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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

There’s not much we can glean from this preview, to be honest, other than that the next Dark Pictures entry is presumably going to have some kind of paranormal slant. So, if nothing else, it should be a good palate cleanser after all of Directive 8020’s sci-fi escapades!

The thing is, whatever form this upcoming project does take, the team at Supermassive will still have plenty of unmined ideas and juicy horror tropes left to explore. To date, they’ve flirted with slashers, torture porn, ghost stories, vampire flicks, and body horror, while also doing a weird witchcraft trials riff on that noughties road-movie Reeker (Little Hope was an odd duck).

Yet there’s so much still on the table! With that said, as The Dark Pictures heads into the promising new era of its sophomore season, now seems like the opportune moment to draw up a wishlist of which horror subgenres we’d like to see the franchise tackling next. Here are seven that we think they should prioritise!

International Horror

Suspiria

Back when The Dark Pictures was still in its adolescence, and sat under the publishing banner of Bandai Namco, a trilogy pack was released in Europe, bundling together the first three games in the series. This shipped with an assortment of goodies, including a nifty SteelBook case, a set of pins, and a cloth map that depicted the known world.

Dotted sporadically around the latter collectable were a handful of symbols that each corresponded to the setting of a different instalment in the anthology (as it stood at the time). A ship marooned in the Pacific denoted where our hapless vacationers got stranded in Man of Medan, while a seventeenth-century ragdoll placed in the New England territories marked the witchy happenings of Little Hope, and a crescent moon over Iraq delineated House of Ashes’ combat zone.

Although it was never made explicit, we always took this map to be a mission statement for The Dark Pictures going forward. An articulation of Supermassive’s globe-trotting aspirations for the franchise, and a sign that they hoped to one day raise their inky-black flag in each and every continent. Much like how jetsetters use those scratch maps to proudly tick off all the travel destinations they’ve been to.

Yet if this Dark Pictures atlas were to be updated now, the icons would still largely be concentrated in or around America. There’d be representation for The Devil in Me in the Chicago area, and some kind of topographical contouring that places Directive 8020 way out of the atmosphere, but nothing in Europe, the Far East, Africa, or the Antipodes.

We’d like to see the series expanding its horizons in Season 2, then, not only for the literal change of scenery, but because it would also open up tantalizing possibilities for new genre switch-ups. Just imagine an Italian giallo entry, some Aussie outback horror, or even something that boldly homages the New French Extremity (only half-serious with that last one).

J-Horror 

1998’s Ring

The likeliest and most fitting candidate, however, would have to be J-horror. As a genre, it clicks super well with the interactive movie formula, given that its protagonists are often doomed by the poor choices they make (be it to watch an evil VHS tape, to answer a sinister phone call, or to trespass in a notorious murder house) and must then figure out the precise steps they need to follow in order to avert their appointment with death. Which might as well be a standardised synopsis for every single game in The Dark Pictures Anthology!

Case in point, the ethical dilemma that our heroine is faced with at the end of Ringu — whereby they have to either accept the grim fate that’s been handed to them or otherwise pass Sadako’s curse on to a patsy — is practically gift-wrapped for this type of choose-your-own-adventure experience. If you squint next time you’re watching Hideo Nakata’s film, you can almost imagine the branching-path options loading before your very eyes. “Copy the Tape” or “Don’t Copy the Tape”.

But it’s not just J-horror’s emphasis on moral deliberation that makes it feel uniquely suited to The Dark Pictures’ whole deal. The genre also tends to have a heavy

investigatory element — as characters race against the clock to uncover the truth behind supernatural goings-on — a countdown structure that lends itself nicely to video game chapters, and some basis in real-life folklore or urban legend. All of which are prerequisites for The Dark Pictures Anthology. Like onryō spirits and poor plumbing, these two would go perfectly together.

Gothic Horror

The Woman in Black

If, on the other hand, the Surrey-based developers would prefer to make something that hits a little closer to home, they could always turn to old Blighty for inspiration. It’d make sense to honour their roots and have at least one of these games take place somewhere in the UK, what with half of the actors on their Rolodex hailing from the nation to begin with (including Will Poulter, Pip Torrens, Paul Kaye and Latasha Lynch).

And if you’re going to do something set on this quaint isle, then the most obvious route to go down would be a traditional gothic chiller, à la The Woman in Black or The Turn of the Screw. Because Christ knows England, Wales, and Scotland have got more than enough local ghost stories to pick from, whether it’s the wraiths that are said to stalk the Tower of London, the Grey Lady of Glamis Castle, or the headless Princess Gwenllian. Hell, you can barely walk ten steps down the cobbled streets of York without bumping into another purported spook site or supposedly haunted pub.

If they wanted to, Supermassive could fully embrace their heritage and commit to doing a proper period-piece set in Victorian England, switching out Little Hope’s camera-torches for kerosene lamps and Directive 8020’s spaceship decks for stately homes. It’d be a welcome change of pace after all of the series’ 21st-century scenarios, and could be an opportunity to pivot away from the blunt jump scares and gore that have defined The Dark Pictures thus far. Indeed, the developers could take the opportunity to deliver more elegant, subdued frights, adding a welcome touch of class to proceedings.

Exploitation Horror

Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left

An alternative to class, of course, is pure sleaze. The Dark Pictures have been relatively straight-laced when it comes to everything but elaborate deaths. Sure, characters are liable to meet sticky ends if you lead them astray, but the resulting kills are over-the-top and not in the least bit disturbing (unless you’re of a very sensitive disposition). Not to mention, there’s a general avoidance of taboo subject matter, upsetting themes, and even strong language. Considering that they take after infamously horny flicks like Friday the 13th, they’re remarkably chaste too.

Plunging into the grimy depths of grindhouse cinema could be a way to make the puritanical titles feel more dangerous and disreputable than they do. To be clear, we’re not advocating for some tasteless, interactive rape-revenge premise or anything, but there is scope to introduce a bit more grit into the franchise. Perhaps something along the lines of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. You know, something that’s legitimately transgressive, brutal, and grungy. It’d be a timely move as well, given that Ti West’s X trilogy recently gave the movement a new lease on life and dragged it back into the cultural zeitgeist.

If they don’t want to go whole hog here (which is understandable, given how off-putting to general audiences this sort of thing can be), they could still gesture towards the exploitation cycle. Even if it just meant emulating the DIY aesthetic of the genre’s ‘70s heyday.

Religious Horror

The Exorcist III

Another wave of horror that was inescapable in the ’60s through the ’70s, and often cross-pollinated with exploitation cinema, is religious horror.

Out of everything on our list, this is probably the most glaring omission from The Dark Pictures canon thus far, particularly when you consider how many bona fide classics belong in the conversation (see The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, etc.). If Supermassive truly aims to encompass everything that horror is and can be, then they’ll have to tackle this theme sooner or later.

There’s a lot of cool stuff they could do with it! Their dialogue system, for instance, could be used to ask probing questions about dogma and to test the faith of characters with different values and opposing world views (a la CBS’s “Evil“). Meanwhile, the patented “Turning Point” system could enable you to respond to supernatural phenomena— be it a possession, a miracle, or a demonic infestation — with either a cold scientific rationalism or an unwavering belief in the divine, presenting a really interesting fork in the road that could have meaningful consequences for the story.

Apocalyptic Horror

Night of the Living Dead

With its emphasis on stealth encounters and a Resident Evil-esque puzzle that had you mixing chemical compounds, Directive 8020 saw The Dark Pictures affording players greater agency than ever before. Should the development team want to continue down this road, tentatively adopting more interactive elements that go beyond mere QTEs, then they’ll need to pick a genre that gives them sufficient latitude for that.

There’s arguably no better option in this respect than apocalyptic horror. Because any Doomsday calamity will inevitably leave the world divided and fraught with danger, and those who linger on after the bombs / viral outbreak/ A.I. Armageddon/ sound-sensitive alien invasion (tick as appropriate) will need to forever keep their guard up.

Which means it will be really easy for Supermassive to integrate persistent, real-time threats into their story. It’s why zombie pandemics have always been the go-to scenario for survival horror games for decades, as they give you an inexhaustible supply of enemies that you can evade or gun down. Speaking of which, if Supermassive ever wanted to branch out into full-blown combat mechanics, either gun or melee-based, then doing the George A. Romero thing wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Holiday Horror

Terrifier 3

It’s not commercially viable for myriad reasons (not least because no one in their right mind would release a AAA title that people would only want to play for one month out of the entire calendar year), but our dream scenario is for Supermassive to embrace holiday horror. Specifically, we’d go nuts for a Dark Pictures Christmas Special!

Whatever kind of story you choose to tell here — whether it’s a killer Santa murder spree, a Krampus-style take on Yuletide traditions, or just a secular creature feature that happens to unfold at the most wonderful time of the year — it’s bound to be a ton of fun. After all, ‘tis the season for petty dramas and long-repressed hostilities bubbling to the surface.

You see, we’ve always enjoyed fanning the flames of characters’ interpersonal conflicts in these games, and there’s no better time to stoke those tensions than during the holidays. You’ve got (often dysfunctional) families cooped up together for days on end, the stresses of present buying, awkwardness around the mistletoe, and people getting unwisely liquored up around those they secretly resent. It’s a powder keg ready to blow, and, as the puppet master manipulating the strings of everyone involved, you get the privilege of deciding if, when, and how it all blows up.

Even without rampaging psychopaths or bloodthirsty ghouls on the prowl, it’d be a hoot exploiting this messy dynamic. Especially since it has been sorely lacking from the last few Supermassive outings, which have all revolved around button-down professionals (are we the only ones yearning for the hormonal soap opera antics of Until Dawn?)

And then, when the horror does begin in earnest, the developers would have free rein to devise hundreds of ironic seasonal kills for players to discover — from fairy light strangulations to candy cane impalements and mangled bodies being jammed down chimneys. You’d be compelled to play it over and over again just to collect them all!

In short, cheesiness like this would play to the franchise’s strengths. Of course, the main reason we’re pushing for holiday horror is so that we can see the Curator wearing a fetching festive hat and sweater as he bookends the tale. That’d be the only gift we’d ever need!

Anyway, those are the subgenres we’d most like to see The Dark Pictures exploring next, but what about you? Would you be interested in an animal attack outing? A bit of folk horror? Some gateway horror? Or something else entirely?

Directive 8020, is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Steam.

The post Seven Horror Subgenres ‘The Dark Pictures’ Should Tackle Next After ‘Directive 8020’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The talent roster on the film is pretty remarkable for a slasher, and it’s the feature debut for actors like Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and Brian Backer. Tom Savini did the practical gore effects, and editor Jack Sholder would go on to direct his own genre bangers, including Alone in the Dark and The Hidden.

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

The Burning (1981)

Commentators: Tony Maylam (director), Alan Jones (film journalist)

1. There aren’t a lot of American slashers directed by British filmmakers, and Maylam credits his own journey towards that dream to a sexual predator named Harvey Weinstein. The creep saw an early concert film that Maylam made about Genesis and asked if he’d like to make a movie for him. “He was manic,” says Maylam about the prick. (Okay, I got that out of my system.)

2. The initial story idea was called The Cropsey Maniac about a summer camp killer. It was very loosely inspired by an urban legend known around the New York area that’s explored further in 2009’s Cropsey. They don’t mention it here, but the film’s core premise regarding Cropsey and a summer camp was reportedly conceived before the release of Friday the 13th. Also, Madman was heading into production around the same time with a similar Cropsey premise and decided to change it up some to avoid feeling identical.

3. Weinstein’s mother and father were named Mira (Miriam) and Max, respectively. We’ll probably never know if that had any bearing on the name of the Weinsteins’ production company.

4. The early murder of the prostitute doesn’t seem to fit the narrative of Cropsey (Lou David) being fixated on killing folks at a summer camp, but Maylam recalls a certain producer not wanting to wait too long for a kill.

5. Tiger is played by Shelley Bruce, who was starring as Annie on Broadway at the time (possibly as an understudy?) but left the show to do this film. It’s her only feature film credit. She also apparently hung out with Maylam’s fourteen-year-old son and brought him to nightclubs during the film’s production.

6. Cropsey’s choice of garden shears as a weapon was Maylam’s idea.

7. Jones asks why Maylam never worked with the Weinsteins again, especially seeing as this was their first feature, and he helped put them on the road to success. The director says they’re all still friends (as of this recording back in 2007, just over a decade before Harvey Weinstein was arrested for numerous assaults), but the right project never really came along.

8. He says that while the story was conceived by Weinstein, it was Peter Lawrence who wrote the bulk of the actual script, with minor contributions from himself and Bob Weinstein. Maylam doesn’t know why Brad Grey is given a story credit on the film. “Brad was the manager of the camp’s superintendent and was basically a manager of comedians at the time,” and he worked very closely with Weinstein as the man’s gofer. He ultimately went on to become CEO of Paramount Pictures.

9. The story goes that Savini turned down working on Friday the 13th Part 2, “because he was so in love with this script,” but Maylam doesn’t quite confirm that. “We flew to Pittsburgh and went to his home. He liked the script very much, and he was on board, simple as that.”

10. Maylam suggests that the burn makeup effects in 1996’s Academy Award-winning The English Patient are pretty poor. He adds that looking back at The Burning, it would have been “much more sexy” if they had Cropsey’s burnt facial skin peeling off.

11. The original ending was meant to unfold in a big cave, but they discovered it was home to a high number of bats, so they squashed the idea. Cowards. They went with an old copper mine instead, and Maylam spent the next two months coughing up red dust.

12. The mask used to scare campers at the campfire was designed by Savini.

13. The “massacre on the raft” scene is the main one that caused the film issues with censors, particularly in the UK. Maylam considers it one of the best scenes in the film, and he giddily recalls handling the blood pump for the finger-cutting beat.

14. Maylam’s also standing in as the silhouetted Cropsey with the shears and is even the one holding the shears for 90 percent of the killer’s POV shots. He says it’s because he couldn’t get anyone in the crew to do it exactly right.

15. There are two times where the film fades to red, and Maylam thinks he maybe used the gag two times too many.

16. This is the slightly uncommon slasher that eschews the traditional “final girl” ending and has male characters defeat Cropsey instead. Jones references that as if to ask why they went that route, but Maylam says only that female characters give you “more vulnerability” before going silent for ten seconds.

17. He’s not aware of any thoughts on rebooting The Burning, but Maylam says there was brief interest in a possible sequel that ultimately went nowhere. He seems okay with that, in part because a sequel would have to go the supernatural route if they wanted to bring back Cropsey.

18. There’s a weird stinger at 1:21:45 where one of our final boys, Todd (Brian Matthews), sees a dead woman with a neck impalement. The camera seems to zoom in on a still photograph instead of being an actual filmed moment, and Maylam says the Weinsteins added it on their own in the editing room. “I don’t know why it was put in.”

19. There’s an end credit listing nine people as Special Business Advisors, and Maylam adds that they were all “Harvey’s friends.”

Quotes Without Context

“You bump into Bob or Harvey [Weinstein] in a hotel room, and we have a chat.”

“There’s nothing particularly innovative about this film at all.”

“Here’s Brad Grey’s plant again. I’ve never seen him since.”

“Look darling, we’ve all seen naked women for goodness sake, just get on with it.”

“The superhuman strength of these maniacs is always quite amazing.”

“You really hate this guy.”

Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.

The post 19 Things We Learned from ‘The Burning’ Commentary appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Because I did say “rarely”, there is one specific episode that, perhaps for others as well, leaves me a little panicked. It fueled a phobia I didn’t even know I had until I saw it play out on screen. Now, that dread remains intact as I rewatch Season Three’s “Abra Cadaver”. Dying is one thing, but to witness your own autopsy? Maybe feel all the sensations that come with said event? Yeah, I will probably never have to go through the same ordeal that Tony Goldwyn’s character endured, yet Crypt made sure that I would always fear the slim possibility.

