Movies
7 New Horror Movies & Shows Releasing for Thanksgiving Week Including the ‘Resident Evil’ Reboot!
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While Ghostbusters: Afterlife tops the box office in its first full week of release, you may be wondering what else we can expect on the road to Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It’s actually a surprisingly robust week for the horror genre, with the Resident Evil film franchise returning to theaters and a brand new Bruce Campbell horror-comedy making its way home to Digital.
Here’s all the new horror headed our way between November 22-28!
Bruce Campbell and Devon Sawa lead the cast of the brand new holiday horror-comedy Black Friday, which released in theaters last week and comes home this Tuesday, November 23.
In the Black Friday-themed horror-comedy: “On Thanksgiving night, a group of disgruntled toy store employees begrudgingly arrive for work to open the store at midnight for the busiest shopping day of the year. Meanwhile, an alien parasite crashes to Earth in a meteor. This group of misfits led by store manager Jonathan (Campbell) and longtime employee Ken (Sawa) soon find themselves battling against hordes of holiday shoppers who have been turned into monstrous creatures hellbent on a murderous rampage on Black Friday.”
The cast also includes Ivana Baquero (Pan’s Labyrinth), Ryan Lee (Goosebumps), Stephen Peck, and Michael Jai White (Spawn). The film was composed by Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump.
We debuted the trailer here on BD. Watch it now.
Also on Tuesday, Shudder will release The Strings, fresh off the film’s world premiere at the Salem Horror Fest this past Halloween season. The film marks Ryan Glover’s directorial debut.
“In the dead of winter, musician Catherine travels to her aunt’s remote cottage on the shores of Prince Edward Island to work on new material in solitude. Soon after visiting an abandoned farmhouse with local photographer Grace, strange and disturbing occurrences begin to manifest at the cottage, escalating each night and eroding Catherine’s sense of reality.”
The all-female cast of The Strings is headed by up and coming musician Teagan Johnston (aka Little Coyote), marking her acting debut, and she also wrote and performed the film’s original music live on set. Jenna Schaefer co-stars as Grace.
Tuesday, November 23rd also brings us the second-to-last episode of SYFY and USA’s “Chucky” Season 1 from Don Mancini, which is titled “Twice the Grieving, Double the Loss.”
Chucky has begun brutally killing off the parents of the show’s teenage characters, while Tiffany and Nica-Chucky form a surprising new bond and Andy and Kyle from the original two Child’s Play movies continue to hunt down and terminate possessed Chucky dolls. But what exactly is Chucky’s end game and what can we expect from these final two episodes?
Here’s the official synopsis for this week’s new episode:
“As Hackensack reels from Chucky’s relentless–but secret–reign of terror, the Mayor tries to allay fears by cluelessly arresting an innocent suspect. Meanwhile, the kids desperately try to figure out Chucky’s mysterious endgame–before it’s too late.”
The Resident Evil film franchise returns to the horror roots of the video games with new movie Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which hits the reboot button on the film series.
From director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey at Night), Sony’s new movie takes a bite out of theaters on November 24, with no at-home release scheduled.
“Returning to the terrifying roots of the massively popular franchise, fan and filmmaker Johannes Roberts brings the games of the billion dollar franchise and the most successful video game adaptation in history to life for a whole new generation of fans.”
“Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland…with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever…changed…and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.”
The cast includes Kaya Scodelario (Crawl) as Claire Redfield alongside Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp) as Jill Valentine, Robbie Amell (Upload) as Chris Redfield, Tom Hopper (The Umbrella Academy) as Albert Wesker, Avan Jogia (Zombieland: Double Tap) as Leon S. Kennedy, and Neal McDonough (Yellowstone) as William Birkin.
We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for Black Friday deals on November 26th, but don’t forget that there are also two brand new horror movies being released this Friday.
The first one is titled The Last Rite, coming to VOD platforms.
An official selection of FrightFest, Samuel Goldwyn Films will be releasing The Last Rite, a new exorcism horror film that’s said to be rooted in writer-director Leroy Kincaide‘s love of The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
In the film, “A medical student suffering from sleep paralysis finds herself plagued by a demonic entity hell-bent on ripping her apart. With time running out and the dark force consuming her from within, Lucy is left with no alternative but to seek help from a local priest, But Father Roberts has a dilemma – does he obey orders or help Lucy by conducting his own exorcism against the will of the church?”
You can watch the trailer right here.
The other new horror movie releasing this Friday is the Indian film Chhorii, from T-Series, CryptTV, and Abundantia Entertainment. It’ll be exclusively available on Amazon Prime Video.
Chhorii was directed by Vishal Furia, and it’s a remake of his own Marathi-language horror Lapachhapi. The cast also includes Mita Vashisht, Rajesh Jais and Saurabh Goyal.
“Set deep in the heartlands, Chhorii is the story of a modern, young couple, Sakshi (Nushrratt Bharuccha) and Hemant. Sakshi is eight months pregnant with her first child when the couple, forced out of their home, escapes from the city and seeks refuge in a house located deep inside sugarcane fields. The house is inhabited by an old couple who seem to know more than they tell. Unknown to Sakshi, the house and the fields are ridden with dark secrets that start unravelling as the story unfolds, posing a threat to Sakshi and her unborn child.
“Even as Sakshi tries to save herself and her unborn baby, scary sightings of three mysterious kids and a charred monster coupled with an eerie lullaby, emanating from an old transistor, wreak havoc with her sanity. Will Sakshi be able to save herself? Will she be able to protect her unborn child? Sakshi’s quest to find the answers to these questions and escape from the horrors takes us on a journey that’s deals with scares, both normal and paranormal.”
Encounter a sinister evil by watching the trailer here.
The final new release this week brings a little holiday horror to the table, with Netflix premiering the brand new Danish creature feature series “Elves” on Sunday, November 28th.
In Elves, “A Christmas vacation turns into a nightmare for a teenager and her family when they discover an ancient menace that stalks their island getaway.”
We won’t make you click another link. Watch the trailer for “Elves” below!
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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