Widow’s Bay is full of eccentricities and tantalizing secrets, but there’s a rock-solid foundation underneath it all. It’s a community with good bones, in more ways than one. It’s one of 2026’s best horror surprises. A confident first season hits the ground running to deliver consistent scares and laughs that are anchored by passionate performances, creative chaos, and an ambitious scope that sets the stage for many more seasons to come.

The series looks at a humble New England town that doubles as a hotbed for supernatural superstitions and paranormal activity. It effortlessly taps into that whole eerie island town vibe that feels ripped right out of a Stephen King novel. Widow’s Bay is also rife with the same style of community eccentricities that ran rampant in Parks and Recreation. There are definitely moments in Widow’s Bay in which it feels like a bunch of Pawnee residents have wandered into Jerusalem’s Lot, in the best way possible.

Matthew Rhys in “Widow’s Bay,” premiering April 29, 2026 on Apple TV.

There are clear parallels between Widow’s Bay and other Stephen King series, like Castle Rock, Kingdom Hospital, and even Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. Widow’s Bay makes sure to assert an original voice and viewpoint so that this doesn’t just feel like “Diet King.“ There are also shades of John Carpenter and reflections of Jaws in regard to how Matthew Rhys’ mayor stubbornly refuses to acknowledge Widow’s Bay’s increasing supernatural concerns, even as a body count accrues.

Widow’s Bay has a lot to say about the power of superstitions and how they can be a tool to preserve culture, protect a town’s secrets, and keep its residents safe. However, superstitions can also transform a community’s reputation or embrace lore that’s more interested in division than unity. The series even flirts with the idea that this New England town is cursed and is actively rebelling against attempts at gentrification and modernity as it tries to remain pure. It’s a creative take for this sort of story that cleverly ties together social concerns with heightened genre storytelling. Widow’s Bay tells a tale that’s eerie and unpredictable, but also surprisingly poignant and prescient.

Series creator Katie Dippold doesn’t just know comedy, but genre-blending comedy. Parks and Recreation, 2016’s Ghostbusters, and Spy represent just a fraction of Dippold’s career. Widow’s Bay is the perfect wheelhouse for Dippold, and it’d be so easy for this to be a predominantly comedy-forward series. One of its greatest assets is that it doesn’t try to undercut its scarier moments with comedic punctuation. The moments that are meant to be scary are genuinely unnerving and carefully constructed with the right cinematography, score, and visual aesthetics to evoke fear from the audience. 

Widow’s Bay stands out from many similar small town horror stories by giving these more intense moments the respect that they deserve, so that the series’ horror truly shines. This is also largely a credit to Hiro Murai (Atlanta), Ti West (House of the Devil, X), Andrew DeYoung (Friendship), and Sam Donovan (Severance, Utopia), who are all directors who actually know how to shoot horror. The series would fall apart in less competent hands, and there’s such a palpable and meticulous appreciation for gothic horror storytelling and frightening folklore.

Jeff Hiller in “Widow’s Bay,” premiering April 29, 2026 on Apple TV.

It cannot be stressed enough that Widow’s Bay is a series that is actually scary. It easily clears Apple TV+’s previous horror efforts like Lisey’s Story, Shining Girls, and Pluribus, while it’s about on par with M. Night Shyamalan’s suffocating Servant. As much as Widow’s Bay nails the horror elements, the comedy is also incredibly on point. The first season also contains what might possibly be my favorite joke ever about the ridiculous resilience of slasher villains and how impossible it is for them to truly die.

Widow’s Bay does great work with how it closes the walls around Loftis as he grows more susceptible to this island’s disturbances. It uses these moments to breathe life into rote scenarios that might otherwise wear thin and feel superfluous, like Loftis’ attempts to get his dating life back in order. Formulaic exchanges are then effectively subverted as Loftis loses sight of what’s real and what might be some antagonistic obstacle. Widow’s Bay routinely weaponizes its accomplished genre instincts to push generic ideas to uncomfortable places so that Loftis, and the audience, is left on guard.

On the topic of Tom Loftis, Matthew Rhys is such a delight here and infinitely watchable as Widow’s Bay’s frantic mayor. Loftis constantly oscillates between passionate town pride and defensive damage control. It’s an entertaining performance that really connects and allows Rhys to do something different that slightly pushes him out of his comfort zone. Rhys doesn’t hold back, especially once Widow’s Bay’s terrors intensify. Widow’s Bay also does a good job when it comes to highlighting Loftis’ constant stress level and the many balls that he’s juggling in his personal and professional life. Loftis tries to put his teenage son on the right path and successfully turns Widow’s Bay into a thriving tourist destination that puts Martha’s Vineyard to shame.

Kevin Carroll in “Widow’s Bay,” premiering April 29, 2026 on Apple TV.

Rhys’ Loftis steals the show, but Widow’s Bay is rich in a strong supporting cast of character actor weirdos that includes Jeff Hiller, Toby Huss, Neil Casey, Stephen Root, Kate O’Flynn, and Dale Dickey. Stephen Root is always enjoyable when he’s playing an exaggerated old coot, and he really commits to the bit in Widow’s Bay. He commands plenty of authority and plays a crucial part in this story instead of being some washed-up local punchline. All this works together, and it’s so much fun to see Loftis get swept up in a cyclone of nonsense between Widow’s Bay’s irregular residents and brewing paranormal activity as he tries to stay on top of it all.

Widow’s Bay is occasionally guilty of the “mystery box” style of genre storytelling that’s only become increasingly prominent in the streaming era. That being said, it isn’t overly gratuitous in this regard, and all of the hidden developments that it teases properly pay off and don’t just become red herrings or the equivalent of narrative white noise. There’s a sublime flashback episode on Widow’s Bay’s origins that’s justified and not just unnecessary lore-gazing. It highlights the cyclical nature and impossible circumstances of this cryptic curse.

Season one makes a perfect first impression, and its debut is strong enough that viewers will want to set up permanent residency there. There’s an excellent sense of storytelling, character development, and an engaging mystery that’s strengthened through pitch-perfect horror and comedy. A proper sense of closure is reached by the end of ten episodes, but the narrative also dramatically evolves and sets the series’ future up for success.

Widow’s Bay has the potential to simultaneously succeed as Apple TV+’s next comedy classic and horror hit.

Widow’s Bay premieres on Apple TV+ on April 29th with two episodes, with new episodes following weekly.

The post ‘Widow’s Bay’ Is a Horror Comedy That’s Actually Really, Really Scary [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

But even with that in mind, there’s never been a discussion of King quite like Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Part in-depth analysis of King’s creative process, part memoir, part ode to the synchronicities and magic of stories, Caroline Bicks’ nonfiction dive into several of King’s most important works is an essential piece of horror nonfiction, and a thrilling odyssey into one of America’s most productive imaginations. 

The book began a few years after Bicks was named the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at King’s alma mater, the University of Maine. The position was simply named for King; he did not create or fund it, but thanks to childhood experiences reading his work, Bicks felt a certain distant kinship with the author, a kinship furthered when King reached out and asked to meet her. A short while later, Bicks became the first major academic granted access to King’s private archive of his papers, including manuscripts going back six decades or more. The result is this book. 

Bicks’ scholarly experience tends more toward Shakespeare than Stephen King, yet from the beginning she applies the same rigor and emotional investment to the King of Horror as she would to the Bard. She also wisely limits her explorations to five key books – Pet Sematary, The Shining, Night Shift, ‘Salem’s Lot, and Carrie – rather than attempting to grapple with King’s entire catalogue. This allows her the space to really dig into the minutiae of King’s compositional habits while also reflecting in each chapter on her own relationship to the work. 

Even diehard King fans will learn something from the depth to which Bicks dives. Her research, including thousands of hours with King’s first drafts, revision notes, and correspondence with editors, uncovers everything from The Shining‘s much darker original ending to the shifts in characterization that make Pet Sematary even more frightening to the surprisingly personal roots of ‘Salem’s Lot. Bicks, through engaging and personal prose, conducts her excavation with care, humor, and constant curiosity, reaching out to King himself to ask what Shakespearean tragedy he might have been thinking of throughout the writing of The Shining, or why he discarded a supporting character at the last moment in Pet Sematary.

She even digs into King’s column in UMaine’s student newspaper back in the 1960s, and explores how his emerging political convictions and anger of the state of America shaped the stories in Night Shift. It’s a mesmerizing view of King’s early work, rich in details that’ll have you going back to the novels themselves to see the secret scaffolding lurking behind the scares. 

But perhaps more importantly than her academic rigor and enthusiasm, Bicks seems to grasp from the beginning that it’s King’s humanity which sets him apart, which helped catapult him into the upper echelons of the bestseller lists and remain there for decades. Rather than focusing entirely on King’s thematic concerns and emotional leaps through the work alone, she carefully intertwines her analysis with King’s personal history, his evolving views on the world, and the instinctual decisions which shape key moments in his defining work.

Then she goes further still, infusing pieces of herself into the narrative both as a fan and as a person attempting to undergo a form of creative mesmerism through immersion in King’s world. Along the way, everything from the daily word games she plays to the drives she takes through Maine to and from King’s Bangor home seem to take on a preternatural aura. 

The result is not just a portrait of a young artist writing the work which would shape his professional life, but a portrait of a scholar in search not just of answers, but of the magic behind the basic facts and strokes of blue pencil in the margins of a manuscript. Monsters in the Archives is not just a wonderful companion to King’s work. It’s a journey in and of itself, revealing the spell King’s work continues to cast, and the hard work which made that magic possible.

Monsters in the Archives is now available wherever books are sold.

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Unfortunately, Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 doesn’t rise above these low standards, and it’s hardly essential viewing. It’s a shameless attempt to recapture the magic of Stranger Things’ past at a point when it feels like they should have already left the party.

The most frustrating thing is that this spin-off teases so many other ideas and angles that would have been a great concept for this show. Instead, these appealing premises are ignored as Tales From ‘85 veers into a more derivative and generic direction that comes across as discarded B-sides instead of anything new. The prospect of a new paranormal mystery in Hawkins that’s experienced by the core cast is the least interesting vantage point. Tales From ‘85, as its title suggests, is also set between Stranger Things’ second and third seasons, even if this spin-off breaks some of its predecessor’s established canon. 

It’s easy to picture Tales From ‘85 working as a spin-off expansion had it been released during the middle of Stranger Things’ run, rather than after the series’ conclusion, when there’s been considerable burnout. Tales From ‘85 tries to inject some rejuvenating energy into the formula with Nikki, a new kid who enters the gang’s orbit, even if her presence doesn’t make any sense. It’s not difficult to suspend one’s disbelief on this front, but it’s just so awkward that this pivotal character came and went, without ever being referenced again afterwards. She can conveniently be slotted into this series and removed without consequence.

Stranger Things: Tales From ’85. (L to R) Braxton Quinney as Dustin, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport as Max, Elisha Williams as Lucas, Luca Diaz as Mike, Brooklyn Davey Norstedt as Eleven, Benjamin Plessala as Will and Odessa A’zion as Nikki in Stranger Things: Tales From ’85. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2026

Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 would actually be greatly improved and feel more natural if the whole show were from Nikki’s perspective, rather than making her just one of the gang. It’d be valuable to watch core characters from a fresh vantage point and to explore past events through a parallel and complementary perspective. Instead, it tries to shoehorn a new story onto existing characters. This angle could have better justified a lot of what Tales From ‘85 explores, yet it lacks the confidence to fully rid itself of the security blanket of existing characters. Ironically, it’s these characters that become its greatest weakness.

Tales From ‘85 is at its best when it captures that classic Saturday morning cartoon vibe, and it feels reminiscent of Tales from the Cryptkeeper or Goosebumps. It floats the idea of the Hawkins crew becoming the equivalent of Upside Down Ghostbusters, which is actually kind of perfect and would be great fodder for a spin-off. Unfortunately, the animated series doesn’t give itself the freedom to be more episodic in nature and go all out with this idea, which is really what’s necessary. It tries to saddle this premise to a greater timeline and gets lost in serialization.

Stranger Things: Tales From ’85. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2026

The prospect of Stranger Things in winter shouldn’t be such an exciting development, but it’s appreciated to see how much mileage Tales From ‘85 gets out of the presence of snow. It’s a fun change of pace that provides some fleeting moments of entertainment. It also facilitates a winter mitt moment between Lucas and Max that’s actually quite sweet. However, it’s still something that would have been better suited for the main series, and here it comes across as a deleted scene afterthought.

This spin-off also features plenty of Stranger Things’ signature “science experiment exposition” sessions where crunchy lo-fi high school science provides the key to defeating some Upside Down demon. It’s well executed in Tales From ‘85, but it’s another example of this spin-off playing it far too safe. It’s more proof that Tales From ‘85 runs to the comfort of what’s previously worked, rather than using this spin-off as a chance to subvert expectations and discover something different. It’s so worried about being palatable that it fails to be interesting. Without these ambitious detours, it’s doomed to repeat the past’s mistakes and conjure increasingly diminishing returns. It’s the last thing that anybody needs from this.

Where Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 does shine is with many of its presentation elements. There’s a great, moody score that’s amplified by a pretty impressive soundtrack that’s full of era-appropriate needle drops that give off the energy of a major blockbuster. The visuals are sure to be a more polarizing point of controversy. The animation actually looks great when it’s depicting stylized sci-fi creatures and chaos. The monster designs and the neon-splattered color palette are Tales From ‘85’s most distinct features. That being said, people are another story. 

Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 (L to R) Jeremy Jordan as Steve and Braxton Quinney as Dustin in Stranger Things: Tales From ’85. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2026

Humans don’t look great here, and they come across as some uncanny valley version of the cast that doesn’t do the actors any favors. The visuals have the aesthetic of a Telltale Games title, which works just fine in a video game, but it’s jarring to watch in motion across a full season of television. It’s such a miscalculation that reiterates why this show should have probably just told interconnected stories within the established universe with new characters. 

Honestly, it wouldn’t come as a huge surprise if Tales From ’85 was just a way to salvage the cancelled Telltale Games title and retrofit it into a season of television in order to do something with it. The Telltale Games release was announced during Stranger Things’ second season, which would also lend credence to why Tales From ’85 is haphazardly set between seasons two and three, a decision that seems random now but would have been logical during the game’s development. None of this would even matter if Tales from ‘85 still punched above its weight and was doing something original, but it’s not.

Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 builds to some decent action spectacles in the finale that even hit a little harder than the final fight from Stranger Things’ final season. It’s quite kid-coded and feels more like a Metroid boss battle than a Stranger Things setpiece, but it works. It’s the type of ending that Stranger Things fans have come to expect from a season of this franchise, for better and for worse. These paint-by-numbers climaxes aren’t going to hit as hard in a second season.

There are plenty of issues with Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85, and it’s not the restorative vehicle that the franchise needs most right now. This doesn’t seem like it’s going to appeal to many people other than the most devoted Stranger Things fans who have already seen The First Shadow enough times to have memorized its script. It’s a fun sci-fi adventure for those who lower their expectations and expect something frivolous that skews younger, like how Camp Cretaceous connects with Jurassic World.

Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 is branded content that’s passable for second screen viewing, that’s just familiar enough to drag the audience along. Hopefully, a hypothetical second season truly takes advantage of the full potential of a Stranger Things spin-off and peels back Hawkins’ layers like never before.

All ten episodes of Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 begins streaming on Netflix on April 23.

The post ‘Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85’ Gets Lost in the Past With Reheated Adventures [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Matched with disorienting camerawork from cinematographer Carmen Cabana and alternately squelchy and roaring sound effects on the soundtrack, the opening is both a standard horror movie cold open and deeply emblematic of Hive as a whole. The narrative messaging is deeply influenced by class and race, while the technical elements are playful and high energy.

The film’s protagonist is Sasha (Xochitl Gomez), a low-income girl with aspirations of living in an affluent gated community like Coral Grove. It’s her first day working as a nanny to a rich, entitled brat named Zaley (Victoria Firsova), whose mother Camille (Tanya van Graan) is the kind of stereotype who condescendingly refers to Sasha as “sweetpea” while fretting about the dangers of consuming sugar or playing with other kids.

Sasha puts on a brave face through all of this ridiculousness because she needs the money and a reference to a prestigious school. As her landscaper brother Marco (Aaron Dominguez) reminds Sasha, “We need this gig.” The money is tied to their livelihood, and it’s clear from an early call with her father that this job is an opportunity to help not just Sasha and her family, but also to ensure a future that extends beyond domestic labor.

Photo Credit: Marcos Cruz

Naturally, the conflict is that Coral Grove hides a nefarious secret (though, to be clear, it’s not exactly a Get Out situation). While the people are definitely part of the problem, the children are under the influence of something living beneath the ground that is fond of gobbling people up. And since people don’t miss nannies, housekeepers, and landscapers because they’re typically people of colour, Sasha and Marco are next on the hit list.

The commentary in Hive isn’t subtle, and it does tend to belabor the point a few too many times, particularly in the film’s last act, but that’s mostly forgiven because – despite its dark racial implications – it’s a surprisingly fun time. The majority of the film takes place around colorful playground equipment, weaponizing familiar items like swings, merry-go-rounds, kiddie pools, and slides in a variety of set pieces.

Sasha, Marco, and Marco’s co-worker Darius (Thulani Nzonzo) learn from the film’s harbinger, housekeeper Frances (Zenobia Kloppers), that Coral Grove has been infected by a creature that uses these items as traps. Unsuspecting targets are lured in, usually by infected children, and then swallowed up into a subterranean world that looks like a combination of construction site and abandoned children’s playroom.

Photo Credit: Marcos Cruz

Considering this is a relatively small film, Hive has a lot going for it with regard to sound, production design, and make-up. The camera is constantly on the prowl, which ensures that even in the more sedate interior scenes, it feels as if Sasha and the others are being stalked. Sound mixer Derek Mansvelt rachets up the tension by accentuating the sounds of the playground, along with hungry rumblings and angry roars from the entity, particularly as Sasha, Marco, and (eventually) Frances discover ways to fight back.

The bright visual aesthetic of the playground, including the ball pit in Zaley’s backyard, is sharply contrasted by the world below. For example, Hive gets plenty of mileage by turning the interior of a slide into a threatening tarp with laughing, chanting children lurking around the bend.

Hive. Photo Credit: Marcos Cruz

It doesn’t hurt that the action sequences tend to involve a horde of infected individuals. Since the creature itself is never visually seen, Vargas’ screenplay wisely uses the Coral Grove residents as a stand-in. Sasha and Marco routinely find themselves surrounded by a circle of children who move and chant in unison. They’re not acting of their own volition, though; as Frances will explain later, they’re in a kind of spell, snapping to command before violent outbursts; then they’re released, bewildered, and none the wiser about the horrors that they’ve committed.

These moments, with their child-like rhymes mocking victims, herky-jerky motions, and acrobatic feats (expect back bends aplenty!), effectively toe the line between threatening, silly, and exciting. There’s something delightfully Goosebumps-y about Hive that makes it feel both familiar and distinct, so even though the film sometimes pulls its punches when it comes to stakes or leans too heavily into obvious messaging, it’s still a fun time.

Tubi originals can be a little inconsistent, but thanks to its candy-colored production design, evocative sound design, grotesque scabby yellow make-up, and prowling camerawork, Hive is a solid watch. 

Hive is now streaming on Tubi.

The post ‘Hive’ Review – Goosebumps-esque Tubi Original Weaponizes The Playground appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s a crowded space, especially with the recent release of the runaway hit Slay the Spire 2, but it finds fun and surprising ways to both stand out from its peers and stay true to the vibes of the original.

The first thing that’s apparent with the game is its change of perspective. Instead of looking at the action from a top-down view, you’re in first person, moving square by square through dungeons. Even with the switch-up, it still retains the same nostalgic pixel-art style that made it famous. It’s really cool to see these creatures and environments up close, presented like 2.5D-style Doom monsters. It’s wild how well it translates, being extremely familiar while also feeling completely new.

Moving through the space in the new way definitely changes the pace of the game, allowing you to take on encounters at your own pace rather than being bombarded and constantly moving. You’ll select a specific area and be dropped into a small map that’s marked with several enemies, including a boss that is your final goal for the stage. Each area has a specific number of stages that make up that run, which are all procedurally generated. Since treasures are marked on the map, there’s an interesting risk-reward element of trying to figure out how thoroughly you want to explore the map before taking on that final challenge and moving on. It’s helpful to be able to collect things and level up by taking on all the enemies and collecting every power-up, but it puts you at risk of losing valuable hit points.

Familiar Weapons Translate Into Card Mechanics

While the exploration is solid without being too innovative, the card mechanics are where the game really sings. The subtitle for the game is “The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors, and it definitely earns the turbo. Roguelike deckbuilders sometimes suffer from analysis paralysis, slowing you down to think about all your card options with each hand, but Vampire Crawlers does an amazing job at keeping up the pace.

Each of the cards is based on a power-up from the main game, like garlic, whip, or cross, translating their concept into standard card archetypes. Most of the weapons attack slightly differently, but it’s not complex enough that you’re ever going to have to puzzle over it for too long, and hovering over a card shows the amount of damage it will do to the enemies as a preview, so you’re able to make your selections quickly without being too hasty.

During each battle, you will face waves of enemies that come at you in various rows. Only the front row will attack you, so killing them or pushing them back will help negate incoming damage, which is all telegraphed in the UI. Blast through all the waves of enemies, and the encounter ends. Each time you kill a creature, you get the same blue gems that would pop out of monsters in Vampire Survivors, filling up your experience bar. Upon filling your bar, you’ll level up and be able to select a new card to add to your deck. It’s a super simple system that cleverly allows you to power up in the middle of the fight. The card you add to your deck is free to play for that first round, so your choice can have consequences for both the long and short term, making for complex decision-making.

In addition to attacks, you’ve got cards that buff your stats and cards that add armor. Armor has a base level that you’ll get each turn, but it will go away if not used up by the end of your current hand. Damage numbers can get pretty high when the waves build up, so if you don’t have the firepower to take them all down, you’ll need to lean on armor to help out, as healing is fairly rare.

There are two categories of stats in the game: those that build up within an encounter and those that are built up throughout the whole run. Stats like might and hand size can be upgraded, but will always be set back to a base value at the beginning of a fight. Other stats like XP gain or money gain are persistent, slowly building as you explore. The base values of the resettable stats can be upgraded, but moments like that are rare treats that feel like you’re really powering up.

Crawler Combat, Character Abilities, and Build Strategies

While most of this is pretty basic deckbuilder stuff, there are a few systems that add some complexity to the mechanics. The first, and more revolutionary for me, is the combo system. Like many games of this type, you’ll have a specific amount of mana you can spend per turn, and the cards each have a mana cost associated with them. In a standard deckbuilder, you’re looking at your cards and figuring out which ones you can play within your limit, trying to chain them together to take advantage of synergies. Vampire Crawlers does that, but you’ll also get a multiplier if you play them in ascending mana value.

If you start out with a zero-cost whip attack and follow it up with a one-cost garlic attack, that garlic card will do double damage. Follow it up with a two-cost axe, and that’s triple damage. This doesn’t just apply to attacks; it will also multiply armor or stat buffs, adding lots of flexibility to how your hand goes.

This extra layer really makes the combat sing. Instead of just looking at the effects, which are important, there’s another vector on which to consider your choices, making optimizing even simple turns really fun. It never feels overwhelming to do, even with all the extra math it creates, but you always feel like a genius when you’ve set yourself up with the perfect sequence. It feels extra great when you mix in cards that refresh your mana, because playing them higher in a combo will yield greater mana gain, allowing you to get through more and more cards per turn.

Order of operations becomes so important, and figuring out when it might be better to break a combo in order to play a stat boost is a good challenge. It’s also a consideration when you’re picking your new card, as having a strong spread of different value cards helps make sure that each hand you draw will be fertile ground for combos. I’m not sure if this is something that other games in the genre have done, but it feels like a great hook that made every encounter something that tickled the numbers-go-up part of my brain the same way that Vampire Survivors so perfectly tapped into.

When you start a run, you pick a crawler, which is your character. They have a starting deck, as well as a unique crawler card. When you play that card, it will have a one-time effect, but they’ll also stick around in play with a specific trigger-effect combo. For example, one of them does bonus damage any time you play a red attack card, making this crawler perfect for an offensive deck build. Another heals you if you’ve played blue cards during that encounter, making them good for keeping your character’s health topped off. It’s a subtle mechanic at first, but as you unlock later characters, you see just how valuable it ends up being and how timing it well can be crucial to your run’s success.

Cards also have gem slots on them, and adding gems that you find in the level or select from a level up augments the card in an important way. A double power gem makes a powerful card even more powerful, while an armor gem will give you armor every time you play it. Some gems allow you to put the card back in your hand or make a single-use copy of it. More and more gems unlock as you progress, and the variety of strategies that emerge from them makes it tantalizing to play over and over again.

Between runs, you’re able to spend coins earned during your runs on all sorts of different upgrades. Just like the original Vampire Survivors, you can upgrade your base stats in substantial ways, helping you power your way through the more difficult later levels. New characters can be purchased after you meet their unlock conditions, and you can even alter cards by adding more gem slots. There are also over 150 achievements to hunt down, each of which will add something new to one of the shops. If Vampire Crawlers is anything like the original, I’m sure more options and achievements will be added post-launch, giving you plenty of reason to return over and over again.

Why Vampire Crawlers Keeps You Coming Back

Much like the original game, Vampire Crawlers succeeds at being a real dopamine generator, tickling the right part of your brain through flashy VFX, crunchy old-school sound effects, and amazingly satisfying power scaling. Seeing the big damage numbers you’re inflicting on the enemies before they pop into a shower of pixels as you hear the ding of the gems getting added to your experience bar feels incredible, which only makes the clever card mechanics feel that much better.

I find myself questioning if the game is great or just addicting, but after about 15 hours, I’m still unlocking new cards or gems or upgrades that change the way I play, so I’ve landed on the great side of things. The combo system adds a great layer on top of already compelling card gameplay, activating my brain in the way only the best card games can. There were times when I would finish an encounter with the first card of a hand, and I would feel disappointed because I had a perfect combo lined up that I didn’t get to unleash.

Vampire Crawlers finds a way to distil the essence of Vampire Survivors into a completely different genre, and succeeds with flying colors. I almost always have at least one roguelike on my Steam Deck for when I want to play a quick run of something while I’m winding down for the day, and Vampire Crawlers has just earned its way into the category.

Review code provided by publisher. Vampire Crawlers launches April 21 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.