Season Three was off to a strong start; the opening two episodes, “Loved to Death” (Tom Mankiewicz, Joe Minion) and “Carrion Death” (Steven E. de Souza), each left a lasting mark. Even today, it’s hard to forget either Mariel Hemingway’s lovesick performance or the stalking vulture that finally got to feast on Kyle MacLachlan. While the Michael J. Fox-directed episode, the tongue-in-cheek “The Trap” (written by Scott Alexander), wasn’t at all frightening, it was at least amusing. 

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

Then came “Abra Cadaver”, that memorable collaboration between Stephen Hopkins and Jim Birge. It was unlike any of the previous three episodes, seeing as how this one employed a heavy gimmick. That, of course, being the first-person perspective used throughout most of the story. Shooting from a corpse’s POV not only made “Abra Cadaver” stand out, it also put the audience in the protagonist’s shoes. That way, it’s almost as if you’re going through the same nightmare as Doctor Carl Fairbanks.

It wasn’t unheard of for Tales from the Crypt to use first-time or inexperienced writers, although in Jim Birge’s case, this looks to be his only known writing credit. Meanwhile, director Stephen Hopkins had come off directing two sequels, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) and Predator 2 (1990), after debuting with an underseen (but worth seeing) Australian slasher called Dangerous Game (1988). In the years after his Crypt debut—Hopkins would return for episodes “Beauty Rest” and “Staired in Horror”—he directed Judgment Night (1993), The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) and Lost in Space (1998).

This episode’s EC Comics basis can be found in the Tales from the Crypt story called “Dead Right!”. Keep in mind, there was another comic of the same name found in EC’s Shock SuspenStories; Demi Moore, who was in Ghost (1990) with Goldwyn, starred in its TV adaptation. But naturally, they couldn’t have two episodes called “Dead Right”, so Crypt gave this a new (and punnier) title. Either way, the two plots remain about the same. 

A page from “Dead Right!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.

In EC’s version, long-time friends and bachelors Joseph Fairbanks and Carl Winston are having their weekly dinner together when Joseph suddenly poisons his pal’s drink. This was after Joseph was going on again about his seemingly preposterous theory: can the senses remain active even in the event of death? From there, it appears as if the recently bankrupt Joseph is causing Carl’s untimely death so that he can then inherit his fortune. Being a physician too, Joseph could put “died of natural causes” on Carl’s death certificate without raising any suspicions. 

“Dead Right!” enters more familiar territory as Joseph, along with accomplice Ben Norton, goes through the motions of autopsying Carl’s body while Carl is still conscious but paralyzed. The two then bring the victim to his own funeral before taking him to his final resting place. Once at the graveyard, Joseph reveals it was all a gag to prove his outlandish theory. Unlike in “Abra Cadaver”, though, Carl never wakes up long enough to know Joseph was pranking him; he died of a heart attack sometime ago. You’re left wondering if Joseph confessed to his crime, or if, because Carl was already pronounced dead and halfway buried, he simply kept quiet.

Tales from the Crypt obviously reworked the comic quite a bit. In “Abra Cadaver”, the two main characters, Carl and Martin Fairbanks, are biological brothers, not lifetime friends who seem like brothers. They’re also younger than their older EC parallels. In the black-and-white flashback set some years in the past, you see where Carl (Goldwyn) and Martin (Beau Bridges) first began their sibling issues. What started out as a brotherly rivalry between two surgeons-in-training eventually turned into a rather sad, lifelong scenario where Carl awaits whatever revenge Martin has supposedly cooked up for him.

Tony Goldwyn, Beau Bridges and Tom Wright in Tales from the Crypt, “Abra Cadaver”.

That prank from the prologue, which was essentially Carl scaring Martin into a heart attack, has since haunted Goldwyn’s character. No amount of apologies, be it verbal, monetary, or whatever else Carl throws at him, can make the now partly disabled Martin forgive his brother. Instead, Martin is more concerned with death and voodoo. Oh, and exacting his vengeance after all this time. What vengeance it is!—Martin’s payback makes Carl’s zombies-in-the-morgue joke look like total child’s play.

What felt like days to Goldwyn’s tortured character was roughly ten minutes for the audience. You’re there with him every step of that awful journey, imagining all the pricks, prods, and cuts inflicted upon his defenseless body. For an episode that is relatively light on the red stuff, it feels violent. Kind of like how The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is remembered as gory, when in truth, it’s pretty tame in that regard. It just goes to show that the suggestion of harm can be as great, if not more effective, than seeing the knife actually pierce the skin.

Circling back to my irrational fear, a kind of variation of taphophobia, I realized “Abra Cadaver” isn’t the first media to prey on this arcane anxiety of mine. After seeing it unfold in Crypt, I found similar depictions in Buried Alive (1990), Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (“Autopsy Room Four”), and Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction (the Robert E. Lee-inspired segment “The Burial”). Surely the list goes on, as does my unease towards the idea of a fate I deem worse than death.

“Abra Cadaver” is high-concept Tales from the Crypt at its best. Darkly funny, thoroughly suspenseful, and damn merciless, this episode was the show dipping into almost purely psychological horror.

It wouldn’t be the last time, either.

Season Three of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on May 15.

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.

The post Tales from ‘Tales from the Crypt’: Exhuming Season Three’s “Abra Cadaver” Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Thankfully, this difficulty in depicting online interactions on the big screen hasn’t stopped some intrepid filmmakers from coming up with high-tech hits like Livescream, Spree and even Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam.

If you ask me, the secret to successful “influencer horror” lies in recruiting filmmakers who have a real background (or at least a genuine interest) in the medium that they’re trying to represent. This is just one of many reasons why Curry Barker’s 2024 microbudget horror flick Milk & Serial became such a champion of the growing genre, with this lo-fi thriller quickly going viral and launching a humble YouTube comedian towards genre stardom.

With Barker making the rounds online due to the release of his hotly anticipated thriller Obsession, not to mention the fact that the filmmaker is also set to helm the upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, I think this is the perfect moment to look back on the digital thriller that kickstarted his Hollywood career.

Naturally, the comedian-to-horror-filmmaker pipeline is nothing new, with artists like Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger having proven that sketch comedy serves as a wonderful basis for storytellers who eventually want to set up gags that end in scares instead of punchlines. Yet, Curry Barker is one of the few comedians to make his first film a meta commentary on the exploitative nature of internet entertainment itself and how it favors a particular kind of sociopathy.

Produced on a minuscule budget of roughly $800 dollars (most of which was spent on a camera and the hiring of a single extra actor), Milk & Serial was actually Barker’s second horror project, released on the comedy channel That’s a Bad Idea. The filmmaker had previously worked with his comedy partner Cooper Tomlinson, who produced and starred in Milk & Serial, on a creepy short film called “The Chair“, with the success of that video inspiring the duo to envision a larger horror production.

The project that became Milk & Serial ended up being shot over a period of four months as the team made the most of their existing comedy setup. Since the story focused more on character interactions and shocking reveals rather than expensive gore and complex chase sequences, the filmmakers were able to slowly piece together a feature in their free time while simultaneously working on the comedy channel.

Unfortunately, once the film was completed, mainstream distributors seemed uninterested in such a bizarre story. After realizing that their feature would never get the attention it deserved if it were released through conventional means, the filmmaking team decided to simply upload the entire film to YouTube and hope for the best.

If you haven’t yet seen the movie – which you absolutely should, as it’s completely free and only about an hour long – Milk & Serial follows budding YouTubers and best friends Marshall “Milk” (Barker) and Steve “Seven” (Tomlinson) as they engage in over-the-top pranks meant to grow their online fanbase. Unfortunately for Seven, Milk harbors a sociopathic secret and will stop at nothing to make the ultimate prank video, no matter the cost to the people around him.

To go into further detail would only spoil an already-brief experience, so suffice it to say that the flick is a wonderful exercise in manipulating audience expectations. From mind-bending thriller akin to David Fincher’s The Game one minute to a serial killer vlog the next, it’s impossible to predict where Milk & Serial is going, and that’s precisely what makes it so much fun.

The found footage aesthetic is also much more than just a gimmick here, with the movie’s visual language having been long established by real (and sometimes problematic) vloggers wanting to convey a misplaced sense of sincerity. This parasocial presentation grounds Milk & Serial in the real world despite some over-the-top horror tropes and the occasional dumb character decision – most of which you’ll probably be too engaged with the story to notice on a first watch.

Of course, it’s Barker’s performance as Milk that really holds the experience together, with his twisted views on fame,coupled with that mid-point plot-twist, making this an all-too relatable nightmare if you’re familiar with the extreme side of internet culture. Hell, in the years since the flick’s release, we’ve seen streamers and YouTubers face trouble with the law for crimes ranging from texting-and-driving to provoking fatal shootings with ill-conceived pranks, so a disturbed individual like Milk isn’t that far from reality. The only difference is that Barker’s character appears to be fully aware of the all-encompassing algorithm that encourages increasingly egotistical behavior in exchange for views.

While certain elements like the plastic mask that appears to have been borrowed from Alice, Sweet Alice, or even the bloody souvenirs under the bed steer dangerously close to B-movie territory, the emotional core of the film is believable enough that we’re still talking about this clever little movie two years after it was surprise-dropped on YouTube.

Barker has clearly grown as a filmmaker since 2024, with even his comedy content getting an aesthetic upgrade, and the Obsession reviews claiming that he’s the next big thing in horror. However, I’d argue that the young filmmaker’s success is firmly rooted in his origins as a content creator with a metaphorical finger on the pulse of online culture. That’s why the success of Milk & Serial wasn’t just a fluke, as this bold new vision is exactly what the film industry needs right now if movies are supposed to compete with short-form content and dwindling attention spans.

So, if Barker’s future endeavors are half as entertaining as Milk & Serial, I think horror fans are in for a very interesting career.

The post ‘Milk & Serial’ and the Rise of Comedian-Turned-Horror Filmmaker Curry Barker appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Guns didn’t need to be reloaded because that would get in the way of the action. Demons were hanging out in this space because that’s where the designer wanted to challenge you. The Mars base was laid out like a maze because it was fun to get around. There was no concern for anything beyond the most basic of narratives, which was only there to provide a pretense for you to turn demons into pixelated corpses using a range of great feeling weapons.

It was a simpler time, and that simplicity allowed them to be laser-focused on making it fun.

For a while, this model of games dominated, with DOOM clones popping up everywhere. Despite getting DOOM II and Final DOOM, the franchise fell off the map a bit. In 2004, we saw id try to reboot the franchise, but it looked very different from its predecessors. In the intervening years, Half-Life had shown the world a template for making first-person shooters more story-focused, and DOOM 3 tried to move a bit in that direction. There was more narrative, with actual NPCs delivering plot information, as well as a new focus on atmosphere and horror. This was divisive at the time, though history has mostly vindicated this approach, as it felt like this was a reconceptualization of what DOOM was rather than an evolution of what people liked about it.

Following this, the DOOM franchise would go on a long hiatus as it figured out what it looked like in a modern landscape. Call of Duty came out, and that franchise, particularly the Modern Warfare games, redefined the first-person shooter genre as one that was about linear spectacle, throwing you into bombastic setpieces that evoked action movies. These games focused more on a sense of realism, set in grounded locations with conventional weapons.

This was also the era of the third-person cover shooter, which trained gamers to be a bit more passive, hiding behind waist-high walls as their health recharged before popping up to take more shots at enemies. It seemed like the world had left behind the style of DOOM, leaving its future uncertain.

It took a long time for the franchise to figure out what it wanted to be. The game known as DOOM 4 was stuck in development hell for a long time, conceived of as a Call of Duty-style game that featured a focus on cover, scripted cinematics, and passive health regeneration, casting you in an epic struggle examining the impact of Hell’s invasion of Earth. As time went on, they decided that this direction was out of touch with the original games, and development was restarted essentially from scratch.

Slick Design Unleashes Stylish New Vision of Hell That Still Holds Up

This ended up being the right call, as it resulted in DOOM (2016), a perfect combination of retro sensibilities and modern design, evoking the feeling of the original two titles while still setting itself apart with an identity all its own. Heralded as one of the best games of the year, it was praised for its propulsive single player campaign that managed to give a different kind of thrill than the Call of Duties of the world, challenging the player with snappy combat that didn’t pull its punches. While the multiplayer and map creation tools were not as well received, it was hard to deny that DOOM was back in a big way that still resonates now, on its ten-year anniversary.

The story wastes very little time, mocking the idea that the Doom Slayer would have any patience for exposition. Like DOOM 3, there are other characters that move the plot forward, but you play as a man of action who smashes screens that monologue at him. It’s the perfect way to pay homage to the no-nonsense attitude of the originals while also still being at least somewhat narrative driven like a modern action game. All the Doom Slayer needs to know is he’s on a Mars base and some corporate idiots unleashed Hell in the name of profit, and that’s all we really want as the player, so we’re right alongside him when he’s brushing off any notion of plot.

The level design also reflects this mentality of being classic and modern at the same time. The spaces you traverse feel more grounded, like something you expect to see in a science lab on Mars, but they also feel fun to traverse and explore. Rather than feel beholden to being completely authentic, they put an emphasis on making the space playable first and foremost.

Arenas are well laid out, with changes in elevation and cover that make them perfect for the game’s exciting firefights. As you progress through the levels, there are plenty of secrets hidden throughout, rewarding you for going off the beaten path or doing extra platforming challenges. There’s even a modern version of the original’s extremely game-y colored keycard system that shows up as a fun callback.

All Hail the Glory Kill System

When people talk about DOOM (2016), the thing they still bring up, even a decade later, is the combat. Compared to the Call of Duties of the world, it was fast. Really fast. You don’t even have to hold down a run button to be moving quickly. Very frequently, you’ll be locked in arenas with enemies that need to be killed to move on, and these scenarios can get lethal quickly if you’re not careful. Standing still was frequently a death sentence, forcing you to constantly be on the move to dodge enemies and line up your shots. There’s no regenerating health, so you heal the old-fashioned video game way: glowing powerups.

Weapons don’t need to reload, but you’re limited in how much you can carry for each weapon. Ammo is replenished through pickups around the level, though it’s rare that it will be able to keep up with your rate of consumption. This creates an interesting rhythm that requires you to switch between weapons on the fly as you run out, changing tactics in the moment as the intensity ratchets up.

At some point in the game, you’re given a chainsaw that will make an enemy explode into ammo, making you think about how low you need to be before using up precious chainsaw fuel to restock on ammo. These weapons can all be upgraded, with alternate fire modes and stats that can be unlocked as you explore. Upgrades like this are another concession to modern game design, but it feels like it fits into the classic DOOM ethos because it’s all about giving you more tools to turn demons into piles of gore.

And boy, will there be gore.

The biggest change to the combat is the Glory Kill system, which allows you to do brutal executions on stunned enemies. The hyperviolent animations could be considered reward enough, but these Glory Kills also send health pickups flying, contributing to the core loop of the game. Despite the Doom Slayer being a killing machine, enemies can do quite a bit of damage to you very quickly, so this creates the “push forward” feel of the combat.

In order to heal, you need to get up close and personal with the enemies. It’s a simple concept that forces you to take calculated risks when you need to, but it truly elevates combat into something that’s both tactical and reflex-based. Some people argue that the overly animated kills break up the flow of combat a bit by bringing you to a complete stop, but even that becomes a tactical decision because you get a moment of invincibility that can be taken advantage of.

You’ll need all the advantages you can get, because classic DOOM enemies were remade in high definition glory. Instead of the darker color palette of DOOM 3, enemies are a bit brighter, saturated with reds in a way that leans more cartoony than realistic. When stunned, they get a very artificial glow to them so that they stand out, once again putting emphasis on game design over verisimilitude.

Each enemy has a different type of threat that they pose on the battlefield, and their extremely distinct visual styles not only make them easy to tell apart at a glance, but also convey what they do effectively through how they look. It feels like id figured out the exact number of enemy types and systems that they would need, creating a lean and mean combat system that’s simultaneously challenging and empowering.

