tactfully approach the subject matter in order to expose how media empires exploit children.

There have been enough real-life scandals since 1990 to inform a serious Brat Pack adaptation that could very well turn out to be one of the most important Superhero stories ever put to screen – so long as the showrunners treat the subject with the respect it deserves.

3. The Strange Talent of Luther Strode

Equal parts horror comedy, Spider-Man homage, and parody of those Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisements that used to haunt comic books during the ’50s and ’60s, The Strange Talent of Luther Strode is one of the most insanely creative projects to come out of the industry in decades.

That’s also why I think Justin Jordan and Tradd Moore’s high-octane parable about a troubled teenager who suddenly becomes a hulking strongman could also turn out to be TV’s next big superhero-themed hit. And if you ask me, a digitally de-aged Alan Ritchson would be perfect for the role of Luther!

2. Nemesis

The sadistic brainchild of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, Nemesis is so edgy that it often becomes an unintentional comedy. And yet, there’s an undeniable charm to the over-the-top cynicism of this ridiculously hyperviolent story that can best be described as: “what if Batman was the Joker?”

However, the farcical world of Nemesis is so over-the-top that an appropriately satirical adaptation has the potential to surpass its source material. Hell, the added limitations of a TV budget might even help to make this a more easily digestible experience, though it really depends on who might be cast as the Patrick-Bateman-esque title character.

1. Something is Killing the Children

Putting James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera’s action-horror opus on this list is kind of a cheat since an adaptation has been in the works since 2021, but until Blumhouse gives us an update on the long-gestating movie and animated series, I’ll continue to beg for a live-action rendition of Something is Killing the Children!

In this ultraviolent Boom! Studios series, we follow monster hunter Erica Slaughter as she hunts down hungry abominations that are usually only able to be seen by kids. While the overarching story here is perfect for a multi-season TV epic (and maybe even a couple of spin-offs), there’s also plenty of room for monster-of-the-week stories too.

The post 5 Ultraviolent Comic Books That Deserve ‘The Boys’ Treatment appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

However, with Aaron Fisher’s Corporate Retreat releasing in theaters this Friday and exposing audiences to brand new forms of workplace terror – and with Smith’s film celebrating its 20th anniversary this year – I believe that this is the perfect moment to finally look back on the original Severance and explore exactly why it’s such an underrated piece of corporate satire.

With that in mind, I’d advise readers to strap in, as this is going to be one hell of a team-building exercise!

Crafting a Corporate Retreat Nightmare

Christopher Smith had already established himself as a celebrated genre director by the time he became attached to Severance, with the success of his 2004 slasher Creep (another one of his films that was later overshadowed by a different movie with the same name) allowing the filmmaker and his team to secure more funds for a sophomore production. This next project would end up being a satirical horror comedy co-written by Smith and fellow British screenwriter James Moran.

Moran, who some of you may know from his work on Doctor Who and The Borderlands/Final Prayer, documented much of the writing process on his personal blog back in the day. He would often comment on the real-world frustrations that inspired the story and even provided fans with a peek behind the curtain by explaining some of the changes that Smith had to make to the script in order to make it more practical to shoot.

Filming took place in both Hungary and the Isle of Man after an intensive casting process where the filmmakers spent four months trying to find actors who could convincingly make these characters entertaining even in an awful situation. Funnily enough, the actors wound up experiencing the shoot as something of a real-world team-building exercise since they were filming in remote locations with little outside company – at least of the English-speaking variety. Smith was also impressed with the Hungarian stunt team and their tendency to put themselves at risk in order to guarantee a better shot, something that you can see in the film during a thrilling bus crash that was originally scripted to be much less dramatic.

Severance Skewers Corporate Evil with a Unique Sense of Humor

In the finished film, which was released in August of 2006, we follow an ensemble of office workers employed by Palisade Defence as they travel to Hungary for a weekend of team-building exercises at a luxury lodge. Unfortunately for the disgruntled sales team and their bumbling boss (played to irritating perfection by Tim McInnerny), an ill-advised detour leads them to a different and much creepier lodge located in an area said to be stalked by homicidal holdovers from the Soviet Union. As the weekend goes on, the workers soon realize that they really have to learn how to work together if they’re going to survive this business trip from hell.

While this sounds like a great premise for a crowd-pleasing horror comedy, the creativity behind Severance didn’t necessarily translate to box office success. The film garnered something of a cult following over the years, but its peculiar setup (which can be best described as Wrong Turn meets The Office) was a bit too strange for mainstream audiences – especially overseas, where filmgoers expected something more akin to the playful direction of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead.