The post ‘Vampire Crawlers’ Replicates The Addictive Fun of ‘Vampire Survivors’ in a New Genre [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Kylie Lee Baker, fresh off the success of her phenomenal novel Bat-Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, is concerned with precisely these kinds of things in Japanese Gothic, a time-hopping, vivid saga steeped in both Japanese history and modern true crime. The book earns its title within moments, and quickly sets out to weave a tale both unpredictable and inescapable, so rich with meaning and texture that you’ll get lost in it. 

In present-day Japan, college student Lee Turner has fled his NYU campus life, running away from a crime he can’t quite explain or remember to hide out in the centuries-old home where his father has opted to spend his golden years. Rural, quiet, and hidden by sword ferns, the house seems like the perfect escape from the wider world, but Lee cannot so easily escape himself. Ever since the disappearance of his mother nearly a decade earlier, he’s been troubled by the depth and breadth of his own perception, so flooded with sensation that he drowns his senses out with near-constant sedation. But here in this old country house, something calls to him that he cannot ignore. Reality seems to strain here, not just flickering but sometimes opening up pathways to the past. 

In 1877, Sen is a young woman living in the same house with her destitute family, training under her father to be among the last samurai Japan has to offer. Their way of life has been banned by the Imperial government, but Sen is determined to make her father and her ancestral traditions proud by carrying on the samurai way of life, fighting for it to the death if she has to. At least until the space behind her closet crackles with strange life, revealing a doorway to the future where a strange foreign spirit waits to converse with her, and reveal some truths she might wish she’d never heard.

Yes, this is a novel about a rogue samurai in 19th-century Japan and a present-day runaway college student connecting across time through a single haunted country home, and while that’s a phenomenal hook, it’s only the beginning of the ambitious, sprawling yet intimate narrative Baker seeks to weave here. In the first section of the novel, comprising roughly 80 pages, she is unhurried in her pursuit of the emotional truths behind this compelling scenario, patiently laying out the emotional landscapes through which both Lee and Sen move, and the darkness to which they’re privy.

Lee fixates not just on what he’s done that made him flee America, but on the eventual fate of his mother, which remains a mystery even after she’s been declared legally dead. Meanwhile, Sen lives in mortal peril of her own, remembering the losses her family has suffered amid the fall of the samurai and looking ahead, through her father’s own brutalist view of the world, at the death she must still face if she is to retain her honor. 

What, then, does it mean when these two death-obsessed souls encounter one another? What happens to your own psyche when, to the person staring at you across time, you are nothing but a ghost, or worse, an evil spirit? These are the questions that consume Sen and Lee’s early relationship, but just as she did with Bat-Eater, Baker quickly proves that she’s just getting started.

To give away the directions in which this novel pushes its characters would be to spoil the achingly beautiful, emotionally devastating magic trick Baker’s able to pull off in these pages, but I will tell you that this feels like a book I could have read forever. I was lost in the magic, in the chemistry between these two souls looking for a way to reclaim their own stories even as they’re enrobed in the darkness of their own pasts. Kylie Lee Baker is, quite simply, one of the most important voices in modern horror, and with Japanese Gothic, she has reaffirmed her place as an essential storyteller in the genre. This is one of the best horror books of 2026, and should not be missed.

Japanese Gothic is now available wherever books are sold.

The post ‘Japanese Gothic’ Review – Kylie Lee Baker Weaves a Singularly Beautiful Ghost Story appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Of course, I’d argue that this is an excellent problem to have, especially when these releases are passion projects like Malformation Games’ Resident Evil-inspired Ground Zero.

A survival horror throwback that looks and feels like a long-lost Dreamcast title in the vein of Carrier or RE: Code Veronica, the Swedish-developed Ground Zero is the latest attempt at scratching that familiar genre itch that AAA gaming has long since forgotten.

In the game, you initially take control of South Korean special operative Seo-Yeon as she and her Canadian partner Evan investigate the aftermath of a mysterious meteor impact that devastated Seoul and the surrounding area. The agents soon discover that the impact site isn’t as dead as it seems, with the apocalyptic environment now being home to mutant creatures and a cancerous growth that may soon threaten the entire world.

Classic Survival Horror Gameplay with Modern Twists

In gameplay terms, this setup translates to players exploring a charmingly lo-fi (yet still visually stunning) rendition of South Korea as they fight monsters, solve puzzles, and deal with limited inventory space in an attempt to progress through the area and find out exactly what’s going on. This process is enhanced by modern additions such as upgradeable stats that you improve through a series of color-coded vials, an intensely satisfying critical hit system, and “genome points” that you can trade in for items at certain automated vendors.

The main gameplay loop is still pretty much identical to the survival horror hits of yesteryear, with progression involving plenty of backtracking to item boxes and consulting a detailed map (which automatically updates with icons indicating door functionality and missed items). However, you’ll soon find that the constant running around between previously explored areas means that it’s almost always better to deal with enemies as soon as possible, a situation that removes much of the tactical thinking that makes these games so thrilling in the first place.

In fact, the overall Ground Zero experience is a little on the easy side if you have any prior history with this sort of game – especially if you can master melee combat and keep an eye out for upgrades. That being said, I’d much rather deal with a title that occasionally holds my hand a little too hard than an obtuse nightmare that removes all the fun from the experience. Plus, there are separate difficulty sliders for both combat and puzzle solving, so this shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Pre-Rendered Backgrounds and Immersive Sound Design Contribute to Haunting Atmosphere

Besides, the atmosphere is the real highlight of the game, with Seoul and the surrounding area appropriately feeling more real than Raccoon City or even Silent Hill. The pre-rendered graphics and colorful art style make the devastated area look hauntingly beautiful, and the hand-crafted visuals are enhanced by a highly effective soundtrack that keeps things interesting even after you realize that the plot isn’t going to win any writing awards.

Ground Zero is also a surprisingly lengthy experience, with some of its mechanics being spread a little thin over so much game. While the title never truly wears out its welcome, things get a bit repetitive once you’ve upgraded your character to superhuman levels and understand more or less where the story is going. That being said, not only do the level and monster designs continue to be excellent throughout the entire campaign, but you also get a lot of bang for your buck here.

The title offers multiple playable characters, branching paths, and a plethora of cosmetic upgrades, and there are also alternate game modes containing a plethora of unlockable secrets that will likely have you playing and replaying for much longer than the promised 15-20 hour story mode.

Unfortunately, this embarrassment of genre riches is somewhat marred by a handful of technical issues endemic to ambitious indie projects. While I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs, it’s clear that the title could have gone through another round of testing in order to deal with clunky item hitboxes and unpredictable enemy collision detection (especially where the critical hits are concerned). I also had to reload to an older save file after encountering a glitch where Seo-Yeon became invincible after upgrading her stats.

Final Verdict: Is Ground Zero Worth Playing?

None of these issues kept me from enjoying the title, but it’s a shame that the developers came so close to delivering a masterpiece but ended up fumbling the details. This also applies to the game’s narrative, as the characters are all quite likable (I particularly enjoyed Evan’s charming sense of humor and Seo-Yeon’s badass demeanor), but the story itself is a retread of established survival horror tropes covered up with a South Korean-flavored coat of fresh paint.

The minute-to-minute experience of actually playing through Ground Zero is so entertaining that most of these issues simply melt away. It’s hard to worry about the occasional missed critical hit when you’re thinking about how gnarly the monster designs are and how the pre-rendered backgrounds make Seoul look beautiful in spite of the ongoing apocalypse.

That’s why I’d recommend Ground Zero to both new and veteran fans of classic survival horror, as the game’s unique blend of South Korean style with fleshy homages to the genre titans like Dino Crisis and Alone in the Dark makes it one of the best Resident Evil Clones in years.

Just be sure to play on a higher difficulty if this isn’t your first survival horror rodeo.

Ground Zero is available now on all major consoles and PC.

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Writer/Director Lee Cronin employs all the Evil Dead Rise tools in his arsenal, including a rather strong affinity for the split diopter shot, as he centers another family in a harrowing demonic nightmare. This time, it’s the Cannon family, who, when we meet them, are living in Egypt for work when young Katie Cannon (Emily Mitchell) gets snatched up by a stranger. Yet the senior detective dismisses Katie’s parents, journalist Charlie (Midsommar‘s Jack Reynor) and nurse Larissa (Laia Costa), suspecting them as prime suspects in a disappearance case that spans eight years, at the end of which Katie’s discovered alive (now played by Natalie Grace) but unwell in a nondescript sarcophagus near Aswan.

In the first of many moves that stretch plausibility and suspension of disbelief, Katie’s doctors immediately discharge the catatonic and traumatized girl back to her parents, who have since relocated from Egypt to New Mexico along with Katie’s brother Sebastian (Shylo Molina), younger sister Maud (Billie Roy), and abuela Carmen (Veronica Falcon). It doesn’t take long for Katie to throw the household in disarray with creepy behavior that continues to escalate as Charlie seeks answers regarding her disappearance.

ACK REYNOR as Charlie Cannon and NATALIE GRACE as Katie Cannon in New Line Cinema’s, Atomic Monster’s and Blumhouse’s “LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release.

Logic and rational behavior become nonexistent as the Cannon household descends into, essentially, another Evil Dead movie. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy owes great debt to it as well as The Exorcist, as Katie slowly emerges from her catatonic state, emulating the similar telltale signs of possession that Regan MacNeil exhibited before ramping up to full-blown Deadite mayhem. Imagery plays a far more prevalent role than mythology here, which simply trades Kandarian demons for an Egyptian demon without much depth.

The lack of depth or fleshed out lore and themes becomes glaringly noticeable in a runtime that stretches past the two-hour mark, especially when the story feels more like a series of unconnected horror scenes meant to test your mettle. It’s here where Lee Cronin’s latest has the most fun, unleashing a variety of freakouts, including a toenail clipping moment meant to rival Cronin’s attention-grabbing cheese grater moment from his previous film. But for every inspired bit of gore or cruel carnage unleashed, it’s often offset by illogical choices.

The discovery of a particularly nasty bit of bile and viscera under a rug should trigger alarms in a concerned parent, for example, but simply gets forgotten for a much larger payoff later. The scene does make for a demented bit of fun, but it flattens its characters in the process. Not helping is the Mummy design. Cronin’s approach to the wrappings is novel and yields skin-crawling body horror moments, but SFX Creature Designer Arjen Tuiten evokes a sickly possessed girl that calls his work on Wolf Man to mind, another too-far deviation from source material.

MAY CALAMAWY as detective Dalia Zaki in New Line Cinema’s, Atomic Monster’s and Blumhouse’s “LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release.

The Cannon family isn’t very smart, nor are the parents all that observant or aware of their own children. Finding rooting interest or connecting with any central characters in this story is tricky, making May Calamawy‘s Detective Dalia Zaki, who’s resolve to course correct for her partner in Katie’s disappearance, a revelation. Calamawy’s character isn’t just responsible for driving the story forward in her quest for answers; she quickly becomes the cultural bridge and the trustworthy authority with the determined physical prowess to see The Mummy through to its big exorcism finale. Calamaway isn’t just an engaging and nuanced performer; she fully commits to the grotesequeries Cronin subjects her character to in the demonic confrontation.

Despite its namesake and occasional Egyptian imagery, Cronin’s latest is less a reinvention of the Mummy and more a conventional possession horror movie with an Egyptian twist. One that bears all the familiar earmarks of Evil Dead Rise, complete with an expositionary tape recording and a cameo by Lily Sullivan. Cronin succeeds in topping the viciousness of his previous effort, but sacrifices nearly everything else in the process.

It’s gross and gory in all the right crowd-pleasing ways, but it completely forgets to define its new Mummy, one that instantly breaks its first tenant: this Mummy isn’t even dead, let alone mummified, really. Perhaps it should’ve been titled “Evil Dead Unwrapped” instead.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy releases in theaters and IMAX on April 17, 2026.

The post ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review – A Classic Monster Gets Lost in Demonic Possession Horror Story appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Right off the bat, you can see why Ubisoft decided to publish a small game like this. Every part of the moment-to-moment experience is undeniably slick, with a rock solid game feel that immediately grabs you. I’ve seen it pitched as Devil May Cry meets Returnal, and that’s not entirely far off, at least at first glance.

Morbid Metal is a third person action game with extremely mobile combat, throwing you into small arenas where you slash your way through hordes of enemies with fast-paced melee combat that has an amazingly kinetic feel thanks to great audio-visual effects. Between these encounters, which probably last about a minute at most depending on enemy composition, you’ll find yourself a combination of traversal and light exploration, using your double jump and dash to do some rudimentary platforming.

Meet Flux, Ekku, and Vekta: Character Playstyles in a Post-Apocalyptic Setting

There’s some very light story content that sets up why you’re stuck in this roguelike loop, but at the moment, it doesn’t feel particularly fleshed out. Best I can tell is that you’re an AI in a post-apocalyptic setting that’s being run through a simulation by the mysterious Operator to help eliminate corrupted robots. In parallel to this, an entity known as Eden is trying to help you from the shadows, giving you a safe space known as the Void to hide out between runs. It’s not a ton to go on, but the voice acting is strong enough in the limited dialogue you get that you have a sense of who the Operator and Eden are, hopefully setting up for some solid story content in later versions.

While this doesn’t sound entirely unique, the big hook of the game, aside from how good it feels, is that you have a set of characters that you can instantly swap between in the heat of the battle. There are three in the current build of the game, with a fourth planned to be added before the game hits 1.0. Each of the characters has the same movement options, but their suite of skills and attacks varies. Flux is much faster in their basic attacks, with skills focused on closing the gap between you and your enemies. Ekku is extremely slow with their strikes, but hits like a truck, with skills focused on popping enemies into the air or knocking them off their feet. Vekta relies on projectiles, focusing more on crowd control.

Each of these skills, which can be swapped out for another option during your run, has a cooldown before you can use it again, which means that combat sometimes breaks down to you using each skill, then switching to the next character, using their skills, and so on, as you try to waste time between cooldowns. For me, this had the effect of not really treating each character as their own distinct individual, but rather the option of where you spam a skill from.

Routines and Upgrades: How Progression Works in Morbid Metal

The main issue that leads to this for me is the fact that the encounter variety isn’t really there yet, especially given that you’re going to run through them over and over due to the roguelike structure. The robotic enemies you face fall into pretty basic archetypes – fodder, flyer, heavy – and it doesn’t really feel like there’s a ton of thought required for strategizing how you approach the fight. It seems like I’m starting every single fight in the exact same way, using Flux to zip up to a flyer to take one out, before landing on the ground as Ekku to do a big sweeping slash to try to stun as many of the smaller enemies as I can, before turning my focus to a heavy. Being able to get into a rhythm is a good thing for a fast-action game like this, but it felt like I was getting into the same rhythm every time, which meant I never really had an encounter or run that stood out to me.

After each encounter, you’re given the option to pick from a series of upgrades, called routines. These can either be universal routines that apply to all characters or routines that apply only to specific ones. With how much swapping you do, I found the universal routines to be the ones that I leaned towards the most, especially since these give you options to do a lot of passive damage through things like applying leak (this game’s version of bleed) and deploying drones. While I definitely felt myself getting more powerful during a run, I never really ran across options that changed how I played; instead, they just enhanced how I already played.

Occasionally, you’ll run into optional trial rooms that will give you very specific tests that will provide greater rewards. These can be anything from “survive for a certain amount of time” to “swap characters every five seconds.” While the rewards for these were better, it wasn’t something I was really psyched to actually do. The swapping one, which felt like the most common, felt like a task rather than a fun challenge, even though theoretically it should be highlighting the unique mechanic of the game. Hopefully, these are reconceptualized a little bit as time goes on, because the risk-reward calculation of doing an optional fight like this is a great choice to have to make.

Secrets, Traversal, and Exploration Mechanics

The traversal between arenas helps it not feel like an endless string of repetitive fights, but it’s not the most substantial part of the game. It’s very clear that there’s a limited set of these connecting pieces, and you will quickly see all of them within a few runs. You are rewarded for trying to push the edges of the maps, using your movement mechanics to reach parts of the level to find more upgrades, but once you know which world piece you’re on, it’s pretty easy to remember where to find the barely hidden secrets.

When you are in the Void between runs, you can buy various unlocks with the Void Matter currency you pick up during runs. These can come in the form of upgrades to your basic stats, like max HP and attack power, or additional options that will present themselves throughout your runs. This gives you something to chase while you’re getting better at the game, but I never really got one that made me go “oh hell yeah” while thinking about the possibilities it provided.

Even though you see the same map sections over and over, it’s still really nice to look at. Given the robotic nature of your characters, which all convey so much character in their silhouettes, I was surprised at how the biomes looked. The Void is an abstract cyberspace, but the actual biomes are more man-made temple-like structures in cliffsides and forests. Perhaps it will make a bit more sense once the narrative is fleshed out more in future updates, but for now, it gave me a little bit of tonal whiplash, even if it’s generally pretty. Occasionally, there’s a bit of pop-in that mars the visual splendor, but overall, I didn’t have too many visual bugs, even playing on the Steam Deck.

Both of the biomes have their own boss to fight, and these are good challenges that make up the most difficult portions of the game. Most of the time, deaths in Morbid Metal came after several encounters where I took small amounts of damage that just finally caught up to me, but bosses are enough of a test that you can go in with a full health bar and still get demolished. One of the difficult things with the roguelike structure, as opposed to something like a soulslike, is that if you die to a boss, you’ll have a pretty long run to get back to it to try again, making it take longer to get used to the patterns, but for the most part, they were pretty readable from the jump. The boss fights are a highlight of the game for me, combat-wise, so I hope they take the time to add in as many as they can, allowing for alternates in each biome to keep things interesting.

Morbid Metal Early Access Verdict

Aside from the occasional visual pop-in, I did have a few bugs that popped up here and there. The worst offender put me in a state where my dash would do the animation, but not actually move me through the level at all, removing a key piece of my defensive arsenal. There have also been several times when the camera acted erratically, both with lock-on and without, which is frustrating for a fast-paced game like this one.

I know I’ve had a lot of nitpicks about Morbid Metal, but everything I saw in my time with the Early Access build is a great foundation for something that could turn out to be pretty special. Given how great the core combat feels, I hope they take the time to find ways to add meaningful complexity to both the encounters and the build options, as those are the real secret sauce of any roguelike.

This is exactly what Early Access is for, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Morbid Metal looks like when it hits 1.0 somewhere down the road.

Early Access code provided by publisher. Morbid Metal is currently available on Steam.

The post ‘Morbid Metal’ Has the Means to Succeed as a Hack-and-Slash Roguelike [Early Access Impression] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

I mention this audience, specifically, because watching this new restoration, I couldn’t help but marvel at how surprisingly relevant this film is 46 years after its release.

You can sum up this film, part of the Canadian exploitation cinema boom that also included films like Black Christmas and Terror Train, with grindhouse brevity: A group of survivors from a wrecked cruise ship stumble upon a ghost freighter in the open ocean, only to find that it’s sentient, and it wants to kill all of them. There’s no dancing around the facts of this plot, no waiting until the last minute to reveal that the ship’s haunted and not just home to very devious, very sneaky sailors. From the jump, you are on a supernatural horror ride with very few stops. 

Directed by Alvin Rakoff, a veteran in the chair who wasn’t really known for horror (though he did some disaster movie experience, which is key for this film), Death Ship plays like a film that’s haunted from the very beginning, and to make that clear the first thing we see other than open water is the title ship, looming in silhouette against a delicately painted evening sky. The opening sequence alone forces Rakoff to reckon with many lighting challenges, from shooting the lit portholes of a cruise ship at night from afar to imbuing the Death Ship itself with a sense of personality even before we get inside the hull. 

The 4K restoration preserves all of that, and highlights how surprisingly beautiful this film is, particularly when Rakoff gets the luxury of gliding his camera across the water and shooting an empty ship with a grit that makes me wonder if he’d seen Ridley Scott’s Alien before production began. The print is occasionally jumpy with a missing frame or two, and the original compositions aren’t always the most elegant (there’s a lot of handheld stuff in this movie, not all of it great), but it’s a lovely restoration overall, and really enhances the things about this movie that were always worth preserving for present and future genre fans. 

This is also a disc set that benefits deeply from its commentaries, which help to not just lay out the backstory of making the film, but shine a light on exactly why it feels so vital after all these years. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the film yet, but Death Ship is not just about a haunted ship. It’s about a haunted Nazi ship, and because its protagonists are cruise ship survivors, it becomes metaphorically about how fascism is still out there in the open water, like a predator, waiting to find unwitting, distracted new prey.

That might not be the most obvious element of the film at first glance, but it’s undeniably a key piece of its lingering appeal, and the commentary by film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson will highlight this thematic oomph in beautiful ways that’ll forever shift the way you see the film. If you want to see the film from the perspective of the Canadian film industry and beyond at the time, the commentary by Paul Corupe and Jason Pichonsky, both experts on the subject, adds that context. Together, these two tracks tell the story of a film that has grown from exploitation horror fodder to a cult classic with unexpected dimensions still surfacing like wreckage in an ocean.

If you’re a collector and you don’t want to miss this disk, I don’t blame you, but if you’re a newcomer to the world of physical media and exploitation horror of the 1970s and 1980s, I think you especially might want to give this film a try.

Death Ship is available from Kino Lorber on April 14.

The post ‘Death Ship’ 4K UHD Review: A Canucksploitation Classic Gets a Glow-Up appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

An extended opening sequence in first-person perspective introduces a timid, asthmatic man (Kazunari Ninomiya) traveling on the subway. He keeps to himself, even as he witnesses a mother being berated by a man over her baby’s crying. As he leaves the train, he receives a call from his ex-girlfriend; she’s pregnant and unsure whether to keep it. Initially paralyzed by indecision, fear, and an asthma attack, the man agrees to meet her at the hospital. But when he attempts to exit the station, he instead finds himself trapped in a sterile backroom purgatory.

Like the game, the rules for the Lost Man are simple: scour the endlessly looping hallway for anomalies. If spotted, turn back immediately. If no anomalies, proceed. If the Lost Man can make eight successful loops, escape awaits.

Director Genki Kawamura gets inventive through simplicity. The brightly lit, pristine white tiled corridor is sparse in detail, ensuring both the Lost Man and the audience can keep track when it comes to spotting anomalies. It’s here where Exit 8 comes closest to capturing the essence of gaming, as much of the film’s fun comes from scouring for clues, picking up on subtle shifts in décor before the characters. In some instances, audiences can note the difference that onscreen characters miss entirely, instilling dread for the inevitable consequence of failure. And failure gets increasingly bizarre and cosmic.

It’s also here where Genki Kawamura adds complexity by toying with the narrative structure, weaving in nonlinear perspectives of the eerie grinning “walking man” (Yamato Kochi) and “the boy” (Kotone Hanase), touching on the prominent theme of guilt. It all ensures that Exit 8 is as unpredictable as it is meticulously crafted.

But the more the Lost Man attempts to find his way out of this twisted Möbius strip, the more the threadbare plotting begins to drag down the dizzying mind trap of horrors. The Lost Man’s arc is entirely driven by his indecision over whether to have the baby or abort, and once the boy fully enters the equation, it loses all nuance to the point of feeling more didactic in its pro-life messaging. That we never get a sense of who the Lost Man is beyond his panicked indecision and paralyzing fears means that the emotional stakes feel too low, to the point where the climax loses a lot of momentum.

Still, what Exit 8 lacks in storytelling, it makes up for in endless creativity. Kazunari Ninomiya capably navigates the physicality of his character’s cowardice and fear, without ever veering into unlikable territory. But the true magic of Exit 8 lies with its impressive ability to recreate the feeling of playing a game, as you find yourself scouring the walls, floors, and ceilings of a cosmic backroom hallway to assist the Lost Man in his search for anomalies. Even when the Lost Man’s story is easy to surmise in advance, there’s no predicting the aural and psychological terrors that await those trapped in Exit 8’s bizarre limbo.

Exit 8 screened at TIFF and releases in theaters on April 10, 2026.

Editor’s Note: This TIFF review was originally published on September 8, 2025.

The post ‘Exit 8’ Review – Liminal Looping Horror Has Endless Creativity But Minimal Plot appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Thrash wastes not a second of its runtime, diving in immediately as the cozy town of Annieville, South Carolina, races to evacuate and brace for the incoming Category 5 hurricane mere hours from landfall. At the forefront of the scurrying residents are the agoraphobic 18-year-old Dakota Lewis (Whitney Peak), still reeling from the loss of her mother, and Lisa Fields (Phoebe Dynevor), an expectant mother held up by her job.

There are also orphaned Olson siblings Ron (Stacy Clausen, Leviticus), Dee (Alyla Browne, Sting), and Will (Dante Ubaldi), who are attempting to cope with their mistreatment by foster dad Billy (Matt Nable) as the flood waters rapidly rise. All quickly discover that the hurricane also swept in a shiver of aggressive bull sharks, along with a great white being tracked by marine biologist Dr. Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou).

Thrash. (L-R) Alyla Browne as Dee, Dante Ubaldi as Will and Stacy Clausen as Ron in Thrash. Cr. Netflix © 2026.

After succinct introductions, Wirkola gets right to the goods, plunging Annieville into debris-filled waters and chumming up shark-infested waters with a tanker truck filled with meat paste. From there, Thrash tracks its characters to a hellish night of survival as they’re all trapped in their respective corners of town by the elements and vicious predators. But characters are a distant secondary to spectacle in Thrash. 

The protagonists contending with personal dilemmas and nature’s threats are never fleshed out beyond their initial defining features and archetypes. They’re also prone to bad dialogue and cheeky one-liners, with Hounsou relegated to exposition deliverer. Still, Peak and Dynevor bring enough affable charm and steely nerve to instill rooting interest and keep us engaged, while Clausen and Browne manage to ground their wacky subplot with genuine underdog pathos, and with a more authentic southern drawl than most would endeavor.

Of course, the characters aren’t the selling point here, but the shark feeding frenzy amidst a Category 5 storm so powerful it earns wisecracks about the need for a Category 6 distinction. It’s here where Thrash truly impresses. Production designer David Ingram (“Raised by Wolves”, Crazy Rich Asians) crafts an impressive array of practical set pieces, particularly a knockout town square that serves as center stage for aquatic action and rising water levels. Wirkola stages the water-soaked action with an appropriate level of scale and blends VFX with practical and effective ways. The sharks not only look great, but Wirkola smartly avoids employing them as anything but opportunistic predators on the constant prowl.

Thrash. Phoebe Dynevor as Lisa in Thrash. Cr. Netflix © 2026.

It’s Wirkola’s amused sense of adventure and the stunning craftsmanship that elevate Thrash beyond its straightforward disaster movie meets shark thriller plotting. There are no real surprises here at all. It’s easy to predict who’s marked for shark bait and who will survive, though at least there’s no shortage of fodder. It’s also a bit restrained for a Wirkola film; the impulses to embrace the preposterousness of the shark carnage are often damped down by the serious environmental messaging. The tonal clashes prevent Thrash from reaching its full zany potential.