The Revitalized Series Ensures No Rest for the Living

DOOM (2016) was such a successful revamp of the franchise that it spawned two sequels, each of which further attempted to evolve the formula. DOOM Eternal pushed the mechanic complexity even further, adding all sorts of tools to the Doom Slayer’s arsenal, but losing some of the streamlined nature of its predecessor. This was a divisive direction.

On one hand, it made things feel more game-y than ever, with platforming challenges and intricate weapons, and on the other hand, it complicated things too much, taking you out of the flow state that DOOM (2016) was so good at putting you in by giving you too many things to think about. There was also a strangely large emphasis on narrative, with longer cutscenes and more demonic lore, which never really landed with me.

DOOM: The Dark Ages followed Eternal, this time heading to the past for a medieval war against Hell. Narrative was clearly a core pillar of this entry, but thankfully, they pared back some of the more complicated mechanics of Eternal. In their place was a new shield, which allowed you to block and parry enemy attacks. Instead of leading to a defensive playstyle, it gave you the tools to be more aggressive, pushing forward as you shrugged off projectiles or sent them flying back at your foes.

Even the signature Glory Kill system was pared back a bit, removing the synced animation to keep you in the action. The relative simplicity of The Dark Ages worked better for me than Eternal, but I still think the medieval setting and narrative focus put it a step behind 2016 in my book.

In an industry where so many games are chasing a cinematic feel, DOOM (2016) was a great reminder that sometimes you just need to let a video game be a video game first and foremost. There can be a thrill to leading the player through bombastic, scripted setpieces that feel ripped from Hollywood blockbusters, but very often, I just want to run through a well-laid-out space and use fun weapons to rip and tear until it’s done. I need just enough pretense to justify the demons-on-Mars premise, not the entire history of Hell and all its generals.

I think the Boomer Shooter revival we’re seeing among indie games, highlighted by games like Dusk and Prodeus, shows that id was onto something with their franchise revival, and I hope that more AAA games start thinking about ways to capture that retro charm with a modern edge.

You can pick up DOOM on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch.

The post A Decade of Ripping and Tearing: How ‘DOOM’ 2016 Revived The Series appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Warner Bros’ long-awaited sequel Mortal Kombat II continues this trend of making up for the adaptational mistakes of yesteryear, with director Simon McQuoid going out of his way to include as much of the original lore and iconography as possible without ever getting in the way of the story. In honor of that noble effort, here are four fun Easter eggs that you may not have noticed while watching Mortal Kombat II!

While there are plenty more callbacks to the games in this 116-minute feature, these are just five of the less obvious references that stood out during our first watch. That being said, don’t forget to comment below if you think a particularly fun easter egg was missed.

Just in case you’ve yet to see the film: beware of spoilers ahead!

With that out of the way, onto the list. 

4. Failed Fatality

Executing a Fatality in Mortal Kombat used to be a hell of a lot harder before you could simply pause the fight and check the in-game move list. Hell, back when arcades were still a thing, you’d even see kids running around with hastily-scrawled notes containing the secret to humiliating your friends by turning their character into a charred skeleton.

However, even with the instructions in hand, it’s sometimes hard to get some of these moves right (especially as an aging gamer). That’s why I appreciate the inclusion of a failed Fatality towards the beginning of the flick, where Kitana refuses her father’s command to execute Johnny Cage, and he stumbles around awkwardly before falling to the ground just like in the game.

While Kitana’s hesitation is explained later on, the gag is still a clear nod towards one of the most annoying aspects of the source material.

3. Ed Boon’s Cameo

Ed Boon is one of the most influential creators in the gaming industry (as well as the iconic original voice for Scorpion and several other characters), so it’s kind of frustrating that he only ever had a live-action cameo in the low-budget Mortal Kombat: Legacy web-series.

Thankfully, the new film finally gives Boon the Stan Lee-esque treatment that he deserves by having him portray a friendly bartender who addresses Johnny Cage’s alcohol-fueled depression by commenting that the character used to be “more animated”.

2. Johnny Cage’s Callback to Big Trouble in Little China

It’s no secret that the development team over at Midway used to be huge movie buffs. In fact, the entire concept behind the Mortal Kombat games was basically lifted from Bloodsport, and the character of Johnny Cage was even meant to be a digitized Jean Claude Van Damme before the actor became busy with other projects. However, some of the MK franchise’s influences are much more obvious than others.

That’s why it was fun to see Karl Urban’s Cage finally address the fact that Raiden is an obvious knock-off of Lightning from John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. Now just wait until he finds out about Shang Tsung!

1. Cheating Shao Kahn

Arcade games are known to be unfair in their attempts at extracting every last quarter from excited gamers, but it was only recently that fans discovered just how mean the original version of Mortal Kombat II could really be. As it turns out, the game that introduced us to the legendary villain Shao Kahn actually reacted directly to player input rather than the onscreen action, often making it literally impossible to land a hit during some of the boss battles. If that wasn’t bad enough, Kahn would later appear in the 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot as an essentially broken character that did way too much damage with nearly unavoidable attacks.

That’s precisely why it feels like such a clever little in-joke when the film presents Shao Kahn as something of a supernatural cheater. After all, in McQuoid’s movie, the monstrous conqueror rigs the tournament in his favor by stealing Raiden’s powers and essentially becoming an immortal god – with devastating consequences for our fair-playing heroes.

I never thought I’d see a videogame adaptation use a literal “god mode” as a plot device, and yet here we are!

The post 4 ‘Mortal Kombat II’ Easter Eggs You Might Have Missed appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Midway through Scott’s Alien (1979), the audience watches as Kane (John Hurt), an industrial spaceship’s crewmember, begins seizing over his dinner plate just hours after his body is attacked by a spider-like entity now called a facehugger. Known as the chestburster scene, this infamous sequence concludes with a baby xenomorph pulsing against Kane’s fracturing ribcage, ultimately tearing a fatal hole in his chest. Merging body horror with pregnancy, this revolutionary moment in genre history forced male audiences to confront the pain we’ve long-since accepted as commonplace in female life. 

Following this jaw-dropping scene, the franchise leans into the terror of birth as a variety of parasitic monsters use the human body to procreate. While Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus makes the allegory explicit, perhaps no film in franchise history parallels Kane’s disturbing death like Prometheus and its harrowing c-section scene.

While this medical ordeal is a stomach-churning example of body horror, perhaps most disturbing is the way the scene encapsulates the dehumanizing struggle to seek reproductive care in the modern United States. Released ten years before the fall of Roe v. Wade — a Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to abortion care — Prometheus offers a prophetic glimpse of the hell many women must now navigate. 

Elizabeth Shaw’s Pregnancy and the Horror of Lost Bodily Autonomy

Heralded as Scott’s long-awaited return to the Alien world, connections to the franchise remained vague until a post-credits scene featured a prototypical xenomorph. Functioning as a prequel to the 1979 film, Prometheus begins with a humanoid figure drinking a mysterious black liquid, which causes his body to disintegrate. Close views of this visceral death reveal his DNA reconstructing itself into what may be the beginning of human existence. Millenia later, archaeologists and partners Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) will call these beings Engineers and track them across the galaxy to unravel the secrets of life itself. 

Unfortunately, they arrive on a distant moon to find the Engineers have long since died. Not only that, but LV-223 appears to be a military outpost dedicated to creating a biological weapon intended to destroy humanity. While exploring their deserted station, the crew’s android David (Michael Fassbender) secretly returns to the ship with an inky, black liquid he subtly slips into Holloway’s drink. When this results in the archaeologist’s mysterious death, Shaw finds herself under quarantine. David scans her body and thankfully pronounces her free from illness, but declares that she is three months pregnant. 

Shaw is shocked by this diagnosis, insisting that it’s impossible. We remember a recent conversation with Holloway in which she tearfully reveals that she cannot conceive, pushing back on her partner’s callous comment about the easy nature of creating life. Anyone who has struggled with infertility likely sees themselves in her somber rebuttal as Shaw reminds us that women are not defined by their wombs or their ability to carry a child. But the frightened archeologist is also disturbed by the timing of this pregnancy. Though she was intimate with Holloway, their encounter happened the night before.

Three months ago, she and the rest of the crew were in deep cryosleep on the multi-year journey to LV-223, implying an unconscious assault. Thankfully, David allays this fear while introducing a more frightening scenario: the fetus’s size proves that her pregnancy is not “traditional.”  

Horrified, Shaw begs for a c-section, demanding David “get it out of me.” With a placating grin that reveals his intentions, David gently states — without consulting the crew’s medical officer — that they do not have the personnel onboard to perform this relatively simple procedure. In his opinion, the best course of action is to return her body to cryosleep as the mysterious pregnancy runs its course. Considering Holloway’s grisly death, Shaw knows that allowing the fetus to fully gestate will likely be a death sentence. As David gives her a sedative, she becomes a living incubator, her own life now less valuable than the collection of cells in her uterus.

Fortunately, Shaw has a backup plan. Fighting her way out of quarantine, she rushes to the ship’s MedPod, an automated surgery table presumably reserved for the crew’s ultra-wealthy captain. Initiating the device’s emergency protocols, Shaw tries to program a cesarean, only to find that this MedPod has been calibrated to service only male bodies. Yet another impediment to accessing care, it’s a hurdle familiar to millions of women. Much of Western medical research has been built around the concept of the 70-kg Man.

Also known as Reference Man, this model was assumed to be the standard human body type and used to study everything from the effects of radioactivity to organ transplants and public health. While this framework may provide a baseline for comparison, it’s a limited and myopic paradigm that ignores physiological differences between the bodies of women and children, not to mention men of varying sizes. 

An Extreme C-Section From Hell

Though Scott will eventually reveal the reason for this MedPod calibration, its setting reflects an unfortunate truth about the medical world. With male bodies viewed as the norm, women are treated as variants, and women’s health is viewed as an optional specialty. Female patients have routinely been left out of clinical trials studying ailments like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The agony of IUD insertion is still widely dismissed, and companies did not test feminine hygiene products with actual human blood until the year 2023. We’ve been conditioned to see pain as an acceptable part of female life and told that legitimate symptoms are in our heads, harkening back to the days of hysterectomies and lobotomies performed on inconvenient and ungovernable women.  

But in the year 2089, Shaw is able to find a workaround. Describing her condition as a penetrating wound, she recalibrates the machine to perform the removal of a foreign body.

Shaw climbs into the machine and injects herself with local painkillers, bracing herself for surgery. As the fetus visibly pulses inside her womb, a laser descends to make an incision across her abdomen while mechanical arms spread the wound apart. Metal forceps then plunge into her belly and pull out what looks like a grayish sack. This membrane instantly bursts, splashing blood and viscera all over her torso. Shaw frantically reaches inside herself to roughly sever the umbilical cord while the squid-like creature tries to escape the grip of the MedPod’s metal arms. 

This moment of extreme body horror is frighteningly similar to cesarean birth. The mother is typically strapped to an operating table and remains awake throughout the procedure, numbed with a spinal block or epidural. On the other side of a surgical drape, doctors create an incision similar to Shaw’s and manually stretch the skin apart. Many believe that doctors remove vital organs, placing them on top of the mother to get to the baby. While organs typically stay inside the body, it’s common to feel aggressive movement as the bladder and intestines are jostled around. Once a pathway has been cleared, the baby is cut from the uterus and then taken to receive its own medical care. 

The MedPod Scene Reflects Real-World Fears

While cesarean deliveries can be beautiful and empowering, Shaw’s experience is unthinkable. She is not presented with a crying infant, but an alien creature desperate to attack the body from which it emerged. Seconds after the machine closes the eight-inch incision, shooting rapid-fire staples into her flesh, Shaw frantically opens the MedBay doors and slides past the writhing creature. This again mirrors the experience of a cesarean birth, as many women begin nursing their infant while doctors are stitching their bodies back together. That’s not to mention those denied maternity leave who must return to work before they’ve adequately recovered from major surgery.

I do not write this essay to problematize C-sections or vilify the dedicated doctors and nurses who perform them every day. I was born through a cesarean and delivered both of my children surgically. But I wish someone had prepared me for the torturous experience of an emergency c-section, not to mention the pain of recovery. Like Shaw, I remember being horrified by the feeling of hands moving inside my body, pushing and pulling my organs around. We’ve been conditioned to see birth as a beautiful moment of bonding and connection between mother and child, leaving first-time parents unprepared for the messy and often frightening reality.  

Women living in the United States now have fewer reproductive rights than they did when a baby xenomorph burst out of Kane’s chest in 1979. Prometheus and its hellish c-section remain a mirror to this frightening scene, but now reflect a more hellish reality, confronting modern audiences with the terror of healthcare denied. After all, it shouldn’t be only in science fiction where pregnant women have the resources to save their own lives. 

The post The Most Horrifying Scene in Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’: The C-Section from Hell appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Commonly described as movies that contain dark imagery and stories that blend urban thrills with horror elements, this subset of late-90s and early 2000s filmmaking earns its name due to a perceived similarity with the Nu Metal music scene (an infamous sub-genre that combines heavy metal with hip-hop, industrial, and even funk music). Appropriately enough, these films also tend to include copious amounts of Nu Metal in their soundtracks, which were frequently more successful than the movies themselves.

And if there’s a single film that can be traced back as the progenitor of this unique genre, it has to be the disastrous 1997 comic-book adaptation, Spawn, and its undeniably Nu Metal charms.

While both this particular style of edgy action and the hardcore music accompanying it were commonly looked down upon back in the day, enough time has passed that it’s now easier to appreciate the myriad of cultural influences that led to the birth of such a divisive way of making art. While we wait for the long-gestating Spawn reboot that promises to bring the character back to his horrific roots, I’d like to invite readers to join me as we look back on the grandaddy of Nu Metal Cinema and explain why it doesn’t deserve all the hate.

Todd McFarlane, Image Comics, and the Creation of Spawn

The origins of Spawn as an intellectual property are about as convoluted as an actual comic-book story. Tired of being mistreated by the higher-ups at Marvel and DC and not even being allowed to retain ownership of their original characters, a group of artists led by Venom co-creator Todd McFarlane decided to form their own publisher called Image Comics. Image would then start its own shared universe of heroes and villains meant to compete with Marvel and DC, with McFarlane’s hellish anti-hero Spawn becoming the flagship title leading the charge in May of 1992.

Originally an extraterrestrial-based character that McFarlane dreamed up as a teenager, Image Comics’ Spawn was reimagined to be Al Simmons, a cold-blooded assassin who was murdered and sent to hell only to strike a bargain with the demonic Malebolgia so he could see his wife again. Unfortunately, this bargain led to Simmons being reborn as a super-powered Hellspawn five years after the world moved on from his tragic death. Now, Spawn roams the streets as a vagrant, torn between a desire for vengeance against those who orchestrated his demise and the grisly machinations of a hell that intends to use him as a pawn in their eternal war against heaven.

With gorgeous artwork by McFarlane himself and edgy subject matter perfect for an early 90s audience, it’s no surprise that Spawn would quickly become an international best-seller, rivalling the likes of Batman and Spider-Man. With great power comes great movie deals, so it wasn’t long before Hollywood came knocking in search of a piece of the Image Comics pie.

However, McFarlane bravely resisted millions of dollars offered by studios that wanted to exclude him from the creative process. It was only when New Line Cinema offered the artist an exclusive merchandising deal and a creative role in their proposed movie that McFarlane sold the rights to the character for a single dollar, despite knowing that this would be a comparatively smaller movie – a noble decision that would have unintended consequences further down the line.

The Chaotic Production Behind 1997’s Spawn

Thus began production on one of the hottest anticipated blockbusters of the ’90s. Originally allotted a respectable $20 million budget, this sum soon ballooned as first-time director Mark A.Z. Dippé (who’d later helm the underrated Frankenfish) slowly came to terms with the fact that they’d have to invent a lot of the digital technology they needed in order to bring this story to life. This led to much of the post-production process being outsourced to 22 individual companies as the team realized they didn’t have enough time to complete visual effects through Industrial Light & Magic alone.

