Camp finds itself in harmony, not contention, with its dreamlike parts. Even when a scene comes across as straightforward, there is still something rather surreal in its presentation. Take, for instance, that game of truth or dare that prefaces the story’s inciting incident. Zola Grimmer’s character is pressed to dish out a juicier truth that, ultimately, goes on to make her audience feel both engaged and uncomfortable. The whole quality of this moment is similar to that of our most mortifying dreams.

As the title indicates, the movie takes place at a summer camp. This, of course, is only after Grimmer’s character, Emily, has been directly involved with another person’s death. This time, it’s the loss of a loved one, as opposed to a stranger, that sends the protagonist into a deep and guilt-ridden depression. Emily’s father (Michael Tan) then helps turn things around by signing Emily up to be a camp counselor. That’s when the movie enters more familiar territory, in terms of genre, but astonishingly, Fast doesn’t ever settle into the same-old routine that we now associate with these sorts of camping trips.

Zola Grimmer as Emily in Camp.

Grief and trauma are always on display here. From Emily becoming something of a death magnet in her life, to the other camp counselors working through their own private issues, this movie doesn’t ever avoid personal tragedy and suffering. However, these components of the story are handled with a kind of care that doesn’t come up often enough in modern horror. Rather than sensationalizing or exploiting Emily’s pain, there is an aware attempt at helping her. And not just using the cinematic tactics that would force the character to confront her fears, either.

Camp has the setup for a more traditional-acting horror movie. A bunch of young women ominously head off into the woods, unaware of all the potential terrors that could be waiting for them. Even the trailer implies a sinister movie. In contrast, though, Fast goes the opposite way of addressing Emily’s problems. Most importantly, this new direction is without the act of creating more trauma for the main character.

What sounds unfeasible, especially for a movie marked down as horror, is actually quite the refreshing approach to a very common concept nowadays. Yes, simple revenge has its perks and fans, as does the paring down of casts until only one person is left standing. But opting for restoration, as opposed to destruction, in dark scenarios is surely also worth exploring.

Deeply felt, textured, and always self-questioning, Camp is an extraordinary movie that goes to some unexpected places. The gorgeous presentation alone is one rife with beautiful nature and spotted with haunting, otherworldly imagery. Performance-wise, Grimmer makes a tremendous debut here; she and co-star Alice Wordsworth have this growingly incandescent chemistry that lights up all the right parts of the story. Overall, Camp is a pleasant surprise that is light on conventional horror but never low on compassion for its characters.

Camp plays in select theaters on June 26.

The post ‘Camp’ Review: A Cathartic and Dreamy Tale of Witchcraft appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

However, this more accessible environment also means that, for every Tormented Souls 2 or Ground Zero, we get a deluge of overly familiar cash-grabs that cherry-pick mechanics and imagery from classic survival horror games without really understanding what makes the genre work in the first place. That’s why I was only cautiously optimistic when I first saw the trailer for Tainted Pack’s Flesh Made Fear, a stylish throwback that was originally released on Steam back in October of 2025 and is now making its way over to the PlayStation 5.

In the game, you select between Reaper Intervention Platoon (R.I.P.) agents Jack and Natalie as your team is sent on a mission to stop the nefarious Victor Ripper – a former CIA researcher who appears to have set up shop in an isolated town. Naturally, things take a turn for the worse when the agents discover that the area is now overrun with undead mutants created by Ripper in an attempt to perfect his previous MK Ultra experiments. What follows is a retro horror adventure that takes you from secluded woods all the way to a familiar mansion-turned-laboratory as you track down a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein and his army of gruesome goons.

The setup is standard enough for a survival horror title, with the R.I.P. squad obviously riffing on the S.T.A.R.S. team and Ripper’s manor standing in for the iconic Spencer Mansion, but it’s really the over-the-top presentation that makes Flesh Made Fear stand out from its peers. The high-contrast comic-book aesthetic and stylized menus give the title a certain B-movie/exploitation flick vibe that’s rarely seen in this kind of game, with the exaggerated violence and memorable characters often making it feel like you’re playing through a grindhouse picture.

Although the low-poly graphics here are meant to harken back to classic PSX (and even early PS2) releases, a lot of care went into adjusting the textures and lighting in order to make the most of simple character models and environments. In fact, I can’t think of a single vintage horror title with the same amount of visual flair as Flesh Made Fear, despite the fact that you don’t really visit that many unique locations throughout its 6-8 hour runtime.

Unfortunately, Tainted Pack didn’t go the extra mile when it came to actually writing the game, as Flesh Made Fear suffers from a script that aims for camp but lands in cheap mockbuster territory – and I don’t mean that as a compliment. While the aforementioned R.I.P. team is consistently entertaining despite the amateurish voice-acting (which is more of a quirk of the genre than anything else), the epistolary tapes and notes that you find around the map suffer from prose so generic that I wouldn’t be surprised if large portions of it were actually written by Artificial Intelligence.

This is a huge shame, as the visuals and sound design are so lovingly crafted that the lack of narrative effort stands out like a sore thumb. While the original Resident Evil games never really focused on story as much as gameplay and atmosphere, the developers at Capcom at least went out of their way to include satisfying bits of bite-sized horror like the infamous “itchy tasty” and even Lisa Trevor’s side story in the remake of the first game. Flesh Made Fear has no such luck, with the game’s narrative elements serving as little more than an excuse to revisit age-old mechanics.

Speaking of mechanics, it’s been a while since I’ve played a game so dedicated to its retro premise that it also manages to bring back some of the less savory aspects of the genre it’s attempting to revive. From unpolished combat to awkward camera placement that often hinders level traversal, which is especially annoying when you’re left to rely on a disappointingly vague map, there are plenty of frustrating elements here that I remember showing up in many of the less popular survival horror releases of yesteryear.

Of course, it’s easy to look past most of these blemishes when the experience of hunting down Victor Ripper by solving inventory puzzles and exploding copious amounts of undead heads is so damned addicting. Flesh Made Fear won’t be joining the Mount Rushmore of survival horror anytime soon, but there’s plenty of fun to be had with this brief yet entertaining tribute to classic genre thrills. And while veteran fans may not appreciate the mostly linear level design (and I still wish Tainted Pack had invested more time and effort into writing), you’ve got to love a standalone horror game with fixed camera angles and limited saves that can still be casually completed over the course of a lazy weekend.

Flesh Made Fear is available now on PC and PS5.

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This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels. 

In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11. 

Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote. 

Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars. 

This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite. 

More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.

It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus. 

The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.

The post ‘The Sixth Nik’ Review: Pulitzer Winner Daniel Kraus’s Horror Sci-fi Epic appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The comments are usually from men who simply cannot resist the urge to reply to your posts with criticism about your looks, your weight, or even the way you talk. As if that isn’t enough for women online to deal with, sometimes men become obsessed and stalk, harass, or doxx the object of their unwanted affection. Australian award-winning writer, director, editor, and visual artist David Ward’s (Dorothy, Capable of Anything) first feature film, Lenore, takes a hard look at the scourge of parasocial relationships plaguing the internet, with a focus on the male gaze and the devastating consequences.

Co-written by Josie Hess (Morgana) and director David Ward, Lenore introduces pale, lanky, basement-dweller Max (Nicholas Jaquinot), who goes by the screen name LoneWolf91 online. His basement is a labyrinthine setup of video equipment where Max can watch the controversial content creator he is infatuated with, who calls herself Lenore (Ruby Duncan). Lenore posts makeup tutorials, music, and elaborate vlogs, and has recently been involved in several scandals, which have been broadcast online. She has achieved celebrity status online, and Max believes she is talking directly to him in her videos. He keeps lists of what he believes are their common interests, convinced he can make her love him back. When Lenore suddenly disappears, and her social media is deleted, Max is consumed with finding her so he can have her all to himself.

Jaquinot gives an unsettlingly captivating performance, portraying Max as a meek, lonely, unstable young man who lives vicariously through his online interactions and lacks the ability to socialize with people away from the internet. As the story progresses, Max becomes more unhinged as he hallucinates videos of Lenore, which he believes were meant for only him, and that may contain clues to her location. Max’s slow, painful descent into madness is fueled by his lack of self-awareness and poses the infuriating question of accountability. Her rise to internet fame has stripped Lenore of her agency, but is that the risk that women take when they have an online presence? Is it okay that we’re often objectified and subjected to these one-sided, obsessive, imaginary relationships that men have in their heads?

Duncan gives a convincing, poignant performance as Lenore, who is given a brief attempt at liberation in the form of an emotional monologue. Ward’s storytelling and Lenore’s words loosely echo Edgar Allan Poe’s poems Lenore, a story about the death of a young woman and her fiancé’s fixation on proper decorum for mourning the dead, and The Raven, a tale of a young man grieving his lover Lenore, as Lenore utters the word “nevermore,” in reference to her determination to take back her life, and ultimately her fate.

Ward has meticulously crafted a well-written, disquieting, single-location film that begins by painting an intricate portrait of a chronically online, disturbed young man that evolves into a mystery and becomes an electronic ghost story. Lenore is a cautionary tale that pleads with the audience, specifically men, to start a conversation about the troubling aspects of internet culture, women’s autonomy, and who bears the burden for the treatment of women in online spaces.

Lenore premiered at Chattanooga Film Festival 2026; release info TBA.

The post ‘Lenore’ CFF Review: A Creepy Descent Into Parasocial Madness appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Written and directed by Christopher B. Stokes, the new film stars Taye Diggs as Leon/Kennedy/Darnell, a man in search of the perfect family and willing to kill for it. Following Panic Room-inspired opening credits stretched across downtown buildings, Stepfather opens in 1990 when 10-year-old Leon talks with therapist Marsha Sanders (Lisa Ann Loggins) in the wake of his stepfather Harold’s (Kenneth J. Morgan) death.

In flashbacks, it’s revealed that Harold beat young Leon and, in the process, instilled a key tenet that would define Leon as an adult: “too bad you don’t get to pick your own family.” It’s also evident that Leon allowed Harold to die: following a pretty upsetting beating, the boy watched his stepfather pass from a heart attack rather than call 911.

The film then flashes ahead to the present as adult Leon, now named Kennedy, murders his latest family (this will later be revealed to be his third, stretched across Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico). He then introduces himself to Asia (Tamar Braxton) and her youngest daughter, Sasha (Kalani Jules), as Darnell in a grocery store meet-cute.

Asia has just moved her family away from her cheating ex, Timothy (TJ Shaw). Emotionally vulnerable and susceptible to flattery, Asia and Darnell quickly hit it off and, six months later, they have eloped.

TJ Shaw

The biggest issue with Stokes’ film is that it is both too slight and too familiar. Surprisingly, no one, Darnell is a model husband and stepfather right up until the moment his “perfect” family fails to meet his expectations. When Sasha repeatedly refuses to refer to him as Dad because she misses Timothy, there’s a visual fake-out of Darnell striking and/or yelling at her. These interior glimpses of Darnell’s rage eventually escalate into real-life outbursts, often when he confuses Asia and the kids for the families he’s killed in the past.

One novel visual choice occurs when Darnell accepts that he must terminate his latest imperfect family. As the police close in, he rents a cheap motel room and engages in a three-way conversation with phantom hallucinations of Leon and Kennedy, each of whom has their own distinct costume, vocal mannerism, and personality.

It’s a moment that’s reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, not just for Diggs’ solid performance as three different personas, but also for its questionable pop psychology about mental health. When the police interview Marsha, she unloads a torrent of exposition about her patient’s condition (without a warrant!), explaining: “Leon suffers from extreme trauma…bipolar and schizophrenia, as well as hallucinations,” which he apparently can’t distinguish from reality. Marsha is quick to explain that Leon/Darnell doesn’t even know he’s committed a crime.

It’s an outdated and tired line of thinking, which is unfortunate because it undercuts Diggs’s performance, which is the only reason to check out Stepfather. While Braxton is fine as the deluded housewife torn between husbands new and old, Asia lacks any kind of interiority. The character exists solely in relation to Darnell, a criticism that applies to both of her two daughters, Sasha, the obstacle to Darnell’s fantasy family life, and Melanie (Jessica Jarrell), the College-aged daughter who is more than happy to call Darnell “dad” because she sees how happy her mother is.