Still, there’s just enough of Wirkola’s trademark wacky weirdness to entertain and get Thrash to its over-the-top finish line. Netflix’s newest shark thriller may not stand out in an ever-crowded sea of shark horror movies, but it gets the job done.

Thrash is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Thrash’ Review – Tommy Wirkola’s Fun Shark Horror At Odds With Serious Eco-Thriller appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

That’s why films like Rec opt for a different kind of horror experience altogether despite the familiar setup, and more recent projects like Butterfly Kisses choose to confront the stick-figure-shaped elephant in the room directly by acknowledging their cinematic inspirations in the narrative itself.

Markian Tarasiuk’s Hunting Matthew Nichols is a great example of this latter strategy, with the Canadian mockumentary (which was a big hit at this year’s edition of San Francisco’s Unnamed Footage Festival) actively questioning what it means to be a modern-day successor to The Blair Witch Project while also managing to incorporate these decidedly meta anxieties into a story about loss and grief.

In this authentic-looking feature, we follow a documentary crew led by Tarasiuk himself as they investigate the 2001 disappearance of amateur filmmaker Matthew Nichols in an attempt to bring closure to Mathew’s sister Tara (Miranda MacDougall). Unfortunately, this true crime investigation leads to Tara discovering more than she bargained for when the team realizes that this cold case may very well be connected to a terrible force lurking deep within the eerie woods of Vancouver Island.

Presentation-wise, Tarasiuk really knocked it out of the park with the film’s Netflix-like visuals and structure, as well as a series of surprisingly convincing interviews with an assortment of memorable locals. From creepy time-lapse footage to the occasional use of animation in lieu of boring exposition, Hunting Matthew Nichols feels like a genuine attempt at a high-profile documentary throughout most of its runtime – especially when interviewees are allowed to be a little idiosyncratic.

Things get a little less authentic once we get to the more traditional found footage portions of the flick, however, as some of the trope-heavy scripted moments (which are mostly relegated to conversations within the crew) are far less believable than the familiar deluge of talking heads conveying pieces of a larger narrative puzzle. Thankfully, these more over-the-top moments are easy to forgive when you realize that they exist in service of the film’s metatextual layer as a story about the very nature of found footage.

Not only does a big part of the plot involve Tara coming across a lost tape shot by her brother, but the film also establishes that Matthew himself was a huge fan of The Blair Witch Project. The young man’s love of the film and his creative desire to produce something equally spooky is what ultimately led him and his native friend Jordan to venture off into the woods, never to be seen again.

While Hunting Matthew Nichols doesn’t quite explore this idea of unfiction having real-life consequences as deeply as I would have liked, especially now that we know how even the silliest of creepypastas can lead to real-world tragedies, I appreciate how the filmmakers made a point of explaining that the movie takes place in our reality where most people are aware of the concept of a found footage production.

On that note, you could even consider the flick to be something of an unofficial sequel to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s lo-fi opus, though it’s a shame that the main characters here aren’t quite as iconic as Heather and company from the 1999 film. That being said, Miranda MacDougall does a great job of selling her character’s long-gestating grief and obsession.

There are plenty of original scares to be found here as well, and I’m always in favor of Canadian storytellers incorporating more native folklore into scary movies. While I’m fairly certain that the local legend of a cannibal pioneer was made up for the film in much the same way that Kedward was invented for The Blair Witch Project, the bizarre VHS footage and the climactic “encounter” in the woods still feel terrifyingly real.

I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but suffice to say that Tarasiuk makes great use of light and shadow during the flick’s final moments, and I love how he shies away from showing too much of Mathew’s tapes and focuses instead on our main character’s horrified reactions.

Hunting Matthew Nichols likely won’t enjoy the same staying power as its retro inspirations, but it doesn’t really have to. Despite some iffy performances and a general sense of deja vu, the film works well enough as a meta commentary on why we still insist on searching for answers in the woods even after so many other scary movies have explained to us why that’s a bad idea. That’s why I’d recommend this indie gem to fans of slow-burning supernatural terror everywhere – as well as true crime enthusiasts who wish that missing persons cases could come with a side of paranormal frights.

Hunting Matthew Nichols releases in theaters on April 10.

The post ‘Hunting Matthew Nichols’ Review – A Familiar Yet Effective Homage to ‘The Blair Witch Project’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Director/Co-writer Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer/producer Isa Mazzei forgo the traditional remake route in their contemporary update of Faces of Death and instead build a narrative feature around the original’s notoriety and controversial imagery to explore digital voyeurism and the terminally online desensitization to violence. Morbid curiosity fuels their polished cat-and-mouse horror thriller, one that poses unsettling questions through its provocative but underdeveloped approach. 

That starts with Barbie Farreira‘s Margot Romero, a content moderator for a YouTube-like platform, Kino. She’s a senior employee fully numbed to the graphic videos that cross her desk, demonstrated by the way she dismisses an informative Narcan video but quickly gives a pass to graphic violence. Never mind that her own brush with internet infamy further eroded her morality on digital content. That changes when she comes across an apparent execution clip that Margot realizes, with the help of her horror-obsessed roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday), recreates a snuff scene from the original Faces of Death. Only this time, it’s real.

Goldhaber and Mazzei frontload Faces of Death with a chilling depiction of a cynical world where violence has been commodified for bite-sized entertainment, and its insidious ripple effects on society at large. That’s reflected not just in its flawed, complicated protagonist, but in everyone around her, from her apathetic boss Josh (Jermaine Fowler) to her jaded co-worker (Charli XCX), who vocally delights at gore videos while puffing on her vape over breaks. The first half also sets up a collision path for Margot and the Faces of Death-inspired killer Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery), challenging Margot’s world-weary, hardened nature as she’s further entangled in the serial killer’s crosshairs.

From there, Faces of Death 2026 descends into a standard cat-and-mouse chase between the killer and his amateur adversary, though one terminally online enough to be savvy to his pursuits. Goldhaber evokes the grimy feel of the original with grainy, gorgeous 35mm photography, but leans even harder into vibrant Giallo influences. Which is to say that this is easily the most handsomely shot, well-crafted film of the entire franchise. But it’s also a bit empty in terms of shock or suspense.

While Arthur revels in his work and his affinity for staging mannequins in his grisly recreations is striking, the new Faces of Death never comes close to invoking the discomforting, forbidden danger of the original movie. As intense as Dacre Montgomery’s committed performance is, the action-heavy back half fails to generate scares as it abandons introspective themes altogether for an underwhelming climax.

FACES OF DEATH, an Independent Film Company and Shudder release. Photo courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder.

Not helping is that, for all that Margot endures, some by her own poor decision-making, Faces of Death doesn’t draw any conclusive answers from its themes. Instead, Goldhaber and Mazzei are more fascinated by the way the digital age and social media have shaped society and our morbid fascination with violence. It’s just abandoned halfway through to deliver a by-the-numbers serial killer thriller, one that’s never as transgressive or gory enough to draw the ire of censors.

Smart commentary and a clever approach get Faces of Death off to a strong start, but it lacks the conviction to see its bolder ideas through to its forgettable and far too conventional end. Whereas watching the 1978 film felt like a rite of passage, this update superficially wades into ideas already covered more chillingly in films like Red Rooms.

Faces of Death releases in theaters on April 10, 2026.

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When she goes searching for more answers, she only attracts the attention of a certain black-gloved, pink-masked killer who doesn’t appreciate her prying.

Like Open Water and Inland Empire, City Wide Fever was shot using a Sony DSR-PD150. It’s a quirky choice, but the grungy, SOV-esque route also leads to a more apt and effective atmosphere for the increasingly delirious story. Other filmmakers today would use the 4:3 ratio and then call it a day, yet Heaps went that extra mile with the retro technical aspects. His efforts elevate an otherwise well-trodden concept.

It’s only a matter of time before you, too, are falling down the rabbit hole with the main character. That journey is ultimately one fraught with severity and frenzy, but in the meantime, Heaps keeps things somewhat light and even a bit fun. Keep in mind, a sense of foreboding is glued to just about everything and everyone on screen, regardless of any levity involved. Onur Tukel’s naturally humorous presence alone, or a couple of well-placed jokes, can’t erase the sinister quality of this story.

Carolyn Farina and Diletta Guglielmi in City Wide Fever.

Where City Wide Fever doesn’t quite excel is, surprisingly, its horror parts. Heaps has a good grasp on stage-setting and tension-building, but whenever it comes time for the killer to act on his or her impulses, the following sequences are brief and underwhelming. With this being a movie about the giallo genre, you would be right to want more of the red stuff to go with that pink-purple aesthetic. Alas, that’s not the case here, as the movie’s real strength is, apart from its overall presentation, a heady and intriguing story. Gore buffs will have to look to the classics for more over-the-top and sanguinary set-pieces.

Knowing full well how giallo movies don’t always possess the most sound logic, or they are simply weird, City Wide Fever throws in these certain elements that may lead to confusion. Such as, why are two different actors playing the same character? Nancy Kimball suddenly portraying Sam in a few scenes is quite odd, but perhaps Heaps is really referencing a specific Luis Buñuel movie with that decision.

Then there are moments where the story almost convinces you that Barresi was indeed real, thanks to some well-done reality-bending. On top of the home movie-like approach, actors portray themselves, albeit fictitiously. Seeing the likes of Larry Fessenden and Rutanya Alda here, feeding into the myth of Barresi, might have you wondering if Heaps really did dig up a bona fide yet long-lost filmmaker and then fabricated a mystery about him.

To Heaps’ credit, this isn’t just a case of throwback filmmaking that’s been achieved with contemporary technology; the director used era-authentic equipment to help create this striking and nostalgic piece of modern horror. The end result is a movie that, despite all appearances, doesn’t entirely escape convention, but it’s also teeming with enough verve and style to make it feel fresh.

City Wide Fever screens in Alamo Drafthouse venues on April 15th. It’s also now available from Vinegar Syndrome.

Poster for City Wide Fever.

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But despite the struggles that went into making and releasing it, Mimic is also still an entertaining movie, as well as a fascinating peek into the filmmaker Del Toro would become in the years that followed. Looking at it now, you can see thematic and visual clues leading the way to Blade II, Hellboy, and yes, even 2025’s Frankenstein. Compromised or not, it’s a film that showcases a young director with a genuine vision, and that’s never been clearer than in the new 4K UHD restoration released this spring by Kino Lorber Studio Classics.

The new 4K edition, approved by Del Toro himself and offering both theatrical and director’s cuts in a single package, preserves so much of what the original film got right, chiefly the visual flair of the young filmmaker and the unsettling, insectile soundscape. Mimic is one of those movies I, and a lot of other horror fans, first saw on VHS or early DVD, in the days before it was remastered or even recut with a few extra minutes of footage. Like Alien before it, it’s a film that benefitted from those non-HD days, because the shadows engineered by Del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen are so deep, so foreboding, and so important to obscuring key details until it’s time to reveal them.

Happily, the new 4K preserves that experience, handling Del Toro’s painterly chiaroscuro with grace. There are two shots in particular that really stuck out to me as proof that the Kino Lorber team overseeing this release got it right. The first comes early in the film, when a long corridor turned into a makeshift hospital illuminates dozens of draped beds like paper lanterns in a long night. It’s arguably the most beautiful shot in the entire film, and it loses none of its ability to inspire awe at Del Toro’s early directorial prowess. It’s just gorgeous, but that doesn’t just apply to the big shots.

In the middle of the film, when Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) and Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam) are having an intense discussion in their apartment, Del Toro’s reliance on the warm glow of table lamps still layers light and shadow in gorgeous ways. Beyond that, as the characters move into the sewers and abandoned subway tunnels to seek out the horrifying threat below, the film’s deep, inky blacks and low-light grain also make it through intact, creating an experience that’s not all that far removed from seeing a pristine 35mm print. Del Toro’s snow-capped, empty see-saws and rain-splattered alleys remain, and because they’re so well-preserved, you can see the filmmaker he’d become.

As for the special features for this release, there are many, but most of them are holdovers from past releases, including the original director’s cut drop. Del Toro’s director’s cut commentary is here, as are various featurettes and even the original gag reel. The lone newcomer for this package is a commentary by two film scholars, Arne Venema and Stefan Hammond, who approach the theatrical cut of Mimic with enthusiasm and a conversational tone that makes you feel like you’re watching the film with friends. They dig into the making of the movie, why Del Toro’s relationship with it has been so rocky over the years, and of course, how the film shaped his next career moves, from The Devil’s Backbone to his later comic book efforts.

While I would have liked to see a little more extra analysis and retrospective insight thrown into this package, overall, this Mimic set is still a must for Del Toro completists and newcomers to the film who want to see why it retains such a hold on a subset of the genre fandom. It’s a fascinating piece of what made Guillermo del Toro the filmmaker he is today, and thanks to a restoration, it’s never looked better.

Mimic 4K UHD is now available from Kino Lorber Studio Classics.

The post ‘Mimic’ 4K UHD Review: Guillermo del Toro’s First English-Language Film Has Never Looked Better appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The best part about thinking of cinema in these relative terms is that it then becomes possible to enjoy no-budget features in all of their lo-fi glory while still pointing out the narrative elements that don’t work regardless of production value or technical prowess. However, things aren’t always so simple, and I was reminded of this while watching Jake C. Young’s indie oddity Souls Chapel. While the film’s shockingly low budget and rushed production harken back to shot-on-VHS passion projects from the 90s (as well as internet videos shot by LARPers wanting to immortalize their imaginary exploits), I can actually understand why some audiences might be put off by these limitations.

That being said, though I can’t blame anyone for being unable to look past dollar-store Halloween decorations being passed off as props and bizarre acting choices that would be considered questionable even for fans of community theater, I genuinely think that there’s some interesting filmmaking going on in the cursed bowels of Souls Chapel.

Inspired by local legends about Kentucky’s real-life Soules Chapel (an aging church that was abandoned after the Civil War and is now said to be one of the most haunted locations in the United States), Young’s film is a period piece following a familiar-looking drifter (played by Young himself) as he becomes entangled in a supernatural mystery involving an assortment of creepy locals interested in the church’s history. Of course, as the movie goes on, we soon realize that the “period setting” being emulated here is actually an alternate reality inspired by Steampunk, Spaghetti Westerns, and classic horror.

Right off the bat, the biggest influence here appears to come from Sergio Leone’s work, with Young’s poncho-wearing protagonist obviously serving as a stand-in for Clint Eastwood’s iconic “Man with No Name.” This makes a lot of sense, as Jake is actually related to Eastwood and aims to keep the family legacy alive through his own genre-bending projects. That being said, the film quickly shifts from the epic western aesthetic into a more intimate setting as Jake’s character seeks shelter from the snow and becomes trapped in the titular chapel.

Unfortunately, this is where budgetary issues begin to affect the viewing experience, with hastily improvised props and laughable weapon effects not only distracting audiences from the actual story being told while also failing to immerse viewers in an otherworldly timeline. The lack of proper sets even hinders the film’s internal logic, as this humble building doesn’t seem large enough for our main character to hide from his would-be captors. Don’t even get me started on the basement sequence where the filmmakers pretend that this (decidedly modern and well-lit) space is actually a dark labyrinth.

While I’d argue that most of Souls Chapel’s blunders are endearing in much the same way as visible strings on UFO models can be entertaining in a Roger Corman production, it’s hard to justify some of these creative decisions when the story could easily have been reworked into something much less difficult to shoot. It’s often said that, when working with microbudget filmmaking, the script should adjust itself to the limitations of the production instead of the other way around, and that’s why I find it odd that Jake didn’t make things easier for himself here.

I can sympathize with wanting to stay true to a creative vision, but there’s no concrete reason why this story couldn’t have been told as a neo-western set in the modern day. Think about it: a descendant of the Man with No Name (still wearing an antique poncho) happens upon a haunted chapel and becomes trapped inside with its ghostly denizens. This would have eliminated the need to cover up anachronistic details while also giving the narrative more creative leeway.

That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of creativity on display here. From a couple of effective scares to an overarching structure that reminds me of the best parts of the most recent Hellboy adaptation, there’s plenty to like about this indie experiment if you can get past the cheap presentation. Hell, I’d even argue that the uneven production helps to add some much-needed humor into the mix.

That’s why I’d still recommend Souls Chapel to cinephiles who don’t mind having to wade through poorly crafted production design and campy acting in order to reach an interesting story. The actual telling of this tale may not be as smooth as it could have been (and I wish the film had either leaned further into its oddball Steampunk inspirations or omitted this detail entirely), but Jake’s heart is definitely in the right place.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see what kind of genre mashup this team can come up with next – especially if there’s a bigger budget involved.

Souls Chapel is available now on Digital and DVD.

The post ‘Souls Chapel’ Review – Steampunk and Spaghetti Westerns Collide in DIY Horror Western appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Sarafina, the new historical horror novel from genre mainstay Philip Fracassi, is an example of this latter joy. It begins somewhere familiar, even predictable, and nestles the reader happily into a sense of cozy familiarity. Then, just when you think you’ve arrived at the place you always expected, the story takes flight, and you’re left breathlessly turning pages to see where it goes next. 

Set in 1862 in the midst of heavy fighting during the American Civil War, the book follows three brothers – Ethan, Mason, and Archie – as they desert the Confederate Army right in the middle of the Battle of Shiloh. Determined to survive rather than die fighting someone else’s war, the men flee through the wilderness, starving, wounded, and filthy, until they miraculously happen upon a house on the other side of an idyllic creek. There, a kind woman named Sarafina offers to care for them, even shield them from the Confederate Home Guard, which hopes to arrest them. But this house, with its massive guard dogs and stream that seems to run in all directions at once, is more than a simple refuge, and Sarafina’s hiding secrets threaten the brothers’ hopes of ever seeing their family again. 

There are a lot of narrative risks cleverly nestled in this propulsive narrative. Much of the early pages are devoted to the trio of brothers simply fighting to survive through confrontations, starvation, and the elements, putting us as readers in the position of empathizing with men on the losing side of a treasonous war. Fracassi deals with this by, quite smartly, placing us in Ethan’s head, framing the narrative as an extended letter home to his twin sister, Ellie. Ellie also makes appearances along the way, writing letters of her own to her lost brother, waiting for word of survival or death. Their struggle becomes universal, particularly as Ethan reckons with the possibility that he and his brothers may not actually be good people, and may in fact be on the path to something worse.

When Sarafina enters the picture, you get the sense that Fracassi is playing in some kind of demented, historical fiction Hansel & Gretel territory, and he is, but not in the way you think. The formula is there, but through careful plotting and evocative first-person prose, Sarafina evades easy classification the deeper you get into the narrative. Yes, this is the story of a group of lost people taking refuge in a mysterious, almost otherworldly house in the middle of the woods, but it’s not going to go the way you think.

The longer the brothers stay, the more Ethan sees his siblings changing, and the more Sarafina and her mysterious surrogate son Titus start to trust him with their own secrets. Soon, it’s no longer a simple matter of survival horror. It’s about more than just remaining intact. It’s about what happens when the world you know starts to change, and the makeup of your own soul changes along with it. It would be easy for the Civil War narrative, particularly the Confederate perspective, to serve as mere window dressing, a layer of intrigue to get readers in the door, but Fracassi refuses to stop there. What begins as an act of desertion from a lost cause soon evolves into a meditation on good, evil, and our place in a world that’s packed with secrets we cannot fully understand without risking our own sanity. 

With Sarafina, Philip Fracassi has joined the ranks of fellow authors like Daniel Kraus, Isabel Canas, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia as a first-rate practitioner of historical horror, blending in dark fairy tales and even religious mythology along the way. This is a transportive, vivid book that’s very hard to put down, and reaffirms Fracassi’s place as one of horror’s essential modern storytellers.

Sarafina is available now from CLASH Books.

The post ‘Sarafina’ Review – Philip Fracassi’s Latest is Immersive Historical Horror appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

That’s the question that opens Mermaid, the new film from writer/director Tyler Cornack, and while it’s a straightforward way to open a movie, this is also a story brave enough to keep you guessing beyond the confines of its hook. Dark, funny, and deeply strange, this is one of those movies that defies easy classification at every turn, and despite its often brutal conclusions, finds a way to infuse its entire runtime with surprising, irresistible warmth. 

Doug (Johnny Pemberton) can’t get it together. When we meet him, he’s been fired from a thankless gig maintaining the giant aquariums at a Florida strip club, he’s got a pill habit he can’t seem to shake, and he’s a constant disappointment to his daughter (Devyn McDowell), her mother (Julia Valentine Larson), and her stepdad, Keith (Kevin Nealon). It’s gotten so bad that Keith is willing to loan Doug money just to make sure his daughter gets a birthday gift from her real father, but just as Doug seems to grasp the precariousness of that particular situation, another falls in his lap. 

A chance discovery during a moment of peak depression means that Doug is suddenly playing host to an injured mermaid – the kind with gills and jagged teeth and fishy skin, not the kind from Disney movies – in his bathtub. Fascinated and instantly drawn to the creature, he decides to name her Destiny, and devotes himself to caring for her even as those around him are convinced it’s all just part of his never-ending downward spiral. But the deeper Doug gets into his new life, the more he risks exposing Destiny to dark forces, like a seedy local kingpin (Robert Patrick) ready to sell his find to the highest bidder. 

Cornack’s film opens with a declaration that it’s “a love letter” to the state of Florida, with all the strangeness and transgression and scenic beauty that implies. Anyone who’s ever spent time in the Sunshine State can see that it’s a sincere mission. Cornack and cinematographer Joel Lavold capture the state’s ability to embroil you in relentless, bright blue skies punctuated by periods of intense heat, contrasting almost immediately with cool ocean breezes and sudden rain showers. It’s an environment of often staggering beauty and meteorological chaos, and that carries over into the entire tone of the film, a hybrid of comedy, crime, and creature feature horror that swerves and pivots like a runaway speedboat. 

And yet, even as the plot careens in various directions that’ll drop your jaw, Mermaid also develops into a strange hangout movie, thanks in no small part to Pemberton’s performance. In the horror world, we’re used to seeing characters gain new vigor when a supernatural incursion on their lives forces them to rethink everything, but Pemberton’s Doug does not change overnight. Through dialogue, subtle expressiveness, and the kind of dazed fascination that punctuates so many slacker comedies, Pemberton makes Doug into a sympathetic character and an infuriating one at the same time. It’s a tough tonal dance, but he makes it work, and he’s backed up by a cavalcade of born scene stealers, chief among them Patrick and Nealon, who are clearly having a blast as supporting players in this dirtbag Creature From the Black Lagoon. 

Mermaid won me over through the sheer ambition of its shifting tones and madcap plotting, as well as wonderful creature makeup and practical gore effects. It’s a bit sloppy around the edges, particularly when it attempts to steer between moments of earnest emotion and unhinged comedic chaos, but most of the time it’s just so beautifully singular that you barely notice it might be slightly overlong or a bit too reliant on its melancholic foundations. By the end, Cornack and company have, warts and all, achieved something that feels like The Shape of Water by way of Sean Baker, and that’s the kind of thing you have to see to believe.

Mermaid opens in select theaters April 8.

The post ‘Mermaid’ Review – A Creature Feature Comedy with Bite and Heart appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The added immersion provided by actually being able to explore haunted houses and abandoned asylums makes detective work an incredibly underrated  mechanic in horror games, though it takes a skilled developer to make these titles feel like more than mere walking simulators with a spooky coat of paint. That’s why I was so interested in Daedalic’s first-person experiment The Occultist, a brand-new gothic horror title where the protagonist’s mediumistic gifts are used to solve a multi-generational mystery.

In the game, players take on the role of paranormal investigator and spiritual medium Alan Rebels (played by Doug Cockle, better known as the definitive voice of Geralt of Rivia) as he visits Godstone Island in order to search for his missing father. With the help of his trusty mystical pendulum, Alan soon discovers that the island was once home to a secretive cult that conducted horrific experiments which led to the sudden death of the settlement’s entire population. Now, Alan must unravel the mystery behind his father’s connection to the cult, all the while interacting with the ghostly specters that still wander these abandoned streets.

Memorable ghosts, level designs, and mechanics keep The Occultist engaging

In gameplay terms, this means rummaging through dilapidated farmhouses and orphanages as you collect items, solve puzzles and use your pendulum to activate mystical powers. At first, you’ll only be able use the pendulum to see clues from beyond this plane of existence, but the strange little trinket eventually allows you to turn back time, take control of rats and even summon a spectral raven in order to help you navigate the secrets of Godstone. Along the way, players will also encounter a series of (mostly) undefeatable enemies that you have to hide from while exploring certain locations.

In general, this makes for an entertaining gameplay loop as you move from area to area, convincing ghosts to help you out and receiving new nuggets of information about the island’s sordid history. It may not be quite as action-packed as something like Silent Hill F or even Resident Evil: Requiem, but the more methodical pace helps Daedelic’s latest release to firmly establish mood and atmosphere – two of the game’s greatest assets.

From the impeccable lighting effects to the memorable monster and level designs, The Occultist excels at immersing players in an appropriately gothic tone that’s just as visually impressive as it is scary. Pepe Herrero’s cinematic soundtrack also does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to ambience, especially when combined with Doug Cockle’s sultry narration.

Thankfully, there’s a lot more to the title than its charming presentation, as the developers went to great efforts in order to keep exploration from ever getting too repetitive. From cinematic moments where Alan has to chase down spirits using his powers to unexpected boss fights where you have to use the environment against your overpowered enemies, The Occultist does a great job of varying gameplay just enough so that it never feels like this story would have been better told as a book or film.

However, it’s clear that the developers could have used a bit more time to iron out some of the mechanical kinks here. Despite generally looking like a AAA experience, The Occultist occasionally stumbles due to frustrating technical issues like janky traversal, unpredictable collision detection as well as unfair puzzles that can only be solved if you interact with items from a pixel-perfect angle.

For instance, I could never get the hang of the balancing mini-game that you use to get across narrow platforms (though the developers have assured me that this feature will soon be patched), and some of the drawing/painting puzzles are particularly annoying about detecting whether or not you’ve doodled the correct pattern.

The Occultist punches above its graphics weight

There are occasional graphical hiccups as well, though I suspect that most of these surface-level issues will be patched out by the time the game is released, and none of the programming mishaps were enough to kept me from successfully completing the game. In fact, I’m still thoroughly impressed by how expensive the title feels despite its indie origins.