On the physical side of things, actors Michael Jai White (Al Simmons) and John Leguizamo (The Clown/Violator) suffered with uncomfortable prosthetics during a rushed 63-day shoot. The writers also had to come up with a new villain in the form of Melinda Clarke’s Jessica Priest since the studio failed to negotiate the film rights to Chapel (the super-powered anti-hero who originally murdered Simmons in the comics).

In the end, total production cost came in at about $40 to $45 million, not including the massive marketing investment. Part of this spending was also relegated to the flick’s undeniably awesome soundtrack produced by Happy Walters, with the album featuring songs by ’90s titans like Korn, Marilyn Manson, The Prodigy, and even The Crystal Method as the artists partnered on unique songs.

Ironically, screenwriter Alan B. McElroy was simultaneously working on another – much better received – adaptation of Spawn via HBO’s animated series. While I’d argue that the show features the definitive version of the character and even improves on the comics, it had the benefit of being a completely adult-oriented endeavor. The movie, on the other hand, was forced to contend with a PG-13 rating as a part of New Line’s contract.

The finished film (which was released in August of 1997, a mere two weeks after the effects had been finalized) is a reasonably accurate retelling of the first few issues of the comic as Al Simmons (White) comes to terms with his demonic rebirth and becomes embroiled in an apocalyptic conspiracy involving his previous employer and the literal forces of hell. The main difference here is in how the film tones down much of the “comic book-ness” of the original story, as well as the violence/horror. Not only does the adaptation forfeit other superpowered Image characters like the aforementioned Chapel, but even the unrated cut feels a lot less horrific than its edgy source material.

Unfortunately, the real problem with New Line’s Spawn lies in the practical consequences of its messy production. The script was constantly being rewritten to compensate for dwindling resources, and the final act feels like it was cobbled together from whatever the filmmakers could scrounge together on short notice. Not only that, but the special effects range from amazing (the Violator animatronic and digital double are terrific) to embarrassing (just look up the hell sequence if you haven’t yet seen the movie) – sometimes within the same scene!

Why Spawn Still Matters Nearly 30 Years Later

So why is this film such a cultural landmark if it failed to impress both critics and general audiences? Well, the passage of time offers us the gift of perspective, and even if Spawn isn’t a traditionally good movie or a particularly faithful adaptation of the character, there simply wasn’t anything else quite like it at the time. The peculiar combination of horror tropes and high-octane action was a novel concept even in its neutered form, and the entire thing was drenched in so much visceral style that it’s easy to forget the flimsy story beneath it all.

Hell, the first time I saw the film as a kid in the single digits, I thought it kicked all kinds of ass, and the flick’s strange balancing act between superhero tropes and demonic imagery even turned it into a bizarre case of Gateway Horror. I vividly remember being creeped out when I first sought out the comics after having seen the movie, though it was only a matter of time before I was firmly hooked by Simmons’ dark adventures.

Removing the nostalgic lens, there’s still something special about Dippé’s movie, even if you accept that it’s a complete narrative failure. The thrilling soundtrack and innovative imagery somehow combine into an experience reminiscent of a feature-length music video that’s sometimes hard to understand but never boring – especially when Leguizamo is onscreen.

From absurd scene transitions to gratuitous rooftop posing with screensaver-quality CGI, there’s never a dull moment in Spawn, and it’s precisely the over-the-top angst that makes it the first true Nu Metal Movie.

That’s why you can draw a straight line from this film to everything from the Underworld franchise to Constantine and even the original Resident Evil movies. This style may not be for everyone (and I know I’m not always in the mood for it), but sometimes it’s enough for a movie to want to be cool just for the hell of it.

The post Revisiting ‘Spawn’: The 1997 Cult Classic That Defined Nu Metal Cinema appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Yet, even in a show well known for its brutal comeuppances, there are those times where sympathy for the dirtbag isn’t totally out of the question. One example resides in Season Two’s “Television Terror”. The unfortunate protagonist in this humdinger of a haunted house story isn’t an upstanding guy; there’s no denying that. However, you also wouldn’t be wrong to feel a tad sorry for the opportunist who got more than he bargained for—way more, to put it mildly. At the very least, you’re happy to not be in Horton Rivers’ shoes as he achieves the highest ratings ever in his now short-lived TV career.

While some actors wouldn’t have been caught dead doing Tales from the Crypt, others were more than pleased to play a part. Even big names, such as Demi Moore (“Dead Right”) and Kirk Douglas (“Yellow”), didn’t agree with the consensus that doing a cable show would be beneath them. For its actors, Crypt was a safe place—an outlet, if you will. Where else could they do these weird and gruesome roles?

Whoopi Goldberg, for instance, was particularly enthused with her casting in the Tobe Hooper-directed episode, “Dead Wait”. Her only condition, though? To be “repulsive,” recalled producer Alexander B. Collett. According to Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives, the Ghost star said she “had been playing a lot of squeaky clean nice people and [it was] getting to be a drag.”

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

The closest Crypt ever came to blatant stunt casting was Morton Downey, Jr. That loathed talk-show jerk rose to shame in the 1980s, and his notoriety, plus his over-the-line opinions and shock tactics, made him the ideal candidate for “Television Terror”. Sure, Morton’s range as an actor was limited; he knew he was just playing an exaggerated version of himself. Nevertheless, you can bet some viewers had a hard time resisting the possibility of Mort the Mouth getting flayed by a bunch of bloodthirsty ghosts.

“Television Terror” director Charlie Picerni began in Hollywood as a TV stuntman, as well as an actor on occasion. Then, after his long tenure on Starsky and Hutch, Picerni got the directing bug. He cut his teeth on action shows throughout the ‘80s, including Vega$, T. J. Hooker, and Stingray, before stepping outside of his comfort zone with Crypt. Experience varied from director to director, but in this show, Picerni was seemingly at a bigger disadvantage. On top of being relatively new to directing, he had no discernible background in horror. Having said that, some greenness didn’t stop Picerni from making what is now considered one of the most popular episodes of Crypt.

As far as Crypt episodes go, “Television Terror” is straightforward. Perhaps more than some fans might like. Admittedly, writers Randall Jahnson (“King of the Road“) and G. J. Pruss didn’t bother with any twists or turns in their script; they most certainly didn’t hide what lay ahead for Downey’s character. The story did all but shout the ending at you. I am referring, of course, to those not-so-subtle winks at the audience, including Dorothy Parke’s character planting the most low-hanging setup halfway through the episode: “The ratings are gonna be out the goddamn window, if you don’t do something to spice it up.” However, as undemanding as this story very much is, it’s also never short on fun.

A page from “Television Terror”, as seen in EC Comics’ The Haunt of Fear.

The real-life property chosen for the dreaded domicile in which Horton hears a boo is none other than the famous Higgins/Verbeck/Hirsch Mansion located in Los Angeles. This grand, Queen Anne-style home can be spotted in a good chunk of horror films (to name some, Ben, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Witchboard, and Waxwork) and at least two erotic thrillers. Elsewhere on TV, the dwelling popped up in Darkroom, Freddy’s Nightmares, and Beverly Hills, 90210. So, yes, this is a house with an interesting history both on and off screen.

As for the mansion’s Crypt makeover, it’s nothing extreme; don’t go into the episode expecting anything along the lines of a modern-day Halloween haunt. That said, the understated approach was the right way to go. You know what’s coming to Horton well ahead of schedule—there’s no need to make that fate obvious to him, too. ”Television Terror” is unsubtle in just about every other area, but the atmosphere and setting? No notes.

The source material for “Television Terror”, a story from EC Comics’ The Haunt of Fear, is rather different from what eventually manifested in Tales from the Crypt. For starters, that ominous, on-air tour through the Creedmoor Mansion is a great deal more restrained than the one in Ritter House. In lieu of that art-imitates-life rendering of Downey, we have the blander Al Hunt, the host of TV’s ‘Hunting with Hunt’. This amateur ghost chaser is nowhere as obnoxious as his on-screen counterpart, and his demise is the opposite of grisly. In fact, the money shot—Hunt is last seen hanging from the ceiling of the room at the top of the stairs—is largely obstructed by a door frame. What little you do see of Hunt’s death, though, is quietly horrifying. Like something out of Ghostwatch (or is that the other way around?). Also worth mentioning is the striking artwork from EC artist and writer Harvey Kurtzman; take note of his fierce hatching and cross-hatching, as well as his use of rich shadows.

The episode “Television Terror” yields no surprises, but does the sheer predictability do it any harm? Not really, especially if you crave jump-scares—some of the show’s best and most intense are right here. While his part doesn’t undo every repellent thing he said or did in his lifetime, Downey was a good sport. His performance, even a self-parodying one, is nothing to scoff at, either. Downey’s reactions are so visceral that you actually begin to fear for his character.

Truth be told, if some random stranger on the street were to bring up Tales from the Crypt with me, asking for recommendations, my mind would go straight to “Television Terror“. It’s S-tier, plain and simple.

Season Two of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on May 8.

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.

Jeannie Epper in Tales from the Crypt, “Television Terror”.

The post Tales from ‘Tales from the Crypt’: Exhuming Season Two’s “Television Terror” Episode appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Based on a 1924 O. Henry Award-winning short story by Richard Connell, the film was originally intended to be a much larger movie, on par with King Kong in spectacle and budget, featuring a much larger cast and more intricate adventure sequences. Unfortunately, the studio got a case of cold feet, especially because the film was being shot, at least in part, simultaneously with Kong and had a first-time director calling the shots. The budget was cut to about $200,000, less than half of what the original script required. As a result, the cast was cut down considerably along with the higher concept situations and, ultimately, the overall length of the film.

In some ways, The Most Dangerous Game was a way for first-time feature director Ernest P. Shoedsack to show the studio brass at RKO that he was up to the task of helming (or at least co-directing) their big, special effects-laden gamble. He was paired with established dialogue director Irving Pichel but was found to be up to the task of directing not only the action scenes, but the quiet dialogue sequences as well. Because of the budget constraints, Shoedsack cut down the intended shipwreck scene to just a few moments and created the shark attack sequence from shots lifted from King Vidor’s Bird of Paradise (1932).

King Kong Connections and the Infamous Trophy Room

Instead of a cast of about half a dozen “hunted” individuals, most of whom perish in the shipwreck and shark attack scenes in the final film, the story focuses on Robert Rainsford, played by Joel McCrea, who would soon become a massive star, and Eve Trowbridge, played by the Original Scream Queen, Fay Wray. Facing off against these two is acclaimed British actor Leslie Banks as the homicidal Count Zaroff and his faithful assistant Ivan, played by Noble Johnson.

I use the term “homicidal” intentionally to describe Zaroff. In many ways, he is the first serial killer of the American screen, with perhaps only Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) preceding him worldwide. In the original story, his character is essentially an ultra-rich nut who has grown bored with his big game hunts and decides that man is the only worthy trophy. In the film, Zaroff has entwined personal sexual gratification with the hunt.

The most horrifying sequence of the film involves the discovery of Count Zaroff’s trophy room, featuring the stuffed and mounted heads of several animals and a human being. After test screenings in 1932, the sequence was cut significantly, resulting in the breezy, sixty-three-minute final runtime of The Most Dangerous Game. Though short, the sequence is still chilling and offers a glimpse into the madness of Zaroff, who then sends his guests out into the wild to fend for themselves.

The second half of the film was shot on RKO’s standing jungle set, which had been built for King Kong stop-motion genius Willis O’Brien’s abandoned film “Creation.” O’Brien was shifted to working on Kong, and the spectacular jungle set played double duty on Game and Kong. In fact, several topographical features of Zaroff’s private isle can also be spotted on Skull Island for those who care to look. These island adventure sequences are the most memorable of the film and climax with a pack of Great Danes (provided by silent comedy legend Harold Lloyd) pursuing the glamorous couple.

It is difficult to unravel the timeline of the nearly simultaneous shooting schedule of The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong, but film historians and Fay Wray herself in her memoir On the Other Hand have been able to give some clues. It seems that Kong visionary Merian C. Cooper was in charge of directing the special effects sequences involving actors for Kong. Principal photography was then paused as those shots were sent to Willis O’Brien and his team to create the miniature and stop-motion effects. In the intervening weeks, the actors, including Wray, were free to work on other projects.

This process went on for so long that Wray alone made about a dozen films in 1932 and 1933, including the horror films Doctor X, The Vampire Bat, and Mystery of the Wax Museum, in addition to Game and Kong, a run that would solidify her legacy as one of horror’s greatest stars. After work on the film was completed, Shoedsack, Wray, Robert Armstrong, and others threw themselves into finishing the principal photography for King Kong, a film that would make them all legends.

The Film’s Lasting Influence on Horror and Action Cinema

Watching it today, The Most Dangerous Game feels a bit slight compared to other island horror adventures released around the same time, like Island of Lost Souls (1932) and, of course, King Kong (1933), but its real power has become apparent in the decades since. The story has been remade officially and unofficially almost endlessly. The basic setup of the ultrawealthy hunting human beings, usually poor people, is dramatically compelling but also politically evergreen. It is no wonder that filmmakers keep returning to the basics of the story to mine the depths of its themes.

Shoedsack himself made a science-fiction tinged take on the idea called Dr. Cyclops (1940) in which the hunted are shrunk down to about four inches and sent into the jungle. An official remake, retitled A Game of Death, directed by Robert Wise, was released in 1945 and features a cast and situations more along the lines of the original vision for the 1932 film. A faithful adaptation of the story was released as recently as 2022, starring Tom Berenger, Bruce Dern, Judd Nelson, and Casper Van Dien, but far more fascinating are the unofficial versions of the story.

In the 1980s and 1990s, several action versions of the story were released, including John Woo’s Hard Target (1993) starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ernest Dickerson’s Surviving the Game (1994) starring Rutger Hauer and Ice-T. The latter especially takes advantage of the political dimension of the story, including not only aspects of class but race as well. Perhaps a bit more tangential but still similar enough to be included is the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man (1987), which pits wrongly accused prisoners against futuristic hunters called “Stalkers” in a game show format.

Recent Horror Reinterpretations

A new variation of the story has forced the poor, usually young people, to hunt one another while the wealthy and corrupt government looks upon it all for entertainment. Battle Royale (2000) is a great example of this variation in which a group of ninth-graders is forced to kill each other in brutal ways. The Hunger Games series (2012-present) has been the most financially successful version of the story to date and continues to spawn revisions and spinoffs. Hot on its heels was the hugely successful South Korean series Squid Game (2021-2025) on Netflix, which dives deep into the psyche of its contestants as well as the rich overlords.

In the vein of more traditional horror, three recent films (plus one sequel) have caught the fire of The Most Dangerous Game once again. Ready or Not (2019), directed by Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett), and its recent sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026) up the ante by pitting Samara Weaving, and in the sequel Kathryn Newton, against families of rich weirdos with a satanic twist. The Illuminati-style element of the wealthy Le Domas family and their ilk also pokes fun at the conspiracy-minded nature of our current world.

Adding a political dimension to all this is the controversial The Hunt (2020), which not only pits rich versus poor but left versus right in a situation that becomes more complex and nuanced as it goes along. Also playing on a Faustian Satanic bargain is Kirill Sokolov’s They Will Kill You (2026), which combines the familiarity of The Most Dangerous Game with the hyper-stylized action and gore of Hong Kong and Japanese cinematic sensibilities.

These are really just a few highlights. There are subtle and blatant riffs on the story spanning nearly a hundred years, and I am positive that we have not heard the last of The Most Dangerous Game.