L-R: Tamar Braxton, Taye Diggs, Jessica Jarrell

Alas, Stokes never pushes the plot or the characters beyond the most obvious situations, which leads to plenty of predictable dinner and bedroom scenes as the female characters inadvertently trigger Darnell’s psychosis and he fantasizes about murdering them. Any men who wander into the proceedings, such as Timothy or Melanie’s boyfriend, Brad (Koda Kalani Beschen), are obvious Red Shirts destined for slaughter. By contrast, Asia’s curious (and possibly queer-coded) brother, Brett (Troy Brookins), is never given an opportunity to do anything.

And then there are the cops, who occupy a substantial amount of screentime and repeatedly threaten to launch the film into camp territory. With the exception of Detective Bronson (Darrell Philip), who takes “Kennedy’s” statement after the murder of his wife and stepdaughter, every single member of law enforcement in the film is inept, belligerent, or flat-out rude.

Young, boastful Detective John Simmons (Ma‘s Dante Brown) joins the squad late with an introduction that is both ageist, condescending, and completely out of left field. When Bronson outlines their profile of the killer, Simmons’ response is: “Ok, blah blah blah. It’s a lot of information on this killer dude. It’s like a movie.” Like…what?!

He immediately butts heads with new partner Detective Andrews (Janeline Hayes), who one expects might be more open-minded, but proves just as standoffish. Late in the film, when questioning a witness who has tangled with Darnell, Andrews berates the battered victim: “You assumed he was dead, but you didn’t wait to see?!” Even a random police officer gets in on the asshole behavior, heavily inferring that Asia’s promiscuous behavior is to blame for a fight between Darnell and Timothy that leaves the latter with multiple broken ribs.

L-R: Tamar Braxton, Taye Diggs

The baffling human responses across the board feel out of place with the more serious threats of domestic violence, making for an extremely uneven viewing experience. If the film played up its ridiculous elements more, Stepfather could be a fun diversion in the Hallmark/Lifetime vein. Unfortunately, most of its perplexing elements feel accidental, rather than intentional.

Despite Diggs’ commitment to the bit, there just isn’t enough here to recommend. Stepfather could have been a fun guilty pleasure, but Stokes is too content to stick to well-tread narrative beats without offering anything new. Underdeveloped characters and fleeting violent set pieces simply don’t cut it, which makes the brief 93-minute runtime drag badly.

File this under a disappointing missed opportunity.

Stepfather is now streaming on Tubi.

The post ‘Stepfather’ Review: Taye Diggs Can’t Save Tubi’s Familiar, Uninspired Retread appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In 2018, they made their first genre film, The Hatred, which tells the story of a young girl who brings a soldier back from the dead, and they realized they enjoyed making horror movies. By the time they released their second horror movie, The Deeper You Dig, in 2019, genre fans were discovering their unique DIY style of filmmaking and their talent for dark storytelling.

Filmmakers Tina Grapenthin (When God Sleeps), Katie Green (The Family I Had), and Carlye Rubin (The Family I Had) realized the wildly artistic Adams family would be the perfect subject for their documentary Blood and Guts, which provides a fascinating, intimate glimpse into the family’s personal and professional lives. Premiering at the Cucalorus Film Festival in North Carolina in the fall of 2025, Blood and Guts is making the rounds of the festival circuit in 2026 and is playing this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival.

Featuring moody songs from the family’s band H6llb6nd6r as the score for the documentary, Blood and Guts skillfully weaves together candid interviews with John, Toby, Zelda, and Lulu, with the Adams’ personal as well as behind-the-scenes footage of the family making horror movies together.

John’s father shares that his son was an artist at a young age who had a preference for darker art. A painter, a punk rock musician, and eventually a successful high fashion model, John was hit with a cancer diagnosis at a young age, which caused him to reassess what was most important in life. After earning a BFA, Toby was a regular on the soap opera Guiding Light until she met John, got pregnant with Lulu, and was fired from the show. The couple eventually built their extraordinary house in the Catskills, with random skeletons and body parts littering the front yard and porch and showcasing John’s artwork on every inch of the interior walls. Everyone in the small town they call home knows the Adams family; locals frequently ask if they can be killed in their next horror movie, and the Adams sometimes happily oblige.

Despite finding success as indie horror filmmakers and becoming regulars at film festivals, there is nothing pretentious about the Adams family. Blood and Guts confirms John, Toby, Zelda, and Lulu are all outgoing, outspoken, and humble, while being fueled by the need to create new art. John and Toby talk about raising their daughters to be independent, artistic, and fearless, and after Lulu moves away and Zelda goes off to college, the couple fields potential projects. Partially because they love making movies, but according to John, also to avoid the emptiness of the house in the Catskills when their daughters are away.

John and Toby ultimately decide to travel to Serbia to make their first creature feature, Hell Hole, which required them both to work outside of their comfort zones. John details how he initially thought he would be acting as cinematographer on the film, as he has on all the movies they’ve made, only to later discover he would have a camera crew, something that he says was a difficult adjustment for him at first.

From the coming-of-age story Hellbender to their recent film Mother of Flies, it’s evident the Adams family has a flair for witchy storytelling that captures the darker side of femininity. With more than one member of the family being touched by cancer, which particularly manifested in Mother of Flies, they describe their work as a reflection of their life experiences and sometimes also the inverse of their family dynamic.

If you think you know everything there is to know about the Adams family, Blood and Guts will probably prove you wrong. This bewitching documentary is an expertly edited, up close and personal portrait of an endlessly interesting family who excel at macabre storytelling, and yes, even at making their own blood and guts.

Blood and Guts premiered at Chattanooga Film Festival 2026. Release info TBD.

The post ‘Blood and Guts’ CFF Review: An Intimate Portrait of the First Family of Horror appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

However, now that this once-niche creepypasta has escaped the online bubble and permeated all of popular culture, several of these developers have decided to rework and rerelease some of their old titles in order to reach a new audience. Puppet Combo did this with their interpretation of The Backrooms last month (originally released in 2019 as Day Seven), and now Cortez Productions is doing the same with the console release of The Backrooms: Lost Tape.

However, Lost Tape is more than just a cleverly timed rerelease, with Vini Cortez having taken the time to completely overhaul the 2022 game’s graphics and transfer the project over to Unreal Engine 5.6 – complete with bug fixes, exclusive new content, and a brand new visual style that’s a little too impressive when compared to what the original version of the game was trying to do. In fact, I’d argue that this is more of a remake than anything else, though it’s still built over the skeleton of that original game.

In the updated title, which is presented as a found footage anthology where each “tape” tells a self-contained story, players initially take control of a movie theater usher named Josh as he no-clips into the titular Backrooms and tries to find his way out of a liminal labyrinth. The second (and final) tape follows Josh’s brother Nikolas as he attempts to track down the missing usher and ends up embarking on his own journey through infinite hallways and not-so-empty pools.

What follows is a highly atmospheric first-person walking simulator with the occasional light puzzle and a handful of thrilling chase sequences. While the liminal environment is obviously the star of the show here, the rooms are actually populated by monsters in this game, and our characters have plenty to say about the situation they find themselves in.

Unlike Parsons’ more introspective take on the Backrooms mythology, Cortez has decided to incorporate the multiple levels of the Backrooms wiki as well as several crossovers with the SCP “franchise”. While I personally don’t mind this inclusion due to the creepypasta’s collective origins, die-hard fans might be bothered by the fact that you can run into SCP-173 (affectionately referred to as Peanut by some fans) while wandering around the yellow hallways.

However, the real problem here is the fact that the game is simply presenting imagery and ideas made by other people without adding anything new to these familiar elements. There is an undeniable novelty to exploring these beautiful renditions of classic liminal environments, but Lost Tape offers little in the way of originality in both narrative and presentation. This extends to the unfortunate use of generative AI in some of the new textures and audio files – issues that weren’t present in the 2022 version of the title.

Though Cortez has promised that he’s working on bringing back the VHS filter that made the original experience so grungy and atmospheric, the glossy new visuals make the game feel a lot less scary while also consuming way more computing power than can be reasonably expected from an indie title. Sure, the game is pretty in a “tech-demo” sort of way, but there’s no reason for it to be hogging resources like a blockbuster AAA title.

This is made even more frustrating by the fact that this found footage anthology is technically still incomplete. The two existing tapes only scratch the surface of the setting’s narrative potential, and Cortez has announced that the next ones will only be available as (likely paid) DLC. Josh and Nikolas’ tapes are self-contained yarns that’ll each get you about a feature film’s worth of entertainment, though a lot of that runtime is taken up by very slowly walking from one point to another. But it’s a shame that there isn’t a concrete promise of more content to come.

At the end of the day, Backrooms: Lost Tape isn’t a bad game. Cortez really nails the liminal atmosphere and even breathes new life into tired SCP tropes, and the upcoming VHS filter will likely resolve most of my gripes with the revamped visuals. That being said, I find it hard to recommend a project that took a completely functional experience and spoiled it with AI-generated assets and poorly-optimized “upgrades” that no one was really asking for – especially since it doesn’t give existing owners the chance to roll back to a previous version of the game.

So, if you’re looking for more Backrooms-related thrills after enjoying the A24 adaptation, Lost Tape isn’t necessarily a bad place to start, but there are certainly better and more original options out there.

Backrooms: Lost Tape is available now on Steam and PS5.

The post ‘The Backrooms: Lost Tape’ Review: An Entertaining But Unnecessary Upgrade appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s an interesting angle, and when combined with a dreamy visual style and a handful of confident performances, Mark O’Brien‘s film starts with a lot of promise and maintains a consistent dramatic tension throughout. There’s ambition here, and craft, and a sense of care that saves the film from oblivion, but unfortunately, thanks to confused pacing and certain baffling moments of characterization, all The Voices of Our Mother can really do, in the end, is avoid becoming a complete mess. 

The mother of the title is Harriet (Sheila McCarthy), whose four adult children fled the home she shared with her own mother as quickly as they could and never looked back. For years, Harriet’s efforts to stay in touch with her children were in vain, at least until their grandmother dies suddenly and a devastated Harriet is hospitalized after a medical episode of her own. It’s only then that twin siblings William (O’Brien) and Therese (Carolina Bartczak), junkie baby brother Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), and devoted nun Annika (Georgina Reilly) are forced to return home to bury their grandmother and deal with Harriet, whose physical and psychological issues are growing stranger by the day. 

Photo Credit: Shudder

There’s a reason so many horror stories follow adults who must return to the site of their childhood trauma. It’s just such a charged environment for drama and psychological tension, as the characters fight to reconcile the understanding that comes with maturity with the rage and confusion they still feel over what happened long ago. O’Brien, who also wrote the screenplay, digs into this emotionally fertile ground immediately, showing us siblings who’ve left quite a few things unsaid, trying to reconnect even as their mother is constantly upsetting the delicate balance of peace they’re trying to construct for her.

In just his second feature as director (after 2021’s The Righteous), O’Brien recognizes the potency of the environment he’s created, and in the early minutes of the film, he exploits it. While Harriet recuperates in bed, the four siblings explore their various resentments, memories, and flat-out grudges from all angles, and it mostly works. The performances are solid, O’Brien works hard to infuse a genuinely distinctive visual style awash with dramatic reds and the glow of firelight into the proceedings, and the supernatural mystery at the core of the film is intriguing, if a little sloppily laid out. It’s a horror story built on the age-old conundrum over what to do with aging relatives with whom you’ve lost any real sense of emotional connection, and that’s palpably unsettling. 

But these unsettling qualities never translate to real horror, or even a cohesive narrative, once the supernatural mystery of it all really starts rolling forward. As Harriet’s illness progresses, and she starts doing things like whispering secrets in her kids’ ears to turn them against each other, the film stirs up fresh drama but fails to deliver on the emotional throughlines of that drama. Characters make baffling decisions, and not in the way that horror characters often act out of passion or confusion or plain old fear.