Of course, it’s ultimately the unexpectedly emotional story that makes The Occultist worth playing, as I was thoroughly invested in Alan’s exploration of his father’s past and how the island’s inhabitants justified their cruelty to children. It also helps that the whole thing feels a lot like an alternate universe Witcher yarn, especially once you get in the groove of banishing phantoms and learning about their unfinished business.

The Occultist may not reinvent the Survival Horror wheel, but it’s still one hell of a spooky and entertaining ride through all of our favorite gothic horror tropes. From haunted dolls to disturbing freakshow attractions, there’s something here for every kind of horror fan, and that’s why I recommend this surprisingly poignant tale of intergenerational trauma and learning to let go of the past.

That being said, I’d also love to see a sequel where Alan takes on another supernatural case, now armed with a fully upgraded Pendulum from the very beginning…

The Occultist will be available on Steam, PS5 and XBox Series X on April 8, 2026.

The post ‘The Occultist’ Immerses You in a Classic Paranormal Investigation [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It was edgy, angry anarchy that’s now just the status quo. With two spin-offs and two more on the way, The Boys has increasingly resembled the very thing that it was lampooning. And yet, despite its baggage and diminishing returns, it still punches above its weight – and below the belt – and proves itself as the unmissable series that helped Amazon Prime Video solidify its standing in the streaming wars. 

The final season is rich in exaggerated action, character-driven drama, and superpowered spectacles. It gives its bloodthirsty audience everything they could want and plenty of things they’d never imagine. However, behind The Boys’ infinite machismo and thinly-veiled critique of America, this season dares to dig deeper and unpack what’s left when those flashy superpowers are gone.

As The Boys says goodbye to its extreme world, it explores whether a little carnage and death are sometimes worth it. If the end can ever truly justify the means, or is just an extended exercise in hypocrisy. The Boys celebrates courage, values, and the importance of family – both found and real. There’s also a whole lot of hyperbolized bloodshed and shocking displays of what the fuck that have become The Boys’ specialty.

Eric Kripke and his team deserve credit for ending the series after five seasons at a point where it still has something to say. It’s very easy to picture The Boys continuing indefinitely for several more seasons and completely draining itself of any remaining cultural cache. The sheer fact that this is the final season helps these concluding eight episodes hit extra hard and make a strong final statement that’s likely to stick with the audience more than any Herogasm massacre or cinematic universe satire. 

The Boys’ final season also benefits from a very clear mission that’s set up from its start and doesn’t unnecessarily overcomplicate its storytelling. There is still the occasional pacing problem, but not to the same extent as The Boys’ previous two seasons. These episodes don’t waste time and make sure that everyone has something to do and contributes to the greater whole, which is also something that’s previously been lacking. The titular team of outcasts still experiences their share of relationship problems and interpersonal drama. However, they also truly function as a team, which is paramount as The Boys comes to a close and attempts to rapidly underline all its themes. 

The Boys has never been a series that struggles to create over-the-top action setpieces, and some of the series’ most entertaining work is on display in these final episodes. The season kicks off with an excellent heist that subverts expectations and keeps its audience guessing, while still greedily indulging in extensive gore and cathartic conflict.

Granted, there are several moments this season that go a little too far with The Boys’ signature shock value creature comforts. There’s a digger supe who utilizes his power through an unusual orifice. Prehensile gonads become a valuable combat tool. There’s lava ejaculate and mountain pornography. Everything is just a little extra, which can work, but also elicits plenty of eye rolls when these instincts aren’t reined in.

It’s also become increasingly difficult for The Boys to parody and poke fun at a world that feels like a caricature of itself. Subtlety has always been The Boys’ Kryptonite, and this season doesn’t hold back when it comes to chilling real-world parallels and Homelander’s ludicrous attempts to “reboot the universe.”

This season features “freedom camps,” deepfakes and AI conspiracies, the elimination of DEI programs, rampant media manipulation, and casual references to Musk, Epstein, and Thiel. Politics and religion are intrinsically married together as Jesus gets knocked off his pedestal. The Boys is astute and scathing with this commentary. It’s just hard to laugh at these developments when so much of it is hardly hyperbole anymore. It’s a little chilling that Homelander operates with greater scruples than how the actual President would respond in the same situations. 

This farewell season also floats the disturbing thought that superheroes are just the current boogeyman du jour. Even if Homelander and his whole situation are mitigated, there will just be something else that follows because corporations still need to increase profits and push their thumbs down on the scales a little more. It’s a depressing, albeit realistic, perspective that steeps everyone’s mission with melancholy and raises the question of whether the world is too far gone to truly be fixed.

Alternatively, The Boys also argues that this is okay, even if the people who are pulling the strings are doing so with razor wire. Superheroes can fade into the sunset and become relics of the past as long as there are people out there who are fighting the good fight and doing what’s right. It’s a perspective that’s important now more than ever.

The Boys reaches the brink of the apocalypse and highlights the heights of supe strength. It’s also a season where its humble human relationships are its greatest superpower. Every single relationship gets tested and put through its paces. There’s proper tension surrounding Butcher and whether he can be trusted or is potentially a bigger hurdle than Homelander. Ryan is also a fascinating wild card who is an atom bomb that could go off at any minute, and another complication to worry about through this final season’s free-floating anxiety. The season’s strongest material unsurprisingly involves Homelander, but not how one might expect. He reckons with his loneliness and vulnerabilities, even if he’s the most powerful person on the planet. His ego reaches terrifying levels of delusion where he believes that true Godhood is the only way to achieve ultimate, universal praise.

There’s a lot that this final season does right. That being said, there’s still a formulaic and generic nature to it all as it goes through the motions. This is a very traditionally structured season with developments that are simultaneously harrowing and darkly hilarious, but they’re also pretty much exactly what you’d expect.

The Boys still finds ways to surprise on an episodic level. It just doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to the final act of this saga of good versus evil. 

The series faces a tall task with its aggressive swan song. These episodes feature plenty of self-aware discussions about finales, final seasons, and the inevitability of a fandom’s disappointment. Endings aren’t easy, and a series like The Boys is definitely going to ruffle feathers on its way out. Nevertheless, The Boys ends about as well as it possibly can and arguably trumps its source material’s conclusion.

Another season of supe-driven terrorism and oppression would be exhausting. Thankfully, The Boys pulls the ripcord at the perfect moment so that empathy, understanding, and forgiveness can shine through the darkness like a guiding beacon. 

Season five of The Boys premieres on Amazon Prime Video on April 8 with two episodes, with weekly episodes to follow.

The post The Boys’ Final Season Burns Down The House With Suspense, Satire & Slaughter [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In the last few years, there’s been a surprising streak of announcements for the franchise. We’ve had remasters of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 as well as Defiance. There’s even been a tabletop RPG that ran a crowdfunding campaign. Even with all my nostalgia, the only one of these projects that actually drew my attention was the announcement of a new entry in the series, Legacy of Kain: Ascendance. I was even excited by the shift into the 2D action-platformer genre, one that usually doesn’t resonate with me. Unfortunately, the game we ended up with does not feel like the highly anticipated return to the series my 15-year-old self would have been looking for.

Legacy of Kain is known for its overwrought stories of time travel, magical swords, elder gods, and vengeance-seeking vampires, and Ascendance aims to continue that tradition, but not nearly as elegantly as I recall from others in the series. The story, which is apparently based on a recent comic called the Dead Shall Rise, introduces Raziel’s sister Elaleth, who is positioned as one of the main narrative forces in the series. Filling in the gaps between Blood Omen and Soul Reaver, Ascendance swaps between different protagonists to tell a story of time-hopping revenge and manipulation.

New characters and clashing art styles plague the return to Nosgoth

It definitely stays true to the gothic sensibilities of the series, but the level of writing doesn’t really reach its ambition. Right off the bat, there are a lot of characters to keep track of, and mixing that with time travel makes it a bit hard to onboard. Prequels are challenging to write, and it feels like so much of the story is just about moving the pieces on the board towards a natural conclusion, oftentimes in convoluted ways that bring the focus to Elaleth at the expense of the series regulars.

Aside from the new character, there are huge changes to the series in both gameplay and visual style. As I mentioned, we’ve now shifted to a 2D perspective, focusing on platforming and combat challenges. In addition, the game now features a retro pixel art style that brings the classic characters to life in a new light. This combination is one of the most successful parts of the game for me. Maybe it was just the vampire focus, but it really gave me a Castlevania vibe, specifically the more linear early Castlevania rather than the sprawling map style made popular by Symphony of the Night. If they aren’t going to do a full-scale new entry in the series, this feels like the perfect way to keep the scope in line while still delivering style in spades.

In addition to the pixel art, there are a few more styles that they mix in to provide variety. During the fully voiced cutscenes, we’re given cartoon-like character portraits that provide more detail than the pixel art, bringing life to the performances. For a couple of key sequences, it switches to a classic PS1-style low-poly look, which helps ground it in the past, even if it doesn’t gel with the rest of the game. Other cutscenes are animated using a more hand-drawn anime style, creating dynamic action that feels more in line with the main game than the low-poly elements. It’s ambitious that they tried to use so many different styles in the game, but it felt like that lack of focus made the final product feel less cohesive.

Gameplay mechanics are draining

I’m glad that Ascendance didn’t chase the Metroidvania trend and attempt to make a labyrinthine map, instead opting to do a very linear level-based approach. Unfortunately, the core gameplay just doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, doing the bare minimum for the genre without the crisp game feel that defines its strongest competitors. Without having navigation to worry about, it needs to rely on the strength of the jumping challenges and combat encounters, and neither of them finds interesting ways to feel unique. The basic jump feels stiff, and the challenges the level design provides never feel compelling. None of the three playable characters has combos, just a normal sword slash repeated over and over, preventing combat from ever getting into a satisfying flow.

That’s not to say they don’t each of them doesn’t have their own vibe and feel. You’ll play as Elaleth, Kain, and Raziel (both as a human and as a vampire), which offers a decent bit of variety. The vampires all share a gimmick of having to drink blood to heal, which gives you a power fantasy of tearing through hordes of humanoid enemy soldiers and ripping them apart to gain strength. This is also accompanied by a constantly draining health bar, adding a bit of urgency to your combat, at least in theory. For the most part, the health drain never really caught up to me, except when I was explicitly taking my time to try to track down some of the game’s secrets.

At different times throughout, some of the vampire characters will be able to fly, which takes up stamina, a resource also used by the dodge roll everyone has access to. Flying often feels a bit janky and inconsistent, with each flap of your wings propelling you upwards slightly in a manner that never quite feels like you have precise control over. Most of the time, it just allows you to get a good angle for a dive attack on enemies, but some levels use it extensively. These stages have long areas with no ground where you are guided through by orbs that will recharge your stamina. These were the areas where I died most, and it never really felt like my fault when I did. It’s a cool gimmick, and the wings surprisingly have narrative importance, but the execution never reaches their design intention.

Enemy AI gets in the way of Ascendance‘s combat

When playing as the human version of Raziel, it’s noticeably more challenging. Instead of drinking NPC’s blood, you have to do an execution that lights your vampire enemies on fire to finish them off, or they will rise again. Having parts where you feel underpowered is a great idea to change up the tone of the gameplay, but the pacing of the game never really knows how to alternate this to make it feel meaningful in some sort of overall challenge arc. Human Raziel comes off as a less fun version of the other characters, which makes those sections feel more like a bummer than a tense challenge.

Even with the full suite of combat options, the enemy AI is so baffling that it almost never feels satisfying. There were so many times throughout the four-hour runtime that I would run across a pair of enemies where one would attack me while the other stood there doing nothing. I couldn’t tell if this was a bug or if their awareness range was just set extremely short, but either way, it really hampered the combat experience. Some of the more mobile enemies would move around so much that they would jump off cliff edges, killing themselves.

This wasn’t a reward for me smartly maneuvering around them to trick them into doing it; they just did it themselves with little interaction from me. The only time the fights felt good was during some of the boss fights, particularly ones where I’m fighting player characters that I’m not currently controlling, but I think that mostly came down to the novelty of seeing an NPC use the same player kit I’ve had access to. I hear so much about how the combat in games like Hollow Knight and Blasphemous feels great within the 2D platforming genre, so it’s disappointing to see it so poorly implemented in Ascendance.

Not only is the combat not particularly compelling, but the level design doesn’t provide spaces for very good platforming. It’s not just the stiff jump I mentioned earlier; it’s an overall lack of care and creativity in the layouts of the level. There are no moments that find clever ways to challenge your dexterity, no standout sequences of jumps that stick in your memory. It’s just boilerplate maps that never find interesting ways of escalating the complexity or adding variety as they go on, either within the level or throughout the overall structure of the game’s 12 chapters. They tried to make it a little more compelling with lots of fire-based environmental hazards to stand in the way of the vampire characters, but it ends up looking weird when it doesn’t affect the NPCs.

Two levels stood out to me: one that was fully dark, presenting everything in black and white with small splashes of lighting that break it up, and another where you’re on horseback being chased. Both of these were notable for their visual variety, and I wish they were able to back that up with clever gameplay gimmicks.

Ascendance doesn’t quite live up to Kain’s legacy

Aside from all these gameplay issues, there are so many little polish issues with Ascendance that really ended up wearing me down. There’s no mid-level save, so if you have to stop in the middle of the chapter, expect to start over from the beginning. Also, the cutscenes aren’t skippable, making it a chore to wait through them again. Occasionally, there were sections of the level where you were ascending throughout, and if you fell off a cliff, you’d end up going way back toward the beginning of the level. It’s a baffling design decision not to just make falls like that a death, because the first thing I did was look for an enemy to kill me so I could respawn at a reasonable checkpoint.

Speaking of enemies, if you ever killed them while they were in the air, they would often just finish their jump normally, then die on the ground, which was laughable. If they were in the middle of a line of dialogue, they would finish that up even if their death animation completed. Even if the core gameplay was solid, this would feel like a death by a thousand cuts situation, but instead, these polish issues added even more annoyance on top of an already shaky foundation.

I wish my return to the world of Nosgoth was worth the decades-long wait, but there just isn’t a lot here. The move to 2D was great in theory, echoing the gothic vibe of Castlevania, but the execution was as lackluster as it could have been. Narratively, it’s all over the place, presented with a combination of visual styles that makes it feel incoherent, if occasionally sharp-looking.

Given the recent remasters, I’m really surprised we didn’t see a more traditional Legacy of Kain game, and I hope this game doesn’t hurt our chances of getting one. I’d love it if this series had more life in it, but Ascendance may have proved it’s already been sucked dry.

Review codes provided by publisher. Ascendance launched March 31 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The post ‘Legacy of Kain: Ascendance’ Disappoints with Lackluster Return to Nosgoth [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Vermis series of books by Plastiboo captures this feeling in the form of gorgeous narrative art books, telling dark fantasy tales that capture the mood of FromSoft classics. Available now, my copy of Vermis III: Old Curses & Buried Horrors has made its way to me, and it’s another great entry in the unique series.

What makes the Vermis series so novel is the way they choose to tell their story. The books present themselves in the form of strategy guides for video games that don’t exist, laying out things like character classes, enemies, and narrative beats as a way to present their fictional world. As a collector of old school strategy guides, it’s a nostalgic format that feels like a truly innovative way of telling its tale, even if it bends the format a bit to tell some of its story content. It’s a clever hybrid that gives the book a narrative immersiveness, making you think about it in game terms even if what’s being presented wouldn’t exactly translate to a video game.

After a quick opening narration that sets up the book’s themes, you’re presented with a list of character classes, each with its own starting equipment and stats. The real secret sauce of Vermis III is the evocative prose that makes everything feel like it has a long, lived-in history. I could spend this entire review just posting large chunks of text from the book and saying “look how great this is,” but the one that exemplifies it most for me is the Wax Warlock. Described as “a bottomless well of knowledge, dexterous in many sorceries, such as enchantments, invocations, and pyromantics,” they are occultist who are so knowledgeable because their heads are covered in wax rendered from the fat of the Fallen Giant, which prevents memories from escaping their head.

I feel like I would read an entire book series about a Wax Warlock based on that brief description alone, and that’s only one of the classes. Others, like the Wood Witch or the Choirman, have ties to locations and events found later in the book, making it feel like a rich, interconnected tapestry.

Following the introduction of the classes, the book falls into a pattern of alternating between descriptions of narrative beats, introductions of new locations, and pages outlining the various creatures you run into. This isn’t a formal structure, and these all bleed into each other a bit, but it’s a nice rhythm that keeps new ideas coming in at a relatively steady pace. With as much as I’ve talked about how the writing brings so much personality to the book, the art does just as much work to bring all these sections to life. It’s moody and mostly monochromatic, creating extremely memorable imagery on every single page.

The events laid out in Vermis III are all wonderfully enigmatic, feeling like the strange encounters with Dark Souls NPCs that speak mysteriously of the world around them. All the writing of these sections is in second person, using “you” for the main character to give you the illusion that this could be a game that you’re interacting with. There will be parts where the outcome of an encounter is described as going different ways based on whatever choice “you” make, giving the impression that the “game” is alive and reactive. While the narrative elements of these are great, these are the parts that break the official game guide illusion most for me, as they are written with the effusive prose of a dark fantasy novel, not the more workman-like and easy-to-follow text of a walkthrough.

There are also references made to things that couldn’t necessarily be conveyed in a video game, like when the Shadow of Doubt shrivels your heart in dread, or when the transition between locations is a journey that takes “at least a week.” To be clear, I wouldn’t change this, as I think the writing of Vermis III is top-notch, but it’s the part that does make me wish it were a little more dedicated to the gimmick stylistically.

Vermis III, more than other books in the series, feels a bit more like a series of vignettes rather than a cohesive overarching story, but it doesn’t feel worse for it. This book has some highs for the series as far as short stories go, including the tale of the Eyeless Champion who holds the eyes of the King of Ashes, and your stay with the mapmaker who is trying to chart a labyrinth as he descends into cannibalism. It’s pitch-perfect dark fantasy that traffics heavily in various types of horror, even if the narrative throughline isn’t as strong as in previous entries.

The places you visit in Vermis III are all wonderful twists on standard fantasy tropes, brought to life in just the right amount of detail through the words and images. While it’s strong throughout, the final two locations, the Singing Palace and the House of Red, really stood out to me. The Singing Palace is a location hidden by a garden maze, presented with a full map detailing the way through, and features a side view breaking down its various floors and the horrors that dwell there. Travelling through the plague-ridden gardens, descending down the well into the palace below, before finally finding the Daughter of Locust, is a fantastic stretch of the book, building both a strong story and a sense of place.

The House of Red grabbed my attention by being a bleak prison haunted by mad prisoners and even madder jailers, making for a harsh landscape that feels like a true climax to the story. I wish there were a little more connective tissue between the areas, but each place feels like a great piece of the puzzle that makes up the overall world of Vermis.

To me, the part of the book that makes it feel most like an old strategy guide is the enemy sections. Anytime I turned the page to see a grid of messed-up little creatures staring back at me, I was immediately excited to see what it would bring. Just a picture and a name are enough to get the mind racing about what fighting these monsters would be like, but some of them have full-page descriptions of their encounters. While it’s great to have them explained, sometimes my favorites were ones that didn’t have details, allowing your mind to fill in the horrors in ways no writing can. A hunched-over skeleton called “Lunatic Bones” or a deer with a human face named “Distant Observer” are so perfect in their brevity, finding ways to efficiently do a lot of storytelling in such a small space.

Back when I worked in an office, I used to bring in the previous Vermis books and read passages out loud to my coworkers without giving them any context, and they would often reply with enthusiastic confusion, wondering what FromSoft wiki page I was reading from. While I don’t think you need to read them all to enjoy Vermis III, I definitely think that it’s worth checking out the previous books, not only because they are just as high quality, but also because there are a few references you can catch that tie them together. Plastiboo also created an unrelated book called Godhusk: Rebirth that uses the same fake guide format to present a strange sci-fi world that feels like a demented take on Metroid, and this one is just as worth checking out as any Vermis book.

It’s such a unique experiment in storytelling, and Vermis III proves that Plastiboo’s formula is one that has legs. You can enjoy it as an art book, a dark fantasy narrative, or even a setting to play in your favorite tabletop RPG (feels like it would be a perfect fit for the Mork Borg system). The book represents a perfect combination of concept, art, and prose, making for a haunting journey that I’ll frequently return to for years to come.

Vermis III: Old Curses & Buried Horrors is available now via Hollow Press.

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Here’s what I saw at this year’s event…

Normal

Normal feels like the culmination of Bob Odenkirk’s fascinating career trajectory, from cult comedy icon to lauded dramatic actor to unlikely action hero. It’s essentially “Fargo” meets Nobody, which may seem like a lazy comparison given the Odenkirk of it all, but Normal successfully juggles high-octane action, neo-noir crime, well-placed humor, and small-town dynamics.

Odenkirk stars as Ulysses, acclimating to his new position as interim sheriff of the sleepy, snowy town of Normal, Minnesota, following the death of his predecessor. After a character-driven first act, all hell breaks loose when a bank robbery goes wrong, leaving it up to Ulysses to save the corrupt town from the deadly grasp of the Yakuza.

Odenkirk is in top form, but Henry Winkler (Scream) steals his scenes as the mayor. The cast also features Lena Headey (“Game of Thrones”) as the local bartender, Brendan Fletcher (Freddy vs. Jason) as a would-be criminal, Ryan Allen (In the Shadow of the Moon) and Billy MacLellan (Nobody) as police officers, and Jess McLeod (It’s a Wonderful Knife) as an ostracized nonbinary kid.

Writer Derek Kolstad (John Wick, Nobody) has a seemingly endless supply of creative action set pieces in his arsenal, even channeling Final Destination in some of Normal‘s violent fatalities. Director Ben Wheatley (Meg 2: The Trench, Kill List) dips back into Free Fire territory to deliver another explosively chaotic genre-bender.

Normal will be released in theaters on April 17 via Magnolia Pictures.

Buffet Infinity

Told through a series of escalating faux-TV commercials, Canadian horror-comedy Buffet Infinity coalesces into a mostly cohesive and surprisingly engaging narrative involving rival local restaurants, an ominous religious organization, and a mysterious sinkhole.

The retro-screenlife approach proves effective, although the unique storytelling device is needlessly abandoned during several key moments in the final act. Not every gag lands, and the film’s conclusion fails to reach the potential of the buildup, but there are plenty of laughs to be had along the way.

Writer-director Simon Glassman cleverly pokes fun at cheesy small business ads while embracing their lo-fi aesthetic and satirizing consumerism and capitalism. Fans of WNUF Halloween Special and Too Many Cooks will certainly get their fill with Buffet Infinity, although it lacks the discipline of the former and the operatic absurdity of the latter.

Buffet Infinity is currently on the festival circuit.

Camp

The majority of Camp‘s 111-minute runtime plays like a Richard Linklater-esque coming-of-age hangout movie, but something sinister simmers beneath the surface as writer-director Avalon Fast methodically bewitches the viewer.

Racked with guilt following two tragedies in her young life, Emily (Zola Grimmer) takes a job as a counselor at a religious summer camp for troubled youth, where she finally finds belonging among her peers. When the full moon rises, Emily is drawn into the darkness. The darkness welcomes her with open arms, and her reality begins to slip away.

Like its main character, Camp requires the viewer to give itself over to the experience. If you’re on its wavelength, it will suck you into a hypnagogic limbo that exists in the space between dream and reality; adolescence and adulthood; grief and acceptance.

Camp will be released later this year via Dark Sky Films.

The Cramps: A Period Piece

Informed by writer-director Brooke H. Cellars’ experience with endometriosis, The Cramps: A Period Piece lives up to its cheeky title with a genre-bending combination of irreverent humor, coming-of-age melodrama, body horror, and feminist social commentary, all wrapped in a dreamy, 1960s aesthetic.

It centers on Agnes Applewhite (Lauren Kitchen), a blossoming young woman who takes a job as a shampoo girl at a colorful beauty salon, much to her sanctimonious family’s dismay. But no amount of shampoo can wash away the monster that lurks inside Agnes, whose period emerges as a deadly, Blob-like monster.

The Cramps could have made for a delightfully campy short in the vein of John Waters, but the material is stretched thin into a meandering 89-minute feature. Despite being shot on 35mm with a Technicolor-inspired palette and stylized production design, most scenes play out in a static wide shot, which further hinders the unfocused pacing.

The Cramps: A Period Piece is currently on the festival circuit.

Boorman and the Devil

Following the success of Deliverance, John Boorman was given the opportunity to direct The Exorcist, but he passed on it and instead made Zardoz. That film’s failure led him to helm what he proclaims to be “one of the most famous failures of all time:” Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Boorman and the Devil explores the filmmaker’s complicated relationship with the maligned 1977 sequel through his own words. Although the resoundingly negative response to the film still affects him, Boorman maintains a sense of humor about the production that quite literally almost killed him.

Actors Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, along with several crew members, supplement Boorman with wonderfully candid stories from the trenches, while genre filmmakers Mike Flanagan (currently in production on his own take on The Exorcist), Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body), and Joe Dante (Gremlins) provide an appreciative perspective on the movie.

Far more than a glorified special feature, director David Kittredge delivers a full meal of a documentary. Boorman and the Devil may not change your opinion on Exorcist II, but it will allow you to appreciate the sequel’s unconventional approach and visionary technical achievements.

Boorman and the Devil is currently on the festival circuit.

Exorcist II: The Heretic

Revisiting Exorcist II: The Heretic after seeing Boorman and the Devil is like experiencing the film for the first time. Its perceived flaws suddenly play more like big swings; misguided though they may be, the bold choices are fascinating and the ambition is constant.

Set four years after the events of The Exorcist, 16-year-old Regan MacNeil (Blair) has ostensibly recovered from her demonic possession. Science and religion collide as psychologist Dr. Gene Tuskin (Fletcher) and Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) utilize an experimental hypnotherapy treatment in an attempt to mine Regan’s repressed trauma.

Since no film could live up to the impossibly high standards set by The Exorcist, why not go in a wildly different direction? That’s exactly what Boorman did, eschewing the legendary horrors of its predecessor in favor of a more metaphysical take on the material. Plus, the misunderstood sequel boasts an ethereal score by Ennio Morricone (The Thing, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

Sugar Rot

Punk-rock in both ethos and aesthetic, Sugar Rot is something like Promising Young Woman meets Titane by way of Troma. But the transgressive indie struggles to find a balance between tone and messaging, as its exploitative mayhem undercuts the impact.

In the first of far too many sexual assault scenes, stripper/ice cream shop worker Candy (Chloë MacLeod) is raped by a deranged ice cream man. The sticky situation causes Candy’s body to begin turning into colorful ice cream from the inside out, rendering her an irresistible treat to men and women alike.