The post ‘The Most Dangerous Game’: The Horror Classic That Inspired Generations appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In fact, fellow filmmakers have often borrowed Tom Sullivan and Brian Rae’s original stunt prop from Evil Dead II and included it in their own stories in order to pay homage to one of the greatest horror movies of all time. And in honor of Evil Dead Burn bringing the grimoire back for another Deadite rampage, we’ve decided to come up with a list highlighting five times that Sam Raimi’s Necronomicon appeared in non-Evil-Dead media!

For the purposes of this list, we’ll only be considering media that uses the specific Evil Dead version of the book rather than Lovecraft’s public domain original. That being said, don’t forget to comment below if you think we missed a particularly memorable cameo by the Naturom Demonto.

With that out of the way, onto the list…

5. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1994)

Jeff Burr’s Pumpkinhead 2 may not benefit from Stan Winston’s unique brand of movie magic (and Lance Henriksen allegedly refused to reprise his role as Ed Harley because he found the film’s script to be terrible), but I’d argue that the sequel is still an entertaining horror romp if you don’t take it too seriously – which also happens to be my assessment of the flick’s tie-in videogame, the FMV-heavy Doom-clone Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead’s Revenge.

Of course, the more irreverent tone here also means that the film contains a handful of nods to the horror classics of yesteryear, with one pivotal scene involving a group of youngsters that invade a witch’s home and find a page from the dreaded Necronomicon.

While future Pumpkinhead projects don’t really consider Blood Wings to be canon, the implication that the titular demon could be part of Evil Dead universe is fascinating to think about!

4. What Comes After – The Walking Dead Season 9 (2018)

Special effects wizard and master of horror Greg Nicotero had a hand in several of the most iconic genre productions in history, so it’s no surprise that the executive producer of AMC’s long-running zombie show was also offered a directing spot on one of the series’ most important episodes.

A bittersweet farewell to Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes, the Season 9 story What Comes After also serves as an homage to some of Nicotero’s previous work in the horror genre. At a certain point in the episode, Rick stops to rest in a familiar isolated cabin and we get a brief glimpse of the Necronomicon collecting dust in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

While this is almost certainly just a fun little easter egg, I wouldn’t mind it if the show eventually revealed that the Book of the Dead was responsible for the zombie apocalypse (though I’m also partial to Robert Kirkman’s initial pitch for the Walking Dead comic where it would eventually be revealed that the plague was a bioweapon engineered by aliens).

3. Public Television of the Dead – Creepshow Season 2 (2021)

Something of an unofficial spin-off of the Evil Dead series, Public Television of The Dead also happens to be directed by genre veteran Greg Nicotero. In this second half of Creepshow’s Season 2 premiere, a public broadcast station is attacked by demonic forces after Ted Raimi shows up to an antique appraisal show with a certain mysterious tome.

And while the story features a legally distinct design for the Necronomicon, the leathery face binding the cursed pages together combined with the obvious Deadites unleashed by the book make it pretty clear that this entire endeavor is meant to be a stealth sequel to the Evil Dead movies. It’s just a shame that Ash never pursued a career in broadcasting!

2. That Actually Hurt – Invincible Season 1 (2021)

Robert Kirkman’s Invincible may not be as nihilistic as something like The Boys, but the show still has its fair share of dark and gruesome moments. And with Kirkman being a big horror nut, it makes sense that we occasionally see references to iconic imagery from beyond the world of comic-books in Amazon’s animated hit.

In one hilarious addition to the series’ expansive mythology, paranormal investigator and benevolent demon Damien Darkblood (meant to be a tongue-in-cheek combination of characters like Rorschach, The Question and Hellboy) is revealed to use the dreaded Necronomicon Ex Mortis as his personal notebook.

Funnily enough, Season 4 would later have Bruce Campbell himself make a guest appearance as Damien’s father, Satan, which is just another reason why horror fans are likely to enjoy this hyper-violent satire of superhero media.

1. Jason Goes to Hell (1993)

One of the most famous additions to this list, 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell features a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by Evil Dead II’s version of the Necronomicon in a scene where characters are rummaging through the dilapidated remains of the Voorhees residence. While it was never confirmed if this was intended to be an actual clue towards Jason’s supernatural comeback or just a tongue-in-cheek reference to another franchise, the same film was instrumental in setting up the Freddy vs. Jason crossover years later.

So is Jason a Deadite? Not necessarily, but it’s easy to imagine a murderous Pamela investigating the dark arts in order to bring her beloved son back from the dead. If you ask me, maybe her killing spree in the original Friday the 13^th was actually some kind of resurrection ritual that required human sacrifice. Unfortunately, as horror fans are well aware, sometimes dead is better!

The post 5 Times the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis Showed Up Outside the ‘Evil Dead’ Franchise appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

They lurk everywhere in his first three features – Caveat, Oddity, and the just-released Hokum – driving the plot, enhancing the tone, and delivering some of the best jump scares we’ve seen in horror cinema over the last half-decade. McCarthy’s not alone in these obsessions, as any fan of Mike Flanagan or James Wan will tell you, but over the course of these three films, he has found a way to make them his own. 

One way McCarthy puts his own stamp on the subgenre of ghost horror is the remarkable connectivity of his films to date. Every horror auteur worth their salt has shared themes, visual motifs, and character concerns arcing through their filmography, but McCarthy’s works are always in delicate, near-constant conversation with one another. The ragged little dowsing rabbit from Hokum turns up in Oddity, the bell from Oddity turns up in Hokum, and so on. 

This extends to the way he thinks about ghosts, in that every Damian McCarthy film positions these spectres as psychopomps on the way to the horrible truth of the human world while also positioning them as emotional links to the lost souls, which are his characters. In a Damian McCarthy film, the undead are quite lively indeed, and for extra fun, they never stop being scary along the way.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD for Caveat, Oddity, and Hokum!

Caveat

Ghosts are, at least in terms of fiction, convenient metaphors for all manner of things, but most recognizably, a ghost is a representative of the past trauma of a place, person, or group of people. They point the way to unfinished business, and in doing so, help the living to reach some manner of conclusion, if not closure. 

In McCarthy’s first three films, it’s easy to see where the ghosts are pointing, at least by the end. In Caveat, the ghost of Olga’s mother, left to wide-eyed decay in a hole in the wall, is pointing the way to a criminal conspiracy that robbed Olga (Leila Sykes) of her agency and Isaac (Johnny French) of his memory and sense of sure footing in the world. In Oddity, the ghost of Dani (Carolyn Bracken), with much help from her psychic sister Darcy (also Bracken), points the way to a similar conspiracy in the hopes that her husband (Gwilym Lee) will suffer for her death and her sister might find solace in the truth. And in Hokum, McCarthy’s most layered ghost story yet, multiple ghosts point the way for writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) to not just solve the murder of a hotel employee (Florence Ordesh) but to make peace with the accidental death of his mother when he was a boy.

This makes each of McCarthy’s ghosts a powerful engine for plot, particularly since his films tend to run closer to 90 minutes and therefore must be lean exercises in storytelling. From the opening scene, Ohm’s mother haunts him. In Oddity, even before Dani’s death at the hands of a man hired by her husband, she takes Darcy’s advice and has her camera auto-shoot to scan the place for ghosts. With Caveat, the old, secluded house where the story unfolds feels like something’s very wrong there even before we see the ghost. More than that, it looks like something was always wrong there.

McCarthy’s ghosts, even before we see them, infect the landscape with fear, desperation, and simple, well, wrongness. Even beyond the sense of wrongness we expect because we’ve just sat down to watch a horror movie, something stirs in the corners of rooms and makes you question everything.

Oddity

We question right along with McCarthy’s protagonists, each of them searchers for some version of the truth, each of them primed to have their convictions shaken by a shade from beyond the realm of the living. But their positioning as a blank slate of character set to go through a straightforward supernatural arc is yet another piece of the ornate, weathered puzzle boxes McCarthy sets up here.

Isaac enters Oddity as a man without a memory, hired essentially to babysit Olga with the caveat that he wear a leather vest secured with a chain to keep him from getting too close to his charge. So, as the film begins, he is the ghost at the core of the house, a shambling, empty shell of a man dragging his chain through dark hallways. When Olga clues him in to his past involvement in the lives and deaths of her family members, Isaac reacts not unlike a ghost who’s forgotten how he died (his memory loss is the result of a fall he took at the end of this initial calamity).

He is the first example of the kind of lively, haunting figure that stalks these films, and when he meets Olga’s mother’s corpse in the wall, it’s almost a relief. Finally, there is something tangible, wide-eyed and sneering at him in her frozen state, to which he can connect all of this strangeness. With a ghost in the house, he feels less alone, and as the web of memories grows more complex, Olga’s mother becomes more animated, more alive, until she’s once again a player in the story that took her life to begin with.

Darcy enters Oddity through an entirely different paradigm, as someone who’s not only blind but blessed with perceptions that grant her sight beyond what everyone around her can perceive. She is quite aware, almost painfully so, that there is life after death, and she plans to use that to her advantage as she attempts to unmake her brother-in-law’s life.

Oddity

Like Isaac, Darcy haunts the house where her sister died, arguably even more than Dani, accompanied by her wooden golem with its head full of talismans. Each of McCarthy’s films deals with justice in some form, with the dead helping the living to correct some wrong, but Darcy’s position within Oddity makes his most pointed, vicious version of this story. We know this not just because of the frightening golem who becomes the film’s mascot, but because Darcy, with all her extrasensory power, seems to understand from the beginning that this is a mission from which she will not return.

She seems like a ghost in the house, with her shock of white hair and her cryptic way of speaking, because she already is one, and her love for her sister animates her with purpose even beyond her death. Then, of course, there’s the bellboy ghost, a passive player in Darcy’s game, whether he realizes it or not, to give us one last jolt of life from the great beyond. 

The bellboy is a perfect entry into Hokum, where his presence is essentially repeated in the form of a living bellboy in a near-identical costume. The bellboy’s not the center of the story, but he does add to the connective tissue of McCarthy’s films, and the feeling that these films present a spiritual (pun intended) trilogy.

Hokum

Hokum is not the story of a writer who discovers ghosts are real when he visits a haunted hotel, because Ohm is haunted even before he sets foot in Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. He’s been haunted his entire adult life because in a moment of childhood curiosity gone horribly wrong, he shot and killed his mother, and her last act as a living person was to embrace him instead of damn him. He hides in the fiction he writes and drinks himself into oblivion because it’s easier than confronting the spectre with the shoulder-length blonde hair who lurks on the staircase, who creeps up behind him at his desk. She is Ohm’s burden, psychologically and physically, which explains why he hopes that scattering her ashes will be the end of that particular journey. 

It’s not. Instead, Ohm finds more ghosts waiting at this strange country hotel, ghosts amplified by the legends of a local witch and the macabre dioramas waiting in the lobby. When Fiona, the bartender, goes missing, Ohm feels an unexpected pull to help her, to solve the mystery of her disappearance. It’s something for his mind to chew on, but it’s also perhaps a sign that he can sense the growing supernatural energy in the hotel, whether he knows it or not. He’s lived with ghosts so long he can anticipate them, so when he finds Fiona’s corpse, like Darcy and Isaac before him, he’s weirdly at home with it.

Trapped in a locked honeymoon suite, he faces memories of his mother, but he also faces the nagging feeling that anyone who gets close to him becomes a ghost, a lost soul for which he is the only anchor. In confronting the web of secrets that led to Fiona’s murder, Ohm finally looks these persistent ghosts in the face after decades of sidelong glances; that is his salvation. 

Lots of filmmakers are able to wield ghosts as metaphors and tonal enhancements. Lots of filmmakers are able to wield ghosts as engines of plot and jump scares. It’s rare to find a filmmaker who can do both not just in the same film, but in the same frame, and do it as well as Damian McCarthy. He is one of our finest ghost story craftsmen, and with Hokum, he’s completed an essential 2020s horror trilogy. 

Hokum

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In the wake of unprecedented box office success, a slew of copycats were released. Films like Mako: The Jaws Of Death (1976), Piranha (1978), and Blood Beach (1981), not to mention three outright Jaws sequels, attempted to cash in on the film’s surprising appeal. Some iterations, like Grizzly (1976) and Claws (1977), even made their way onto dry land.

For twenty years, we saw retreads and spoofs of Peter Benchley’s original source material: a killer shark or similar beast terrorizes scientists, fishermen, and ignorant bathers, leading to an explosive showdown on the stormy seas. By the mid-90s, this formula had begun to run dry as audiences tired of the same basic story. Until, that is, a surprising contender brought the shark horror subgenre splashing back to life. 

Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea opens with a familiar scene. Two couples on a catamaran are attacked by a massive shark that seems intent on destroying their boat and eating them once they fall in the water. But this massacre is stopped by a rugged stranger who manages to subdue the fish at the last possible moment. Carter (Thomas Jane) is a stoic shark wrangler aboard a deep-sea research facility studying sharks to eradicate Alzheimer’s Disease.

Deep Blue Sea

But their test subjects are no ordinary fish. In order to harvest usable sample sizes, Dr. McAlester (Saffron Burrows) has genetically modified three gigantic Mako sharks to drastically increase the size of their brains. This results in a team of super intelligent predators who will do anything to escape their enclosures and kill their captors one by one. 

This admittedly ridiculous premise shouldn’t work as well as it does, but the veteran director fully commits with a series of spectacular action set pieces. The maniacal Makos use a life flight helicopter to destroy the facility’s radio tower, feign sleep to sabotage an underwater lab, and stalk their human prey through corridors and kitchens by systematically flooding the station.

In one of the film’s most shocking moments, wealthy financier Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) is snatched off dry land by one of the fish that launches itself out of the water, bites the proselytizing man in half, then drags his mangled body back into its tank. This stunning death — which takes out one of the film’s marquee stars — set a new bar for shark attack sequences and action horror films in general. 

While the science of Deep Blue Sea is flimsy at best — sharks do, in fact, get cancer — the idea of genetically mutated killer fish would push the floundering subgenre in a new direction while transitioning away from the Man vs. Nature model. After all, these animals aren’t innocent fish simply trying to eat and make baby sharks. They are scheming killers who work together to execute their sinister plan. But they were created by a scientist who uses her altruistic intentions to dramatically change the natural order.

Most shark horror of the 21st century would veer away from rogue anomalies targeting unsuspecting swimmers in favor of punishing humans who corrupt their environments.  

Shark Horror’s B-Movie Monster Mash Era

Sharknado

After the surprise success of Harlin’s splashy blockbuster, other creators jumped on the genetic shark train. With Jaws rip-offs having run their course, attention turned toward more schlocky creature features, most stemming from one particular source. The Sci-Fi Channel (later Syfy) debuted in 1992 as an arm of the USA Network. The fledgling outlet was originally conceived as a haven for long-running genre series and classic monster movies, but a 2001 initiative increased the focus on original films. Usually made for under $2 million dollars, these B-movies were often reverse-engineered by title, tossing around audacious creature matchups then piecing together a shoestring plot. 

Though early titles ran the gamut of sci-fi topics, we can see the influence of Deep Blue Sea in releases throughout the aughts and teens. Python (2000) and Sabertooth (2002) both involve genetically mutated predators, while Deep Shock (2003) concerns sea monsters released from a deep ocean trench. As the trend began to establish itself, directors leaned into absurdity with films like Boa vs. Python (2004), Frankenfish (2004), and Hammerhead (2005), which follows a father researching his son’s cancer treatments when he accidentally merges his own DNA with that of the curious oblong shark. Jack Perez’s schlock spectacular Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009) not only presents the titular monsters as mortal enemies frozen in time, but sees the prehistoric fish bite the Golden Gate Bridge in half and pull a commercial jetliner out of the sky. 

This pattern reached surprising ubiquity with Anthony C. Ferrante’s bombastic crowd-pleaser Sharknado (2013). When an approaching hurricane manages to sweep up an unprecedented number of schooling sharks, the aptly named Fin (Ian Ziering) must save his family from torrents of the bloodthirsty man-eaters, somehow flying through the air. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Fin allows a great white to swallow him whole only to cut his way free — while rescuing his previously eaten ex-wife — with a whirring chainsaw blade.