Photo Credit: Shudder

The tension over Harriet’s real fate fades in and out as the kids squabble, and she only seems to act out in overtly horrifying ways when the script needs to wrap up an argument without ever actually arriving at any conclusions. It’s a shame, because when McCarthy’s actually able to flex her horror muscles and turn Harriet into something to be feared, she brings remarkably nuanced terror to the film, and yet the film barely wants to showcase it. It would rather, it seems, be a psychological drama about the fallout of Harriet’s illness, which would be fine if that drama held together. Instead, we’re left with a string of interesting scenes that never quite come together into a story worth following, and by the time the more overt horror elements kicked in, I’d grown too frustrated to really be hooked. 

But The Voices of Our Mother is not all bad. McCarthy’s performance is solid, as is O’Brien’s, who injects a welcome naturalism into scenes that might otherwise be stiff. Reilly (who, as a Pontypool fan, I was just really happy to see), Bartczak, and Ozerov-Meyer bring their best to the material, but the film is just too tonally confused to deliver anything truly satisfying out of their work.

Still, I can’t help but think that with a little narrative tightening and some basic brush-ups on things like blocking and scene geography – the film is sometimes ambiguous on purpose but more often ambiguous by accident, like setups arrived half-formed – this thing could’ve gone much further. The Voices of Our Mother doesn’t work, but it’s far from a disaster, and I sincerely hope Mark O’Brien tries his hand at more horror in the future. 

The Voices of Our Mother hits Shudder June 19.

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Talk to Me‘s Joe Bird stars as Naim, a new kid in a small Australian suburb who’s introduced as he’s hanging out with new friend Ryan (Stacy Clausen). Playful ribbing quickly leads to romance between the pair, though one that can only carry on in secret. The town’s prominent religious community, of which Naim’s mom (Mia Wasikowska) is a devout member, doesn’t approve of homosexuality.

When the lovers are outed, they’re subjected to a strange conversion-therapy ritual by a mysterious outsider that marks them as targets for an unrelenting, malevolent entity that takes the form of whoever the afflicted desires most.

If that sounds like It Follows, well, it sort of is. Chiarella refines the horror mechanics and metaphor with much sharper precision, ensuring that the scares and emotional gravity of Naim and Ryan’s terrifying predicament reach their intended impact. Here, the lust-induced curse gets very personal, with the entity offering tantalizing temptation in doppelgänger form, hoping to lure its victim close before brutally ripping them apart.

Chiarella uses this as a launchpad to immerse audiences in the horror of constantly living in fear for simply existing. And it’s here where Leviticus rises above its influences with clear purpose. Through the curse, fleeting moments of tender romance or comfort also breed fear and tension. A discreet kiss leaves the cursed vulnerable in more ways than one; safety doesn’t exist for two young teens simply trying to understand their burgeoning emotions.

Ultimately, though, Leviticus owes much of its success to the tremendous performances by its two leads. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen deftly navigate all the emotional complexities of coming-of-age in a repressed setting that hits too close to home for any reprieve. While the tenderness beneath Ryan’s machismo endears, it’s Naim’s bone-deep fear and melancholy that’s as heartbreaking as it is compelling.

Naim is scared of his emerging feelings, and it’s exacerbated without any avenue to explore them without violent recourse. The threats aren’t just external but internal as well, and it’s those moral and emotional complexities that transform familiar horror formula into something that feels fresh and timely.

Chiarella injects a few potent jump scares that left the Sundance audience shrieking, but does struggle to stage some of the supernatural sieges. The cold open introduces a previous victim of the curse, but only mildly intrigues with its familiar staging. That’s not to say the entity isn’t scary, though; Clausen in particular is a terrifying menace when in Ryan’s doppelgänger form.

Keeping the focus on the star-crossed lovers was the smart and correct choice, but some plot elements feel underutilized by the succinct conclusion. Wasikowska plays her character too guarded, leaving many questions regarding her background and motives unanswered, even if the film gives her a satisfying end to her arc, for example. The rules, though simple and straightforward, can also bend at whim.

Still, Leviticus is a strong debut with an incisive voice at the helm. Chiarella coaxes poignant, layered performances out of his young leads that ensure that the social horror cuts deep, even if some of the more supernatural components occasionally feel stale. We care deeply about Naim and Ryan’s survival, making Leviticus a tense, atmospheric, and claustrophobic vision of young love in a hateful world.

Leviticus made its world premiere at Sundance and releases in theaters June 19, 2026.

Editor’s Note: This Sundance review was originally published January 24, 2026.

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The process of restoring Day of the Dead, Romero’s 1985 zombie classic, has that same air of the improbable. When the restorers working on Scream Factory’s beautiful new 4K glow-up of the film first set to work, they were delivered cans of film from the much-maligned 2008 remake of the same name, and had to keep searching to get all of the footage necessary to revive the original. A film initially shaped by budget constraints and Romero’s inventive spirit was once again fighting to stay alive. The restorers kept at it, found the footage they needed, and the result is a new horror essential, a 4K set that proves Romero was always worth rooting for, not just because he was a fighter, but because he had the talent to back it up.

Day of the Dead famously began as an epic, only to grow in intimacy as the budget shrank and Romero found he had to limit his locations and setpieces. Like Night of the Living Dead before it, Day then becomes a study in how to do a lot with a little, and my God does Romero do a lot. The film opens with its most expansive sequence, a helicopter flight over a desolate, zombie-ridden Florida, complete with alligators lurking on street corners and zombies piling out of buildings in states of advanced decay. Its heroes, including intrepid scientist Sarah (Lori Cardille), are looking for survivors, for hope. They find nothing and instead retreat back to their bunker, an underground labyrinth of salt mines and cinder blocks, wondering what to do until the end comes for them too. 

If Night is a case study in how people behave in a crisis, Day is a case study in what happens when the crisis grows humdrum, when all that’s left to really squabble over is what the few remaining survivors will do with their time. Some, like the infamous Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato), shift into full-blown violent ideation towards others, while Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) throws himself into bloody work. In the middle of it all is Sarah, still clinging to the idea of a future even if she can’t see or feel it, and the film’s chief dramatic tension becomes not who will break first, but who will be left standing when the break eventually comes. 

All of this serves to make Day especially bleak, even by Romero zombie film standards, not just because of the death surrounding the characters, but because of the grind of it all. It’s a gritty, dirty, shadowy movie, and I don’t know that I recognized quite how intensely focused a film it is stylistically until I saw this restoration. It’s not just sharpening the lines and correcting the colors after years of degradation; there’s a real texture to this movie that even Night and Dawn don’t really have, a sense of people scrounging around in the dirt for whatever they can find, and this restoration highlights that.

It might be Romero’s most visually developed film and compositionally ambitious movie, from the opening dream sequence to the final collapse of the bunker, and it’s all captured and enlivened by a careful, beautiful 4K upgrade. 

If I had my druthers, this set would come with a few more brand-new bells and whistles, but the ones it does come with, including a set of lobby cards in the collector’s edition and new interviews with surviving cast and crew, are quite lovely. The cherry on top, though, is a new commentary track by critic and film historian Drew McWeeny and author Daniel Kraus, who has now completed two unfinished novels of Romero’s, including the epic The Living Dead. Few people working in the horror space right now know more about Romero than Kraus, but more importantly, few people understand Romero as Kraus does. He’s been inside the man’s imagination for so long that he’s imbued with a certain emotional intelligence about the films, and listening to him and McWeeny trade insights for the length of the film is a delight. 

But what comes through most from this new restoration of Day of the Dead is just how much we still want to root for George A. Romero. To this day, he remains one of the great titans of independent cinema, a filmmaker who fought for every dollar on the budget, every creative decision, and every story for as long and as hard as he could. Day of the Dead‘s existence is proof of that, but seeing it with this fresh spotlight is a reminder of the artistry behind that independent spirit, and a celebration of one of horror’s greatest storytellers. 

Day of the Dead is out now in a new Collector’s Edition 4K from Scream! Factory.

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Tabletop roleplaying game manuals are an interesting object. Traditionally, we want them to be laid out cleanly in a way that’s easy to understand so they can be played effectively. But this means they are often dryly written, focusing on clarity instead of style. That’s not to say they don’t have good art, but they are rarely experimenting with the form in a way that makes the book itself exciting.

Some of my favorite games in recent memory are the ones that purposefully break the rules in an attempt to be just as much of an art book as a rule book. Games like Mork Borg, whose aggressive, borderline unreadable layouts are constantly shifting fonts alongside its maximalist artwork. Games like Triangle Agency, which use in-fiction format changes to illustrate the strange forces at play behind the titular agency. Games like Soul Cemetery, a book that kept up the illusion that it was an instruction manual for a lost PS2-era video game, tell a tale of how our relationship with fiction shapes our lives.

You Will Die In This Place takes this to the extreme, mixing its nihilistic dungeon crawling rulebook with a “House of Leaves“-style meta narrative that tells a deeply personal tale about identity, mortality, and the act of creation. Not only is it stylistically bold and endlessly inventive, but it weaves its characters with a raw believability that brings the book itself to life in a way I’ve never seen in the medium.

The Meta-Narrative That Sets You Will Die In This Place Apart

The actual game is by Elizabeth Little, but it’s framed as a reconstruction of an abandoned project pieced together from various notes and design documents. Fictional tabletop designer Samantha Little is cleaning out boxes in her parents’ attic when she comes across the game, which was originally written by a college friend, Charlotte Avery, whom she hasn’t talked to since graduation.

The version of You Will Die In This Place that you’re reading is one that Samantha has “finished,” compiling Charlotte’s notes, which included design work, microfiction, and illustrations, but the line between Charlotte’s original vision and Samantha’s additions to the work remains a tension throughout. There’s also a third character, KC, who is the book’s editor, who comments to Samantha about the process and questions her decisions. The book presented is the “final version” of the game, along with footnotes that give insight into Samantha’s work on the book and how it felt rediscovering her old friend through these notes.

The actual game part has a premise that seems pretty standard, but is done with its own unique flair, both mechanically and narratively. Your party plays a group of people who have been exiled to the Abyssal Labyrinth, a horrific series of corridors and rooms full of creatures warped by manablight.

You will never return from the labyrinth. There’s no winning your way out.

The title says it all. Rather than being a game about heroically slaying the beast that has cursed the labyrinth, it’s about trying to find meaning before you die in this place. While it’s definitely not the first game where you are doomed adventurers that will reach an unfortunate end before the campaign is over, the way it explores the idea thematically feels unique.

It’s hard to figure out where to even begin to talk about this game, and that’s part of the fun. Should I go into the maybe-too-clever class system first, or dig into the themes about what it means to create? Is it best to dive into the strange bestiary, or do you first need to have context about Charlotte’s thought process through her tangential essays that Samantha decided to include? Maybe I don’t even get into the details of that because the rewarding part of the book is watching it all click together in a holistic way.

Experimental Character Classes and Innovative RPG Mechanics

I’ll start by treating it as a traditional tabletop RPG, but even that will immediately give way to talking about the meta layers. One of the most interesting ways for me to look at what a game is capable of is by looking at its character classes and the ways it expects players to use them to interact with the world through their rules. In a bold move, You Will Die In This Place forgoes traditional conventions by having each class operate on a completely different set of rules. While it may seem like a bit of a stunt at first, it’s very clear that each of these disparate ways of playing is well thought out and intended to convey something important about each class.

The Muzeiiyd Mercenary sounds like the most standard class of all of them, a powerful warrior, but you play by rolling a pool of dice and placing them on different body parts to do different actions, almost like a worker placement board game. The Zibari Headhunter uses a deck of cards and asks you to play poker hands to activate your skills, with your deck acting as an alternate health system. The Corpse Engineer forces you to directly control your character while also doing a programming minigame for a flesh golem that does most of your fighting for you.