Relatively light on body horror despite a premise that begs for more, writer-director Becca Kozak uses genre trappings as a conduit for blunt commentary on such feminist issues as abortion, beauty standards, and sexual objectification.

Sugar Rot is currently on the festival circuit.

The Furious

The Furious is 112 minutes of wall-to-wall, hard-hitting, martial arts action. It may not be quite as expertly crafted as The Raid or as hyper-violent as The Night Comes For Us, but in a post-Epstein world, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch child traffickers get their comeuppance.

When his daughter is kidnapped, mute handyman Wang Wei (Xie Miao, The New Legend of Shaolin) teams up with Navin (Joe Taslim, Mortal Kombat), a pseudo-journalist with a personal vendetta of his own, to take down a human trafficking ring — which includes a mini The Raid reunion between Taslim and Yayan Ruhian, who plays a deadly archer that makes Hawkeye look like Cupid.

The duo battle their way through the ruthless criminal syndicate in spectacular fashion, as director Kenji Tanigaki utilizes his decades of experience in stunts (including Blade II and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) to choreograph innovative martial arts sequences. They sometimes veer into camp territory, but each show-stopping fight advances the plot.

The Furious will be released in theaters on May 29 via Lionsgate.

The post Boston Underground Film Festival 2026 – 8 Movies We Watched From ‘Normal’ to ‘The Furious’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It also represents the apex of vulnerability. This couple must bear their souls – fully and completely – and decide if this is what they want the rest of their life to look like. It’s a beautiful exercise, albeit one that can also exacerbate the cracks in a relationship so that romantic love and devotion congeal into annoyance and obligation. Marriage sits at the crossroads of renewal and destruction, which is why this emotionally heightened milestone is such fitting territory to explore in horror. 

Marriage is a lovely tradition, but it’s also a custom that has an inherent darkness that’s baked into the pomp and circumstance, as death and eternity are echoed through commitment vows. Netflix’s Something Very Bad is Going to Happen is far from the first horror story that tackles marriage. However, Haley Z. Boston (Brand New Cherry Flavor) attempts to turn this series into a definitive deconstruction of marriage’s potential toxicity from the female perspective. It’s a horror text that’s thematically at peace with Carrie’s approach to maturing womanhood and Rosemary’s Baby’s take on motherhood. 

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen. (L to R) Camila Morrone as Rachel Harkin, Adam DiMarco as Nicky Cunningham in episode 105 of Something Very Bad is Going to Happen. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

The series keys into that magical period when you’re planning your future with someone, and anything feels possible, yet these inviting dreams can easily transform into nightmares. It’s a dark story that ripples between generations and argues that life can be full of cyclical patterns that are bigger than us and inescapable. A sinister karmic undertow threatens to sentence this bride and groom to cosmic doom. It toes the line between cathartic character drama and surreal occult horror story. It’s Netflix’s best horror series of 2026 and a title that’s as fascinating as it is frightening.

It’s clear from the title alone that there’s going to be carnage in Something Very Bad is Going to Happen. However, the fact that it culminates in a bloodbath isn’t what’s shocking here. It’s the explanation behind this massacre that’s sure to unsettle the audience. The series builds up to Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky’s (Adam DiMarco) impending wedding, when an unexpected tragedy threatens to throw these plans off kilter. This emotional stressor soon feels like the least of everybody’s problems as looming nuptial obligations mix with past family trauma and the potential summoning of a supernatural scourge.

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen crafts an effective formula where mundane wedding tasks overlap with dark, disturbing horrors. There’s such a clear, distinct voice on display from creator and showrunner, Haley Z. Boston. It functions like an evolution of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s intimate, female-driven anxieties, but mixed together with a touch of Ready or Not‘s social hierarchical storytelling. 

Simple stylized details, like a POV shot from Rachel’s perspective that’s obscured through the gauzy fabric of a wedding veil, make sure that innocuous moments are visually profound and resonant. These heightened touches also condition the audience to understand that this is not your average newlywed horror story. Kinetic, intuitive editing helps reflect Rachel’s frayed mental state. 

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Jennifer Jason Leigh as Victoria in episode 102 of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

There’s a very magpie-like quality to the series as it pieces together dark stories from random sources that all come together and contribute to this grander collage of trauma. Right from the start, Something Very Bad is Going to Happen is presented as a haunted world in which sweet anecdotes are filtered through depraved darkness. An aside about ice cream turns into a digression about serial killers. Killer needle drops recontextualize romantic love songs into melancholy portents of doom. It’s a potent point of view that vacillates between extremes in this fragile world that’s one crack away from shattering into pieces. A free-floating feeling of deception lingers through the series and makes it impossible to trust anything. It’s almost as if Rachel’s toxic thought process and anxiety are in control of the camera and editing.

Rachel and Nicky’s evolving relationship is the series’ most gripping dynamic. There’s such comfortable chemistry between these two that feeds into the odd – and sometimes even perverse – traditions that we do for our spouses in order to accommodate them and achieve a happy marriage. Everyone is keyed in with their performances to achieve the right tone. However, Camila Morrone really steals the show as Rachel. So much of the series rests on Morrone’s performance, and she absolutely rises to the occasion. She delivers such captivating, layered work that channels extreme emotions as the universe puts her through the wringer.

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Camila Morrone as Rachel Harkin in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen isn’t afraid to get lost in thematic detours, but it still makes sure that the scares actually deliver. There’s a mounting dread that crescendos over these eight episodes that does something original and doesn’t just rely upon tired jump scares. There are so many uncomfortable and disturbing visuals that will leave the audience feeling haunted. Creative, natural use of found-footage camcorder aesthetics also amplifies certain moments. There’s one flashback episode that relies on this device that could easily be a standout V/H/S franchise segment.

So much of Something Very Bad is Going to Happen’s success boils down to its ending. This is a structure that often seems set up to fail, but Something Very Bad is Going to Happen both sticks the landing and defies expectations. It provides answers and finality over arbitrary twists and hollow setups. Something Very Bad is Going to Happen achieves a chaotic, claustrophobic quality that capitulates over its final episodes. It’s full of unnerving moments that play with the audience’s perception, all while it tells a story that’s surprisingly inspirational. It’s a touching, terrifying story that preaches the virtues of soulmates and whether love is enough to overpower death. 

All eight episodes of Something Very Bad is Going to Happen are now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Something Very Bad is Going to Happen’ Turns Marriage Into a Brutal, Bewildering Blood Pact [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Now he’s back with another collection of stories, and they prove that cliched phrase is still true: No one is doing it like Attila Veres.

In This’ll Make Things a Little Easier, which the author translated himself from his native Hungarian, Veres brings together half a dozen stories that run the gamut from fantasy to science fiction to all-out terror, each of them a dazzling blend of genres and sensibilities, each of them singular. In the opening story, “a pit full of teeth,” Veres follows an author not unlike himself whose work is translated into an unreadable language, with terrifying results. In “Transistor,” a woman looks back on her life’s work as a conduit for forces that slowly devour her, and in the follow-up tale, “The Designated Contact Individual,” we learn what she was working toward. Then there’s the title story, in which the government installs strange new trees meant to solve money problems for citizens, but there’s a terrible price to be paid. 

In each of these tales, and the others which make up the collection, Veres plays with a particular set of ingredients, chronicling what happens when a system meant to uphold certain norms is upended, either robbing characters of their grip on reality or remaking it altogether. Whether they’re forced by their employers to shovel a mysterious substance known as “Mud” into their mouths all day or gifted money trees that exact a heavy toll, each of the characters in these stories is pulled, often in many directions at once, by forces greater than themselves, both cosmic and mundane.

Every story in This’ll Make Things a Little Easier hums with Veres’ singular style, a mixture of the esoteric, the comic, and the deeply unsettling. They are stories capable of horrifying and delighting in equal measure on each page, sometimes within each paragraph, and nowhere is that more apparent than the story which, for me, stands as the collection’s centerpiece.

In “Damage d10+7,” a group of friends playing a homebrewed RPG decide to push the accuracy of their characters into a truly dark place, setting off the unraveling of a fictional world carefully maintained by the game’s master. It’s a wonderful concept for a story, and it’s also a stellar example of Veres’ gift for pacing out a story. The concept draws you in, the catalyst for the narrative shocks you, and then the story pushes further, out into unknown territory, as the characters reckon with the shockwaves of what’s happened and question everything they think they know. 

The unpredictability of Veres’ stories makes them thrilling to read, but his storytelling style is about so much more than swerving on readers who think they see a horror formula developing in a predictable way. In all six of these stories, we are treated to a creative mind that refuses to stop at the water’s edge, or even in the knee-deep cool of an oncoming tide. In every tale, Veres wants to go deeper, to pull us under in the darkness beneath the rippling surface. These aren’t just stories but excavations, and their combination of sly grace and endlessly unnerving imagery makes them irresistible, no matter how deep Veres dares to go.

If you still haven’t discovered the wonder of Attila Veres’ writing, this is a great place to start. It’s a wonderful follow-up to The Black Maybe, which proves Veres still has much, much more to show us, and an essential horror fiction collection for 2026.

This’ll Make Things a Little Easier is in bookstores now.

The post ‘This’ll Make Things a Little Easier’ Review – Another Can’t-Miss Collection of Horror Tales appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Following a cold open featuring lesbian-coded Jessy Griffin (Jesse Anderson) and Becca Lipshits (Rebekah Cianci) ill-advisedly hanging out in the DeFeo house, the action pivots to friends Trey (Trey Ball) and Jib (Jib Haddan). The besties are spending the weekend in Amityville, largely because Trey is Jessy’s jokey brother who is housesitting her cat, but also because he plans to attend the Skull Crusher concert on Friday and throw a rager on Saturday. Jib, meanwhile, is less enthusiastic about…well, everything; all he wants to do is drink a few beers and relax.

The gentle tension between the friends helps to power at least 50% of Amityvillenado, which is reminiscent of ‘opposites attract’ buddy comedies, complete with plenty of fart and poop jokes (courtesy of Trey’s poor diet and reflective of a long, random tradition among Amityville titles). It’s not as if Trey and Jib dislike each other, though; they simply have different goals, and Jib is constantly dragged along on the more high-energy Trey’s escapades (this is code for: expect a falling out around the 2/3 mark of the film, which is typical of the subgenre).

The fractured friendship occurs at the same time as a spate of deaths kicks off around Amityville. Meteorologist June Weathers (Elizabeth McCoy) believes that there’s something supernatural occurring, though her efforts to inform the public about the connection between the suffocation deaths and a rash of seemingly sentient tornadoes draw the ire of her misogynist boss, Brent Baculum (Kyle Wigginton).

As the death toll climbs, the survivors, including June, Jib, Trey, Becca’s cop husband Richard (Clay Aleman), and priest-turned-paranormal investigator O’Haharan (Will Debeest), must band together to uncover the truth about the soul-sucking tornados before Amityville (and maybe the world?) is devoured.

Amityvillenado is something of a mixed bag. On one hand, there’s a clear reverence for other entries in the “franchise” as evidenced by mentions of the real-life DeFeo and Lutz family (who even have a lake named after them!), as well as other entries. Tucker and Van Gerwen also understand their budgetary limitations and how to work within them. Case in point: after destroying the Amityville house (offscreen) in the opening sequence, the remainder of the film features frequent on-the-nose expository dialogue confirming that something supernatural is behind the unassuming empty lot where the house once sat. As the friends observe, “I’m amazed at how quickly they cleaned up all of the debris.”

On the flip side, the film’s single greatest sin is its punishing 1:51-minute runtime. Sure, the film contains secret identity reveals and even a stellar shadow puppet flashback sequence, but there’s still no justification for dragging the narrative out this long. On top of this, the acting is (expectedly) a little amateurish*, with some performers faring better than others (McCoy and Haddan are decent, while Debeest tends to scream/yell all of his lines and Ball is too one-note).

*It’s helpful to have a single stand-alone scene featuring frequent Amityville writer/director/actor Shawn C. Phillips to remind us how, um, *challenging* the acting can be in these films.

All this to say that Amityvillenado is unlikely to change purists’ perspective about the inclusion of DTV entries in the “franchise”. For individuals who have seen some of the output from the last two decades, however, this entry is heads and tails above recent duds like Amityville Bigfoot and Amityville Backpack.

Amityvillenado at least tells a coherent story, with identifiable character arcs and the requisite self-awareness evident in the best contemporary entries.

Amityvillenado is out on VOD as of March 24.

The Amityville IP Awards go to…

• Tornado Warning: The storm FX are the most demanding effect of the film, so it’s wise of Tucker and Van Gerwen to mostly imply the tornadoes until the climax, which principally shifts the action into B/W and green screen. The rest of the time, characters simply look to the sky as their souls are sucked out like a black mist. The reality is that it doesn’t look half bad. If anything, it’s on par with your average genre cable TV show.
• Amityville Awareness: From Jib swiping at flies and acknowledging that “There’s like a million [Amityville] movies…” to his rant about the items that Trey expects to find in the Amityville wreckage (examples include: a mirror/painting, dollhouse, clock, and spooky toilet), it’s pretty clear that these filmmakers have done their homework. Which makes sense, considering they literally host an Amityville podcast called “For God’s Sake, Get Out: An Amityville Podcast.”
• Shadow Puppetry: It worked the charm in Nia DaCosta’s Candyman remake, and it works here, as well. The sad historical backstory about the tornadoes is depicted late in the film via a shadow puppet sequence, and it’s arguably the best/most gorgeous part of the film. Kudos to the team, which includes Puppet Maker Jacob Bursch and puppeteers Jeff Van Gerwen, Paul Tucker, Clay Aleman, and Bradley Greer. Let me tell you: none of the other Amityville films have displayed this level of creative experimentation, and I, for one, greatly appreciated it!
• Scream Homage: In addition to June’s hilarious meteorology name (we eventually learn she changed it from Brittany June Cummings, so…BJ Cummings), the news anchor June aspires to replace is named Gale Thunder, which is spelled the exact same way the Scream character spells it. This, in addition to a specific sound cue evoking Angelo Badalamenti’s score, is an obvious homage to Wes Craven’s slasher classic.
  • June also drops “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” at one point, confirming Tucker and Van Gerwen’s media literacy.
• Queer Coding: Considering that the film more or less insinuates that Becca was cheating on her police officer husband, Richard, with Jessy, it’s interesting that the film never pulls the trigger on the queer chemistry between Jib and Richard. All of their interactions have an antagonistic/mocking tone that suggests a sexual attraction (Jib repeatedly – and deliberately – calls Richard “Dick Lips” throughout the film). Sure, Jib’s main storyline is about his strained friendship with Trey, but the climax seemingly goes out of its way to pair Richard and June as if they’re destined to be a couple, despite Aleman and Haddan’s stronger chemistry.
  • Don’t even get me started on the poly implications of “Storm Chasers”, the band that the survivors propose in the film’s denouement.

The post ‘Amityvillenado’ Review – An Overlong, but Reverent Entry in the “Franchise” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Serpent’s Skin is a world filled with supernatural entities. Chief among them is protagonist Anna (Alexandra McVicker), a trans girl who escapes from her unsupportive parents’ house to move to the big city and live with her older sister, Dakota (Charlotte Chimes).

Almost immediately, Anna meets a dark-haired tattooist named Gen (Avalon Fast), who is drawn to her. The two quickly realize that they share powerful abilities, including the ability to “push” people, which ranges from manipulating their mental faculties to causing them to bleed from the eyes, ears, and nose. Think the teen feminism & sorcery of The Craft meets the bloody telepathy of Scanners.

Obviously, the film needs a villain, but unlike Mackay’s other texts, the antagonist of the movie is more insidious than an intolerant jerk or a shitty dude. In fact, for nearly half of the runtime, it’s unclear who or what the threat is because the most prominent male character, Danny (Jordan Dulieu), seems like a pretty decent guy. Despite hooking up with Anna on her first night in the big city, he has no jealousy issues when she awkwardly confesses that she’s with Gen now.

It’s a little messy, but considering these are early twenty-something characters, it’s expected.

Mackay and co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson give us time to settle in and get to know the characters before the action ramps up. Sure, there’s a predatory thief, Switch (Patty Glavieux), prowling about, but he’s more of a test subject for Anna to learn how to hone and control her powers.

When other people, including several teens, begin showing signs of dementia or lacking all personality, however, it’s clear that Anna and Gen have to step in to help. And if the last act feels slightly rushed and a bit undercooked, it’s forgivable because by this time we’ve sufficiently invested in the girls’ relationship and intrigued by the rules of this world.

It doesn’t hurt that McVicker and Fast have good chemistry. Anna is introduced in a bad place (she’s a cutter, so C/W for self-harm right off the top), but once she moves in with Dakota and is allowed to live how she wants, even her sister notices that Anna has “blossomed.” Anna is empathetic, but she’s also determined and loyal when it comes to her friends.

These qualities are balanced nicely by Gen, whose wit is a little bit dry and whose perspective is a little more world-weary. Mackay and Pahl Robinson deliberately avoid naming the pair “witches”, though the insinuation – not unlike a certain witchy teen film of the 90s – is that there is a strong female component to their powers.

There’s also an open lament about the generations of information and tradition that have been lost due to fear and persecution (this reads both feminist and queer). It’s not the focal point of the film, but the idea of a current generation of women forced to discover how to make their way through the world (without mentorship or a road map) echoes throughout the text.

But The Serpent’s Skin isn’t a dreary drama by any means. Mackay brings back her Carnage for Christmas editor, Vera Drew (who helmed the enormously entertaining trans Batman parody, The People’s Joker), to keep the film moving at a brisk pace, as well as reinforce the empathic connection between the girls’ romance and the villain’s cruising behaviour. In one of the film’s stand-out sequences, Drew cross-cuts between Anna and Gen’s lovemaking and a sexualized attack, symbolically linking them but easily distinguishing them using colored filters (golden amber for the attack; emerald blue for Gen and Anna). It’s hot, unexpected, and – despite not being particularly graphic – the sex is sustained in a way that the majority of contemporary films shy away from.

Shout-out also to special effects make-up artist Dom Keeley for the titular serpentine imagery, which looks appropriately scaly and great. Some of the close-up work on the villain is too reminiscent of the vampires on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, though Mackay enthusiasts may understandably also feel it’s a callback to the vampire make-up of Mackay’s breakthrough 2021 film, So Vam (which was itself indebted to Buffy).

As someone who has always admired Mackay’s punk rock aesthetic while occasionally lamenting the thin characterizations and speedy plotting of her early films, The Serpent’s Skin feels like a solid step in the right direction. The characters are still relatable, but thanks to the measured pacing of the narrative, they also have room to breathe and interact outside of the genre-oriented elements. The result is a film with endearing characters, an intriguing mythological hook, and a healthy dose of sex and violence.

It’s another solid entry in Mackay’s rapidly expanding filmography.

Dark Star Pictures releases The Serpent’s Skin in select theaters starting March 27 before releasing on Digital on April 21, 2026.

The post ‘The Serpent’s Skin’ Review – ‘The Craft’ Meets ‘Scanners’ in Alice Maio Mackay’s Latest appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In Wretch, LaRocca’s latest novel, the heart and the soul are just as vital to the dread-laced puzzle as the body, and even seasoned LaRocca readers might be taken aback by just how tightly the author keeps hold of the extreme horror reins this time around. Patient, restrained, and woven throughout with notes of bleak beauty that whisper like dark silk, this is a new kind of Eric LaRocca novel, and it works quite well. 

Simeon is a widower struggling to cope with the death of his husband, Jonathan. It’s eaten into his professional life, his relationship with his son and his ex, and consumed most of his waking thoughts. The grief is all-consuming, so when someone comes along with a promise to help, he’s naturally interested. 

It’s through his grief that Simeon first learns about two things. One is a support group known as the Wretches, who are devoted to, among other things, finding the faces of their dead loved ones in everyday objects. The other is a mysterious person named Porcelain Khaw, a figure whispered about in the dark corners of the web, who’s able to reunite people with their dead loved ones, for a price. 

If you follow grief horror as a subgenre, you recognize a lot of these ingredients right away, and that’s part of the book’s success. LaRocca doesn’t shy away from the conventional setup of this narrative, from the grieving loner mining the depths of his own soul to the dark bargain struck with a Mephistophelian figure who promises the world. These pieces lock into place perfectly because they’re designed to, but it’s what LaRocca does next that sets Wretch apart.

For longtime LaRocca readers, the book has many things you’ll enjoy, from strange posts on internet forums embedded right in the center of the book to moments of skin-crawling physical sensation that’ll jerk you right up out of your chair. But despite some of his more well-worn tropes, his familiar, somewhat formal prose, and his emphasis on transgression, this is also a different side of Eric LaRocca. 

The deeper Simeon digs into potential avenues for salvation from his grief, the deeper LaRocca goes right along with him, digging deeper into one of the author’s most prominent themes: The fear of being unworthy. Simeon does not just miss his husband. He misses the certainty that came with a warm body next to his own, the blanket, however flimsy, which told him he was wanted, desired, loved. The more he excavates, the more he wonders, out loud on the page for all of us to read, if he was ever truly worthy of love. That makes his descent a dark one, but it also makes Porcelain’s gifts a bigger threat to the state of Simeon’s soul, adding a deep vein of suspense alongside the dread-packed poetry of the prose. 

The result is a book that doesn’t quite go for the visceral throat with the same fury of LaRocca’s other novels, but replaces that fury with a certain horrific wisdom. In many ways, LaRocca has been exploring the same themes over and over since Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, his breakthrough novella. The dramatis personae changes, and the horror goes to different places, but LaRocca’s oeuvre retains a laser focus on questions of monstrousness, love, and how the two intertwine.

Wretch is perhaps his most mature treatment of the subject yet, and while some of the more jaw-dropping shocks have fallen away this time around, we’re rewarded instead with a dark jewel of elegant, atmospheric prose and deliciously restrained terror. This is a culmination of LaRocca’s work so far, and deserves to be savored.

Wretch is in bookstores everywhere on March 24.

The post ‘Wretch’ Review – Eric LaRocca Delivers a Slow-Burn Poem of Dread appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a Japanese filmmaker who is responsible for foundational horror films like Pulse, Cure, and the more recent Cloud, which all blur the lines between technology and the supernatural. Chime, a 45-minute film by Kurosawa, is cut from the same cloth and features some of the director’s most haunting work to date. It’s a slow-burning descent into true madness that hits hard and without warning.

Chime presents a cryptic story in which culinary teacher, Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka, Never After Dark), sees his life systematically unravel once he’s haunted by a sudden, piercing chime. Kurosawa is smart to keep the story simple and let the audience form their own conclusions about what’s actually going on with Matsuoka. There are shades of Edgar Allen Poe regarding the nature of how this “curse” spreads and Matsuoka’s corresponding breakdown.

However, Chime truly feels like a Junji Ito or Haruki Murakami story brought to life. It successfully sustains an incredible degree of tension for the entire runtime. It’s one of the virtues of why Kurosawa’s latest works best as a 45-minute short instead of expanding the idea into a feature-length endeavor. There’s no need for this perfect premise to dilute itself and overstay its welcome.

Chime had its premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, but it was initially produced and distributed as an NFT. Kurosawa feels like the perfect director to turn an NFT into a horror film and potentially engage in a broader deconstruction of this medium. However, the unusual nature of this project led many to believe that Chime would never receive a conventional theatrical release and that it would live and die as a piece of traded digital video. 

It was meant to be seen by fans who have either rented or resold it to others, which beautifully echoes the film’s theme, where its central dilemma moves from person to person. It’s not as if this was the entire point of distributing Chime as an NFT, but it’s an appreciated element that adds an extra layer to the film. It’s a clever exercise that highlights the metatextuality that would be possible if a new Ring film were released this way. 

There’s a raw, loose nature to Chime’s structure, even if it does fall into an intentionally formulaic pattern where Matsuoka tries to get through his day as this chime strikes and destroys. This may not seem like much, but it’s consistently engaging. The tension grows from whether Matsuoka really is “chimed” or if this is just a setup to rationalize a man’s seemingly random violent actions. 

Something supernatural may be at work here, or this might just be a broken man who can’t hold it together anymore. The latter is arguably even more frightening than a supernatural sound that triggers evil actions. Chime puts Matsuoka under the microscope, but there’s a broader feeling that reality’s veil is dropping and that the world is ready to collectively give into dark whims. Matsuoka is just one piece of this puzzle that is meant to represent the greater whole. There are moments where Chime operates with the chilling quality of a Mindhunter episode that just chronicles a detached killer’s mundane monotony.

Chime gets lost in the minutiae of Matsuoka’s everyday routine, and he often feels lost in his own world. The cinematography divides Matsuoka from others and leaves him isolated in lonely shots. There are moments in which he disappears from the frame, only to then abruptly strike with an unexpected intensity. He’s a ticking time bomb of anxiety. There’s a bluntness to the film’s brutality and horror that’s meant to disarm and penetrate the artifice of banality. 

Murder is handled in an almost clinical fashion. It’s like it’s all just food that’s being prepped by Matsuoka. To this point, Chime also creatively uses light, shadow, and sound design to perfection. There’s no score present in the film, which gives a more grounded, naturalistic quality that amplifies its bite. The lack of music creates a sterile quality, but there’s such precise, powerful use of metallic noises that reach a cacophonous fever pitch by the conclusion. 

Chime is a small-scale film that truly feels special in its execution, and it’s interested in so much more than simply disturbing the audience. It’s a startling look into the hidden horrors of routine and how easy it can be to lose your identity and gradually become dehumanized through normalcy. The grander points on whether it’s safe to trust our thoughts and how intrusive beliefs can take over our lives will stick with the audience just as much as its alarming setpieces.

Kurosawa’s latest, even through its restraint, creates the feeling that evil has just been released into the world. It’s a title that’s destined to be a deep cut Kurosawa cult classic and the best NFT horror film.

Chime begins screening in limited theaters as part of a double feature with Serpent’s Path on March 27, with an expanded run through April.

The post ‘Chime’ Features Some of Horror Master Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Most Haunting Work to Date [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

I bring this up because there are clear comparisons to be made between Eldelic Games’ Inky Blinky Bob and a certain other tongue-in-cheek horror title from a few years ago – one where players also managed an unconventional vehicle while scavenging for resources and fending off a bizarre and seemingly unkillable creature. However, despite being an overly familiar and frequently janky experience, I’d argue that Eldelic’s latest release is both fun and creative enough to warrant being respected as more of a consolidation of this emerging genre than a blatant rip-off.

