Movies
The Unborn
“It’s all a very interesting premise and in the hands of a filmmaker with a bit more savvy in the craftsmanship department, THE UNBORN might have been a tense little thriller with a weighty backstory. Unfortunately, the film is rather a mess.”
As a Director, David Goyer makes a fine Writer and Producer. In those fields he’s lent his talents to a string of comic book inspired films, including Christopher Nolan’s hugely successfully BATMAN reboots. Behind the lens—helming a feature film—he’s given us the passable BLADE: TRINITY and the nearly unwatchable THE INVISABLE. Like that last film, THE UNBORN is a supernatural thriller. However, unlike that anemic production, this time around Goyer ratchets the horror up quite a few notches. Well…PG-13 notches, but whose complaining… yet.
Borrowing broadly from mystical Jewish Kabbalah canon Goyer crafts the story of Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman, CLOVERFIELD) – a Chicago-area college student who has been having strange dreams about a ghostly boy, only to wake up and discover that they might not be dreams at all. After Casey is bizarrely attacked by a young child she has been babysitting, she awakens to discover her eye is mysteriously changing from brown to blue. When a trip to the Eye Doctor suggests that Casey might be a twin, she confronts her father and discovers she had a brother that died in the womb. Is the strange ghostly boy the soul of her unborn twin brother—come back to haunt her? And, did the guilt of miscarrying a child cause her mother’s suicide years before, or is something much more sinister at work?
Goyer gets a lot of credit for attempting—thematically—to broaden the confines of your everyday, average, evil spirit/possession story. He succeeds in this by touching on elements of Kabbalic premises. The demon that haunts Casey is identified as a Dybbuk—a soul refused entry into heaven that roams the earth looking for a body to inhabit. The scripture that is used to cast out the demon is the Sepher Ha-Razim or as the film describes it “The Book of Mirrors”. In a twist, the films exorcism sequence is conducted by both a Rabbi (Gary Oldman) and an Episcopalian Priest (Idris Elba, PROM NIGHT)—the two men allude to the idea that an evil as old as the one they are facing would never be constrained by the boundaries of a specific religion. The evil is older than religion. It’s all a very interesting premise and in the hands of a filmmaker with a bit more savvy in the craftsmanship department, THE UNBORN might have been a tense little thriller with a weighty backstory. Unfortunately, the film is rather a mess.
For a supernatural suspense thriller, what we wind up with is a fair amount of supernatural—which Goyer borrows heavily from the Asian Horror handbook—and not much suspense. The film has a few jump scares here and there, but for the most part the production is a meandering mess with only moments of sporadic interest. The problem is that the film moves from Point A to Point B to Point C is such a succinct and linear fashion that the audience can forecast every major event in the film 15-minutes before it happens. The ending of the film—designed no doubt to be a shocking revelation—is suggested to so early on that I was beginning to wonder when they were ever going to get around to revealing it.
The film’s other major problems are more complex than poor pacing and predictable plot points. The first involves the casting of Odette Yustman as Casey. At times, she seems too old to be playing a 19-year old college student. Then, only moments later, she giggles like a schoolgirl and all of a sudden it feels like she’s regressed all the way back to 9th grade. Yustman also seems to have difficulty in connecting to some of the more emotionally resonant moments—particularly when her best friend Romy (Megan Good, SAW V)) is in peril. Overall, it’s simply an uneven performance for the actress in her first starring role. Some of that blame once again falls on Goyer for not pushing her to a darker and more realistic place with her performance.
The final issue is more serious. Goyer—in what I can only hope is his attempt at homage, and not his attempt to slip the obvious past an audience he assumes wouldn’t get the reference—is jacking moments right out of THE EXORCIST, including the now legendary “spider walk” sequence. These moments distract from the film and show a shocking lack of originality, even if their intention is to honor the granddaddy of all possession stories.
It’s easy to pick apart the problems that THE UNBORN has because on the surface they seem so obvious. The real tragedy is that, as a writer, Goyer explores interesting concepts, but he’s sugar coating those ideas in order to make them accessible to the broadest possible audience—the PG-13 audience. I’m not saying that if Goyer had gone for a “hard R” that the film would have been any better—bloodier I’m sure, but not better. I’m saying, that when THE EXORCIST came out 30+ years ago, the film’s concept was high brow even if its execution was, at times, salacious. In the realm of PG-13, I don’t think anyone will tell you that THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE was poor excuse for a horror film. It’s as physically exhausting as any torture film I can think of, and almost noting happens in EMILY ROSE! Still, in both of those films, the story was supreme. THE UNBORN had that opportunity as well; unfortunately, it never quite connects the dots in a manner that makes for compelling cinema. But, hey…it’s still better than THE INVISIBLE.
This week’s new releases offer everything from giant monsters to Spielberg aliens to ass-kicking martial artists and even an ash-eating medical student. Do we have your interest?
Here’s all the new genre movies that released on Friday, June 12, 2026!
These aren’t all HORROR movies, but we want you to be aware of them all the same…
Norwegian creature feature Kraken is now available on Digital.
The film was also unleashed in select theaters. Check your local listings.
In the monster movie Kraken, “unnatural behavior in wild salmon, followed by inexplicable deaths in Norway’s deepest fjord, points to the mythical Kraken. The ancient, multi-armed monster has awakened, ready to crush everything that moves or makes a sound.”
Pål Øie (The Tunnel) directs Samuel Goldwyn Films’ Kraken from a script by Vilde Eide, Kjersti Jelen Rasmussen, and Natasha Arthur. Sara Khorami, Mikkel Bratt Silset, Øyvind Brandtzæg, Jenny Evensen, Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes, Jon Erik Myre, Hans Morten Hansen, Steinar Klouman Hallert, and Filip Bargee Ramberg star.
