Exclusives
Max Minghella’s Genre-Bending ‘Shell’ to Close Popcorn Frights 2025 [Exclusive]
The eleventh annual Popcorn Frights Film Festival is gearing up to unleash an 11-day horror celebration next month, and that includes closing out with a bang. The fest will host the U.S. premiere of Max Minghella’s Shell as its closing night film.
Popcorn Frights will run from August 7-17, in person and virtually.
Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man), Kate Hudson, and Kaia Gerber star in Minghella’s genre-bending body horror comedy.
In the film, “Down on her luck actress Samantha Lake (Moss) is invited into the ultra glamorous world of Zoe Shannon (Hudson), CEO of health & wellness company Shell. When their patients start to go missing, including starlet Chloe Benson (Gerber), Samantha realizes Shell may be protecting a monstrous secret.”
The body horror dark comedy was penned by Jack Stanley, the scribe behind last year’s riveting thriller The Passenger.
Shell’s screening at Popcorn Frights marks the first U.S. screening since its TIFF premiere. I wrote in my review that “Shell centers around an aging actor who embarks on a risky beauty regimen in a desperate bid to retain relevancy, Minghella opts to use it as a vehicle to craft an escapist love letter to ’90s cinema.”
Minghella made his feature directorial debut with 2018’s Teen Spirit, but horror fans will recognize the actor/filmmaker for his roles in Spiral: From the Book of Saw and Alexandre Aja’s Horns.
Individual tickets and All-Access Badges for Popcorn Frights’ in-theater experience—hosted at Savor Cinema Fort Lauderdale and Cinema Paradiso Hollywood—are now available. Virtual All-Access Passes can also be purchased for streaming access to the full digital lineup. To order an In-Theater All-Access VIP Badge, click here; to order a Virtual All-Access Pass, click here.
Catch up on Popcorn Frights’ first and second waves of programming while we wait for a third wave of announcements still to come.
Norway’s deepest fjord isn’t just unleashing a mythic monster in Kraken, but its monstrous deep sea parasites as well.
Watch our exclusive clip below, which introduces the skittering, skin-crawling aquatic menaces on the attack.
Samuel Goldwyn Films will release the Kraken in select theaters and on digital June 12.
Here’s the synopsis: “A marine biologist encounters several strange occurrences while researching a fjord, including the brutal deaths of two local teenagers. At the bottom of Norway’s deepest fjord rests a mythical monster as large as a mountain, with a myriad of arms ready to crush and devour anything they can grab.”
Pål Øie (The Tunnel) directs from a script by Vilde Eide, Kjersti Jelen Rasmussen, and Natasha Arthur.
Sara Khorami (Troll 2), Mikkel Bratt Silset, Øyvind Brandtzæg, Jenny Evensen, Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes, Jon Erik Myre, Hans Morten Hansen, Steinar Klouman Hallert, and Filip Bargee Ramberg star.
The behemoth beast from the deep is the latest kaiju-sized aquatic creature harboring a horde of bloodthirsty parasites, joining the likes of Cloverfield and Underwater. Naturally, the Kraken itself serves as the much bigger threat.
It’s also about time that the Kraken received its own feature; though Meg 2: The Trench featured a Kraken-like beast in its climax, the Kraken hasn’t been fully unleashed since Clash of the Titans.
Watch out for the Kraken in limited theaters and on VOD this Friday.
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