If you haven’t heard about this curious indie experiment, Inky Blinky Bob is a first-person Survival Horror title where players take on the role of an investigator who crash-lands inside a mysterious archipelago after flying into a storm. Fortunately, our protagonist is saved by a fellow castaway who proceeds to gift the player with a weaponized hot air balloon and instructs you to use it to explore the islands and find a way to unlock a mysterious research facility. The only problem is that the dark skies are currently being patrolled by a massive flying octopus affectionately nick-named “Inky Blinky Bob”, with this colorful creature becoming hellbent on destroying both you and your rickety aircraft.

In gameplay terms, this creative premise translates to piloting the high-tech balloon around the islands in search of upgrade materials and electrical fuses meant to activate “Tesla Towers”. Once you land, however, the game shifts into a first-person stealth experience as you sneakily look around for supplies while evading soldiers and strange experiments who attempt to hinder your progress (though you can eventually find both an axe and a shotgun, which allow you to deal with these enemies in a more permanent manner).

Of course, at this point, it’s only natural that you’d want me to skip ahead and just tell you if the game is better than Choo Choo Charles. While the short answer is a resounding no, this doesn’t mean that Inky Blinky Bob is a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. The developers just seem to have bitten off more than they could chew in their attempts to differentiate their title from its inspirations.

There’s an undeniably fun gameplay loop here, and I appreciate the project’s dedication to absurdist humor, it’s just a shame that the experience is plagued by a series of minor issues that make you wish Eldelic had left their game cooking for just a little while longer – though I’ll admit that it’s hard to step away from the title after investing so much time looking for supplies meant to upgrade your balloon into a floating tank.

You’ll need every bit of scrap you can find, as defending yourself against Bob is a surprisingly thrilling endeavor. Not only do you have to contend with the balloon’s finicky controls, but you also have to manage an overheating machine gun (as well as an assortment of upgradeable weapons) while aiming at the correct targets in order to “parry” the monster’s attacks and do more damage. These recurring battles may be simple, but they’re challenging enough to always keep you on your toes during flights, and the escalating difficulty makes the endgame that much more satisfying once you’re finally ready to take the damned octopus down for good.

I’m also a fan of the game’s overall atmosphere. The curious mix of colorful lighting effects and dark forest environments – not to mention a surprisingly effective musical score – helps to sell the illusion that Inky Blinky Bob had more money behind it than it really did. Unfortunately, the illusion is quickly broken when you start to notice how little polish went into other aspects of the experience.

Some of the game’s areas are clearly cobbled together from ready-made assets pulled straight from the digital bargain bin, with this patchwork of disparate designs sometimes undermining the mood. While Choo Choo Charles also suffered from similarly low production value, I feel like this is one area where Inky Blinky Bob could absolutely have surpassed its predecessor. This is also another reason why I’m a bit disappointed in the demo’s disclaimer about how AI tools were used to streamline development.

Of course, the biggest issue here is the fact that these environments feel lifeless despite this being a game about exploration. Don’t get me wrong, there are frequent dopamine spikes whenever you manage to scrounge up some scrap metal sheets or stumble onto a hidden collectible (and I enjoyed several of the random side quests), but the vast majority of these areas are disappointingly empty. Even when you find the occasional interesting object, these assets tend to be static set dressing that you can’t really interact with.

Yet, Inky Blinky Bob feels like more than the sum of its parts. The dead open world and clunky stealth mechanics can get downright frustrating, and I wish a little more effort had been put into the (admittedly humorous) story, but there’s still something special about this hot air balloon trip from hell. That’s why I’m rooting for Eldelic to polish up some of the experience through added patches and updates, as I’d love to see “Choo Choo Charles Clones” take off as a successful new genre.

Inky Blinky Bob is now available on Steam.

The post ‘Inky Blinky Bob’ Is a Fun but Familiar Hot Air Balloon Ride From Hell [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Adam Scott (Hokum) and Danielle Deadwyler (The Woman in the Yard) star as a couple, Sean and Kim Harrison, on the brink of divorce when they rent out their guesthouse to a pair of mysterious siblings. The unemployed Sean spends his days getting stoned or bickering with his conservative family that includes his sister Cleo (Kate Berlant) and parents (Ron Perlman and Colleen Camp), much to the dismay of Kim. Her frustrations with her estranged spouse only get worse with the arrival of new tenants Amir (Theo Rossi) and Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi), a secretive brother-sister duo whose enigmatic behavior awakens mistrust and prejudice in the suburbs.

Hamedani, who co-writes with Travis Betz, signals post-apocalyptic genre leanings early with an opening nightmare sequence but quickly settles on quiet paranoia that scrutinizes the behaviors of its central foursome. At the forefront, of course, are the Harrisons. Scott’s Sean is caught somewhere politically between his empathetic, progressive wife and his conspiracy-spewing family, leaving him prone to social blunder after social blunder when it comes to his polite new tenants. To that end, The Saviors frames much of its story from the intimate perspective of a crumbling marriage, preserving the mystery behind Amir and Jahan’s strange dealings. The stranger things get, the more complicated the marriage as Sean and Kim are forced together in ways they hadn’t been in a long time.

Rossi and Boniadi bring a tender vulnerability to the siblings that ensures there’s no guessing where The Saviors will ultimately head, even as it settles into a more cyclical rhythm that sees Sean frantic to expose their latest peculiar act. It’s clear that siblings Amira and Jahan are up to something; their windows emit an eerie green glow in the middle of the night, and pets around the neighborhood soon go missing. Instead of Dante’s pitch-black humor sowing division and mistrust, though, Hamedani instead opts to keep the proceedings straightforward and matter-of-fact. It’s more Rod Serling than Hitchcock.

Greg Kinnear dials up the energy and the genre elements with comedic antics as Cleo’s private detective lover that herald in the final act, one that pulls the rug out with a timely, sobering vision that blurs fiction and reality. Worse, its messaging arrives potentially too late and in vague fashion. The Saviors has a lot to say about Islamophobia, neo-Nazism, and prevalent prejudices without ever veering into heavy-handed or preachy territory, but it’s also not very incisive about any of it. Hamedani instead uses this left-field shocker of an ending to reframe the film’s preceding events, a means of inspiring self-reflection in the viewer.

Tone is The Saviors‘ biggest struggle in an effective and provocative thriller. Hamedani is too constrained with both the humor and sci-fi here, doling them out in short bursts in preservation of the overarching mystery. While the filmmaker more than succeeds in delivering an unpredictable ending that sticks with you, his darkly comedic paranoid thriller isn’t as sharp or as sharply defined as it should be. But it’s still a thoughtful and engaging enough genre-bender all the same.

The Saviors made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.

The post ‘The Saviors’ SXSW Review – The Suburbs Descend into Paranoia in Genre-Bending Thriller appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

He’s clearly poured everything into Project Songbird, a first-person horror title that is, yes, a commercial product aiming to reach as wide an audience as possible. However, at the same time, it often more strongly resembles a therapeutic exercise being carried out for the sole benefit of its maker. One that we’re tactlessly intruding upon.

Taking the “write what you know” philosophy to its absolute extreme, this is an incredibly vulnerable offering that almost feels like it was never really intended for public consumption. Rush bares his soul throughout the game’s 4–5-hour runtime, weaving a deeply confessional story that works through many of his personal anxieties about what it means to be an artist, as well as the crippling self-doubts that creep in when you don’t believe that you’re fulfilling your true purpose in life.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a case of the beholder projecting their own insular feelings onto a piece of media. On the contrary, Rush makes it abundantly clear what’s on his mind here with an authorial preface right up front, repeated fourth wall breaks, and increasingly meta sequences that obscure the lines between him and his insecurity-ridden protagonist. It gets to the point where the whole thing comes across as borderline invasive. Like you’re not meant to be witnessing something so raw and unguarded.

Facing the Music

The closest thing you could compare Project Songbird to — with all of its semi-autobiographical elements, introspective broodings, direct addresses to the audience, and appeals to universal human experiences — is not another video game but rather an intensely personal album. Which is quite appropriate, given that’s exactly what our lead character is working on when we first meet them!

Dakota (also known by the stage name: “Neon Songbird”) is a young singer-songwriter who has enjoyed moderate success in the past but is now going through something of a creative rut. Critical response to their latest release wasn’t exactly euphoric, and fans have wholly rejected the radical new direction they’ve been trying to take their latest material in. Meanwhile, the record label has been all but begging them to return to the earlier sound that made them so zeitgeisty to begin with.

Alas, neither music nor lyrics are coming as naturally to Dakota as they used to, and they’re starting to fret that maybe they’ve peaked too young and will never make a truly great track again. Giving us an insight into their crisis of confidence, one revealing journal entry confirms that they just aren’t deriving the same pleasure from the creative process that they once did, and are kind of “forcing it” now.

So, at the behest of their friend-cum-manager, Dakota agrees to embark on an artistic retreat in a last-ditch attempt to rediscover their mojo. Going all Henry David Thoreau, they drop off the grid by renting out an isolated cabin in the Appalachian wilderness (where many other struggling artists are said to have been touched by some divine muse and ended up producing their crowning works). That means no technology. No internet trolls. No snarky reviewers. Just the natural splendour of the American Southeast and a vinyl collection full of indie deep cuts to get the juices flowing.

In short, it’s the perfect environment to get back into the swing of things and block out the distractions of the modern world. Or so it would seem. In reality, Dakota finds all new ways to procrastinate amidst the great outdoors, whether it’s by taking scenic woodland strolls, running trivial errands, or getting hung up on annoying plumbing issues. You know, pretty much anything to avoid doing some writing (hey, we’ve all been there!)

That all changes one night, though, when Dakota is awoken by strange whispering emanating from the treeline. Following these eerie voices, they stumble across a will-o’-the-wisp that beckons them onwards into a surreal dream realm constructed out of their worst memories and places from a traumatic past. Here, like many others before them, Dakota inadvertently makes a pact with an eldritch force. One that gives them the vision to finally create that magnum opus they’ve been aspiring towards.

Of course, this is also a Faustian bargain that exacts a heavy toll in return. As our protagonist gets more and more addicted to the intoxicating power of unbridled inspiration and productivity, they also start to lose their grip on reality. Days blur together, they slip into lengthy fugue states from which they can recall nothing, and whatever entity they made this secret deal with becomes increasingly aggressive in trying to collect its payment.

For Art’s Sake

For anyone who has ever pursued a creative goal, Project Songbird’s script (penned authentically by Rush) cuts painfully close to the bone. It explores the heartbreak of falling out of love with— and perhaps even growing to resent — your art, raising probing questions like: “Who are you if the passion you once defined yourself by has faded?” and “What’s the point of carrying on if even you don’t believe in your dreams anymore?”

Whether you’ve successfully churned out several DIY albums or never once picked up a guitar, anyone can relate to Dakota’s worry that the very thing they were put on this earth to do is now beyond their abilities. We all know that feeling of comparing yourself to others who seem to effortlessly excel, while you’re trying so damn hard. And we can also identify with what it’s like to entertain those dark thoughts that take root when you consider throwing in the towel for good.

Even as it becomes clearer and clearer that the occult contract they’ve entered into is going to take far more than it gives, Dakota keeps on following that wisp into mortal danger. And you can’t really blame them! After all, what other choice do you have when the passion that you’ve tied your entire sense of self-worth to is on the line?

You can tell that Rush is writing from (all too real) experience when it comes to this stuff and that he achingly identifies with his protagonist. Not only because the characterisation of Dakota rings so true, but because he regularly pulls you out of the diegesis to make the connection between himself and his proxy as transparent as possible. We won’t spoil the specifics of any of these meta digressions, except to say that the title literally opens with a framing device in which you wander around the developer’s apartment while he toils away on Project Songbird. From there, we seamlessly transition into the game proper and find ourselves exploring Dakota’s uncannily similar domestic life.  So, you can safely assume that everything that follows is as much about the title’s creator as it is about the inhabitants of its fictional world.

Speaking of which, that world very much draws from Rush’s personal life too. The Appalachian Forest in which most of the action takes place is based on the area where he grew up, with certain landmarks being lifted from his hometown, and the owner of the rental cabin is named after his own Grandpa. There’s even a fun mechanic where you can sift through the vinyl collection Dakota hauled up with her to the woods and listen to tracks from some of Rush’s peers in the West Virginian music scene (all while your avatar delivers Patrick Bateman-esque soliloquies about the respective bands and their output).

 A Tortured Artist

Kicking back and listening to indie tunes isn’t the only “cosy” activity you can derive pleasure from in Project Songbird, as the daylight sections of the game take on an almost walking sim quality. In addition to just stretching your legs and listening to Dakota’s monologue, you can indulge your inner shutterbug by taking snaps with a Polaroid camera, messing around with instruments in the cabin, and — in one of the most addictive side-quests we’ve undertaken in recent memory — use your directional microphone to capture the sounds of nature for sampling in future Neon Songbird tracks.

Honestly, it’s during these more tranquil moments that the game is at its best, leading to you getting intimately acquainted with your compelling lead character (soulfully played by Valerie Rose Lohman, in an award-worthy performance) and immersing yourself in their surroundings. It’s got a slow and deliberate pace to it that may test the patience of those who just want to get on with the supernatural shenanigans, but, should you take the time to engage with all the unique interactions, it can be rewarding downtime that enriches the frights to come.

On that note, when night falls, the game does a dramatic heel turn. As soon as you cross the boundary into — for lack of a better description — the “other world”, more traditional survival-horror elements are steadily introduced. You’ll be tasked with solving Metroidvania puzzles, completing a few stealth encounters, and even engaging in resource-draining combat. A sharp contrast, then, to your diurnal objectives.

Taking you on a tour of Dakota’s most formative memories, there’s an echo of Outlast 2’s hallucinatory school flashbacks here. Meanwhile, the way in which the claustrophobic geography shifts and loops around recalls P.T., and the inclusion of mixed-media gimmickry warrants favourable comparisons to Alan Wake.

Yet for all the gaming reference points that spring to mind, it’s actually cinematic touchstones that appear to have had the most tangible impact on Project Songbird’s sensibilities. Specifically, Rush has cited the house style of A24 as a major influence.

Now, that doesn’t give you much to go on, seeing as A24 is effectively a financial backer when all is said and done and not an artistic voice unto itself. Aside from maybe Disney, there aren’t too many studios out there that function as recognisable brands, and this particular company has had involvement with such diverse projects as Lady Bird, Swiss Army Man, and Marty Supreme. There’s not much connective tissue between any of them, apart from the fact that they all made your normie relatives ask: “So, you actually like this stuff?”

To be fair, it’s evident that what Rush is evoking here is that pigeonholed, easily marketable version of the A24 legacy that is used to sell a very specific type of film. You know, slowburn, atmospheric chillers with folk horror underpinnings, traumatising imagery and, ideally, flashes of naked elderly people. All of which are boxes that Project Songbird dutifully checks!

To narrow it down further, we’d say it’s especially indebted to Robert Eggers’ and Ari Aster’s contributions to the canon. In terms of the former, traces of Hereditary can be detected in certain visual flourishes (like when infernal red light leaks out through the windows of your cabin).

Elsewhere, Rush shares many of Eggers’ authorial fixations and recurring motifs. For example, we’ve got a main character exiling themselves to a remote location, people driving themselves to the brink of insanity for the sake of upholding their convictions, and a heavy emphasis on folklore. Not to mention, there are some stylistic affectations that are clearly inspired by The Lighthouse director’s oeuvre, including aspect ratio shifts and flirtations with striking visual formats. The Witch is even namedropped during one missable line of dialogue, explicitly acknowledging it as a key text.

Not Quite My Tempo

Yet despite all of its jumbled inspirations, Project Songbird crucially never forgets to forge an identity of its own. On the contrary, it blends together all of Rush’s many loves (arthouse horror, walking sims like What Remains of Edith Finch, and, of course, music) into something that is often unique and exciting.

And the highs are very, very high indeed. There are at least a couple of ingenious puzzles that’ll test your problem-solving skills under pressure, and the emotional beats land way harder than you might expect (again, Lohman deserves all the praise for her devastating turn as Dakota).

As for the survival-horror side of the equation, there is one protracted set piece that is amongst the scariest we’ve endured in a hot minute. It tasks you with playing a series of musical arrangements on keyboards scattered around a dingy labyrinth, all while being stalked by a Weeping Angel-esque golem that is capable of advancing whenever you break eye contact. Having to perfect your scales here — sweatily consulting a reference sheet as this panting abomination breathes down your neck— is the closest you’ll ever come to a stressful video game adaptation of Whiplash. Suffice it to say, you’ll be rushing, not dragging!

If anything, Project Songbird could benefit from having a few more of these scenarios that cleverly incorporate the story’s musical themes. Because whenever you are thrust into more straightforward encounters, it can be a bit lacklustre.

In one of the game’s many fourth wall breaks, Rush candidly admits that combat is a little outside his wheelhouse and that he is more at ease in the walking-sim space. This discomfort shows in the finished product, on account of clunky shooting mechanics and melee that is quite ungainly.

Granted, Dakota is not meant to be a Navy SEAL, and you can understand why the developer wouldn’t want them to be performing suplexes on the monsters they bump into, but it’d be nice if they had at least some degree of hand-eye coordination!  As it stands, the janky parrying, floaty axe swings, and sluggish movement make you wonder if your character is meant to have knocked back a few beers (or perhaps a few six-packs) before each skirmish.

There’s also a distinct absence of audio-visual feedback to let you know when a creature is on your tail or attacking from behind. Even more glaringly, there’s a disappointing lack of enemy and location variety to keep things fresh. You just keep going up against bland, featureless wood sprites in bland, featureless corridors.

With this combat feeling so deflating, you’ll often find yourself prioritising evasion tactics instead. Not because you want to conserve resources, mind you — as you would in, say, Resident Evil — but because getting into fights simply isn’t worth either the trouble or the time.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only area where Project Songbird slips up, as we also have to deal with an underwhelming conclusion. Spoiler prohibitions make this a tricky one to explain, as we’re not allowed to go into detail about anything that transpires past the game’s second act, but Dakota’s journey is hastily wrapped up to prioritise an eleventh-hour change in focus that (while ambitious and experimental) isn’t what we’ve been invested in.

Again, we can’t say too much, only that entire plot threads are left dangling in the wind, and that we essentially cut away from what should be the final confrontation of the story, subsequently returning to the action when it’s been resolved off-screen!

Given the A24 inspiration, some ambiguity should be expected here. Yet there’s a fine line between leaving things open to interpretation and outright ditching narrative concepts altogether. Throughout the story, Rush introduces fascinating mysteries about a local witch, a tragic mining disaster, and these Appalachian creatures that constantly harass Dakota, and none of it is adequately resolved. Of course, you don’t want the answers spoon-fed to you, especially not if you’re trying to do the whole Robert Eggers thing, but there still needs to be some closure!

What just about redeems the final act is the catharsis we get for Dakota’s emotional journey. The way her creative crisis and historic trauma come together at the end is moving and sensitively handled, with a musical coda that’s legitimately powerful. While you might emerge disappointed by how the supernatural side of the story peters out, it’s hard to fault this particular arc.

Project Songbird might not be perfect then, but it remains an uncompromised personal vision that makes you feel things. Sure, sometimes those feelings are of bewilderment and frustration, but on other occasions, they could be terror, sorrow, and even a little bit of healing. In a landscape of AAA blockbusters that are fun but don’t really mean all that much, you’ve got to admire something that aspires to say something. And what Rush says here will connect with a lot of people.

Review code provided by publisher. Project Songbird will release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam on March 26.

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It’s commitment that’s perhaps the best thing about Vampires of the Velvet Lounge, a campy, often bonkers horror-comedy from writer/director Adam Sherman. There are moments when the film’s budget shows, and moments when its script and its pacing get rocky. There are even moments when it feels primed to go off the rails, but it’s a story told with confidence and many, many buckets of blood, and that makes the ride worth it. 

The title vampires are a trio of beautiful women, led by the legendary “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory (Mena Suvari), who run an absinthe bar in present-day Savannah. The modern world is sometimes frustrating for Elizabeth and her fellow vamps, Joan (India Eisley) and Helena (Sarah Dumont), but the vast digital expanse of the online dating world has been a boon, allowing them to lure unsuspecting victims to their lair under the guise of a rendezvous with a beauty. 

It’s a strategy that makes the centuries-old women harder to detect, but it’s not impossible. Cora (Dichen Lachman), an ex-soldier turned vampire hunter, is on Elizabeth’s trail, and eager to stake one of the most infamous bloodsuckers who’s ever lived. On the weekend of a lunar eclipse that might make the vampires even more powerful, Cora plots her next move with the help of her partner Alexis (Rosa Salazar), but they’re not the only ones paying the bar a visit. A trio of middle-aged men looking for a good time (Stephen Dorff, Lochlyn Monroe, and Tyrese Gibson) are also in town hoping to meet up with these hot women they’ve met online, setting up a blood-soaked night for the ages. 

As with a lot of low-budget, shot-on-digital efforts released in the indie world right now, it takes a moment to warm up to Vampires of the Velvet Lounge‘s visual sense. The strings are showing just a little bit in the visual effects, and the cinematography sometimes goes flat in terms of both composition and color. Throw in a predictable early plot setup and it’s easy to feel, for a few minutes anyway, like you’re about to watch a film you’ve seen done better somewhere else.

Then Vampires settles into its rhythm, and you realize this is a film which, flaws and all, understands exactly the kind of movie it needs to be. Sherman’s script, though sometimes clumsy, is packed with enthusiasm for certain genre conventions, from the film-noir-inspired voiceover of the tortured vampire hunter to the scenery-chewing evil of Suvari’s Bathory. The strings are showing, sure, but so is the camp, and over the course of Act One the latter cleanly wins out. 

In Sherman’s world, vampires aren’t just immortal beauties full of blood-sucking fury and sadism. They’re also bickering, fumbling, occasionally in over their heads even in a world where they can talk themselves out of pretty much any bad situation. You can feel the kind of malaise that’s settled over these women in their centuries-long quest to just keep drinking blood regardless of technology or circumstance, and it especially shines through in the tension between Elizabeth and Joan, who may or may not be regretting her lack of humanity at this stage of her afterlife. Then there’s Cora, who’s so self-serious that she’d make Count Dracula himself tell her to loosen up a little, adding even more of an arch tone to the way these characters are sketched out.

It’s all meant to play with this sense of heightened reality and extreme emotional poles, and while it sometimes stumbles in that effort, it works more than it doesn’t. 

This is thanks in no small part to the cast, led by Suvari, who’s giving it everything she’s got as a legendary vampire frustrated by the company she’s keeping and the evolution of her place in the world. Her Elizabeth is gleefully villainous, and when she gets the chance to play opposite clueless humans, she’s having a ball. No one else in the film can touch her, but everyone’s trying, particularly Dorff, whose turn late in the film is one of its campy highlights. 

But the real draw here, the thing that convinced me this was a film I wouldn’t just enjoy, but enjoy again? It’s the blood, and lots of it. Too often with horror films at this budget level, you get the sense that filmmakers are attempting to pull back on overt gore elements that might seem cartoonish to some viewers, in favor of something more subtle that never quite lands. This is not that film. From the opening sequence to the final chaotic battle, Vampires of the Velvet Lounge is a bloodfest of the best kind, a movie willing to positively drench itself in fake crimson goo for our amusement. It adds to the camp value, and if you’ll permit me, to the vamp value. 

All of this means that, even when the film’s clumsier tendencies and limitations are quite visible, Vampires of the Velvet Lounge is just fun. It’s a wild ride through a blood-soaked underworld where the vampires are hot, the hunters are cool, and the commitment to the premise is palpable and quite rewarding.

Vampires of the Velvet Lounge opens in select theaters March 20.

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Ready or Not 2 picks up immediately from the previous film, with Grace (Samara Weaving) emerging from the burning wreckage of the La Domas estate and into the arms of first responders. She comes to in the hospital just long enough to greet her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) and draw suspicion before both sisters get pulled into a frantic power grab for the head seat at Mr. Le Bail’s high council.

The rules remain mostly the same in an even higher stakes game of hide and seek; Grace must survive until dawn to win while six High Council families compete to slay her.

The prize? Ultimate power.

Read on for Bloody Disgusting’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come review.

Kathryn Newton in READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

There’s a lot of ground to cover in introducing the new Satanic clans and their familial dysfunction, which means Ready or Not 2, while it still moves at a rapid clip, takes a bit to really get the lethal game going in full swing. It’s the introductions that also make clear that this sequel goes much broader with comedy than its predecessor.

Elijah Wood elevates his exposition delivery role as Le Bail’s lawyer with mischievous glee, but writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy prioritize twins Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus Danforth (Shawn Hatosy) more than the rest of the newcomers as the antithesis to the constantly bickering Grace and Faith. Ready or Not 2 is prone to pausing the action to let the sisters work through their issues, and it can overcrowd an already crowded playing field, including the contrasting Danforths.

Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin have fun playing with scale, giving Grace even more places to hide and fight than before. Sometimes that leads to ruthless combat, in which Faith proves she can take a brutal beating as well as her older sis. Sometimes action sequences veer too far into silly, like a cat fight between two jilted women at the scene of an abandoned wedding.

From L to R: Kara Wooten, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, and Sarah Michelle Gellar in READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

The filmmakers never treat the carnage as silly, though, and the deaths and beatdowns remain as effective as ever. Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin’s dedication to practical effects means that bursting Satanists still hasn’t grown stale, or Weaving’s reaction to them.

Kathryn Newton shares an effortless rapport with Samara Weaving on screen, bringing an infectious energy and fighting spirit to Faith that complements Grace’s disillusioned exasperation. But Weaving remains the star here, even in this all-star cast, and Grace’s slow switch from defense to offense heralds in one satisfying finale. Special mention to costume designer Avery Plewes for topping Grace’s iconic battered bride look with new elegant perfection in the climax.

From L to R: Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Samara Weaving in READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

More is more in Ready or Not 2. Bigger stakes, larger playing field, a higher (and more gruesome) body count, and even double the protagonists. All designed to deliver maximum crowd-pleasing fun. It more than delivers on that front, even if it loses some of the original magic in the process.

Watching the ultra-rich and privileged get blood-soaked comeuppance in cheeky, violent fashion makes it pretty difficult to leave Ready or Not 2 without a big grin on your face.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is now playing in theaters.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published March 13, 2026.

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The horror streamer Shudder boasts a diverse selection of films, and they’ve grown over the years to become a valuable resource for documentaries new and old. They’ve made a particular mark when it comes to producing documentaries from marginalized perspectives in horror, including 2019’s Horror Noire and 2022’s Queer for Fear, and now they’re back with another entry in that unofficial series. 1000 Women in Horror is an enlightening and entertaining film that kicks off with a simple observation…

Horror hasn’t always been the most welcoming space for women.