Capturing the attention of early Twitter users, reactions to the film went viral, transforming this unapologetic gorefest into a cultural phenomenon. Sharknado has become a catchall description for gleefully ridiculous storytelling while spanning five sequels, complete with cheeky subtitles like Oh Hell No! and The 4th Awakens.

Shark Week’s Arrival Chums the Waters of Fact and Fiction

Meg 2: The Trench

While these ridiculous B-movies spiraled out of control, another channel was raking in ratings by embracing science over spectacle. The first Shark Week hit the Discovery Channel in 1988 with ten hours of original programming. Largely dedicated to ocean conservation and reversing popular misconceptions about marine wildlife, the modest block reached a record number of viewers and quickly became a yearly tradition. The summer event vastly expanded in 2000 — one year after the release of Deep Blue Sea — by pulling in celebrity hosts and shark-themed installments of popular shows like Dirty Jobs and MythBusters. 

Discovery’s summer juggernaut made its way into mainstream cinema with the dressed-up B-movie Shark Night. David R. Ellis’ teen slasher meets aquatic horror film follows a group of raucous college students terrorized by various man-eating fish on a weekend getaway to Lake Pontchartrain. Inspired by Shark Week and Faces of Death (1978), a group of sadistic content creators has outfitted a collection of exotic sharks with cameras and set them loose in the lake, intent on selling homemade footage of real attacks.

Like a deep sea version of Jurassic Park (1993), Ellis highlights a smorgasbord of killer fish, each with their own specialties. From bull sharks, threshers, and hammerheads to the little-known cookiecutter shark, which leaves round puncture wounds in its victims’ skin, the film is a veritable who’s who for shark superfans, of course concluding with a special appearance by the dreaded great white. 

Though Carcharodon carcharias has become the shark world’s final boss, the deadly fish is dwarfed by another aquatic predator. Fossils prove the existence of a giant Mackerel shark known as Megalodon that ruled the seas 20 million years ago. Now extinct, rumors persist about these massive carnivores lurking in the ocean’s uncharted depths. Shark Week 2013 lit a fire under these conspiracies with Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, a faux documentary claiming to prove the existence of the ancient fish, along with a government conspiracy to hide this proof from a vulnerable public.

Still the most watched show in Shark Week history, the faux documentary received swift backlash from the scientific community and viewers duped by its verisimilitude. While disclaimers were added to subsequent broadcasts, a Discovery Channel poll taken after the event found that 70% of viewers were convinced that Megalodon continues to roam the seas. 

Five years later, this extinct apex predator would reign supreme over aquatic horror with Jon Turteltaub’s blockbuster The Meg. Adapted from Steve Alten’s 1997 novel, the film stars Jason Statham as a beleaguered rescue diver forced to save a team of scientists from a Megalodon that has somehow escaped through a channel in the Mariana Trench. Explained away with bare-bones science, Turteltaub delivers an action-packed crowd-pleaser by remixing the subgenre’s greatest hits while exponentially increasing the size of the shark. Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench would harken back to Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus by pitting a plethora of jaw-dropping monsters against a multitude of giant sharks.

Based on a True Story Trends in Shark Horror

Open Water

While B-movie fans were delighting in unrealistic creature fun, indie studios turned to the archives for more harrowing inspiration. Chris Kentis based his 2003 shocker Open Water on the 1998 disappearance of American scuba-divers Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were left off the coast of northern Australia by an egregiously botched head count. Likely inspired by the low-fi success of The Blair Witch Project (1999), Kentis attempts to recreate the missing couple’s final days. His intimate, handheld style brings us into the ocean with the doomed couple as they helplessly float for excruciating days while unseen sharks swim ever closer. 

Andrew Traucki’s The Reef is based on a similarly haunting true story. The 2010 indie gem follows a group of friends yachting through Australia’s Coral Sea when their boat is capsized by an underwater rock. Forced to choose between the sinking vessel and an extended swim to an unseen island, the survivors are stalked by a great white shark as they navigate the rocky current. Both films represent genre evolution as swimmers are left without a way to escape an inevitable watery death. After decades of screams to “get out of the water,” modern shark horror leaves its characters with no other choice.

Fictionalized versions of this endurance test format made their way to larger studios in a pair of similarly structured films, trapping empowered young women in the shark’s habitat. Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2016 film The Shallows follows Nancy (Blake Lively), a solitary surfer who manages to overcome an exploratory bite, but finds herself trapped on a narrow rock while a shark constantly circles the lagoon. With only a wounded seagull for company, she must outwit the massive predator and make it back to dry land before succumbing to her injuries and dehydration. Lively carries this grisly survival film that eventually trades verisimilitude for a stunning showdown with the apex predator.  

The following year, Johannes Roberts would add new fear to this equation by dismantling a long-held safety net. 47 Meters Down follows sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt), whose ramshackle shark cage disconnects from its boat and plummets to the ocean floor. With only the oxygen left in their tanks, they must find a way back up to the surface while dodging the sharks lured in by their guide. Playing with the darkness of the open sea, Roberts wrings out the horror of thalassophobia (fear of large bodies of open water) with this nightmarish reframing of the shark’s deadly world. 

Man Versus Nature in Aquatic Horror’s Latest Evolution

Deep Water. Image credit: Magenta Light Studios

Though the aforementioned trends are here to stay, modern variations tend to pit human characters against shark-adjacent human enemies. Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals (2025) forces a kidnapped surfer to overcome a sadistic shark enthusiast who dangles his victims over the water, then films the wild fish tearing each one apart. Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War (2025) sees a group of Australian soldiers hunted by a great white shark when their carrier is sunk by enemy fire. Both films present sharks as neutral yet deadly extensions of the ocean itself while interrogating man’s capacity for violence and the human instinct to survive. 

Renny Harlin’s Deep Water showcases a similar exploration of humanity. When a careless passenger on a commercial jet causes a catastrophic midair explosion, pilots Ben (Aaron Eckhart) and Rich (Ben Kingsley) try an emergency landing on a shark-infested coral reef. Scattered among the rapidly sinking wreckage, a handful of survivors must band together to escape the vicious feeding frenzy. With no true antagonists, Harlin nonetheless presents a series of jaw-dropping disaster scenes that nod to his 1999 shark spectacular while maintaining focus on a surprisingly touching message of unexpected bravery.

Twenty-seven years after reinvigorating the shark horror subgenre, Harlin’s newest entry may signal a new iteration of these visceral films. With renewed focus on oceanic conservation and rising threats of global warming, most films position sharks as a pure force of nature fighting back against a human threat. While sharks are simply doing what they do, it’s people who have transgressed by entering or abusing their territory. And only those who respect the natural world will live to swim another day. 

The post From ‘Deep Blue Sea’ to ‘Deep Water’: A Quarter Century of Modern Shark Horror appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

By the time it reached the end of its ten-episode run, the Apple TV+ show’s sophomore season kind of delivered on those promises. But you had to sit through a frankly unreasonable amount of screentime dedicated to people standing around in control rooms, arguing about the ethics of bigamy, and explaining the mechanics of time travel before you could enjoy the overdue creature-feature smackdown.

The finale did set the stage for a potentially breezier third season, however, with the main cast members finally reuniting (after a dizzying number of betrayals and cross-purposed plans) and getting cozy in a new basement office. From which they are primed for some fun Mulder and Scully-ing in the future!

There are a couple of absentees here, though. Most notably, Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe) and Isabel Simmons (Amber Midthunder), who are still fully committed to their harebrained scheme of opening a portal to Axis Mundi so that they can exploit its unique temporal properties. Or something like that. It’s not entirely clear.

Anyway, the last ten minutes of the episode see Kurt Russell’s Colonel Leland Lafayette Shaw III hot on the trail of Kentaro and Isabel, presumably intent on putting a stop to this nonsense. His search leads him to an unspecified rainforest in Southeast Asia, where he meets up with some old acquaintances who (for a price) are willing to point him in the right direction of his quarry.

Yet these guides will only take him so far into the jungle and refuse to cross a seemingly arbitrary border. When Shaw asks what has the men spooked, one of them reveals that his arms are covered in severe burns and that something lurking deeper in the trees is responsible. Something that is very much alive.

With his companions too afraid to continue, Lee presses on alone and eventually lays eyes on this pyromaniac scourge that has everybody so worked up. Nesting atop an active volcano, he clocks the unmistakable silhouette of ancient Godzilla foe Rodan and vows: “I’ll see you soon.” Cut to credits!

If you’re a kaiju aficionado, it’s a very tantalizing set-up for what the third season of Monarch could have in store (that is, assuming Rodan gets more focus in this teased arc than Kong did in his).

To get you up to speed, we’ve done a thorough deep dive on the character’s cinematic lineage, covering everything from his origins in the Japanese Toho films, right through to his previous appearance in the Legendary MonsterVerse. In short, here is the rundown on Rodan.

Rodan: An OG Titan

In his coffee table book, Godzilla: The Official Guide to the King of the Monsters, Graham Skipper writes: “Decades before Marvel would concoct [their] cinematic universe, Toho was making their own MCU. A Monster Cinematic Universe.”

The Japanese studio was certainly ahead of the curve when it came to doing synergistic crossovers on the big screen, beating MCU’s Kevin Feige and co. to the punch by over 60 years. The gliding reptile Varan, the horned quadruped Baragon, and the benevolent lepidoptera Mothra (alongside her diminutive fairy emissaries) all had standalone films to begin with, but it wasn’t long before they were alternately forging alliances and/or kicking the crap out of each other in supersized mashups like Destroy All Monsters.

If we regard the latter flick as the Avengers: Endgame of Toho’s MCU, then 1954’s Godzilla would have to be its Iron Man. After all, much like Shellhead’s Hollywood debut, this Ishirō Honda classic established a winning formula for everything that followed, set up the most enduring character in its respective universe, and is still considered one of the best entries in the storied saga from which it hails.  

Yet while he isn’t the progenitor of this kaiju dynasty, we mustn’t forget the vital part that Rodan also played in getting the shared universe off the ground. Pun not intended! Although Anguirus may have been the King of the Monsters’ first adversary in his own weight class (see 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again), Rodan was the first to actually head up a feature film.

Then the poor guy never got another starring role for the rest of his city-levelling career! Which kind of makes him the Incredible Hulk of this tortured MCU analogy if you think about it.

Rodan’s Big Break with His Solo Feature Debut (1956)

Anyway, what’s important is that you can single out 1956’s Rodan as the exact moment that the Godzilla series went from being a bunch of self-contained movies to a cross-fertilising mega-franchise. One with a continuity that persists beyond just those instalments in which Big G himself appears.

In terms of chronology, it’s the first non-Godzilla outing to be made part of the universe’s canon (even if that was only formalised in retrospect, when our favourite pteranodon gate-crashed Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster). Not to mention, it’s also the first one to be shot in color! So, it has real historical significance for fans.

The film’s story is maybe a little less pioneering, though. In fact, there’s a great deal of overlap between it and the original Gojira, with the biggest difference being that man’s ultimate sin against nature is not pinpointed as the dropping of the atom bomb here, but rather as an avaricious depletion of our planet’s resources.

The inciting incident occurs when a mining company — eager to strip every last ounce of ore they can from the Japanese mainland — digs too deep and inadvertently disturbs a hive of prehistoric bugs. Displeased by their rude awakening, these rhino-sized aphids, known as “Meganulons”, soon proceed to run amok in the neighbouring community, picking off blue-collar workers and cops alike.  

To cut a long story short (this Meganulon subplot accounts for roughly half the film’s runtime), local authorities manage to drive the insects back into the caverns from whence they came. And it’s here that they discover an even worse danger that’s been slumbering beneath their feet this entire time.  

You see, it transpires that the bugs were really just a food source for something much, much larger. Something that has been lying dormant under the Earth’s crust for millennia and is ready to unleash itself upon the modern world.

Our ensuing first look at Rodan illustrates the titular titan’s prodigious scale by showing it pecking away at creatures that, up until now, had been the primary threat of the movie; swallowing the colossal Meganulons whole as if they’re nought but bird feed. It’s a brilliant introduction to the kaiju and a terrifying “out of the frying pan, into the fire” crisis for our heroes. And the thing is, Rodan’s not even fully grown yet!

Once matured, the winged beast then heads to the surface to wreak havoc. Acting almost as a karmic force, Rodan repays humankind tenfold for all the damage we’ve inflicted on Mother Earth by laying waste to our greatest metropolises, making short work of our militaries, and reclaiming the skies from invasive fighter planes. It’s a glorious final act that has some of the best miniature work in the Toho library, with spectacle that feels remarkably tactile and convincing for the period.

Most of the devastation comes courtesy of the “Fire Demon’s” wind gust ability. This signature move sees it vigorously flapping its 270-meter wingspan (a palaeontologist in the movie hypothesises that the otherwise ordinary pteranodon may have reached such an unusual size due to radiation exposure) in order to create gales that flip tanks, derail trains, uproot buildings, and even topple skyscrapers. In addition to this, it can also fly at supersonic speeds, sending out concussive shockwaves in the process that obliterate structures and toss people around like ragdolls.

When a second Rodan emerges out of the blue and — together with its mate — reduces the city of Fukuoka to rubble, the Japanese authorities decide that enough is enough. Taking drastic action, they fire everything they’ve got at the base of a nearby volcano, in which the two monsters have nested. The hope is that this excessive bombardment will bury the abominations alive, but there are also concerns from the scientific community that it might have the unintended effect of triggering an eruption. Still, desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.

Alas, the government’s plan is a success insofar as both Rodans are eventually defeated. Spewing molten rock, clip one of the creature’s wings and bring it crashing to the ground, while the other — unwilling to go on living without its partner — divebombs into the lava stream so that they can welcome death together.  

Kaijus Get Unserious in Silly Showa Sequels (1964 -1975)

Invasion of Astro-Monster

As you can tell, it’s hardly a triumphant resolution. Sure, the monsters’ reign of terror is brought to an end, yet their demise is rendered tragic, and it comes at the cost of further desecrating the planet. In that respect, it heavily echoes the climax of Godzilla, in which the oxygen destroyer weapon helps humanity to tackle its immediate kaiju problem but extracts a terrible price in exchange: scarring the ocean, killing its creator, and leaving everyone reckoning with the dire consequences.

Generally speaking, Rodan is much closer in spirit to that original Godzilla than it is to the campier adventures that followed in the rest of the Showa era (spanning 1954 to 1975). It’s decidedly sober in tone, there’s a distinct focus on collateral damage, bloody injury detail is shown up close, and there is a surprising number of on-screen fatalities.

This serious portrayal of the character wouldn’t last long, however. Whereas Godzilla had a gradual arc over the years that saw him softening from a traumatic metaphor for nuclear annihilation to a victory-dancing goofball — who shakes hands with friendly robots and performs physics-defying glide kicks — Rodan basically had to make that unlikely transition in the space of a single film.

By the time we next see him in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), he’s attending comical “monster summits” and participating in what can only be described as kaiju tennis (hitting a boulder back and forth in a protracted rally with Godzilla, all while an exasperated Mothra watches on). Even his visual design has been ameliorated to make him palatable to a younger audience, with him now boasting larger eyes, smoothed out features, and less angular proportions.

To be fair, the Rodan we see in Ghidorah is presumably meant to be an offspring of the original behemoth, and so that could account for the drastic changes in temperament and the more anthropomorphised personality. Still, it’s never made 100% clear if that’s supposed to be the case, or if the first one somehow survived being roasted alive back in ‘56.

Putting aside that question of provenance, this is definitely a more kid-friendly version of Rodan. While not an overt good guy, he is effectively on the side of humanity in Ghidorah, teaming up with Godzilla and Mothra to defend his turf from the eponymous alien. This “ambivalent status” (as described by author Ed Godziszewski) is something that the character would retain for most of his future escapades, as he regularly puts aside his beef with Godzilla to defend the planet from extraterrestrial nemeses.