The Bermail Knight wears a powerful set of armor, but that comes with a heat management system that alters your available actions as you heat up and cool down. The game’s wizard class, the Blight Channeler, writes as many spells as it can fit on a section of its character sheet, but crosses off words of the spells when using them, while also having to physically tear off pieces of its sheet when injured. There’s even a pair of hidden classes, including one that is written in a cipher that I was not able to solve.

At the beginning of this section, there’s a note about how Charlotte wasn’t a fan of class-based systems because they felt immersion-breaking, and these classes are almost a hyperexaggerated response to that, each being as maximally fiddly as possible in its own unique way. As someone who runs a lot of tabletop RPGs, I pride myself on being able to get a good sense of how something will play just by reading, and I have no idea how these would feel at the table. They definitely are clever, but they might be too clever to the point of not being balanced, or maybe even fun, in action. But I feel like Charlotte would agree with that and respond by saying, “Yeah, pretty cool, right?”

Identity, Roleplaying, and Self-Discovery

The classes are successful on two layers, because they not only offer a fun experimentation with the form, but they also use the mechanics of the game to give us insight into the surrounding meta-narrative of who Charlotte is as a designer and as a person. The notes also mention she was not a fan of levels and hit points, and this game plays with those as well. In an inverse of the traditional power fantasy structure, your characters will get worse the further they get into the dungeon.

When you hit certain thresholds of damage, you will take injuries, which will give you debuffs that will constantly make it harder for you until your death. It’s another bold choice that might not make the game as “fun,” but leans hard into the themes in a way that reinforces the text overall.

The idea of creating characters, both for players and creatures, is one that is very important to Charlotte throughout her notes. Not only was she very particular about putting work into non-playable characters in order to make sure they felt like they had lives that didn’t revolve around waiting for the player characters, but it was also an act that was associated with discovering your own identity.

As the story goes on, it’s revealed that Charlotte is a trans woman, and this fact immediately feels like it unlocks the work thematically. Passages about the disproportionate power of choosing your character’s name make sense within that context. The idea of using roleplaying as a mask to try on different identities is a potent one, made all the more powerful by this detail. The real-life author Elizabeth Little is also trans, making this feel like a deeply personal work that’s just as much about her journey as it is about the fictional characters’ journeys.

The Abyssal Labyrinth’s Bestiary and Worldbuilding

The bestiary of the game contains a lot of strange variants on common ideas, some of them even pushing into experimental territory with their mechanics. Each enemy is described sparsely, with just enough stats and special rules to get you rolling, often leaving the minutiae of the physical description up to you. A giant worm with a human-shaped appendage used to lure unsuspecting individuals, animated chunks of alien meat, and innocuous-looking creatures that devour meaning and words are among the creatures you’ll run into in the Abyssal Labyrinth, making for a more surreal and upsetting dungeon crawl than most.

There are several floors laid out to act as your complete campaign of You Will Die In This Place, each with its own grid layout and threats listed. Many of these are pretty simple fights against enemies, but some of them have clever gimmicks that test the player in ways beyond their character sheet. There’s interesting lore contained within these spaces, but never too much that it takes away from the ominous nature of the setting by filling in too many details.

Coming from Charlotte, who describes her GMing style as one that has trended away from overprepping, I found the explicit dungeon maps to be a bit surprising, but it’s here where much of the tension between the two creative forces of the work comes to a head. This was an unfinished game when Samantha found it, but it becomes clearer as the book goes on that she has made significant changes to the final product, including many that seem to go against Charlotte’s design intent.

So many of the notes and microfiction pieces are about the nature of creation, about what it means to create for the artist and what it means for a piece of the author to live on in the art, making this feel like a strange violation. How much of what we’re reading is Charlotte’s work and how much is Samantha’s, and how much does that really matter if we just want to play the game?

Final Verdict on You Will Die In This Place

You Will Die In This Place is the rare tabletop RPG that I would recommend picking up and reading, even if you have no intention of getting it to the table. As a game, it’s deeply experimental, taking a well-worn grimdark dungeon crawl and bringing it to life with intentionally overcomplicated mechanics that feel fresh and odd, even if they perhaps aren’t the most balanced or intuitive.

As a whole, it’s a marvellous work about the act of creation and finding yourself, even in the face of the bleak world in front of you. It was hard not to make this review into just a list of my favorite passages, but I’d rather leave it to you to discover the story of the Corpse Engineer or Charlotte’s tale of being haunted by the memory of a dying fox or the unsettling demonstration of the natural blind spot we all have in our vision.

There’s so much going on in this book, but it all gels together into one of the most unique tabletop RPGs I’ve ever seen. It’s a powerful statement about the creative process, one that’s inspired me to pick up the proverbial pen again and start writing my own RPG, which is honestly the highest compliment I can give it.

You Will Die In This Place is now available in full over on itch.io.

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The Death of Robin Hood bypasses rehashing the origins of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, instead introducing a grizzled brute who opens the film with a ruthless culling of a young girl seeking vengeance against the outlaw. It’s a downright gentle introduction to Hugh Jackson’s Robin, who only escalates the jaw-dropping carnage when reunited with righthand Little John (Bill Skarsgård) as they seek to reclaim Little John’s home and family from vengeance seekers. These early sequences set up a stark contrast to the Disney-fied legends; Robin Hood’s heroics have been grossly exaggerated compared to the blood debts his violent exploits have racked up over the decades, which in turn have made him a hunted man spanning generations.

Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24

Grave injuries from battle lands Robin on a remote island priory under the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer, 28 Years Later), where the strange, idyllic community, an enigmatic leper (Murray Bartlett), and a traumatized young girl, Margaret (Faith Delaney), force him to confront his legacy.

Sarnoski, who writes and directs, makes the hero the villain in his adaptation, ensuring a deeply rewarding character arc. At every point in the film, Robin is openly, often actively, seeking death. The stroke of poetic beauty here is that his view of a worthy death seismically shifts from beginning to end. What’s a hero’s death? That answer deepens and evolves along with its “hero” in his waning years. All the impressive survival instincts and battle savagery can’t outmatch or outrun endless cycles of death and loss, after all, despite Robin’s attempts to shrug off his own myth over the years.

Those cycles of violence loom large as a constant threat as the aged outlaw finds himself surrounded by those directly impacted by his past. It breeds conflict, external and internal, reflected in tense encounters and tenuous alliances that let Robin’s humanity slowly slip through his hardened survivor’s shell. It’s the type of role with just enough similarities that’ll draw inevitable comparisons to Hugh Jackman’s stellar work on Logan, but the tenured actor quickly sets the emotionally and morally complex Robin apart, whose primal ruthlessness belies a surprising capacity for aching empathy.

Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24

While it’s Robin’s relationship with Sister Brigid that drives his final story to its soulful conclusion, it’s the unexpected friendship between the outlaw and the cautious Leper that has the greatest impact. A quiet conversation between the pair comes barbed with soul-shattering revelations, one that irrevocably alters Robin’s outlook while serving as one of the bolder myth revisions. Still, it’s Comer’s quiet heartbreak that yields the film’s biggest devastation.

Sarnoski depicts medieval life for all its cruelty and filth. Death is not remotely gentle in the 13th century; it’s downright nasty and vicious. Cinematographer Pat Scola captures it with startlingly dark realism and grit, but so, too, the breathtaking Northern Ireland landscape that provides this intimate tale with the scale of a sprawling epic. 

The Death of Robin Hood removes the simple binary of heroes and villains, combining both into a complicated interrogation of myth itself. But the biggest magic feat is its demonstration of how myth-making and storytelling can heal even the most grievous wounds, and even provide peace if earned.

The Death of Robin Hood releases in theaters on June 19, 2026.

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After a pair of tourists goes missing to the beast in the opening, Johanne (Khorami) gets assigned to investigate strange salmon behavior at the Sognefjord. Her first stop is the local fish farm, run by Erik (Mikkel Bratt Silset), a former colleague with whom she harbors romantic history and developed a sonic tool that’s been completed to delouse the salmon. The problem is that owner Avaldsnes (Øyvind Brandtzæg) has dialed up the sonic blasts to the max in a desperate bid to clinch investors, wreaking havoc on marine life.

Director Pål Øie (The Tunnel), working from a script by Vilde Eide, Kjersti Jelen Rasmussen, and Natasha Arthur, bides his time releasing the Kraken. A curious tentacle here or there, an occasional demise, and parasites of its own inject a few action-horror moments to keep the proceedings chugging along as Kraken meticulously leans into the science of what’s happening. It’s a film that is more interested in capturing the natural beauty of Sognefjord and what’s at stake under the rule of capitalistic greed than spectacle. That’d be fine if it were more fleshed out.

While Kraken mentions the fjord’s deep depths with some regularity, that doesn’t extend to its plot or characters. Avaldnes’ teen daughter, Maria (Jenny Evensen), factors heavily into the plot as the younger gen whistleblower, but is never developed beyond a plot device. Similarly, it’s entirely left to Khorami and Silset to sell their characters’ romantic history and longing in a script that gives not even a hint of it. Fish farm employee Georg (Jon Erik Myre) consumes snacks and anime while spouting exposition, the closest to characterization this film dares to venture.

It’d be less glaring if Øie moved at a brisker clip or injected fresh aquatic horror ideas. While the filmmaker helms a stunning feature befitting of its setting, it’s also a collection of familiar aquatic horror tropes and moments. Waiting for the characters to draw the conclusions seasoned horror fans already arrived at much sooner can get frustrating when the scant horror moments rehash The Meg 2, Underwater, and especially Jaws, saving the full reveal of its beast until the climax. Its arrival is spectacular, of course, but the moral posturing eventually leaves its showstopping action finale with nowhere to go. Editing choices meant to build suspense instead confuse, though Khorami’s calm control at least carries the emotional beats through to the end.

Norway’s legendary sea monster traverses shallow but gorgeous waters in Kraken, rising like a natural guardian in response to human-made destruction. Øie approaches his latest with workman efficiency, delivering a well-made but slight eco-horror movie indebted to more prominent blockbusters. 

Kraken releases in select theaters and on digital June 12.

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But it’s not the whole story.

Starting with her own experiences might have been Pazkad’s catalyst, but Find Your Friends works because it’s willing to not just interrogate these threats, but to allow its characters to exist in a way that makes them far from perfect horror movie victims when those threats arrive. Intense, confrontational, and relentless, this is a film that begins as a psychological unraveling, then descends into revenge movie madness, all with a style perfect for the Euphoria generation. 

Amber (Helena Howard) just went through a difficult breakup, and she’s looking forward to cutting loose during a trip out to the desert with her friends Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zion Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali). Her friends all think that what Amber needs is some drinks, drugs, and fun rebound sex, but Amber’s not so sure, particularly after her first attempt to hook up with a guy ends in the kind of casual sexual assault that’s easy for anyone who didn’t witness it to brush off. 

Still, when the ladies make it out to Joshua Tree for their getaway, everyone’s in high spirits, and Amber’s hoping to put the past behind her and get lost in music and mood-altering substances. But the past won’t fade quite so easily, and the quintet of friends is about to find out that the present is even more frightening. 

Structurally, this is a classic plot-driven thriller in which the decisions of the characters and their reactions to adversity inform who they are. We meet Amber and her friends mid-party, and aside from a couple of quiet moments, the party basically never ends, whether the girls are taking Molly at a desert concert or doing mushrooms in the wilderness. Along the way, we come to understand that, with adult responsibilities looming in their lives, these young women are all afraid of drifting apart, and they hope that a maelstrom of experience will bond them in such a way that they’ll reunite for a girls’ trip everywhere.

They’re trying to cling, often unhealthily, to a world in which they can hold each other up, and no one seems to need that more than Amber. Some characters don’t get as much detail brushed in as others – it’s really Amber’s movie despite its ensemble tendencies – but Howard, Thorne, and Moreno in particular imbue the film with emotional weight and palpable tension. 

That tension comes from a few different places, whether it’s Amber trying to hold her friends responsible for what she considers abandonment at a key moment or Lavinia trying to wring every last drop of fun from the trip at all costs, but it’s most evident in the way the girls engage with their environment. If you’ve ever visited any kind of major party destination for twentysomethings, you’ve met these women. I bumped into an almost identical group recently at a resort in San Juan, and I’m sure I’m not alone in my sense of recognition.