“Aha!” you yell emphatically at your laptop screen, “then how do you explain the existence and popularity of final girls?!” That angry enthusiasm is noted, but I’m referring to female fans and filmmakers, not characters. Although let’s be honest, final girls spend the entire film being terrorized and watching their friends die, so let’s not pretend it’s all that welcoming for them either.

1000 Women in Horror, directed by Donna Davies and adapted from Alexander Heller-Nicholas’ 2020 book of the same name, uses this understood truth as a jumping-off point towards discussing both the roles women (and girls) have played in horror movies over the years and the experiences of female horror fans who became horror filmmakers. The talking heads roster is a cornucopia of talents, including Heller-Nicholas, Akela Cooper, Lin Shaye, Roseanne Liang, Mary Harron, Nikyatu Juso, Brea Grant, and many more.

The always brilliant Kate Siegel offers up a growth chart, of sorts, that follows female characters through horror – and typically through a male gaze – and it’s used as a smart structural framework for the documentary itself. From “innocent” children to temptatious teens, from fuckable young women to unfuckable hags, female characters can feel boxed into rigidly specific roles, often in the service of their male counterparts, and the film finds much to discuss at each stage.

While seemingly limiting on their surface, these character types find new life when viewed through a different lens. In some cases, these filmmakers see themselves in those girls and women – whether as they are or as they want to be – while others see motivations for creating female characters who grow beyond the confines of those boxes. Films are referenced at each stage as examples of how horror cinema has used girls and women as objects for horror to ping off of, but genre tropes and stereotypes can’t keep good women down.

Gigi Saul Guerrero recalls being both horrified and ultimately inspired by seeing The Exorcist as a child, while Heller-Nicholas and Jenn Wexler talk about how demonic possession is used to subject a young girl’s body to the strains of grown-up behaviors and suffering. April Wolfe, Kier-La Janisse, and Heller-Nicholas talk about the contrasting presentations of menstruation in films like Carrie, Ginger Snaps, and the female-helmed Black Christmas from 2019. Chelsea Stardust, Heller-Nicholas (who authored a critical study on rape/revenge films back in 2011), and others discuss living with fear as part of your everyday life and then applying those lessons and feelings to the catharsis that the rape/revenge subgenre often provides.

The horrors of motherhood are explored through films like Cujo, Lyle, and Rosemary’s Baby, while specific attention is paid to the atypical truths of The Babadook and We Need to Talk About Kevin. While most media glorify motherhood and focuses on its joy and importance, horror films like these dare to peel back a few layers of skin to expose the raw reality that it’s not always a pretty picture. The elderly are often presented as frightening in horror films, with older women earning their own subgenre called hagsploitation. Cerise Howard, Guerrero, and Harron explore the idea of older women losing themselves to age and madness through movies like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and 2020’s still masterful Relic.

Toby Poser in 1000 Women in Horror

“Women do stuff, even if they’re monsters,” says Heller-Nicholas as a way of positively framing the genre’s generally poor history of portraying elderly women, but it’s a thought applicable to women across the board. “They have agency, and they have power, and it might be dark power, it might be fucked up power, but they do stuff.” It’s evident in the filmographies of the women present here, in those they reference, and in the observations they share about their experiences.

1000 Women in Horror is also far more quotable than you’d expect from a documentary. “Sit down, little boy, the grown-ups are talking,” says Heller-Nicholas early on in response to typically male critics who claim that approaching horror through the focus of gender is a modern phenomenon. “I didn’t need a fucking dick to hold a camera,” says Mattie Do in regard to the realization that women are every bit as capable of making movies. “Mary Shelley was goth as fuck,” says Wolfe when talking about the undeniable influence of Frankenstein. “Every single mother is a final girl,” says Siegel, who’s just on fire throughout, leading up to a wonderfully vivid description of the emergency cesarean section she endured with her first child. “Everything’s fucking terrifying,” she says, and not that my two cents are needed here, but I can vouch for it all as someone who witnessed part of it with the c-section arrival of my own child.

If there’s a fault to be found here, it’s simply that the film’s ninety-six-minute running time will leave you wanting far more. The chapter structure works well, but there’s so much to say that each section could easily occupy its own hour-long episode. As it stands, some of the more compelling ideas and insights see their surfaces barely scratched before we’re moved onto the next observation. Heller-Nicholas’ original book approaches it all with an encyclopedic format showing just how dense the subject is, and fans of the documentary who leave wanting more should strongly consider picking up a copy.

Still, 1000 Women in Horror is an engaging watch, even as an introduction of sorts to seeing horror movies through a specifically female lens. Women will appreciate it, and men might just learn a thing or two while also being equally entertained.

Watch the documentary, seek out Heller-Nicholas’ book, and then make an effort to find and thoroughly enjoy the numerous films talked about here, including gems like Poison for the Fairies, Lucky, Helter Skelter, Suicide Club, and more. 

1000 Women in Horror begins streaming on Shudder on March 20, 2026.

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Kevin Bacon, directing from a script by Dan Beers, plays Jack Smith, a micro-budget horror movie director undeterred by his films’ poor reception or lack of funding. It’s not just his love of the genre that keeps him going, but that he’s made his productions a family affair. It’s wife and almost-star Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), his aspiring actress daughter Ula (Sosie Bacon), and his erstwhile Muay Thai fighter son Trent (Travis Bacon) that hold his crude productions together, even when Maya (Liza Koshy), the pesky documentarian daughter to the financier behind Jack’s latest, Blood Moon, interferes. Production really begins to derail when an actual body shows up on the set.

Family Movie introduces its central clan in the middle of a busy shoot that sees each member wearing multiple hats, sometimes even costumes, as fake blood spurts and set mishaps send an actor (Jackie Earle Haley) off with half-hearted threats of a lawsuit. Despite its meta-nature, this heartfelt sequence isn’t so much a love letter to indie horror filmmaking as it is setting the stage for a real slasher to unfurl undetected, at least at first. 

Kevin Bacon in Family Movie

Instead, Family Movie operates as the perfect excuse for the Bacon clan to play together as extremely heightened, fictionalized versions of each other. Trent struggles to be noticed in a family of performers, with Ula desperate to land her big break while dutifully supporting dad’s long-stalled career. It’s the latter that Jack will have to reckon with most: the realization that his ego and career have taken precedence over his family’s needs and wants when the bodies start piling up.

While the entire family is having an absolute blast playing loose caricatures of themselves, which goes far in fleshing out their paper-thin characters, it’s Sedgwick who winds up stealing the film as the “awe shucks” matriarch with a fierce protective streak.

Sedgwick delights as the wholesome mom with a vicious edge, which goes far in a film that places family dynamics above all else. The production of Blood Moon and the increasing financial pressure it places on Jack falls quickly into the background, not even the steadfast determination to complete filming feels as important as the wacky horror-comedy hijinks of a family working out their issues while a murderer is on the loose. So much so that the film barrels toward an anticlimactic finish once the Smiths have resolved their interpersonal drama, to its rushed detriment. The good news is that the Bacons don’t skimp on the gore, and the deaths that do punctuate their shenanigans are suitably splatterific.

Family Movie never once wavers from its namesake and intent. Beers’ script and Bacon’s direction present just that, a family movie project. Corn syrup and retractable movie knife props run amok alongside rehearsed dance numbers and actual Bacon home video clips in Family Movie. It’s not a love letter to the genre, though the Bacons wear their affinity for it on their sleeves here.

Instead, it’s an infectiously charming excuse to forge new family memories with an earnest reminder to never lose focus on what matters most, especially when life gets bloody.

Family Movie made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.

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Sokolov, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alex Litvak (Predators), skips formalities with a rushed but grim intro to Beetz’s Asia Reaves, a woman with a disturbing domestic crisis that lands her in jail and sets up the entire narrative thrust: Asia’s unwavering resolve to rescue the younger sister she left behind, Maria (Myha’La).

That brings her to the exclusive high-rise residence, The Virgil, as the new maid taken under the wing of building manager Lily (Patricia Arquette). But infiltrating the ranks to retrieve Maria proves harder than expected for Asia when it turns out the Virgil is home to a Satanic Cult that means to make her their latest sacrifice.

(L-R) PATERSON JOSEPH as RAY, TOM FELTON as Kevin, MYHA’LA as Maria, WILLIE LUDIK as Bob, HEATHER GRAHAM as Sharon, GABE GABRIEL as Small Steve, ZAZIE BEETZ as Asia, DAVID VIVIERS as Tall Steve, and PATRICIA ARQUETTE as Lily Woodhouse in New Line Cinema/Nocturna’s “They Will Kill You,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

They Will Kill You wastes no time cutting straight to the action-horror goods; Beetz is forced into fight mode almost as soon as she’s tucked into bed on her first night. Barefoot, no less. Sokolov subjects his star to a grueling gauntlet, slicing and dicing through the Satanic elite while sustaining quite a bit of battering herself. It’s an adrenaline rush of a movie that’s aiming to paint the entire building red while delivering no shortage of action-horror spectacle. More is more in Sokolov’s over-the-top horror comedy that puts Beetz’s physicality on impressive display.

Beetz takes on a variety of combat styles, depending on the circumstance and set piece, which keeps Sokolov’s action-horror movie visually interesting even when Asia’s quest takes her further into the increasingly nondescript, rusty bowels of the Virgil. Before then, Production Designer Jeremy Reed (Dust Bunny, Gretel & Hansel) presents a tongue-in-cheek, vibrant interpretation of the Nine Circles of Hell in high-rise form. It’s almost too good; it quickly becomes a shame that Asia’s constant barrage of brawls doesn’t allow for further exploration of the devilish floors.

New Line Cinema/Nocturna’s “They Will Kill You,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

That surface-level worldbuilding also extends to They Will Kill You‘s plotting and themes; there’s not much depth to the story beyond its resolute heroine’s love for her sister, or Lily’s straightforward bid to protect her own dysfunctional family. It’s a film that brushes its characters with broad archetypal brushstrokes, but luckily leaves its talented and experienced cast to fill in the blanks with quirky character moments that endear and entertain all the same.

Patricia Arquette is disarming as the relatable but steely Lily, but Heather Graham stands out as the scene-stealing Sharon, an effervescent acolyte who can dole out as much pain as she can take it, which is to say quite a lot. Graham is in rare form and more than game for Sokolov’s splatstick mayhem.

Sokolov lets the arterial spray flow fast and freely, pulling from spaghetti westerns to anime to samurai features to inject variance and inspired forms of carnage-fueled combat. Horror, and Raimi’s imprint in particular, looms large over bonkers bursts of gore- like a rather cheeky sequence involving a renegade eyeball- that ensures the infectious energy always matches Beetz’s badassery.

HEATHER GRAHAM as Sharon in New Line Cinema/Nocturna’s “They Will Kill You,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

Sokolov’s striking composition, dedication to carnage-fueled stunts and fight choreography, and an all-too-game cast anchored by a dedicated and fierce Zazie Beetz prevent this slight but energetic crowd-pleaser from careening off the rails. They Will Kill You has little meat on its bones, but it’s so brazen and unabashed in its pursuit of cinematic thrills and splatstick chills that it succeeds in its aim, which is to deliver a riotously great time at the theater.

Zazie Beetz’s fighting form brilliance is worth the price of admission alone to this nonstop, blood-soaked adrenaline rush.

They Will Kill You made its world premiere at SXSW and releases in theaters on March 27.

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It’s an introduction to Reinhart’s commanding Apple, who seduces a leering dad into a compromising position before inflicting humiliation from the parking lot before the start of her shift, that begins director Meredith Alloway‘s feature debut. It’s the type of control and confidence that instantly marks her as queen bee of her clique, before we meet Fig (Alexandra Shipp) and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), the two other current members of the Forbidden Fruits, the sisterhood formed from the employees of the shop Free Eden.

The threesome is in search of a fourth member to round out their coven after tragedy befell their last sister when newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) arrives. Instead of witchy harmony, though, Pumpkin disrupts the ranks and forces the Fruits to confront their poisonous ways.

Alloway, who adapts the stageplay Of the Women Came the Beginning of Sin, and Through Her We All Die with its playwright, Lily Houghton, maintains razor sharp focus on its central foursome comprised of Gen Z’s favorite It Girls. While fashion trends come and go, archetypes never really go out of style and just about all are represented within the deceptively insidious Fruits. If we’re drawing Mean Girls comparisons, which the social hierarchy here is apt to do, Pedretti’s loveable ditz Cherry channels the daft perkiness of Karen Smith while Shipp’s stylish but people-pleasing Fig matches Gretchen Wieners.

Ultimately, though, Forbidden Fruits builds to a savage faceoff between Apple and Pumpkin, two darker, more cunning visions of Regina George and Kady, respectively. Unlike Mean Girls, it takes a much murkier approach to the motives and morals of its two opposing ladies.

It’s the battle of wits and the Gen Z vision of shopping mall witchcraft that engages most in this single-location horror-comedy. Alloway’s feature debut never leaves the mall, but production designer Ciara Vernon keeps it visually interesting with an enchanting vision of Free Eden and flourishes of teen girl whimsy scattered across the shopping center, including an inspired use of surveillance tech by way of Barbie.

Cinematographer Karim Hussain (Infinity Pool, Gen V) captures the witchy social destruction with a dreamlike quality, isolating the frenemies in a bubble of heightened reality removed from the rest of the mall’s employees and regulars that include Free Eden’s boss (Gabrielle Union) or forbidden love interests like Fries Boy (Zack Thompson). Or even traumatized former coven member Pickles (Emma Chamberlain).

Forbidden Fruits wears its cinematic influences on its sleeves as friendships curdle and contempt breeds violence, but unlike Mean Girls or Heathers, Alloway and Houghton afford their primary antagonist more depth and a vulnerable backstory. Reinhart latches onto Apple’s internal complexities and coaxes them to the forefront, earning surprising allegiance in the process even when Apple is at her most vicious. And boy does she get ruthless come the film’s gory climax.

As delightful and winsome as this cast can be, it’s Reinhart who runs away with the film and leaves you rooting for Apple to dig her witchy claws into a new friend or foe. Forbidden Fruits may not necessarily forge new terrain in the teen satire space, but Alloway brings so much style and energy to her well-cast single-location stageplay adaptation for the Gen Z crowd.

Forbidden Fruits made its premiere at SXSW and releases in theaters on March 27, 2026.

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Imposters makes clear that appearances can and will be very deceiving from the outset, with an introduction to protagonist Paul (Charlie Barnett) in an affectionate and intimate moment with a woman who’s soon revealed to be his mistress. Paul’s actual wife, Marie (Jessica Rothe), seems oblivious to her husband’s unhappiness, let alone his straying ways. To her credit, the couple has just relocated to a quiet small town to start anew with their new baby. Marie’s too preoccupied with settling in and raising their son, which leads to catastrophe when the baby goes missing during his birthday party. Her relentless determination to find him means she eventually succeeds, though Paul starts to suspect the child she brought back isn’t actually theirs.

It’s a setup that reads familiar, complete with creepy red herring townies and an ominous cold open that brings titles like Pet Sematary or folktales of changelings to mind, but that’s part of Phillips’ crafty deception. The truth behind what’s happening is as compelling as the enigmatic road getting there, all in service of its somber and sometimes outright disturbing depiction of a relationship well past its healthy prime. Paul and Marie’s marriage is as complicated as their missing child predicament, creating a constant push and pull of shifting allegiances between them as new details expose their flaws. Yul Vazquez (Books of Blood, “The Outsider”) brings warmth and a little worldbuilding as the local sheriff, with Bates Wilder supporting as a not-so-effective but heartbreaking suspect in the inciting disappearance, but Imposters almost entirely rests upon Charlie Barnett and Jessica Rothe’s shoulders.

Phillips puts his couple through the wringer as his feature debut subjects Paul and Marie to grueling physical and emotional devastation in their bid to repair their fractured family. Barnett deftly overcomes his character’s more cowardly impulses and infidelity in act one, coaxing empathy for Paul’s vulnerabilities and misguided but pure intentions, especially once shit hits the proverbial fan, and the horror arrives in earnest. His turn bolsters Phillips’ script, which is careful to point out that both parties are as responsible for the state of the deteriorating marriage.

To that end, Imposters quickly becomes Jessica Rothe’s film in the back half. Rothe gets downright primal as Marie’s maternal instincts drive her to commit shocking, violent acts, and a late sequence of clever staging, sci-fi trickery, and high stakes conflict serves as a jaw-dropping showcase of her talents. It’s a sucker punch of a sequence, both in its pitch black darkness and for Rothe’s guttural screams of fury and devastation. Phillips’ script aims for raw, emotional honesty, and Barnett and Rothe more than rise to the occasion.

Gripping performances and morally ambiguous protagonists propel this sci-fi mystery, one that’s stripped down to its basics in both style and tone. There’s something cozy and nondescript about the wooded small town, and Imposters never veers far past Paul and Marie’s property. Instead, Imposters maintains laser focus on its leads as their marriage reaches a crossroads in more ways than one, while facing one of the most agonizing scenarios for a parent. Phillips script also never balks from emotional honesty; Imposters builds to a fitting end that doesn’t let anyone off the hook.

That Phillips skipped expanding his award-winning short into a feature-length film for his debut, instead opting to explore form and genre with a lean, devastating genre-bender, indicates a thoughtful emerging filmmaker willing to take risks. Imposters is a confident debut, one that keeps you guessing with its mystery setup and shifty protagonists. While its ultimate genre reveals don’t exactly forge new ground, its well-timed and executed reveals and grim character work ensure a gripping new vision of domestic horror and mark Phillips as one to watch.

Imposters made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.

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At the center of the comedic carnage are Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving), a miserable couple as unhappy with each other as their stagnant careers. Dan is a director trapped in commercials when he’d rather make movies, while Lisa is a struggling actress still seeking her big break. He whisks Lisa away under the guise of a romantic weekend excursion and recharge at his dad’s cabin, with the ultimate goal to kill her. He’s unaware that she, too, intends to use their trip as a cover for murder. But their murderous intent gets derailed when they discover a trio of violent fugitives hiding out in the attic, throwing the lethal dissolution of their marriage into mayhem.

It’s not just the comedic talents of Segel and Weaving that get Over Your Dead Body off to a deeply funny start, but a script that positions them as, despite their best plans and research, woefully inept and ill-equipped to execute. Their early bickering and venomous jabs set the stage for a brutal yet hilarious reckoning, yet their explosive confrontation is only the appetizer for the satisfying comedy of errors that ensues when the fugitives enter the fray.

Image courtesy of Independent Film Company.

Jorma Taccone and editor Jeremy Cohen earn additional laughs for the nonlinear structure that frequently rewinds the clock to reveal new wrinkles, like introducing Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), and Allegra (Juliette Lewis) with a crash before cutting to days prior to reveal how they arrived at the cabin. And their arrival marks the turning point where Over Your Dead Body unleashes the comedically gory floodgates that push the splatsick brutality to extremes. The fugitives, a twisted version of the Three Stooges, are as dysfunctional as Dan and Lisa, though much, much more vicious in their bloodlust.

Everyone takes a nasty pummeling here, and the gruesome deaths are as wonderfully executed with an emphasis on practical effects. Even the film’s characters are genuinely surprised by the amount of pain they can inflict or receive, which in itself elicits laughs. To that end, Jardine stands out as the hulking brawn of the villains, one so daft that it’s almost disarming right until he switches into terrifying executioner. And Todd is a tank when it comes to extreme bodily damage.

Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis excel at villain roles, but the layering of comedy lets them really cut loose with Pete and Allegra’s killer quirks. Paul Guilfoyle threatens to steal the film in his brief but unforgettable turn as Dan’s ornery, no-nonsense father, Michael, whose arrival into the fray earned deserved vocal cheers from a rowdy SXSW audience, one that made dialogue occasionally tricky to hear through the roaring laughter. That is to say that the jokes and physical antics land here. 

Image courtesy of Independent Film Company.

Where Taccone’s update of Wirkola’s film flounders a bit is in its uneven handling of the spouses. Once motives for murder are laid bare, it leaves the neurotic Dan with the much meatier arc of self-reflection and accountability. It can leave Samara Weaving sidelined by the film’s focus on having Dan correct past mistakes by putting himself much more firmly in harm’s way. 

The closing coda, while intentionally over the top with a cameo, strives more for laughs with its hyperbolic style than for an organic extension of Dan and Lisa’s journey. It’s a minor quibble considering the rip-roaring comedy that preceded it.

Jorma Taccone captures the look of The Trip and its lakeside setting, but dials up the gory chaos while spending more emphasis on the dysfunctional relationships to inject stakes and suspense. It works, especially with a cast game to come unhinged.

Over Your Dead Body is one of the funniest films of the year; it happens to be one of its bloodiest, too.

Over Your Dead Body premiered at SXSW and releases in theaters on April 24.

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Adam Scott stars as Ohm Bauman, a successful author struggling to conclude his conquistador book series that seems destined to end in bleakness. That’s likely because Ohm is very much haunted by the loss of his parents, and so he travels to the hotel where they honeymooned for a sense of closure. Ohm isn’t a very nice guy, though, and alienates much of Billberry Woods Hotel’s staff.

He does manage to make two friends in bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) and forest dweller Jerry (David Wilmot), both of whom warn him of the witch haunting the closed-off Honeymoon Suite. When Fiona goes missing, Ohm’s attempts to find her and the truth plunge him into an existential nightmare straight out of a twisted fairy tale.

Hokum‘s setting and acerbic author call Stephen King to mind, 1408 and The Shining specifically, in that the supernatural causes its protagonist to confront their issues in a baptism by unholy fire. While that means that McCarthy places higher emphasis on Ohm’s journey than the witchy folklore, the filmmaker firmly marches to his own drum with a unique and haunted vision. 

While Ohm’s introduction brings an effective scare, Hokum bides its time building anticipation and mystery. That’s not to say it’s light on scares; trust that McCarthy will scare you silly here. But dread and atmosphere take precedence over a constant barrage of jump scares; though there are plenty of those, too. One of McCarthy’s biggest strengths is his ability to conjure up chills from seemingly mundane spaces or objects, and with such imagination. 

There’s a distinct look to a Damian McCarthy horror movie. The filmmaker has a way of making whimsy pure nightmare fuel; Hokum distorts a kids’ show into eerie, uncanny valley-induced terror in its torment of Ohm. Production designer Til Frohlich ensures the hotel, and the Honeymoon Suite in particular, is as tactile and immersive as it is full of personality. When Ohm eventually finds his way in, you can practically smell the musk and mildew.

Adam Scott’s Ohm makes for a pleasant surprise, and his complicated emotional journey gives way to a deeply moving story of a man, not unlike his fictional conquistador bookending this film, so thoroughly broken by personal trauma that he constantly dwells in darkness. In true McCarthy style, expect the creepy as hell witch to dole out some supernatural retribution for crimes committed, but never in the way you’d expect. 

Damian McCarthy excels at defying expectations, also reflected in the way that every supporting player surprises: first impressions are very deceptive here. It’s also reflected in Hokum‘s narrative structure. McCarthy is unhurried in doling out details and uninterested in handholding. The Irish, at least in Hokum, simply accept the existence of folkloric entities like the witch. How she got there isn’t as important as the fact that she’s there and for good. Those hoping for an expansion of lore will likely come away disappointed, but that’s not what’s important to this story.

Hokum so thoroughly invests you in Ohm’s off-kilter quest, one that keeps raising new intrigues and questions, and in a way that’s not easily predicted. The full scope of terror takes a while to arrive for the sake of building anticipation, such nail-biting anticipation that explodes in a folkloric freakout, yet it still holds you firmly in its grip.

McCarthy dangles close to the precipice of bleakness, but ultimately rewards with a magical story about storytelling and the ability to heal. Hokum just also happens to be really freaking scary. But, as Jerry explains to Ohm, you have to be open to it.

Hokum premiered at SXSW and releases in theaters on May 1.

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Grind hits the ground running with its lambasting of everything from MLMs to delivery services to unionizations, with all paths directly leading back to nefarious corporation DRGN. It opens with a tense look from inside an Amazon-like warehouse, where its workers face horrific consequences if they miss their package quota. From there, Grind employs Barbara Crampton as the Founder and Rob Huebel as an upper-level DRGN manager, serving as the connective tissue anchoring the segments.

Consistency varies in this anthology, but Grind at least smartly gets its roughest segment, “MLM,” out first. Crampton gives a valiant effort as the domineering yet ominously encouraging boss to two new reps of Lala Leggings as they struggle to maintain their sales goals. This segment quickly gets a bit too off the rails and loses sight of its messaging, but at least it succeeds in establishing the anthology’s overarching big comedic swings.

“Delivery” ramps up the action and carnage with a fun supernatural twist to the hells of being a DoorDash driver, one that makes up for clear budgetary constraints with vibrant creativity. From there, Grind careens into its best and darkest segment, “Content Moderation,” starring Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette as a hopeful DRGN employee promised to move up the ranks if he can succeed in clearing his content queue. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that DRGN has no intention of letting a plebe ascend into upper management and take drastic measures to snuff out hope and sanity.

It’s this segment that feels fully realized and the most polished, both in scares and messaging. It’s also filled with fun homages and memes, including a recurring Frogman jab. “Union Meeting” closes out the anthology with a comical depiction of Starbucks stand-in Neptunia, where its employees attempt to unionize until DRGN unleashes Neptunia’s mascot to squash it.

There’s a noticeable difference in technical precision and quality between segments, with rough seams showing in parts. Grind makes up for it with scrappy DIY spunk and attitude, even when it leans too far into twee humor. That’s largely because it’s so relatable and authentic in its biting commentary on an unsustainable gig economy. Who can’t relate to the work grind at this stage?

Grind holds up a middle finger to all conglomerates and billionaires that view their employees as disposable cogs. It tackles quite a lot of ground with clarity and with an admirable sense of humor. The anthology also fills its cast with a lot of notable horror talent, including Gigi Saul Guerrero, Matt Mercer, and Dead Meat’s James A. Janisse.

What Grind lacks in polish, it compensates for in its smart and earnest lambasting of the work grind. It’s a fun, cathartic reminder that it’s not just you; the current cruelty of big companies sucks. Grant, Dougherty, and Stardust commiserate with an uneven, lighthearted anthology that takes an energetic stab at the system that chews up its employees and spits them out.

Grind made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.

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The troupe in question here can barely get along before they embark on a trip to Budapest to compete, but the voyage quickly derails with travel mishaps. That leaves the five ballerinas and their coach stranded in the remote countryside. They take refuge at the nearby Teremok Inn owned by former ballerina-turned-crime boss Devora (Uma Thurman).