An all girls trip into the desert for escapism fun instead implodes in violence in the revenge thriller Find Your Friends, now streaming only on Shudder.
In the film, “Amber and her four best friends flee Los Angeles for a girls’ trip in Joshua Tree, only to find themselves unwelcome in a desert town simmering with quiet hostility. As isolation sets in and encounters with aggressive locals grow more threatening, festering resentments within the group begin to surface.
“What begins as fun and reckless escape spirals into a violent struggle for control and survival, as past wounds and present dangers collide in a night that turns their trip into a nightmare.”
Bella Thorne (The Babysitter), Chloe Cherry (“Euphoria”), Helena Howard (I Saw the TV Glow), Sophia Ali (Uncharted), Zion Moreno (“Gossip Girl”), and Chris Bauer (“True Blood”) star in the feature debut by writer/director Izabel Pakzad.
Steven Spielberg is more sure today than he was when he made Close Encounters and ET that aliens are very real, and with Disclosure Day, he aims to make you a believer too.
Okay so it’s not a horror movie, but the sci-fi blockbuster is now playing in theaters.
The vague synopsis for Disclosure Day reads: “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to Disclosure Day.”
The film stars SAG winner and Oscar® nominee Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer, A Quiet Place), Emmy and Golden Globe winner Josh O’Connor (Challengers, The Crown), Oscar® winner Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, Kingsman franchise), Eve Hewson (Bad Sisters, The Perfect Couple) and two-time Oscar® nominee Colman Domingo (Sing Sing, Rustin).
Based on a story by Spielberg, the screenplay is by David Koepp, whose previous work with Spielberg includes the scripts for Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Combined, those films earned more than $3 billion worldwide. Koepp also wrote the script for Jurassic World Rebirth.
Steven Spielberg is of course no stranger to extraterrestrial encounters, directing two of the greatest alien movies of all time: Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 and E.T. in 1982. It’s an arena he returned to in 2005, directing an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
Here in 2026, Steven Spielberg sees hope in the existence of aliens. He notes in the final trailer for Disclosure Day, “How will disclosure change us? I believe for the better.”
Another movie that’s not a horror movie but worth mentioning here is the violent martial arts revenge thriller The Furious, which is now playing in theaters from Lionsgate.
Xie Miao (The New Legend of Shaolin) and Joe Taslim (Mortal Kombat) star.
After his daughter is kidnapped by a criminal network and he receives no help from the corrupt police, Wang Wei sets out on a rampage to find her himself.
His only ally is Navin, a relentless journalist whose wife has mysteriously disappeared. Fueled by a furious vengeance, the unlikely duo ruthlessly fights against the kidnappers.
Kenji Tanigaki (Enter the Fat Dragon) directs from a script by Mak Tin Shu (Kung Fu Jungle), Lei Zhilong, Shum Kwan Sin (Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In), and Frank Hui.
A disturbing weight loss craze involving human ashes opens up a haunting world of hurt for a young woman in Saccharine, which is now available on Digital outlets at home.
From writer/director Natalie Erika James (Relic, Apartment 7A), the Australian supernatural body horror film follows lovelorn medical student Hana, who becomes terrorized by a sinister force after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.
Midori Francis (“Grey’s Anatomy”), Danielle Macdonald (Patti Cake$), and Madeleine Madden (“The Wheel of Time”) star in Natalie Erika James’ latest nightmare.
From directors Arturo Ambriz and Roy Ambriz, I Am Frankelda is billed as the first ever full length stop motion movie from Mexico, and it’s now streaming on Netflix.
The history-making stop-motion film is a dark fantasy set in a world of monsters.
Here’s the synopsis: “In 19th-century Mexico, Frankelda is a gifted writer whose dark tales are ignored and dismissed. Forced to suppress her voice, she refuses to give up, even as many try to silence her. But when she is thrust into her subconscious, the very monsters she created come to life.
“Guided by Herneval, a tormented prince trapped between dreams and nightmares, she must restore balance between fiction and reality before both realms collapse. Meanwhile, the sinister writer Procustes and his conspirators plot to seize control. As Frankelda and Herneval grow closer, their bond becomes both a strength and a curse.
“To rewrite their fate, she must confront a love that defies existence and reclaim her power as a storyteller—before dark forces consume her imagination and reveal horrors beyond her creation.”
The directors said in a joint statement, “As brothers, we grew up inventing worlds together, drawing, playing, imagining. Over time we understood that fictional characters were not only companions but guides. Sometimes they felt closer than the people around us. They provided us courage, wisdom, and solace. We believe fiction is not an escape from reality but a way of understanding it. A way of converting truth into palatable chunks. I Am Frankelda comes from a lifelong love of storytelling.”
Mireya Mendoza, Arturo Mercado Jr., and Luis Leonardo Suarez lead the voice cast.
Meagan Navarro writes in her review for Bloody Disgusting, “Mexico’s first stop-motion animated feature is a macabre beauty.” Meagan also notes in her review, “I Am Frankelda is a gothic fantasy feature whose boundless creativity is matched by its ambition.”
The lines of reality and delusion blur in Time of Death, now available on Digital.
Michael Kelly (“The Penguin,” Dawn of the Dead 2004) stars with Kevin Pollak (End of Days), Mena Suvari (Vampires of the Velvet Lounge), and Dennis Haysbert (Send Help).
In the horror-thriller, “When a prisoner vanishes without a trace, Detective Frank Morley (Michael Kelly) is sent to a decaying prison on the verge of shutdown. What begins as a routine investigation quickly spirals into a dangerous search for answers.”
Will Wernick (Escape Room 2017, Follow Me) directs from a script by Jason Rosen. They also produce alongside Kelly Delson, Jeff Delson, and Kyle David Crosby.
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