These women are loud, energetic, intoxicated, and fiercely devoted both to each other and to their shared goal of shutting out the wider world in favor of an experience they curate together. While their behavior might be jarring at first, especially if you’re an old homebody like me, you soon realize that it’s the whole point of the dramatic tension Pakzad has set out to establish. 

These characters need to be loud, profane, sometimes even self-centered and annoying, because Find Your Friends is a movie that dares you to dislike them. Why? Because Pazkad is interested not just in the slowly unfolding revenge narrative in the film, or in the way Amber’s psyche fractures under the weight of increasingly isolating experiences, but in forcing her audience to confront their own biases. In the eyes of a misogynistic viewer, these women seem to be doing a textbook version of “asking for it” or “being a tease.” They drink, they twerk, they speak frankly and openly about their sexual experiences, and they’re not shy about what they want when it comes to men.

Pakzad places all of this deliberately in our faces so that, when the violence and confusion start to kick in, we’re forced to consider our own internalized misogyny and judgment of women like these. If you’ve ever chastised a horror movie character for making a bad decision, Find Your Friends wants to throw that judgment back in your face. It is a wonderfully thorny exploration of the film’s themes, and it creates a thread of piano wire-tight tension that builds to one of the year’s most unforgettable horror crescendos. 

The film’s thematic oomph and the sheer energy of its pacing, helped along by editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia and cinematographer Tim Curtin, is strong enough to mask some of its minor flaws. It could stand a bit more nuance, some tighter plotting, perhaps a bit quieter to let its ideas settle into place around the parties and the mayhem, but the film is so immediate and sensuous in its presentation, helped along by a pulsing soundtrack, that these things barely have time to take root in your mind.

This is a dreamy, feral little movie with a taste for blood, and I hope it finds the audience it deserves. 

Find Your Friends arrives June 12 on Shudder.

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Starring Simone Ashley as a young woman recovering from a horrible accident that may or may not involve an abusive spouse, the film establishes layers of intrigue early on, delicately folding them together with stylish visual and aural flourishes from Montgomery and the production team. It’s familiar to any seasoned viewer of psychological thrillers, and amnesia thrillers in particular, but it’s clicking…mostly.

Thanks to a solid lead performance, some compelling hooks in the script, and capable direction, This Tempting Madness manages to hold itself together as a solid little thriller, even if a third act that’s too twisty for its own good almost derails the whole thing. 

Ashley is Mia, whose opening moments in the film show us her plunge from a high balcony, down through an atrium, and into a safety net that just barely saves her from death. In the hospital, with her jaw wired shut and her leg broken in several places, Mia finds her memories are horribly fragmented, and her lack of information about what happened to her isn’t helped by her protective brother Ajay (Suraj Sharma), who insists that she’ll know more when she’s well. Soon, portions of the truth come out. Mia’s husband, the volatile Jake (Austin Stowell), is in jail for attempting to murder her, but Mia doesn’t remember that, so what really happened? Is Jake a monster? Is Ajay manipulating her? Or is Mia herself forgetting the person she was before the fall?

While the film settles into certain familiar rhythms of its subgenre, Montgomery, who co-wrote the script with Andrew Davis, also works hard to keep you guessing, and largely succeeds. It’s easy to buy Mia’s suspicion over what’s really happened, in part because her life feels so shattered, and in part because it really does seem like Ajay could be a pushy patriarch-in-training, just as it seems like Jake could be an unstable killer, even if he simply acted in the heat of the moment.

Flashbacks start to shade in details throughout the film’s first half, and they too pull Mia and the viewer in disparate directions. It legitimately feels like the truth, whatever it might be, is both nuanced and very frightening. 

The problem comes in the third act, as revelations start to mount and Mia’s life grows even more chaotic amid her recovery. Her fragmented memory induces visions alongside memories, making it harder to understand what’s real, and when Ajay finally makes good on his promise to reveal what he’s been hiding, it shoots the film off in yet another strange direction that, while promising, doesn’t really resolve into anything satisfying in the climax.

There’s a moment where the film seems like it’s going to swerve into something truly bonkers, and while that moment is thrilling, its ending is far too conventional to make good on what it sets up. Instead of an emotional resolution that brings all of these ideas together, we’re left with a more straightforward ending that brushes over the thornier, more intriguing details of the story. 

But This Tempting Madness makes up for its narrative deficiencies with a focus on style and craft that reminds us what mid-budget thrillers can do in the hands of the right artists. Montgomery, with the help of Davis as her cinematographer, makes her feature directorial debut into a showcase of visual dynamism, whether she’s tracking Mia along a creepy hospital hallway or making her orange dress in a flashback sequence flow into gorgeous abstraction, until Mia might be flying just as easily as she’s falling. Editor Kiran Pallegadda also turns in solid work, working with Montgomery to cut together Mia’s present experiences with flashbacks and visions until it all blends into one effective, nerve-jangling maelstrom. 

The cast also shows up with a clear understanding of the assignment. Led by Ashley, who proves her versatility in a film that demands not just swerving between mental states but spending part of the story unable to talk, This Tempting Madness marshalls a strong ensemble that imbues every character with some degree of emotional substance. The whole cast rises to the twisty melodrama of it all, but the real standout is the reliably compelling Zenobia Shroff as Mia’s mother, Lakshmi, who injects soulful, patient warmth into a very dark story. 

There is, it should be clear by now, a lot to like about This Tempting Madness. In the end, the film is simply trying to carry too much, and starts to cave under the weight of its many twists, but the foundation is solid, and structural issues aside, it’s still mostly left standing. 

This Tempting Madness arrives June 12 in theaters and VOD.

The post ‘This Tempting Madness’ Review: Stylish Psychological Thriller Nearly Collapses Under Its Twists appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

However, it’s still largely a slasher franchise that actually has something to say. Mileage varies regarding the Scream sequels’ reception, but 2011’s Scream 4 — Wes Craven’s final film — is right up there with Scream 2 as far as I’m concerned. Arriving a decade after Scream 3, Scream 4 has plenty of new material to pull from and sinks its claws into the whole horror remake craze that was ramping up during the 2000s. 

Not only does this give Scream 4 more to do than its predecessor, but the film’s grander message about destructive clout chasing and gaining fame through infamy in a social media-obsessed age is wildly ahead of its time. It’s a motivation that rings even truer 15 years later and a sequel that’s only gotten better in the context of the following decades of horror and the subsequent Scream films that have followed in its wake.

Scream 4 is available in Ultra HD 4K for the first time in a Lionsgate Limited 4K Steelbook, a Standard 4K Edition, and even a VHS release. It’s the perfect way to celebrate the franchise’s black sheep sequel before your next franchise binge. 

How Does Scream 4 Look in 4K?

The big reason to pick up this new set is that it’s the first time that Scream 4 has been available in 4K. The film is presented in Dolby Vision, 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and compressed as HEVC (H.265). From what I understand, Scream 4 was finished on a 2K digital intermediate and that a native 4K master was never created. This indicates that this 4K release is an upscale, but it’s well-handled, if that’s in fact the case.

There’s a clear difference in the crispness and details of this new version in comparison to 2011’s Blu-Ray. The colors, reds in particular, pop much better and there’s a greater sense of contrast and depth when dealing with darker tones and blacks. To this point, Scream 4 is a film that’s full of scenes that take place at night and in dark rooms. It’s crucial that the 4K’s black levels aren’t compromised and this transfer doesn’t disappoint. This is definitely the best way to see Scream 4 at this point.

One of the biggest sticking points with Scream 4 fans is the “vaseline filter” that gives the film a bright and hazy soft-focus effect. Some people absolutely hate this effect and were hoping that it would be removed in the 4K. The filter does in fact remain, but this look was always intentional on Craven’s part and an additional meta touch on the glossier look of the decade’s many horror remakes. It wouldn’t be right to remove this filter, yet, an alternate option on the disc that’s without the glossy look – or the ability to toggle it on or off – might have been a welcome alternative.

Audio Gets a Surprise Bonus Inclusion

Lionsgate Limited’s new 4K release also features Dolby Atmos, which rises to the occasion and provides solid audio design throughout the movie. There are no struggles between the broader surround sounds and the more precise and directional effects, the latter of which are boosted so that the simplest of sound effects cut right through a scene. There’s a lot more going on in the background of scenes that are evident in the mix’s rear channels, too.

It’s definitely an audio mix where you’re going to potentially notice new elements that you’ve never noticed before. Speaking of surprises, a bonus inclusion is an additional English 5.1 TrueHD audio track, which is the infamous “UK Version.” While largely the same, this audio track features a few line changes that were dubbed over in ADR and worth checking out for hardocre fans.

Scream 4 4K Release Comes Loaded with Features New and Old

Lionsgate Limited Extras (4K)

In addition to this new release including all the “Legacy” Special Features from the 2011 Blu-Ray, there are a handful of new extras that clock in at about 50 minutes of new material. These features include:

The Meta of Scream 

A 15-minute breakdown on the various ways in which Scream 4 is meta. There’s a playful nature to this, but it really doesn’t feel necessary, especially for an audience who is likely not buying Scream 4 for the first time.

Rebooting the Franchise: Scream 4 Revisited 

A 15-minute discussion with a handful of Scream 4’s actors (David Arquette, Marley Shelton, Nico Tortorella, and Erik Knudsen) while they talk about the film and share some stories. This is also a pretty light feature that’s full of anecdotes that you’ve probably heard before. It’s also too bad that such a small portion of the cast is assembled here.

Ghostface Revealed!

This segment is around eight minutes and gives the voice of Ghostface, Roger L. Jackson, his flowers. A feature on what Jackson brings to the Scream franchise is a decent idea and there’s a certain novelty to seeing Jackson do the voice on camera. While this is the 4K’s shortest feature, it surprisingly has the most depth. 

Wes Craven: The Maestro of Scream

A special feature on Wes Craven feels like a given, but this ten-minute segment does the bare minimum. About half of the feature is made up from archival interviews with Craven, with the rest featuring the cast from “Scream 4 Revisited” weighing in on the director. It’s sweet to hear these actors talk about Craven’s impact, but it’s a rather brief tribute.

In the end, all these new features are fine, but they come across as padded filler instead of anything that actually adds real value to the film’s legacy since its last physical media release. A special feature on how Scream 4 has been reappraised over the past decade, a breakdown on the legacy of Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts), or even a discussion on what the original sequel trilogy plan was for the next films. Roberts might not have been available, but it’s hard to imagine that Kevin Williamson couldn’t have chatted for 15 minutes, especially after he was back in this universe for Scream 7. Even a new audio commentary by Williamson or the Radio Silence team would have been appreciated.

These new features are not some treasure trove of undiscovered Scream 4 intel and they’re not the reason to buy this new set. That being said, the 2011 Legacy Special Features remain robust enough. 

Legacy Special Features (Blu-Ray)

Also included in this set are all the previous special features from the 2011 Blu-Ray release. These special features include: 

•     Feature Commentary with Director Wes Craven and Cast Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, and Neve Campbell (via telephone)
•     Deleted and Extended Scenes
•     Alternate Opening
•     Extended Ending
•     Gag Reel
•     EPKs: B-Roll, Soundbites, Junket Interviews
•     Trailers
•     TV Spot

All of this is pretty much what you’d expect and likely footage you’ve encountered before, at least in the case of the alternate opening and deleted/extended scenes. The Deleted and Extended Scenes are the most substantial of these features with around 30 minutes of material. There’s also optional commentary from Wes Craven on all these sequences, which honestly provides some enlightening context. The audio commentary occasionally sees Roberts and Hayden Panettiere dominate the conversation. It’s still a good reservoir of knowledge from Craven and two up-and-coming talents who clearly respect the hell out of him.

Conclusion

Lionsgate Limited’s 4K Ultra HD remaster of Scream 4 is easily the film’s best release and a must-buy for anyone who has never owned the movie before. Anyone who already has this chapter of the Woodsboro murders in their collection likely doesn’t need to upgrade if they’re purely interested in new supplemental features. However, video and audio hounds, plus hardcore Scream enthusiasts, will want to spring for the improved presentation and upgrades. 