Such is the case with 1965’s Invasion of Astro-Monster, which sees the holy trinity of Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan banding together once more for a rematch against the humiliated Ghidorah. Rodan may be further along in his journey to the light side here, but he does at least get to reassume an antagonistic role for a brief stretch of the movie, when the villainous Xiliens use alien mind control to bend all of Earth’s monsters to their will.

Weirdly, that becomes something of a trend for the pteranodon going forward, as he is once again robbed of his agency in the iconic 1968 crossover extravaganza Destroy All Monsters. This time it’s not the Xiliens who are puppeteering him, but rather the amusingly attired Kilaaks. Intent on subjugating mankind, these nefarious spacemen in form-fitting onesies sic Rodan on Moscow, while simultaneously exploiting other kaiju to cause widespread chaos around the globe. Yet when a crew of human astronauts sabotages their base, the aliens lose control of all the earthling creatures who, you guessed it, then proceed to gang up on that pesky outsider King Ghidorah (after a while, it starts to feel like bullying).

Believe it or not, Destroy All Monsters was pitched as the grand finale of Toho’s MCU, which was experiencing diminishing box office returns at the time. Of course, as we now know, there was still some juice left in the tank, and the franchise would continue on for a little while longer.

Nevertheless, the film did mark Rodan’s valedictory appearance in the Showa era, with him last seen chilling out on the Monsterland archipelago, living in harmony with the rest of his kind. Technically, he did have a few guest spots in other Toho projects throughout the 1970s. However, these cameos were all cobbled together from archival footage that the studio liberally recycled in order to trick viewers into thinking they were getting new content (see Terror of Mechagodzilla for an egregious example of this).

Rodan Gets a Fiery Upgrade During the Heisei Era (1993)

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II

It’d be a quarter of a century before Rodan returned to the silver screen in any meaningful capacity.

When the Showa era fizzled out in the mid ‘70s, Godzilla took a bit of a hiatus before undergoing what we’d now dub a “creative reset”. Ushering in the so-called Heisei series, 1984’s Return of Godzilla was an attempt to breathe fresh life into the property after a string of increasingly campy sequels.

Wiping the slate clean, it is positioned as a direct follow-up to the 1954 Gojira that disregards all other films in the continuity and sets us off on a brand-new timeline (similar to what David Gordon Green did with his Halloween trilogy). The ambitions for this reboot were to dial down the outlandish sci-fi elements, restore Godzilla’s prior menace and dignity, and go back to the more serious, politically charged tone of the Ishirō Honda flick that started it all.

To accomplish this, the Hiroshima metaphors were updated to reflect more contemporary anxieties about the Cold War (which was reheating under the Reagan administration). Meanwhile, the God of Destruction was made to be a legitimate threat again, and there was a sense of apocalyptic dread looming large over everything.

Aiming to create as much distance as possible between this edgier material and the cartoonish antics of yesteryear, the Heisei movies initially steered clear of using any of Godzilla’s existing rogue’s gallery. So, instead of wheeling out Gorosaurus, Gigan, or Megalon — all of whom had been turned into jokey mascots by this stage — the filmmakers tried to come up with original, scarier foes whose public image hadn’t yet been tainted by Showa silliness.

The first of these newcomers debuted in the criminally underrated Godzilla vs. Biollante, which saw a plant-human-dinosaur-clone hybrid evolving into progressively stranger forms over the course of 100 minutes of screentime. Unfortunately, audiences at the time didn’t take to this bizarre concept and craved something more familiar, leading to underwhelming reviews and lacklustre box office receipts.

In response, a panicked Toho promptly backpedalled on their decision not to use any of the old staples and capitulated to fans with the crowd-pleasing Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah in 1991 and Godzilla vs. Mothra in 1992. Leaving just one of the big three out of the equation.

Sure enough, Rodan was swiftly corralled out of retirement as well, making an overdue comeback in 1993’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II. As was the case for his Toho stablemates, the Heisei era represented an opportunity for the pteranodon to get back to his roots and reassert himself as a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, this incarnation of Rodan is far meaner and has levelled up considerably.

The backstory now is that he’s a relic specimen from prehistoric times that has been mutated by prolonged exposure to Soviet radioactive waste. We’re introduced to this Rodan 2.0 when a scientific expedition intrudes upon his territory and plunders an egg that he believes to be housing one of his kin (in a later revelation, it turns out that it’s actually a Godzilla spawn).

Its fraternal instincts kicking in, the creature challenges anything that comes between it and the egg over the course of the movie, whether that be humans, fellow titans, or massive Gundam robots. You could argue that it bites off more than it can chew here, because Rodan is eventually defeated and seemingly killed off for good by Godzilla.

Yet that’s when it reveals its newest and greatest power. Resurrecting like the phoenix of Greek myth, the flying reptile comes back swinging in the climax, metamorphosing into a never-before-seen “Fire Rodan” phase. Equipped with a nuclear ray and the power to transfer energy into other lifeforms, it’s the toughest version we’ve seen yet, and he even manages to save Big G’s skin in the denouement.

Despite totally kicking ass, Fire Rodan doesn’t quite make it to the end of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, and so, he’s sadly not utilised again for the rest of the Heisei era. But this time, he’d only be out of action for a mere decade.

The Titan’s Millennial Makeover (2004)

Godzilla: Final Wars

Commemorating 50 years of Toho special effects (or SPFX) pictures, 2004’s utterly batshit Godzilla: Final Wars is the cinematic equivalent of watching an overcaffeinated 8-year-old mash their favourite toys together for two hours. Only less coherent and without the nuance.

It’d be easier to break down the principles of quantum superposition than it would be to summarise the demented plot here, but the basic gist is that Final Wars is a standalone ensemble piece that brings together virtually all kaiju in existence. Possibly the most movie you’ll ever see in your life, it contains anything and everything that was considered awesome in the 2000s, often with the feeblest of narrative justifications.

You’ve got a bunch of X-Men wannabe super soldiers, Matrix-aping motorcycle chases, professional wrestler Don Fyre playing a katana-wielding hero ripped straight from a Street Fighter game, a sequence in which baby Godzilla drives a truck, flying drill machines and spaceship battles, a score inexplicably composed by Keith Emerson, and a passive-aggressive dig at Roland Emmerich’s disavowed “Zilla”. Hell, there’s even a Sum 41 needle drop!

As John LeMay writes in The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: “The film tries to be too many things at once and, as a result, descends into total madness […] Some scenes literally come out of nowhere, to the extent that first-time viewers likely wondered if the theater reels got mixed up”.

And he’s right! It truly does feel like something plucked from the hyperactive imagination of a kid who’s consumed far too much sugar. Or perhaps an adult under the influence of another white granular stimulant.  

Given how much is going on in Final Wars, it’s not surprising that its stacked roster ends up competing for screentime. In fact, some of the kaiju are afforded less than a minute before they’re roundly defeated. Rodan fares a little better than the likes of King Caesar and Manda in this respect, but he still only clocks roughly 65 seconds on camera.  

Naturally, he doesn’t accomplish a great deal in that brief window. Under the command of (say it with us now) alien mind control, he gets to terrorise New York in an impressive early-film sequence, and later gets caught in the middle of a match of kaiju soccer. Trust us, there’s no missing context that will make sense of that last part. Other than that, though, he’s very much a background character here.

One thing that is cool about Final Wars is the technology it uses to portray Rodan. He’s primarily a guy in a suit for old time’s sake, but the movie does also give us our first-ever taste of the creature as a digital effect, courtesy of some dynamic flying shots. This flirtation with CGI nicely tees up the character’s next (completely computer-generated) appearance. But we’ll need to flash forward another 15 years to get to that one.

Rodan’s American Invasion (2019 – Present)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Parsing the Toho lore should give you a general impression of the kind of stuff the “Fire Demon” might get up to when he finally spreads his wings and migrates from the big screen to the small screen. Of course, the precedent he set in those Japanese films has only a limited bearing on how the character will be portrayed in Monarch Season 3. That’s because what we’re dealing with, in that streaming series, is a fundamentally different timeline, a fundamentally different continuity, and a fundamentally different version of the airborne kaiju.

Granted, there is bound to be some overlap between the Rodan of yore and the Rodan of the modern day, and it’s reasonable to assume that the Apple showrunners will make a few respectful nods towards his rich history. Nevertheless, for context that’s more directly relevant to the creature’s imminent arrival in Monarch, we’ll need to consider his stint in Legendary’s MonsterVerse instead. Which so far amounts to a supporting role in just one film.

That’s right, the American iteration of Rodan has only appeared in 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters to date, where he had to vie for attention with the other members of the big three and, regrettably, got shortchanged. Indeed, he’s saddled with a meager five minutes of screentime and barely has any impact on the plot.

Yet despite being given the least to work with, he ended up managing to steal the show with what’s commonly agreed to be the movie’s standout sequence. Surfacing from hibernation within an active volcano — like a classical titan — impassively wiping out a city that happens to be caught in his slipstream, and swatting fighter jets out of the sky with casual indifference, he makes one hell of an entrance. You just wish he got more to do after that!

Alas, his involvement in the story could hardly fill a paragraph on Wikipedia. In a nutshell, he’s awoken from slumber by Charles Dance’s eco-terrorist group, becomes Ghidorah’s sidekick for a while, and then pledges himself to Godzilla when his extraterrestrial master is usurped by the rightful King of the Monsters. You don’t even get a sense that he’s been doing much beforehand, as he’s apparently been sleeping in Outpost 56 (the fictional Isla de Mara volcano) for centuries.

Still, Director Michael Dougherty makes sure to imbue Rodan with due awe in the limited screentime he does get. Partial to folklore and legend, as evidenced by his work on Krampus and Trick ‘r Treat, the filmmaker likes to reverently frame the creatures in his movies. In the case of KoTM, he imagines the kaiju not as brainless smashing machines, but as majestic, godlike figures who have a primordial claim to the planet. 

That goes double for his interpretation of Rodan, who Dougherty depicts as a true force of nature and a living embodiment of fire, ash, and brimstone. The beast radiates extreme temperatures to the point where Earth’s atmosphere nearly ignites in his presence, and is covered in thick geothermal armour that cannot be penetrated by the weapons of man. In the novelisation, it’s revealed that he also has the ability to trigger eruptions by simply being in close proximity to volcanoes, again, making him feel like some elemental deity.

A fire lord, if you will.

While Dougherty does give Rodan an almost mythological quality, he takes care to ground the kaiju in the real world as well, by taking some inspiration from the animal kingdom. Specifically, he lends him the recognisable characteristics of a bird of prey, with vulture-like talons, the folding wings of a Peregrine falcon, and the predatory instincts of a hawk.

Suffice it to say, it’s a very, very cool incarnation of a monster who, unfortunately, doesn’t get enough time to shine in the movie itself. Honestly, there’s not much else to latch onto in the lead-up to Monarch Season 3. We know his abilities, we know the scale of the destruction that he can visit upon the world, and we know that he looks totally badass. Other than that, MonsterVerse Rodan remains a bit of an enigma at the time of writing.

As we see by his switching allegiance at the end of King of the Monsters (when Godzilla is proven to be the true alpha), he’s not even got much in the way of a titan agenda. Godzilla exists to restore balance to nature, Mothra is an emissary of peace, and Ghidorah seems to enjoy wreaking cataclysmic destruction wherever he goes. Rodan, on the other hand, has a sort of “lawful neutral” morality that sees him literally bowing down to whoever demonstrates themselves to be the heaviest hitter.

Given this flexible alignment and vaguely defined backstory, there’s little telling what Rodan will be up to when he lands in Monarch next season. Although if his Toho track record is anything to go by, there’s a decent chance he’ll either find himself under the thumb of alien overlords or caught up in some confounding kaiju sporting event. We’d love to see what those know-it-all Monarch scientists would make of that!

The post Rodan is Back: A Fire Demon Guide from the Kaiju’s Origins to the MonsterVerse appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Accompanied by her dog, Allie, Victoria shared a multimedia presentation featuring lore from her father’s illustrious life and legacy while tracing her own journey to finding joy in horror despite not being a fan of the genre. She also participated in a brief Q&A with returning master of ceremonies Xero Gravity, self-proclaimed cousin to Salem Horror Fest.

Victoria Price & Allie

Festival co-directors Leslie Adams and Brody Bellamy took the stage to announce this year’s jury award winners: Blood & Guts by Carlye Rubin, Katie Green, & Tina Grapenthin for Best Feature, Very Prosperous Men by Josiah Walker for Best Interlude (films running 15-60 minutes), and Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) by Louise Flaherty for Best Short.

The pair also presented this year’s George A. Romero Foundation recipients: Ricardo Albarrán, director of the shor Pelacaras, will be mentored by Matt Leslie (Summer of 84); Wendy Wang, director of the interlude The Man Upstairs, will be mentored by Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor); and Donnie Hobbie, director of the feature Jump Scare, will be mentored by Jenn Wexler (The Sacrifice Game).

A screening of Mangittatuarjuk followed. The 14-minute Inuit folk horror tale about two young women trapped in the titular monster’s lair is beautifully told through stop-motion animation with textured characters and detailed environments. It’s easy to see why it took home the jury award.

Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks)

The guest of honor was cinematic icon Dee Wallace, who, despite being under the weather, exuded the same maternal warmth that she’s brought to the screen for the last 50 years. She left her life as a Kansas school teacher behind to pursue an acting career in spite of many naysayers. “In less than seven years, I starred in E.T., so if you’ve got a dream, say ‘fuck you’ and go anyway,” Wallace advised the audience.

Interviewed by Rue Morgue’s Andrea Subissati, Wallace shared anecdotes about many of her most beloved films — The Hills Have Eyes, The Frighteners, Rob Zombie’s Halloween, and more — but the highlight was hearing her speak on life in general. Much like when she’s in front of the camera, Wallace was not afraid to get vulnerable as she recounted how she has overcome tragedy with love.

The evening concluded with a screening of 1983’s Cujo starring Wallace. The film holds up better than many Stephen King adaptations of the era, and the viewing was enriched by the context Wallace provided beforehand — including working with the 13 dogs used to create the illusion of a rabid St. Bernard.

Dee Wallace & Andrea Subissati

Salem Horror Fest will continue through May 3 with screenings of official feature selections Blood & Guts, Deep Hallows: A Brazilian Gothic Fable, Frankie, Maniac Woman, Jump Scare, Lily’s Ritual, Regression, The Barn Part III, and The Mid-Night Driver, along with over 40 interludes and shorts.

There will also be repertory screenings of Blood Shine, both the 1942 and 1982 versions of Cat People, Let the Right One In, Pet Sematary, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama with live commentary, plus a special showing of The Vincent Price Legacy accompanied by dinner prepared with recipes from Price’s cookbooks.

Additional events include meet-and-greets with Wallace, Price, Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes), and Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead), panels, live podcasts from Girl, That’s Scary and Movie Jawn, a horror drag show, vendor markets, and more.

Salem Horror Fest 2026 passes are on sale now.

Master of ceremonies Xero Gravity

Victoria Price

Allie Price

Salem Horror Fest co-director Leslie Adams

Dee Wallace

The post Salem Horror Fest 2026 Opening Night Scratches the Surface with Dee Wallace [Event Report] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Look, I’m a sicko who loves 1986’s Rawhead Rex, and I’ve made peace with that. The point is that while Irish horror is often generalized as supernatural, gothic, and steeped in spooky folkloric traditions, there are solid exceptions that explore horrors well outside those expected boxes. Some of them are terrifically entertaining genre treats despite being criminally underseen or underloved… and I’m going to talk about a few of them below.

A Clive Barker Adaptation Relocates Its Creature to the Emerald Isle

Rawhead Rex

I’ll be the first to admit that Rawhead Rex is something of an acquired taste, but between reading Clive Barker’s original story in the third volume of his Books of Blood and seeing Rex on the cover of Fangoria magazine in early 1987, I was an easy mark for the film. Barker himself distanced himself from the movie just a year after its release, but it remains a fun creature feature from Ireland.