The troupe’s bad luck continues when one of their own is unceremoniously dispatched, forcing the surviving gals to rally their skills to survive the night.

Debut feature filmmaker Vicky Jewson, working from a screenplay by Kate Freund, assembles a charming young cast very game for the humor and killer pirouettes. Maddie Ziegler steals the entire film as rough-and-tumble Bones, the lead ballerina from the wrong side of the tracks, as well as the good graces of spoiled Princess (Lana Condor). Rounding out the troupe are pure Christian girl Grace (Avantika) and sisters Chloe (A Quiet Place‘s Millicent Simmonds) and Zoe (Iris Apatow), all varying degrees of over the Princess/Bones feud.

That makes their survival plight an entertaining bonding experience as they realize their strength in numbers against an entire inn full of bad guys who mean them harm. Jewson keeps ballet at the forefront of it all, informing everything from fight choreography to production design. On the former, Pretty Lethal has a blast translating a ballerina’s skillset and ability to withstand a lot of pain for the sake of their art into inventive combat sequences that see the ballerinas forge makeshift weaponry and lethal grand battements. More noticeable is their strong form; these ballerinas take their art form seriously and never break, even in peril.

Pretty Lethal does take a bit of time for the girls to realize their strengths, though, with Freund’s surface-level script putting them in distressed damsel mode during the front half to establish the Inn’s backstory and the ballerina’s bubbly personalities.

The production design draws clear inspiration from John Wick, with the interiors of the Inn adorned in dim lighting, rich jewel-toned hues, and decor that blends ballet whimsy, thanks to Devora, and Hungarian crime boss grime. It feels too borrowed and nondescript for the effervescent protagonists and their more ditzy teen antics; this is a comedy through and through, even when spilling blood. Even the costuming comes across as a bit bland, with the girls forced into their plain white tutus, the perfect canvas for bloodletting, of course.

It’s a high-concept action-thriller that trades logic for entertainment, and fairly thinly written, but thanks to the fighting ballerinas and Uma Thurman’s commitment to scene-chewing villainy, Pretty Lethal winds up a pretty fun time. Jewson’s debut refuses to take itself very seriously, which winds up as its biggest strength outside of its fierce ballerinas.

Pretty Lethal made its world premiere at SXSW and releases on Prime Video on March 25.

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The premise is simple: a medium is hired to exorcise a newly acquired hotel of a restless spirit, one which quickly proves to be malevolent. In films of this ilk, it’d be typical to hang at least one of its mysteries on whether said medium actually possesses the faith or skills to complete the task. Never After Dark heads off that question immediately with the introduction to unflappable Airi (Shōgun‘s Moeka Hoshi) on her long drive to her newest gig in the remote countryside; the extremely proficient medium lives with the constant companionship of her dead sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki).

Of course, Airi is met with skepticism from Gunji (producer Kento Kuji), the son of Teiko (Tae Kimura), the hotel’s new owner and excitable believer in Airi’s talents. It’s Teiko’s warm welcome and earnest pleas that have Airi ignoring her steadfast rule to never cross the veil or work past nightfall, when spirits hold far more power than during waking hours. While the hotel’s ghastly specter, The Gaping Mouth Man (Mutsuo Yoshioka, Chime), provides supernatural fright, it’s the living that’ll terrify Airi the most.

Moeka Hoshi makes for a rare vision when it comes to cinematic depictions of spiritualists. There’s an easy air about Airi that signals extensive experience in sending ghosts off to the afterlife, reflected in her calm demeanor and the infectious way she chugs beer while jamming to rock tunes on her day off. She’s even blasé about her sister’s warnings about the house’s unusual paranormal problem. It’s that chill personality that makes it easy to assume her asymmetrical haircut is a trendy style choice, right up until she reveals her ritualistic means of slipping into the ghostly realm to cleanse the house.

Boyle presents a fascinating character study at the heart of his midnight chiller, an intriguing antisocial protagonist far more comfortable with ghosts than people. It makes her direct, though polite, when dealing with the overbearing but sweet Teiko or her protective son, and instantly on guard when anyone beyond her employers comes knocking. The seasoned pro only cracks under pressure when it comes to human threats, of which Boyle finds a creative way to incorporate into his haunted hotel.

The paranormal rules and how Airi interacts with the dead keep things engaging, even when the supernatural scares can feel stale. Not just with her candle and zoetrope means of entering the veil, but in the way they appear only fleetingly in mirrors when Airi isn’t in her trance. It’s also worth noting that The Gaping Mouth Man is as unsettling as his name suggests, made more effective by Boyle’s smart staging to shroud the specter in as much mystery as possible until Airi discovers the full scale of the horror she’s battling.

The filmmaker also smartly contrasts his ghoulish appearance with the quiet elegance of Teiko’s hotel, nestled in a bucolic countryside with few neighbors. It’s that juxtaposition of a cool city girl at home with ghosts battling tangible enemies in a safe rural neighborhood, and Boyle’s blending of subgenres, that makes Never After Dark a fresh but cozy hug of a horror movie.

Never After Dark made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBA.

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Bagworm, which made its North American debut at SXSW this weekend, is a film built on the idea of a sick mind producing an even sicker body. An intimate, grungy descent into paranoia and disease, it’s a very effective work of body horror with more than a few wonderful stylistic flourishes, even if its third act never quite goes as far as you’d like. 

Carroll (Peter Falls) is a man with doom on his mind. Laboring listlessly in the gig economy and playing the numbers game with dating apps, he’s also obsessed with the end of the world, to the point that he believes he knows exactly what crises lie ahead and wants to explain them to everyone. He’s the Uber driver who’ll talk your ear off about the water crisis, the salesman who’ll bug you about plant-based eating, the friend who’ll flake because he’d rather sit in his room and look deeper into the black hole of the internet. He’s also, after an unfortunate encounter with a rusty nail, an extremely sick man.

The film’s spare plot follows Carroll’s downward spiral as he tries to forge ahead with his life and relationships, always aware of the nagging sickness growing inside him, threatening to burst free. 

For much of Bagworm‘s runtime, director Oliver Bernsen and writer Henry Bernsen keep their grip on a tone that successfully straddles the line between bleak and darkly comic, as Carroll bumbles, stumbles, and generally struggles through life in one way or another. Oliver also works as a painter, and it’s clear that even within the constraints of this film’s budget, his visual skills are on point. Carroll’s living space is less of a home than it is of a lair, a gritty, malignant dungeon that looks like something out of Possession by way of Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

As Carroll sits alone in his room, pondering the disgusting new chair he bought or conducting truly strange, deeply unsettling video conferences with one of his employers, we can feel the infection in the space, even when it’s not shown. It’s very well-designed, so even when the film leans into tone poem territory, it works. 

The body horror of the piece also works, both as a potent metaphor and as a disgusting series of visuals ranging from a severely runny nose to…well, much more horrific things that I won’t spoil for you here. Carroll’s deep sense of impending doom runs through every aspect of his life. He distrusts people, uses them, and mocks them both publicly and privately. He believes he’s seen some secret architecture in the way society will someday crumble, and because no one wants to listen to him, he believes that those around him are either indifferent, stupid, or both. He’s seething with so much resentment and bitterness and pain that it manifests physically in ways that body horror fans can savor. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. 

What it does need to be is committed, and unfortunately, the film’s one real stumbling point is how Carroll’s journey resolves in the final act. There’s tremendous tension in his breakdown, and the film keeps building and building it, and then suddenly it’s just…gone. It’s not a cop-out, really, nor is it an unsatisfying handwave moment of quick resolution. It’s more of a sputter.

The film’s most effective qualities as both a horror film and a comedy seem to fall away in the final minutes, leaving us with a movie that feels unfinished. Wanting more when a film ends is good for an audience, but in this case, seeing, or at least feeling, just a bit more would have gone a long way. 

Fortunately, Falls’ performance sells every moment of it anyway. This is a regular guy who went just plain wrong somewhere along the way, and he’s able to make Carroll feel like a guy you might know while also embodying his more monstrous qualities. He’s a man infected not just with illness, but with something akin to literalized toxic masculinity. Falls has to jump through a lot of emotional hoops in this film, and he clears virtually all of them. 

Bagworm is in the midst of its festival breakout after an acclaimed run at Sitges and, now, a SXSW premiere. That means it’s poised to be an indie horror hit in the very near future, and despite my quibbles with its resolution, I hope it gets there. This is one of the year’s most squirm-worthy movies, and you should seek it out.

Bagworm made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.

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A content moderator finds herself on the front lines of evil in a throwback supernatural horror movie that wears its influences on its sleeves without sacrificing its voice or vision. That moderator is Maggie (Brittany O’Grady), a woman who’s taken it upon herself to sludge through the internet’s worst out of penance for her sister’s suicide. At the end of her workday, she flags a creepy but seemingly benign video for rejection, and it unwittingly unleashes an eerie entity that targets her entire team in its bid to spread.

Black & Polly adhere to a conventional horror formula with Monitor, the type of supernatural slasher in the vein of A Nightmare on Elm Street meets The Ring that feels comforting in its familiarity. I suspect that’s by design; a brilliant use of shadows in Monitor gives way to a striking image that brings long-armed Freddy Krueger to mind. It’s so cozy in this way that you can sniff out when the scares are coming.

But that horror familiarity is deceptive; Black & Polly’s foremost aim with their feature debut is to scare you silly, and they rise to the occasion pretty frequently throughout. Part of that is clever misdirection, and part of it is horror savvy. There are variations and a refusal to repeat the same scare tactics too often. Most of all, it’s the almost subtle but ingenious incorporation of tech. This filmmaking duo resists the urge to incorporate screenlife footage or overlay text messages on-screen, opting instead to filter what we see through Maggie and her co-workers’ eyes. Subtle pixelations become so much more alarming, like little tricks of the eye.

Tech plays a huge role here, as the violent tulpa takes advantage of just about anything. While that leaves the characters on screen in a deeply vulnerable state, adding to the tension, it’s a technically tricky demand to execute. Yet Black & Polly seamlessly integrate and make unnerving use of Ring door cameras, computers, security cameras, vehicle backup cameras, smartphones, FaceTime calls, and so much more. This approach, in a way, makes tech more of a practical effect, a smart scare engine.

The other key component to Monitor‘s success is a cast of characters we genuinely like. O’Grady is a natural Final Girl, both with her grit and altruistic heart. Gunner Willis delivers the right kind of earnest awe-shucks Nice Guy that injects stakes from the start. Even the morally dubious ones, like a less-than-by-the-code boss Isaac (Taz Skylar), become someone you don’t want to see fall to the entity tormenting them.

As suitably creepy as this demonic thing can be, particularly with his preternatural movements, its design makes it far less effective when static. In brief flashes, the Lights Out meets Marianne-like entity is freaky as hell, but it can also easily evoke Tim Burton when overexposed.

Black & Polly serve up a warm, stick-to-your-ribs comfort meal with Monitor, one that doesn’t forge new genre terrain necessarily but still wows with its strong execution and a satisfying ability to induce goosebumps.

Monitor made its world premiere at SXSW 2026. Release info TBD.

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Building off the work they did in World War Z, Toxic Commando is another game of blasting your way through horde after horde of zombies, but with a few clever twists that try to set it apart from the pack.

The story, which was written in collaboration with the horror master himself, sees you as a group of mercenaries caught up in a monstrous situation. In the near future, an experiment by a tech company attempting to harness the power of the Earth’s core unwittingly unleashes a Cthulhu-like being known as the Sludge God, immediately unleashing undead zombies and worse. Your team of mercs stumbles upon the Sludge God during a job, gets infected, and teams up with the man who set everything in motion in a desperate attempt to put things right.

Stories about a viral infection causing the zombie apocalypse are a dime a dozen, so I was relieved to see that it was a supernatural creature at the center of the outbreak. On top of that, this creature, being the Sludge God, gave it a good visual identity, with black goo everywhere to indicate the monster’s corrupting influence. The overall solid look is complemented by a strong soundtrack, aside from some weird screaming in some of the more intense songs, including tracks by Carpenter and his son. The game isn’t reinventing the zombie genre itself, but there’s just enough to the premise to set it apart, giving you a menacing antagonist, something the zombie genre often lacks.

The familiar zombie story comes with familiar zombie gameplay, but familiar doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Much like Left 4 Dead or Back 4 Blood, you do missions in squads of four, either with your friends or with computer-controlled companions filling out your team, completing various objectives as you scrounge for ammo and mow down zombies. Toxic Commando has these basics down well, with good first-person gun feel and just the right mix of enemies to keep things interesting.

It could probably use a few more creature types, but you’ve got a good variety of standard fodder enemies, ranged menaces, and hulking brutes to give the encounters some amount of variety. My favorite enemy type was the Nuker, which had a huge bulbous head that explodes when you shoot it, forcing you to carefully choose when to take them out so you don’t hurt yourself or your teammates.

Much like Left 4 Dead, the game is played out through a series of discrete missions, all of which have their own little animated introduction explaining the story and stakes. I’ve been a little fatigued by the mission structure of games like Helldivers 2 or Warhammer 40K: Darktide, where you constantly rotate through different sets of objectives mixed in with variable maps or map conditions, so I was pleased to see that Toxic Commando had a more handcrafted touch that didn’t feel like infinite churn. A beginning, middle, and end do a lot to help drive me through co-op experiences like this, and the fact that each of them has four different levels of difficulty gives you reason to replay them if you’re craving more action.

The biggest thing Toxic Commando brings to the Left 4 Dead formula is open-world missions. Each map is a fairly large area, probably a little bit larger than a Helldivers 2 map. As you travel around completing escalating objectives, you can find caches of supplies, whether that’s ammo for your weapons, health kits to keep you alive, or spare parts that can help you prepare for your final stand. All of these things are essential for your survival, so it’s up to you to do the risk-reward calculations about how much extra exploration you want to do before committing to the finale of the mission, which always ends with a massive last stand.

What makes this open-world structure sing is the addition of vehicles. Not only do they allow you to get across the maps faster, but they are a blast to use, feeling exciting but never overpowered. There are about half a dozen different vehicles throughout the game; some are randomly found throughout the level, while others are special trucks intrinsically tied to the mission goals. Even though some of them have weapons on them, it’s not a walk in the park once your squad hops in one. You’ll need to find fuel to keep it running and repair it with valuable spare parts.

It’s easy to get stuck in the mud and sludge while driving around, leaving you vulnerable to hordes, but it’s just another factor you need to think about when planning your route. Some of the vehicles are equipped with a winch on the front, which can help you pull yourself out of a jam. It’s also used to pry open certain types of crates that hide supplies, so making sure you’ve got transportation with the right equipment is necessary for success.

The nine missions all have different objectives, but most of them boil down to “drive here and get the thing/turn on the thing/kill the thing,” then go somewhere else for a different task. It’s not the most revolutionary gameplay loop, but it does a nice job of moving you around the map, sometimes locking objectives behind a winch requirement to force you to find the right vehicle before tackling it. Missions always end with a huge last stand where you have a moment to set up your defenses before activating something that brings massive hordes down on you as you hold a position for a set time.

These horde sequences are exciting spectacles, throwing a staggering number of creatures your way. Seeing them all climb over one another to reach you shows that Saber took what they learned making World War Z and refined it to make memorable moments. While they are truly a sight to behold, there are some missions where it feels like you can barely make a dent in the crowd as they continue to pour in. It mostly feels balanced. I don’t think I ever failed any of these sequences on normal difficulty, but I do think they might be a little overdone at times.

Despite each of the missions having different little stories and objectives, they do end up running together. As I mentioned, even if the objectives all have different narrative flavor, they do kinda run together, and the environments all feel pretty interchangeable. The exceptions to this were the missions where you had a specific vehicle that was emitting a field that kept you safe from a harmful effect in the area. To stay alive, you needed to keep moving the vehicle with your group to make your way across the map. It was a clever way to vary up the gameplay, doubling down on the best part of the game, the vehicles, to great effect.

With John Carpenter being involved, I was hoping the thing that would set this game apart was personality, but overall, there’s not really much to write home about in that department. The characters each have their own action hero-esque designs, but they never really elevate themselves above “generic snarky” as far as character traits go. If you showed me a script with the names removed, there’s no way I could tell you who said what, because they all seemed extremely similar. They never get to the point where their banter is annoying, but I was hoping for a bit more Snake Plissken or Jack Burton attitude.

Because of their infection at the beginning of the game, each of the characters has a power that they can use on cooldown throughout the missions. Interestingly, you can pick your character separately from your class, so you’re not tied down if you like the look of one but want the skills of another. Classes aren’t anything revolutionary, but having an ability feels good enough. The Medic puts up a regenerating zone to keep people alive, the Defender deploys a shield bubble for protection, the Strike can shoot a powerful fireball to deal massive damage, and the Operator has a drone that can be sent out to autonomously attack monsters.

Each of the classes gains XP upon mission completion, allowing you to allocate skill points and enhance your main ability. It’s all kind of Co-op Shooter 101, never really giving you any extremely interesting options where you can find clever synergies, mostly just increasing certain stats as you go. While I was glad the character classes were there, I never really latched on to one as a favorite, frequently swapping each mission to make sure I got a taste of all of them.

Guns are also levelled up individually by using them, which felt a little tacked on to me. As you increase in levels, you can purchase add-ons to your gun using various currencies that you can earn on missions. Guns are all pretty standard variants of shotguns, assault rifles, SMGs, and pistols, and little stat boosts never really felt too meaningful. Levelling up guns felt like a bit of a tacked-on way to encourage players to swap weapons frequently, but the reward never felt worth it once I settled on a gun that felt like it worked well enough for me.

The Sludgite currency used for add-ons can also be used to purchase various cosmetics between missions, but nothing in the game really stood out as particularly meaningful on that front. If that’s something that acts as a hook for you, it’s here, just don’t expect it to be anything particularly eye-catching or unique.

Weapon crates can be found throughout the levels, unlocked with spare parts, and those add a bit more variety to the combat. Grenade launchers, massive machine guns, and an ultra-powerful railgun all felt like great additions to the arsenal, but the limited amount you get to use them felt kinda like a bummer. I think I wanted the options to start at outlandish, then move on to even more outlandish, but what we got was a fairly bog standard variety. Overall, the gun choices get the job done, but again fail to give the game much in the way of personality.

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando doesn’t reinvent the wheel with the genre, but the addition of the vehicles does just enough to make it worth trying if your friend group has been searching for a new co-op zombie shooter. There’s a great joy in finally finding a truck in the sludge, hopping on the back to operate the flamethrower, and speeding through hordes as your buddies hang out the window, blasting zombie after zombie.

The nine missions took me about seven hours to get through, but if you’re having a good time with it, there are four different difficulties to add challenge and increased rewards to subsequent playthroughs. Everything it does, it does well enough, but a lack of ambition keeps it from being one of the greats.

Review codes provided by publisher. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando launches March 12 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via the Epic Games Store and Steam.

The post ‘John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando’ Doesn’t Beat the Genre’s Greats But It’s Still a Fun Ride [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Crabmeat, a new first-person horror game from Nicholas McDonnell and Mitchell Pasmans, starts off well enough, but never really gets to that next-level subversion I was hoping for.

You play a prisoner, charged with the horrible crime of poverty, who has to survive on a government-issued crabbing vessel in the Antarctic to try to meet their crabbing quota to pay off their debt. If you can’t do it, the toxic capsule in your neck will kill you, and your debt will be passed to your next of kin. It’s a brutal opening that’s presented with a great style, featuring a blurred face on your captor and garbled speech with subtitles instead of actual spoken dialogue. After this, you’re dropped onto the small ship that you’ll spend the remainder of the game getting extremely acquainted with.

Crabmeat is a game about figuring out the process. The process of moving around. The process of setting up traps. The process of sorting crabs. Direction is sparse throughout the ship, with few signs explaining how to operate, but that’s part of the appeal, in theory. While it looks like a standard first-person game, you move around by clicking your mouse rather than traditional WASD keyboard movement. To get around the ship, you click on the ground where you want to go, and your character walks there. It takes a lot of getting used to at first, but eventually you get used to it, even if it remains purposefully clunky. I think it’s neat to try to do things differently, but I’m not entirely sure what’s gained by setting up the game this way, aside from making it harder to get around when dangerous things start happening on board.

The core loop of the game involves you heading up to the cabin, driving the ship around to places on the map with green circles, anchoring the boat, and catching crabs. Much like walking, steering the boat feels purposefully awkward. Spinning the wheel and adjusting the throttle are both done by clicking and dragging the mouse to move them, which feels oddly immersive, fully illustrating the challenge of navigating a boat that size. Most of the time, you’re navigating through pretty open spaces as you travel between marked crabbing sites, but occasionally, you’ll have to make some tricky maneuvers between rocky formations to get where you’re going.

The actual crabbing process is surprisingly involved, with lots of fiddly little steps that you have to repeat over and over. You need to fill the crab trap with bait, then drop the trap into the water using a crane. Once it’s in there for a bit, you need to retrieve it with a harpoon gun, but the catch is that the harpoon gun is on the other side of the ship, so you need to reposition in order to get at it. After dropping your haul into your boat, you need to sort everything to make sure you’re keeping the correct crabs and discarding the unwanted ones. The two places you sort them into are humorously labeled “patriotic” and “not patriotic,” which is one of the few instances of the game trying to represent the vibe of the world at large. All of these steps are pretty tedious, and it’s easy to forget which winch you have to operate at which point, but it’s easy enough to get used to the pattern.

The first time this rhythm of crabbing and moving around was broken, it was by a little beep. I turned around from the steering wheel and saw a red alarm that I hadn’t noticed before was going off, letting me know there was something on board. It was a great moment, making me nervous in the exact way I hoped this game could achieve. I found that the engine was the problem, caused by a massive crab attached to it. I took out my trusty ax and killed it, then fixed the damage with my welding torch. It wasn’t quite the horror moment I was hoping for, but it was a good first step in subverting my expectations.

Later on, I heard that same alarm going off and found a giant crab walking around on deck. It attacked me, prompting me to run to a glass case in the hallway containing a shotgun. I smashed the glass with my ax and blasted the horrible beast with my new weapon. It’s not super easy to wrangle the controls to get this done, but again, it was a nice way to shake up the monotony to keep me off balance. This was decidedly less effective when it repeated over and over again, with crabs either damaging equipment or showing up to try to kill me. What once felt novel became just another repeated action in the rhythm, becoming rote and uninteresting as the crabbing itself.

While you’re told to go to the marked areas for crabbing, there are also question marks on the map that enticed me. What mysteries could lie there? I was on a timer to get my quota, but surely these would still be worth checking out to satisfy my curiosity. Oftentimes, these just ended up being other crab traps that contained weirder things, like keys to lockers on the boat or, in one case, a dead body. The lockers did have some notes in them, but they never really delivered the narrative satisfaction that I was hoping for.

The game runs about three hours, but it feels like the game has shown you most of its tricks by the end of the first hour. It did provide a change in gameplay in the final moments of the game, which I’m not going to spoil, but I still found myself wishing that it took some sort of turn to keep me on my toes. I was waiting for a twist that subverted the premise and revealed something deeper to the situation or the world, but it never came. Even the ending was fairly expected, going in an obvious direction that left the game on a flat note.

The foundation is all here in Crabmeat, but it just feels like a setup that needs more ideas to keep it fresh throughout. Compared to something like Iron Lung, which finds clever ways to freak you out as you go about your routine, there’s just not much here once you’ve seen the few tricks it has. Everything you do feels like a task rather than a challenge, building up tedium instead of tension. While I did appreciate the climax of the game, it never quite reached the promise of the intriguing intro for me, with nothing more to take away from the game aside from the obvious ‘governments treat the poor like crap’ moral of the story. The game would have benefited from being shorter and punchier, or having more twists to keep it interesting the whole time.

Review code provided by publisher. Crabmeat is now available on Steam.

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The Fox and the Devil is Kiersten White‘s second go ’round with a Dracula riff (her novel Lucy Undying was the first), and while she’s clearly thought quite thoroughly and carefully about where the story could go next, this book is anything but a straightforward sequel to Stoker’s narrative. Instead, White looks closely at all those grains of sand in that vast, folkloric sandbox, picks out the shiniest one she can find, and weaves a story of her very own, a tale of the Van Helsing family that reaches far beyond Dracula and into a dark detective story with serious bite.

In the closing years of the 19th century, Abraham Van Helsing’s daughter Anneke finds a clue that could finally solve her father’s brutal death, a sign of the mysterious and beautiful woman she saw the night the elder Van Helsing died. By day, Anneke works as a consulting detective in Amsterdam, and by night she both cares for her agoraphobic mother and stews over her quest for vengeance. So when the mysterious woman resurfaces, she sets off on a journey across the European continent, eager to finally get closure for her entire family. What she finds instead is a dark web of secrets so thick that even Abraham Van Helsing might not have fully grasped it.

The winning twist here is that, despite knowing the strange circumstances of her father’s death, Anneke does not believe in the supernatural. Like her father was as a younger man, she is a scientist, a seeker of truth that she can observe and note and study. In her eyes, her father didn’t discover vampires in his later years, but spiralled into madness, keeping journals full of mythical creatures that do not, and never did, exist. Anneke’s journey, then, parallels her father’s own discovery that the world is darker, stranger, and more frightening than he could have imagined.

That might be enough for an interesting, if smaller, version of this story, but White does not stop there. The Fox and the Devil is an epic in every sense, an expansive historical mystery that’s also a twisted supernatural romance. Several times, the narrative reaches a place that might feel like a natural conclusion point for any other story, and White pushes further, giving Anneke new wrinkles to the mystery, new feelings with which to contend. It’s a novel that never lets go of its constantly expanding ambition, and while that does produce the occasional exposition-filled passage that threatens the pace a bit, White never loses her grip on the story.

White also never loses her grip on Anneke Van Helsing, a remarkable and engaging character who could easily carry several more paranormal mysteries on the strength of her voice, her wit, and her sense of adventure. Anneke’s relationship with her family, and her famous/infamous father, is complex and often surprising, but it’s her relationship with the phantom woman tied to Abraham’s death that drives the story. Their shared game is one of pursuit, but not entirely in service of violence or vengeance. There’s a romance budding somewhere in the depths of this story, and White’s ability to delicately dance through the conflicting emotions this brings out in her protagonist is one of the book’s great strengths.

What starts with a compelling first-person voice soon becomes a peek into a fully formed, often deeply conflicted yet endlessly brave new character. If Anneke returns in a future book, I will be thrilled. For now, though, if you love historical horror or you want a book that reinvents and expands the Van Helsing legacy like never before, The Fox and the Devil is a must read.

The Fox and the Devil is available now wherever you get your books.

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