The post ‘Scream 4’ 4K Ultra HD Review: The Franchise’s Black Sheep Gets a Killer Remaster appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.

In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again. 

Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time. 

This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done. 

This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.

Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together. 

At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.

Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly. 

It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.

The post ‘It Came From Neverland’ Review – A Stunning, Devastating Take on Peter Pan appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but one that’s magical when it’s properly executed, and this claustrophobic structure connects. Hugo Ruiz (One Night with Adela) rises to the challenge with Dante, a chaotic experience that’s pumping adrenaline, burning rubber, and snorting drugs from frame one and then rarely lets up. It feels like it starts in the middle of a film’s third act and then pushes itself to go to even more radical and exciting places.

Ruiz’s Dante is even more confident and accomplished than his freshman feature. It feels like a spaghetti western that’s trapped in a slaughterhouse. It’s Bringing Out the Dead by way of Quentin Tarantino after he’s come off a giallo binge session. It’s a white-knuckle, blood-soaked ride into hell that keeps its audience on edge until the credits roll.

Ruiz accomplishes something quite remarkable with Dante, a subversive take on Dante’s Inferno in which a paramedic ambulance driver, Eduardo (Chino Darin), gets embroiled in a vicious crime caper that pushes everyone involved closer to salvation. Dante, as its title suggests, isn’t exactly subtle with its allusions to Dante’s Inferno. That being said, none of the film’s efforts to match its source material’s themes and tone ever feels forced. It’s a bold, risky adaptation of the classic 14th-century epic poem, but it’s also a distinct film that stands on its own and becomes an incredibly satisfying sophomore entry in Ruiz’s career. 

Eduardo innocently responds to a standard emergency call, only to find himself tending to a crime boss’s wounds and caught in the middle of a deadly feud between two erratic rival kingpins. Dante digs into an impossibly tense situation with a small cast of larger-than-life characters who really feel like they’re trapped in some layer of hell. Every minor victory is met with yet another physical trial and morality test for Eduardo to overcome. It also distills this harrowing encounter down to its most exciting elements so that Dante is a fast, easy watch that’s beautifully paced and always finds the right moment to heighten its mayhem.

There’s a shocking brutality here. It’s a visceral, gross, oozing horror film that’s often hard to look at. It’s a movie that lingers on not just pain, but how the human body can become such a disgusting mess. Ruiz lingers on gross visuals that reduce people to raw meat and emotion. However, this screaming, bloody mess is also an intimate chamber piece and character study. All this extreme subject matter serves a grander purpose and builds to a sweeping salvation rather than purely existing to be sensational. Dante is vicious, but it’s the film’s heart that stands out the most when everything is said and done. 

Among the criminal capitulations is a deeper commentary on faith, passion, and identity. Eduardo is repeatedly confused for a doctor throughout, which is just one of several instances that reflect its themes regarding duality and labels. Eduardo’s wild night highlights life’s transactional nature and how everyone is the same in death. It’s the ultimate equalizer. Alternatively, Dante looks at the weird, unpredictable places in which people can find humanity, connection, and purpose in life, even if it’s surrounded by death and darkness. Everyone is looking for that spark and light that helps us heal. 

In a film full of strong performances, Darin’s work as Eduardo is really spectacular. It’s a performance that’s so deceptively layered that it makes you want to immediately watch the film again as soon as it’s ended. Ruiz’s film is also really smart in response to when it digs deeper into Eduardo’s life and personality. It’s easy to picture Dante beginning with Eduardo carrying out several normal rounds to get a better sense of who he is before danger strikes with Mario. The film also excels as it asks the audience to make their own conclusions on this blank slate before the film begins to pull back the curtain on him. 

Eduardo is a compelling moral compass throughout this dark night of the soul, albeit a character who is hardly infallible. Some of Dante’s strongest moments are when Eduardo’s mental state is unclear, and the audience is left to wonder if he’s actually getting a rush from this on some level. Eduardo is left to process many heightened emotions on his own. However, there’s also a real camaraderie between Eduardo and Mak (Ester Expósito) that’s genuinely sweet and progresses in a very natural, effortless manner. Their chemistry helps power the second half.

At one point, Eduardo muses that “a director must take risks.” This is a film that certainly adheres to its own advice.

Dante reaches a satisfying conclusion that feels like the natural endpoint of this story, only to then launch into such a wild turn that transforms the film into something considerably darker and a powerful meditation on the pervasiveness of pain and suffering. The ending guarantees that this is a movie that’s destined to be debated by both its lovers and haters.

There’s thankfully a lot more going on here so that Dante doesn’t live or die based on its ending alone. It’s just a brave step forward that reiterates why Hugo Ruiz is a filmmaker to look out for. 

Dante made its world premiere at Tribeca 2026; release info TBD.

The post ‘Dante’ Review – A Paramedic’s Night Shift Turns Into A Blood-Soaked Nightmare [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

As much as pregnancy and childbirth are a period of vulnerability, it’s also an act that creates a remarkable bond that’s also ripe material to exploit in the horror genre. Turkish filmmaker Alphan Eseli’s Mutter: The Diary of a Mother is a modern folk horror film on motherhood that’s reminiscent of titles like Hatching, Lamb, and The Brood that explore separation anxiety, legacy, and transformative grief through a surreal lens that also succeeds as a one-of-a-kind creature feature. 

Mutter becomes a powerful examination of the unbreakable bond between mother and child. Gül (Hazar Ergüçlü) refuses to separate from her offspring, even if it’s more monster than man. It ultimately makes no difference. It’s hers, which is more than enough for Gül. Motherhood is painful and torturous, but an ordeal that’s worth all the trauma. Mutter: The Diary of a Mother is an equally distressing experience that tells a powerful, poignant story that dares to be different.

It bluntly highlights the beautiful and brutal horrors that surround the natural extremes of childbirth. However, this storytelling expands into a broader commentary on not just motherhood, but also the judgmental prejudices and corresponding misogyny that accompany single mothers. Mutter moans that this sweeping disrespect is entrenched in every aspect of the world as Gül cycles through transactional relationships in her life, yet it never feels preachy with its messaging. Occasionally on the nose, yes, but never preachy.

This is a movie that wastes absolutely no time, and it begins by throwing Gül and the audience into chaos. It’s not even a few minutes in and Gül has already given birth to some inexplicable monster and just as quickly been left by her partner. Gül begins this story abruptly, abandoned and afraid. Mutter’s fantastical dream logic makes it feel even more like it’s some kind of folk horror parable. It tragically presents motherhood as this all-encompassing force that takes over Gül’s life and is literally draining her dry. Beyond motherhood, Mutter also explores the fine line between love and hate, good and evil, and how these extremes are always at war and in flux. 

The messaging would be potent regardless of how it’s conveyed, but it’s appreciated that the film opts for old school practical effects for Gül’s inhuman offspring. The larval creature that comes out of her and struggles to exist is truly disgusting, while more instances of gruesome body horror reflect upon motherhood’s sacrificial nature. Mutter is a slimy and gross story that showcases especially disgusting sound design. There are frames that look like they belong in a Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna film from the ‘80s.

It’s easy to get caught up in the offensive practical effects. However, the best thing about this movie is the standout performance by Hazar Ergüçlü as Gül. She provides Mutter with a much-needed emotional anchor that gives the audience a reason to continue on this intense endeavor. Ergüçlü’s performance often channels Isabelle Adjani‘s haunting work in Possession, while still bringing plenty of original qualities to this role. When Mutter begins, Gül is left alone in the world, with no one, like a newborn. It’s a very lonely, isolating film that’s full of wide shots, barren spaces, and absent framing.

Gül’s compulsion to stay by her child’s side, no matter what, still manages to be inspiring even if it’s just as heartbreaking. Ergüçlü’s committed performance does a lot of the heavy lifting here, and she’s given many opportunities to convey a wide range of intense emotions. It’s a performance that’s vulnerable, fierce, inscrutable, and so much more. Gül transforms as much as her larval baby does, and it’s as if she’s in her own invisible state of metamorphosis throughout the film that mirrors her baby’s development.

Gül is dealt a bad hand, but the entire film conveys a brutalist aesthetic that’s meant to alienate. There’s bleak, drab lighting and sparse, cold set design that reinforces a depressing world that’s inescapable. It cultivates a heavy, crushing feeling where levity seems impossible. “There are so many sick bastards in the world,” is one of Mutter’s mantras, although this bleak statement is largely talking about men and how they’re this ongoing destructive force in Gül’s life. They’re the one constant that continues to let her down.

Mutter also addresses the concept of “God taking back his blessings” and if, perhaps, Gül actually deserves this cursed offspring for some reason, and that it’s a Biblical form of punishment. The whole film generates dread over a future for Gül that seems fated to fail. There’s some extremely dark messaging in the final act about the selfless nature of motherhood. “Nevertheless, she persisted” doesn’t cover half of it here. The fact that the film is dedicated to Eseli’s own mother is particularly wild and recontextualizes everything that’s come before it. 

Eseli delivers a fierce folk horror film that’s both familiar and disorienting. It checks many of the expected boxes for these types of maternal monster stories, and yet Gül’s plight never wears thin or grows repetitive. Eseli crafts a formidable film that doesn’t struggle to make any of its thoughts on parenthood known. If anything, Mutter’s pitch-black darkness is a little too much at times. The film would actually benefit from pulling back so that all this insurmountable sorrow never feels like parody.

Mutter never reaches this point, but it’s a melancholy exercise in extended sorrow that’s not an especially fun journey once it really locks in. Nevertheless, it is an effective meditation on motherhood and sacrifice that cuts deep despite tackling well-trodden territory.

Mutter: The Diary of a Mother made its premiere at Tribeca 2026, release info TBD.

The post ‘Mutter’ Review – A Mother’s Love Turns Monstrous in This Brutal Folk Horror Tale [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Breeder becomes the tonal and structural hybrid of Barbarian and Misery, but still uniquely its own thing. It’s one of 2026’s best horror surprises.

Goyette’s debut is such an impressive feature film that remains endlessly engaging because of its ability to keep one foot in reality, no matter how extreme the storytelling gets. It builds to a wild complication that actually feels earned because of how it preys upon the protagonist, Russell (Daniel Doheny), and his deep sense of desperation that’s rooted in the world’s grim economic state. Life-changing money makes it a lot easier for red flags to take on a greener hue. 

Russell is a brilliant college student who is at the precipice of a game-changing study that has the potential to prevent a rare bee species’ extinction. He just lacks the funding to make this dream a reality. Russell is cautiously optimistic when a particular poodle breeder, Patti (Dot-Marie Jones), who is a fan of Russell’s work, promises to be an angel investor if he can help her with an experiment of her own. It’s a sublime setup for what turns into a consistently surprising take on the perilous pursuit of perfection and a dark, post-modern version of survival of the fittest.

Credit: Jarryl Lim

Breeder is the very best style of slow-burn storytelling that grows more uncomfortable with each act. There are shades of Dogtooth and even Tusk, to some extent, as this extreme ritual that’s against nature takes place in plain sight and becomes normalized. The blunt, matter-of-fact nature of Patti’s actions makes this all the more horrifying. It’s almost as if Breeder applies a dog trainer approach to a hostage situation. The film deconstructs the complex bond between pet and owner, particularly how this relationship can warp and become toxic. There’s a slipping sense of reality that’s absolutely chilling. However, the film uses this confusion to find the humor in this unsettling premise as it balances these two extremes. Breeder’s sense of humor is low-key its secret weapon, and always feels so natural.

The entire cast shines, but this is really a movie that lives and dies on the success of its villain. Dot-Marie Jones is a revelation as Patti. It’s electric every second that she’s on screen, and there’s taut tension from not knowing when the other shoe will drop. She’s played with such chilling, calculating intensity, even when she’s completely normal. Patti is like Misery’s Annie Wilkes mixed with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, and it’s absolutely unforgettable.