To be clear, director George Pavlou’s film moves the setting of Barker’s story from England to the Emerald Isle and filmed it there as well, meaning while it’s not fully Irish in spirit, it is Irish in practicality. There’s also a kernel of folklore afoot here as “Rawhead” is the name of a creature created back in the 16th century as a way to creep out children and keep them in line. Barker doesn’t really follow that throughline with either his story or script, though, leaving this a straight-up creature feature.

Instead, Rawhead Rex follows a man named Howard (David Dukes) who, along with his wife and two kids, comes to rural Ireland to research old religions and their artifacts. His arrival, unfortunately, coincides with the rebirth of a monstrous, musclebound pagan god-like creature that appears to be dressed like he’s leaving a heavy metal concert and heading to a Renaissance Fair. (He’s always reminded me of Eddie from Iron Maiden…) Rex kills Howard’s young son – an automatic extra half star from me right there – and befouls the sanctity of the church and its servants before finally meeting his demise at the hands of a determined woman.

It’s far from a forgotten masterpiece, and it’s easy to see where another million bucks in the budget could have drastically improved things, but Rawhead Rex still delivers the goods. In addition to killing a kid, giving a religious man a golden shower, championing female strength, and celebrating pagan “gods” over the more traditional ones, the movie features some solid practical gore throughout. The Rex costume, for all its limitations when it comes to neck and head movement, still looks pretty cool, too. Monster movies rock.

Grab a Pint For Irish Horror Comedies

Grabbers

The creature feature fun continues with the far less serious Grabbers from 2012, which unleashes seaborne terrors while also poking silly fun at Irish stereotypes. It unfolds on a small Irish island and the even smaller town on its coast, where some fishermen have gone missing, and the beach is awash with dead whales. The cause soon comes clear as small, tentacled, bloodthirsty cephalopods make their way ashore to target townspeople. A pair of local constables discover the beasts’ single weakness – alcohol – and it’s all the motivation they need to get everyone in town drunk off their asses. Of course, that might not help when a house-sized beastie comes calling.

Director Jon Wright delivers a fun horror/comedy with Grabbers that’s probably most akin to something like New Zealand’s Black Sheep in tone and bloody content. Death is all around, and characters are prone to playfully gory demises, but it’s never enough to stop people from cracking wise or maybe even falling in love amid the carnage. Richard Coyle and Ruth Bradley do good work as the leads, balancing the laughs, terror, and budding romance while the rest of the townspeople party in the background.

Monster movies can live or die on the strength of their creature effects, and the film’s a winner on that count thanks to some terrific practical creations and genuinely great CG that work to bring these things to life. Add in memorable gags and some minor stunt work, and it’s a good time that doubles as a fun (possibly deadly) drinking game movie if you throw one back every time a character does.

Laugh fans looking for more Irish horror/comedies have some fun options. Stitches is the grimly comic tale of a murderous clown, and Boys from County Hell pits some fun-loving Irish lads against a vicious vampire. The funniest Irish horror/comedy ever made, though, remains 2019’s Extra Ordinary, which pits a pair of romance-inclined goofballs against a Satan-worshipping Will Forte. Also, while it’s far from a comedy, Wright’s most recent film, Unwelcome, takes a dark turn with little forest monsters straight out of Irish folklore.

Mad Cows Lead to Irish Creature Feature Madness

Isolation

While Grabbers sets its horrors on a remote island, the deadly serious Isolation tightens its grip even further by taking place entirely on a rural country farm. A cattle farmer facing desperate times rents out barn space and one of his cows to a scientist running a genetics experiment, but things take a messy turn when the pregnant cow gives birth. Together with the scientist, a local veterinarian (Essie Davis), and a young couple (Sean Harris, Ruth Negga) crashing on the property, the farmer finds himself fighting to keep something terrifying from reaching the rest of the world.

Writer/director Billy O’Brien’s 2005 film is a low-budget affair, but it still delivers with a compelling, thrilling, eco-horror riff on Alien. The film’s first hour offers an increasingly tense and unsettling slow burn as the experiment is revealed with bloody results. The cow carnage scenes are incredibly convincing and are crafted using smart editing and camerawork alongside some impressive practical effects – trust me, I had to check the end credits for confirmation that no animals were actually harmed.

Concerns about viral infections and small mutations give way to a third-act creature feature as one of the mutated spawns grows into a serious threat. The beast is all practical and brought to life via puppetry and animatronics, and while the budget is unavoidably felt in these sequences, the effects, editing, and performances all work to convince viewers of the danger and build to an expected but still satisfying stinger of an ending.

Horror fans who love rural settings and characters covered in cow shit can keep that train rolling with 2004’s Dead Meat. A young woman traveling through Ireland with her boyfriend sees him turned by a ravenous zombie bite and is soon on the run for her life. She joins forces with a couple of other survivors, but the bloody nightmare – kicked off by a nasty case of mad cow disease – seems to stretch as far as their legs and wheels are able to take them.

Director Conor McMahon – who would go on to make the monster movie From the Dark, the vampire comedy Let the Wrong One In, and the aforementioned Stitches – makes his feature debut here with a rough-around-the-edges tale of zombie mayhem in rural Ireland. It has the ultra low budget visual aesthetic of something like Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, but it’s played deadly serious. It maintains a similar energy with its camera work, though, resulting in some fun, creative beats amid the horror and drama.

Accept its limitations, visible mostly in some of the acting, and you’re in for a solid zombie thriller highlighted by gory kills and suspenseful set pieces. McMahon finds genuine visual thrills here that keep it from feeling one-note or dull, including a headlight reveal of little kids eating folks by a car and the zombie siege of some castle ruins. It’s entirely possible that Dead Meat will give you a hankering for more Irish zombie thrills, in which case you can choose from a couple of options.

Reflections on Humanity Inspires Bleak Irish Horror with Citadel

Citadel

2017’s The Cured is a classy, well-made zombie film with themes and things to say about the human condition. 2008’s Battle of the Bone is, well, a no-budget romp about a small town’s conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants and three friends using their fighting chops and parkour skills to survive a zombie invasion. It’s worth noting that none of the fighting, parkour, or zombie antics are even remotely good, so, you know, choose wisely.

All of the films highlighted above deliver varying degrees of fun for genre fans, from laugh out loud comedy to gory, horror-fueled thrills. But maybe you’re looking for a horror film that’s also depressing as hell and likely to leave you bedridden from its bleakness? You’ll get no judgment from me, and instead I’ll simply recommend 2012’s Citadel.

Tommy and his pregnant wife are trying to leave the dilapidated and condemned tower block they once called home when they’re attacked by a group of faceless teens in hoodies. The baby is saved, but the mother isn’t, and Tommy is left struggling to care for his infant daughter despite developing a crippling agoraphobia. The teens return, forcing Tommy to find the strength to face his fears or lose his child forever.

Citadel doesn’t feature anything resembling levity and is instead one of the sadder horror films you’re likely to see. The synopsis makes it sound like a straightforward drama or the setup to a direct-to-DVD action film, but there are more horrifying elements woven into its story and resolution. Getting there, though, is an emotionally draining condemnation of a system that leaves people struggling after falling through lackluster social safety nets. Both Tommy and the killer teens have been failed by society and a government put in place to protect and care for its citizens. Add to that the emotional pressure Tommy is suffocating beneath from his disorder, grief, and increasing fear, and it becomes a heartbreaking journey punctuated by incredibly tense sequences and grim genre plotting. Watch it, but make sure you have something far lighter lined up as the back half of a double feature.

All of this is to say that Ireland, and Irish filmmakers, are not a monolith when it comes to their horror output. There are the expected tales inspired by local legends, myths/religions, and folklore, and stories informed by beliefs in ghostly beings and wispy spirits – but there are also movies about zombies, viruses, mushrooms, vampires, tentacled beasts, dark magic, monsters, serial killers, inter-dimensional doorways, haunted folk songs, a creepy drumming bunny toy, and more.

And yes, there’s also that franchise about the randy leprechaun…

The post Monsters, Murderers, and Mad Cows: Celebrating Atypical Irish Horror Films appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Not to kink shame, or anything. If that’s your thing, [salutes].

Anne Goursaud‘s career as an editor is dazzling, including work on projects like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Outsiders. It’d only be a few years after Coppola’s fanged masterpiece was released, in 1995, that she’d make her feature directorial debut with Embrace of the Vampire. It’s a quintessential 90s piece of horror-erotica: lustful, over-the-top, insatiable horny, and packed with nudity.

It’s everything Carl Bessai‘s 2013 remake is not: a looser adaptation of Goursaud’s vampiric romance, opting for a less engaging, flaccidly generic take on taboo desires.

The Approach

Bessai sticks to his indie Canadian roots and goes for a low-budget, direct-to-video take on what’s, at best, a cult classic. It says plenty that Bessai’s Embrace of the Vampire boasts ten times as many Rotten Tomatoes reviews as Goursand’s, but hilariously, they both have the same number of fresh blurbs: one. Academic powerhouse Alexandra Heller-Nicholas praises the original as “good, trashy, ’90s fun,” which is the opposite of Bessai’s bad, just trash, 2010s home video fodder. It’s like Bessai strips any sense of attraction and intoxication, playing into subgenre mundanity without any effort put into sex appeal expectations.

Sharon Hinnendael stars as Charlotte Hawthorn, a chaste Catholic schoolgirl who earns a university fencing scholarship. She suffers from Thalassemia, for which she’s prescribed multiple medications. She’s mousy, swallows her anxiety, and is plagued by traumatic visions of a bloody scene from centuries prior. Despite all that, Charlotte is determined to be your average college co-ed—but that’s not in the cards. Enter her free-spirited roommate Nicole (Tiio Horn), dashing yet aggressive fencing coach Professor Cole (Victor Webster), a mystic named Daciana (Keegan Connor Tracy), and her coffee-shop manager crush, Chris (Ryan Kennedy).

In spirit, you can see the ties that bind Goursaud’s and Bessai’s productions. A beautiful virgin protagonist who’s drawn to a dark force, the boyfriend who stands in the way of a master and their love slave, and the collegiate background. What’s different is the cold open, both taking place long, long ago, but in the remake—penned by Andrew C. Erin, Alan Mruvka, Sheldon Roper—there’s no folkloric fantasy orgy, or blissful woodland aura. Boringly, Embrace of the Vampire (2013) starts with an undisclosed ritual, setting up a mystery that’s a total bust.

Does It Work?

Last month, I wrote about how the Prom Night remake sabotages itself by revealing the killer too early. Funnily enough, Bessai’s Embrace of the Vampire disappoints by doing the opposite. In the original—written by Halle Eaton, Nicole Coady, and Rick Bitzelberger—we’re not toyed with by red herrings or misdirections. Spandau Ballet bassist Martin Kemp plays a new-wave vampire who woefully haunts Alyssa Milano’s Charlotte due to starvation levels of desire. Goursaud can focus on sensually illustrated indulgences of the flesh, and the push-pull chemistry between Charlotte and Kemp’s supernatural entity. It’s cheesy like a bargain-bin airport bookstore purchase your single Aunt might devour with a bottle of wine, but that’s also the film’s weirdo charm.

Bessai chooses a traditional hunt-and-stalk scenario for his Charlotte, who may or may not be part of a bloodline of vampire hunters conceived during the opening scene. The filmmaker wants you to guess the vamp’s identity for a while, no matter how obvious. Titillation takes a back seat, despite being the thrust of Goursaud’s themes. It’s a damning commentary on what passes for an erotic thriller in the 90s versus nearly two decades later, where sex is secondary to a convoluted and choppy interpretation of vampiric stalking. The screenplay isn’t calibrated to handle subplots about sexual abuse, cursed fates, and crimes of the heart in the way Bessai wants to, as Charlotte stumbles through a mess of conflicts that barely align.

Worse still, when there is a sex scene, there’s a blandness to the softcore nature of what you could find on pornographic websites. There’s nothing stylized, and theatrics are dull; 3 AM Cinemax programming looks Oscar-worthy by comparison. Goursaud’s direction is full of longing, as characters push each other to the intimate brink of eruption while also acknowledging the adrenaline rush of forbidden danger. Bessai’s direction of Charlotte’s lesbian encounters and her voyeuristic peeping on humping couples checks the box of showing intercourse on screen, but there’s nothing that’ll make you blush. The way poor C.C. Sheffield has her breasts fondled on a close-up is so awkward, like a cat “kneeding dough” in those viral TikTok videos.

An erotic chiller … sans eroticism.

The Result

It’s like Bessai found a location and decided, “Well, what’s a horror film I can remake that uses a college-town setting?” Lest he waste the scenic mountainside views of British Columbia’s Quest University! But why remix Embrace of the Vampire if you’re not going to lean into the hormonal outrage of the film’s hot-and-heavy signatures? Goursaud’s picture is messy, but it’s also carnal, writhes with temptation, and loudly yearns. Bessai’s equal is nowhere as provocative or confident, hiding behind a trudgy, basic-as-hell retelling of overused bloodsucker tropes. It’s the difference between sex for pleasure and sex for purpose—you want your audience blushing, not yawning.

However, let’s not pretend other issues aren’t present. There’s a sterile, fluorescent-bulb shine to scenes like hospital lighting that’s overly bright—no manipulation of shadows or mood driven by atmosphere. Nor do performances inspire anything more than direct-to-video stereotypes; the type of performances that people think of when they hear a title isn’t opening theatrically. Do we know how much the Zephyr Cafe paid to be so heavily marketed, with their signage displayed like a landmark, for some reason? There’s more emphasis put on local businesses than on the cleanliness of storylines. Techniques lack polish, scripting writes itself in circles, and it’s hard to say anyone shines under such underwhelming circumstances.

In a very 2010s way, Embrace of the Vampire unnecessarily adds more gore to the recipe. That’s the tradeoff. Charlotte’s body is changing in her mind, as her skin burns when touched by a specific necklace, or she imagines her teeth falling out. Bessai loves a blood cannon money shot (or vomit shot), so that’s the vampire flick you’re getting. Bloodlust must be craved, so why not stab a random groundskeeper to death for absolutely no plot-related reason? One might say Bessai approaches his remake with crueler intentions … which have nothing to do with the original he chose to honor.

The Lesson

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING is safe from the remake machine. Embrace of the Vampire falls into the April Fool’s Day or Wizard of Gore camp of low-budget remakes that hope to steal a few bucks off diehard horror audiences. It’s a pale imitation of its superior source title, barely recognizable in multiple instances. Your nostalgia goggles need to be set on “High” to see the connections. Not like there’s a ravenous fanbase for Goursaud’s original, but still, there’s a clear choice if there’s ever a question about which version to pick over the other.

So what did we learn?

• If you’re not willing to touch the ludicrous sexual highs of 90s erotic thrillers, you shouldn’t be allowed to remake them.
• This one’s a repeat, but why remake a movie when you have no intention of highlighting its signature elements?
• Sex sells, but it’s more than just getting butts in seats or putting butts on screens. There’s an art to cinematic eroticism, and it’s more than nudity for nudity’s sake.
• It’s not that hard to fit a pair of vampire teeth into an actor’s mouth, so if it’s looking like your bloodsucker is trying to hold her teeth in at all times, there’s a problem.

I love writing this lil’ horror remake series for Bloody Disgusting. Honestly, every month, I get excited when I remember I’ve got another analysis to pump out. But because of my chosen assignment, the required viewing is sometimes a chore. I’ve been keeping a running ranking of every remake I’ve covered so far over on my Letterboxd, if you’re curious about where everything ranks. Rest assured, Embrace of the Vampire will be toward the very bottom, if not vying for the worst-of-the-worst crown.

The post ‘Embrace of the Vampire’ – Remake of ’90s Erotic Thriller Loses Its Libido to Generic Bloodthirst appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.