However, now that we’re two decades removed from the expectations surrounding British genre films during the mid-2000s, it’s a lot easier to enjoy Smith’s underrated comedy on its own merits. Sure, the overall effectiveness of the flick’s understated sense of humor depends on your tolerance for an unapologetically British kind of comedic timing, but I personally had a blast with all the throwaway conversations that secretly set up ironic deaths and easy-to-miss punchlines. I also appreciate how the movie never loses sight of its initial objective of poking fun at workplace stereotypes and the banality of corporate evil, an idea that’s especially poignant when you remember that these characters work for a weapons company.

Of course, the most impressive element here is just how memorable the ensemble is despite (or perhaps because of) their quirky personalities. You genuinely feel bad for even the worst of them once the horror starts to set in, and while this is partially due to excellent performances by actors like Andy Nyman as the toxically positive Gordon or even Laura Harris as the sensitive designer of “humane mines”, a lot of it comes back to the writing. Moran and Smith know exactly how to develop the group in such a way that you’re aware of their shortcomings (like Danny Dyer’s unreliable slacker persona) while still caring about their workplace crushes and personal feuds.

This attention to detail only makes the horror of the flick stand out more as the team waltzes right into the Eastern European equivalent of The Hills Have Eyes. I especially enjoy the meta-aspect of the genre presentation as our characters recount different versions of the legends surrounding the area (with the Nosferatu-inspired silent film era gag standing out as a highlight of the experience). That being said, I agree with critics who point out how the sadistic Soviet villains feel like they came from a completely different film.

Take it Up with HR If You Don’t Like Gory Kills and Dry Humor

After all, Smith appears to treat the antagonists’ murderous rampage completely seriously, with nearly all of the humor being reserved for our main characters. Despite several jokes about preserving severed legs and watching an annoying boss get his explosive comeuppance, Severance never depicts the villains’ actions as anything less than monstrous. Not only that, but even the most annoying side characters are still treated like vulnerable human beings when the time comes to finally execute them in proper horror movie fashion, a decision that makes these moments more genuinely off-putting rather than “fun”.

I think these frequent and jarring shifts in the story are responsible for the film’s divisive reputation, as I can understand why some audiences would see this as a narrative flaw rather than an intentional choice by the filmmakers. Personally, however, I love how the movie refuses to dilute either its humor or its scares in order to cater to any particular audience. While it makes sense that not everyone can handle this absurd level of tonal whiplash, I think being able to watch coworkers bicker in one scene only to have them being cruelly set on fire in the next is precisely what makes Smith’s film so unique in the first place.

Severance may be something of an acquired taste, with its extremely dry brand of British humor and unflinchingly brutal death scenes making for an unusual combination, but I’d argue that the flick has aged incredibly well. That’s why I’d still recommend this corporate holiday from hell to genre fans who don’t mind it when their horror comedies get a little bit mean-spirited.

Of course, if that bothers you, you can always take it up with HR!

Described as “a gory mix of The Menu and Saw,” Corporate Retreat centers around a group of young executives whose luxury team-building trip descends into a bloody fight for survival against a vengeful retreat leader.

Corporate Retreat releases in theaters this Friday; get tickets now.

The post Looking Back at the Corporate Horror of Christopher Smith’s ‘Severance’ 20 Years Later appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Alas — unlike Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary — when the luckless astronauts of this title arrive at the touted Goldilocks zone, they don’t end up forging life-long bromances with any of the ETs they bump into. On the contrary, their experience of first contact is decidedly more hostile, leading to a desperate fight for survival that’s equal parts Alien and The Thing.

The Dark Pictures have always flitted between different settings and themes, but this latest jump to space horror is undoubtedly their biggest pivot yet. Which raises the question: “Where can they possibly go from here?”

In the past, we’ve had a decent inkling of what’s around the corner, as each previous anthology instalment has concluded with a sneak peek teeing up the next game. Directive 8020 sort of upholds this tradition, although it takes way more effort to uncover the hidden teaser this time, and it’s not particularly revealing when you do.

All it shows is a degraded VHS tape playing on its own accord and flashing up a string of increasingly unsettling images. A startled deer. A subliminal flash of glaring eyes. A group of people hypnotically pacing around in a circle. An occult glyph is being etched onto the screen. And then, finally, a decrepit, spindly hand reaching out from a black void.