Alternatively, Russell’s layered character development and the arc that he experiences highlight the pressures that he faces in life over failing to realize his full potential. Breeder makes Russell feel helpless and establishes why this study is so important to him. It’s so easy to have main characters who make a slew of poor decisions and lose sight of themselves so that their karmic retribution almost feels justified and becomes a cathartic release for the audience. Russell never wavers, and he doesn’t read like any other idiot in a horror film who willingly puts themselves in a dangerous situation.

Credit: Jarryl Lim

Most importantly, Goyette makes sure that the audience cares about Russell and that they’re actively rooting for his survival through all this. He’s put through the wringer, but it’s also fascinating to see how this harsh ordeal helps him grow and eliminate what he perceives to be weaknesses. Russell is a fun foil for every character that he shares time with in Breeder. However, there’s especially great chemistry between him and his girlfriend during the film’s first act. It helps establish a necessary baseline before everything falls apart. There’s a sardonic, dry energy to these scenes that’s such a stark counterpoint to the chaos that follows.

Breeder is such an original take on a low-budget “horror contained in a house” story that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s a unique story that intentionally avoids taking the easy way out, even if that’s occasionally frustrating. The film’s end, for instance, is likely to split audiences. However, it’s a decision that feels real and organic, rather than some gratuitous pivot that only exists to cause controversy. This strong, earned storytelling is lifted through fantastic performances and confident filmmaking that never fail to rise to the occasion.

It’s an excellent showpiece for Goyette, and it’s genuinely exciting to consider what he’ll do with more at his disposal, but it’s also a standout horror film in a year that’s been stacked with creative offerings. Breeder is headed to Shudder after a limited theatrical release, and it will hopefully find an audience and not get lost in the streaming shuffle. Survival of the fittest and all that.

Breeder made its premiere at Tribeca 2026 and is slated for release this fall. 

The post ‘Breeder’ Review – A Modern Horror Classic That Plays Matchmaker With Eugenics [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.

Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things. 

These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.

A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.

A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.

”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.

Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.

Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.

The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable. 

Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.

It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.

Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.

Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.

The post ‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Just as the original Scary Movie (2000) structured its over-the-top parody primarily around 1996’s Scream, the new Scary Movie largely follows 2022’s Scream for its narrative thrust as it reunites the original “core four.”

Since we last caught up with the franchise’s MVPs, Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) has gone full Laurie Strode hermit, complete with a booby-trapped house and familial estrangement. Regina Hall’s Brenda Meeks channels Ma as a suburban mom desperate to befriend her kids and their friends, and time has changed absolutely nothing for Ray (Shawn Wayans), who remains locked in his sexuality struggle. Perma-stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans) remains trapped in high school, making him an excellent bridge between generations as Ghostface returns to slaughter.

Anna Faris plays Cindy and Regina Hall plays Brenda in Scary Movie from Paramount Pictures.

At the forefront of the new gen cast is Olivia Rose Keegan, whose incredible emulation of Anna Faris’ mannerisms and ticks makes her a perfect choice to play Sara, Cindy’s estranged daughter. Sara and her sister, the Wednesday-like Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), drive what semblance of plot there is forward, but this is not a vehicle for storytelling.

Director Michael Tiddes and screenwriters Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, original Scary Movie director Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans (Scary Movie 2), and Rick Alvarez (A Haunted House) aim solely for laughs with a relentless revolving door of crude humor and parody hijinks from a bygone era, set to a modern horror mixtape.

Tiddes and crew take a kitchen sink approach, leaving absolutely no pop culture stone unturned in its skewering. Scary Movie even turns in on itself, poking fun at its past while scratching that nostalgic itch with a litany of franchise cameos.

It’s too much. Scary Movie is so stuffed to the gills that it keeps lampooning through the end credits, though at least it ends on a strong note (I’d like to buy a ticket to Brosferatu, please). This reboot falls into a frenzied rhythm so densely packed that the humor instead becomes sensory overload, unhelped by the hit-or-miss humor. Editor Jonathan Schwartz works overtime, cramming in every reference, homage, spoof, and movie nod possible into the brisk 95-minute runtime, making for a madcap sprint that leaves you exhausted.

Savannah Lee Nassif plays Tuesday in Scary Movie from Paramount Pictures.

The anarchic spirit of Scary Movie leaves little room for insight or perspective; this reboot never gets as outrageous or as offensive as it intends because much of its humor is empty. There’s no insight or aim for a lot of the gags, making the comedy less reliable.

I keep hammering on the overcrowding of parody here because Regina Hall and Anna Faris remain the series’ biggest assets alongside its beating heart: Marlon Wayans. They still elicit the biggest laughs, and Scary Movie is at its most winsome when the camera lingers just long enough to catch small character moments and comedic choices that demonstrate why each has endured so long in this business.

In short, Scary Movie could’ve used way more of them and scaled back in the sheer volume of joke topics. Save some of the fun for the inevitable sequel. Parodies tend to live or die by their humor, and mileage will most certainly vary here, and Scary Movie simply wants to deliver an entertaining time. I can’t say that a lot of it landed for me, but the energy of original creators returning to the franchise they began, and with such passionate gusto, is felt.

Scary Movie is now playing in theaters.

The post ‘Scary Movie’ Review – An Overstuffed Parody Reboot appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.

Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations. 

This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.

On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.

Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.

It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film. 

Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.

Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.

Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.

What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.

This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.

These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when. 

Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.

Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.

If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.

The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.

The post ‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

A musical love-letter to the b-movies of yesteryear that also inspired generations of LGBTQ+ inclusive fan communities around the world, both the film and the original stage musical boast an ongoing legacy that shows no sign of slowing down decades down the line In honor of the 50th anniversary of the original film’s relaunch as a midnight movie that cemented it as a perpetual big screen hit, Linus O’Brien, son of Richard O’Brien, the creator of Rocky Horror and actor behind the fan-favorite Riff Raff, presents fans with his long-awaited documentary: Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror.

Of course, you might be wondering if this new release justifies doing the Time Warp again after so many existing celebrations of the original film, so let’s dig a little deeper into Linus’ production.

Through a dynamic combination of archival footage, personal photographs and in-depth interviews with the original cast (such as Susan Sarandon, Nell Campbell, Patricia Quinn and Tim Curry), as well as commentary by hardcore fans like Jack Black and Trixie Mattel, Strange Journey follows the origins of Rocky Horror all the way from Richard O’Brien’s New Zealand upbringing to the shadow casts and online fandom motivating the film adaptation’s modern-day screenings. The documentary also serves as a surprisingly poignant look at how O’Brien views the “franchise” as a whole and how it reflects his personal journey of self-discovery.

Right out of the gate, the film sets itself up as something of a trip down memory lane for hardcore fans as we’re treated to footage of Richard reckoning with the statue of Riff Raff in Hamilton, New Zealand – right next to where he used to cut hair for a living. While the film benefits from plenty of b-roll borrowed from the Rocky Horror Picture Show as a means of hyping up segments of the documentary and even serving as the occasional punchline, Linus expects that viewers are already familiar with the landmark film and dives straight into the cultural context in which his father began working on the surprisingly lo-fi project.

Information goes by fast due to the brisk 80-minute runtime, but I appreciate the nods to Richard’s creative process as we see handwritten songs in a personal notebook that was eventually expanded into the musical’s script. The idea that O’Brien’s method training informed a different view of B-movie performances is undeniably fascinating -as are his musings on genre cinema – but it’s really when the rest of the cast and director Jim Sharman show up that the documentary really shifts into gear.

Sharman’s insight into the low-budget production aspects of the play makes it clear that this was a rag-tag team of artists taking advantage of raw talent and a new cultural zeitgeist that allowed them to confront taboo subject matter. Susan Sarandon is (unsurprisingly) a joy to watch as she reminisces about her time working on the movie adaptation, showing genuine appreciation for the hardship inherent to passionate indie productions. Of course, Tim Curry’s contributions are some of the most compelling, with his comments on how he originally wanted Dr. Frank-N-Furter to have a German accent until a random encounter on the bus made him realize that the good doctor should speak like the Queen, really making you appreciate the big ideas that turned a small production into a smash hit.

That being said, my personal favorite source of snarky quotes and anecdotes is Patricia Quinn, who originally played Magenta. Her stories about a brief romantic encounter with Meatloaf and how grateful she is that the film adaptation of the musical kept most of the original cast are incredibly entertaining and add to the sense that the production captured lightning in a bottle in a way that can never be replicated.

Susan Sarandon in ‘Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror’

As a longtime fan, it was hard not to get swept up in the nostalgia when the file showed pictures of these young performers unaware that their lives were about to be changed forever by a weird little musical – especially when Richard O’Brien would come in with his guitar and perform acoustic versions of some of his most iconic tracks.

Yet, the completely justified pride that Richard appears to feel when presenting the music to his son, and by extension the audience, alongside the existential questions that this exceedingly personal project forces him to revisit, are what make Strange Journey so much more than a corporate puff piece. While I would have liked to see more interaction between the two generations of O’Brien’s, as you get the feeling that Linus is searching for his place in a legacy that extends far beyond his unusual family history, there is enough of an emotional core here that you’ll likely walk away from the experience thinking about what it means to have a single project define your entire life.

At the end of the day, I can’t imagine a more definitive exploration of everything that makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show such a cultural landmark. Featuring memorable insight from nearly all the major players, with the obvious exception of the late, great Meatloaf, and enough behind-the-scenes imagery to make you feel like you were there alongside the team from the very beginning, Strange Journey is the perfect companion to the 1975 masterpiece. That’s why I’d recommend this return to our favorite Frankenstein Place for both diehard fans and newcomers alike.

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror is available now on digital platforms everywhere.

The post ‘Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror’ Review – The Definitive Rocky Horror Documentary appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s often worth paying attention, though, when a filmmaker targets a more atypical animal threat, including the likes of Jonathan King’s Black Sheep or Juan Piquer Simón’s Slugs. A new contender rumbles its way onto the screen this month, and while we all grew up thinking hippos are rotund cuties, the truth is far more frightening – this hippo is Hungry.

Sistine (Madison Davenport) and her best friend, Hannah (Olivia Bernstone), are enjoying a vacation in New Orleans, hoping to drown out their troubles back home. They sign up for an early morning bayou tour known for its alligator sightings and are joined by four other tourists and the boat’s skipper, Rodrigo (Michel Curiel). An uneventful trip sees Rodrigo take the group off the beaten path, but when an animal in the water capsizes their boat, the group finds themselves trapped in the swamp by something unexpected and deadly.

It’s a hippo. There’s a hippo in the bayou, and it’s not happy about all these pesky people.

From Joy Houck’s Creature from Black Lake to Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort to Adam Green’s Hatchet, the movies have warned us time and again not to go into the swampy bayous of Louisiana. Those cautionary tales are appreciated, though, as bigfoot, inbred hicks, and undead serial killers are a very real threat. But hippos? In the bayou? Well, that just seems silly.

And yet, Hungry plays its blubbery, big-toothed threat with deadly seriousness, and it’s all the better for it. “But Rob,” I can already hear some of you saying, “just yesterday you reviewed the new shark attack film, Chum, and said it suffered from taking itself too seriously. What gives?” For one thing, you’re misquoting me, but more importantly, the reference there was more of an observation on the animal attack subgenre successes as a whole. The “fun” ones tend to succeed more often than their more serious counterparts, but a dramatic and thrilling time can still be found with filmmakers who know what they’re doing.

Chum may be serious, but it’s also poorly written/performed, lacking in any degree of tension, devoid of personality, and so on. By contrast, Hungry lets its suspense build on the backs of engaging characters, good performances, and believable writing. Only one of its ensemble is obnoxious – a major feat for this kind of film – but even then, their motivations are both well-written and understandable.

The rest of the characters are people you’d be happy to see survive the night, and rather than looking forward to the next kill, director James Nunn and his cast leave us uncertain and nervous about who’s going to go belly up. The nervous business traveler wanting to get back to her kids? The family of three celebrating lost loved ones while on their vacation? Joaquim de Almeida’s Walker, an old hunter, is introduced saying, “The only cute hippo is a dead hippo,” so you pretty much know where he’ll end up.

To that end, the film teases out its hippo’s first appearance until well into the ninety-minute running time. We get ripples and splashes, but it’s only around the midway point that we get our first real look at the beast, and it looks fantastic. Nunn goes on to show the hippo in all its glory, and it’s a convincing antagonist brought to life through practical prosthetic effects and digital work. From the ear twitches to the beast’s giant maw opening wide with awe and malice, the hippo’s presence feels part of the action. There’s a tangible nature to it, something practical effects excel at while digital effects sometimes fail to convince of, and both succeed here with quality work from all involved.

While we get brief exteriors early on and some visually appealing drone shots, the bulk of the film unfolds on what looks to be a highly believable, set-dressed water tank (but could very well be an actual location, in which case, kudos to the team). It’s wholly convincing as a section of the bayou, complete with shoulder-high water and arching, twisting trees emerging into the sky. The film was shot in Malta, which is, coincidentally, where Chum was filmed as well.

Nunn, who also wrote Hungry, is now ten films deep into a fairly interesting career as a genre filmmaker. He’s made four movies with Scott Adkins, three of which are certified action bangers (with 2016’s Eliminators in particular being an underrated gem). He dipped a toe into the animal attack subgenre back in 2022 with the aforementioned Shark Bait, and it’s clear he learned some lessons from that endeavor, as its first hour is an engaging, attractively shot feature that sinks fast as soon as its poorly rendered shark becomes a lead character. Hungry improves on every aspect of that film, with its biggest step up being in regard to the effects.

If there’s an area or two where Hungry lacks bite, it’s in both its gore and its ending. There are numerous kills here, but the nature of the attacks and the choices made by Nunn mean none of them result in gory assaults or outcomes. We’re shown the torn apart corpse of an alligator early on, but most of the human kills see them attacked and dragged underwater, leaving nothing but a blood spill behind. Similarly, while the ending encounter satisfies, it still feels like it should have been a bigger confrontation. Neither of these aspects really hurt the film, but a bolstering of the gore and ending antics would have definitely upped the film’s ultimate entertainment value and rewatchability.

When all is said and done, Hungry is a genuinely solid animal attack film that succeeds in making its creature threat thrilling, entertaining, and, dare I say, educational? Title notwithstanding, the film acknowledges that hippos are vegetarians, meaning the five hundred or so people they kill every year – a true fact! – are slaughtered not out of hunger, but out of spite, self-defense, or a desire to play “land orca” while tossing around us fragile humans like we’re little more than seals in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Characters are grounded and engaging, the film moves well between suspense, character beats, and action, and the effects used to bring the hippo to life are highly effective and never feel like distractions. Drop those expectations of a Hungry Hungry Hippo romp, and settle in for a terrific little survival thriller about an angry, angry hippo instead.

Chomp chomp.

Hungry releases in select theaters today, June 3, before arriving on VOD on June 23, 2026.

The post ‘Hungry’ Review – Finally, a Film Brave Enough to Call Out Hippos for the Monsters They Truly Are appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Until now.

Ha, sorry, that was cruel, but sometimes you have to make your own entertainment when the movie you’re watching and writing about offers none of its own. Chum is the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel shark flick that we’ve seen a lot of in recent years, with interchangeable titles like Great White, Shark Bait, and Maneater. A sunny setting (usually the best thing about the movie), obnoxious characters, poor writing, and horrible effects – that’s the recipe for far too many shark attack movies over the past decade, and Chum ticks off each of those boxes in quick order.

It stands apart from those other bad films, though, with the addition of two simple letters. One is an A, and the other is an I, and together they spell shitty, job-killing digital effects. More on that in a minute, but for now, let’s dive into the guts of Chum.

We open on a fishing trawler moving through the water off Malta while a man provides voiceover. Roy (Jim Klock) talks solemnly about the endless ocean, his lovely wife, and the painful collision between the two that came when a Great White shark bit her in half. “I am not the sea,” he says, “I’m a man, and a man does not forget.”

A quick smash to the title card is followed by the introduction of Tina (Alice Eve) and Tom (Eric Michael Cole) at their wedding reception in Malta. There’s already trouble in paradise, but a last minute wedding gift sees them heading out to sea for a three-hour tour the next afternoon with three friends and Tina’s sister, Sadie (Elle Haymond). A couple of very contrived beats later, and the yacht is sinking and in flames, forcing them to be rescued by a conveniently nearby Roy.

He’s not their savior, though, and instead drugs and binds the gang with the intention of using them for a very particular purpose. It’s vengeance he’s after, and he intends to use them as bait in an effort to attract and then kill the shark that ate half of his wife five years ago. Roy apparently got a tracker on the beast at some point, and over the years, he’s tried luring it in with fish entrails, seals, cats, and dogs – but it only responds to live human chum. Uh oh!

A shark attack movie doesn’t need to be entirely original in its concept or execution for it to work, so I’m not put off that the filmmakers obviously watched Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals before concocting the story for Chum. The human antagonist is the only thing they lifted, though, as they apparently decided they just didn’t need any of that film’s fun, suspense, or onscreen/offscreen talent. Director/co-writer Jonathan Zuck and co-writer Joe Leone – this is Leone’s thirteenth produced script since 2017, a feat that grows less impressive if you actually watch those other movies – try to pair character drama with the twin terrors of a madman and a hungry shark, but everything here just falls flat.

What could have been an engaging piece of sunlit terror instead stumbles and falls beneath clunky dialogue and even worse delivery. The cast, Eve surprisingly included, are as unconvincing at saying “good morning” as they are at exclaiming “Jesus! Are you okay?” after pulling a spear from their friend and watching the blood gush out. Did I laugh when someone tells Roy, “You know, for a shark hunter, you’re not very good at this,” or when someone else refers to the aquatic threat as “some aggro incel shark”? Yes, but that says more about my desperate need for entertainment than it does the quality of the movie.

There’s a genuine litany of dumb things worth criticizing, questioning, and calling out with Chum  – one friend confronts Roy because they haven’t seen the shore for hours, but not only has the shore been visible throughout the film, it’s literally in the background of the scene when he says it. Slow motion and repeated, unnecessary flashbacks are frequently used to bolster the eighty-three-minute (pre-credits) running time. The red color tinting whenever there’s blood in the water is horrendous. We’re in Malta, but everyone, including the police, is American? A certain character is given an insulting, post-death voiceover. Climate change is lazily tacked on as a motivation for the shark’s behavior.

There’s also an argument to be made that the film’s serious tone is part of the problem. The issue isn’t that neither the writing nor the performances can deliver on that seriousness, which they can’t, but instead, deadly serious shark attack movies just rarely seem to work. There are examples of great ones like Open Water and The Reef, but in recent years, the overwhelming majority of the shark movies that deliver the goods all seem to have a sense of humor and a genuine personality. They’re not comedies, but from The Shallows and Deep Blue Sea 3 (shut up, it’s a really good time) to Under Paris and Thrash, the shark films that are having fun are the shark films that are fun.

But yes, better scripts, direction, performances, and visual effects would also help.

Which brings us, finally, to the ugly ass elephant in the room – Chum’s use of A.I. to create what looks like all of its shark carnage. The modern ideal will almost always be some combination of practical effects and traditionally created digital effects to breathe life into your film’s sharks, and even then, the end results can still be a mixed bag. Most recent films tend to rely almost exclusively on the digital, with plenty of the sharks looking laughable as a result, but there’s still at least the solace of knowing that hey, real digital FX animators were paid real money to create those ugly visuals, so kudos to them on their journey towards becoming better.

Chum doesn’t list a single digital effects artist in their end credits. Not one. There are a few supervisors and producers, but not a single VFX artist, compositor, or animator.

The charitable explanation is that the filmmakers just decided not to credit the individual artists for some reason. There’s no listing for the end credits song (called “Crimson Tide,” maybe?) either, so it’s entirely possible. The more likely explanation, though, is found in the film’s only credited digital intermediate house, Tunnel Post, which states on their site that their “Artificial Intelligence division augments all of Tunnel’s business disciplines.” A.I. has its place, obviously, and Tunnel’s use of it in other areas might be understandable, but replacing human artists with a garbage machine is just poor form.

Some of you might not care about that aspect, and I can hear you insensitive jerks now yelling, “Get off your soapbox, Hunter, and just tell us how the effects look!” Fair enough. The shark attack sequences in Chum look pretty darn good if you watch from fifty feet away while squinting through a fog bank and some partially closed Venetian blinds.

The A.I. sequences blend real shark and human footage with digital sharks and people to make it look like characters are not just beside the shark in the water, but actually being chomped and eaten. The quickest of glances might seem convincing, partly because we’re just not used to seeing “real” sharks biting down on “real” people, but watch for more than a half second or so, and it’s clearly a cartoon.

The shark looks too smooth, the people sometimes fluctuate weirdly – one character jumps onto the back of the shark and seems to temporarily grow three pant sizes while in the air – and it just never feels like a tangible situation or threat. Try chumming some of this shit, indeed.

Look, if you’re anything like me – well, first off, congratulations – but more relevant to the point at hand, you’re going to watch this movie regardless of what I say. I get it. Animal attack films are an addiction that I am unable and unwilling to quit. (I’m the same way with Bigfoot movies, and hoo boy, let me tell you, the decline rate on those is even steeper.) There are fun, effective shark films with shoddy effects, movies that entertain despite their visuals, but Chum is not one of them.

No thrills, no suspense, no entertainment value, no real effort, no digital effects artists, and no reason to watch. But you will, so I hope you enjoy it more than I do.

Chum releases in theaters on June 5, 2026.

The post ‘Chum’ Review – Get Your A.I. Trash Machine Out of Our Animal Attack Films! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Not just loss. Not just unsuccessful inadequacy. But true, all-encompassing, cataclysmic failure.

The Vampire Lestat, much like the two seasons of Interview with the Vampire before it, is a series that’s profoundly interested in failure. The type of failure that can only be understood by someone who has been making the same mistakes for over 250 years. The Vampire Lestat is utterly consumed by failure, but also temptation, regression, obsession, and evolution. It remains unparalleled when it comes to sprawling, epic love stories that endure for centuries. 

The new season reminds us that we’re all slaves to the past, whether it’s in terms of repeating it or trying to rise above it. This season is such a potent cocktail of pain, vanity, fear, and regret that’s shared between this sad collection of lost souls that culminates in such explosive bursts of tremendous emotion. Human, vampire; nobody wants to burn alone. It’s all too appropriate that a season that functions as a sweeping ode to failure is genuinely one of the year’s most perfect pieces of television, horror or otherwise.

At first, The Vampire Lestat’s transition to rock and roll may seem like a radical pivot. However, this is a series that continues to creatively mythologize and normalize vampires. It presents them as a crucial societal pillar and creates rewarding parallels between vampires and rock stars, right down to their parasitically adoring groupies. Lestat goes so far as to argue that vampires are the original rock stars, and it uses Lestat’s latest metamorphosis as a way to highlight these toxic, unbalanced relationships.

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt and Jennifer Ehle as Gabriella – Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat _ Episode 02 – Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

It’s a truly perfect setup that’s a beautiful extension of the previous two seasons as well as a sublime rebirth into a new “hedonistic pursuit of extremity.” It’s an inspired way to continue the franchise’s “interview” and unreliable narrator concept, while also doing something completely original with the construct. Each episode of this season takes Lestat’s traveling menagerie to a different city on his band’s 54-stop tour, while a foreboding sense of dread accumulates over the global catastrophes that are the consequence of this tour and its corresponding album.  

Lestat is like a virus that passes through these metropolitan cities, leaving them ravaged and changed by the time that he leaves. It leads to some stunning commentary and visuals of the New World Order that gradually sets in over the season. Additionally, there’s a powerful apathy to the idea that Daniel Molloy’s (Eric Bogosian) published exposé on Lestat would fizzle out after a year and that humanity would move on and stop caring as they flock to the next big thing that they’re supposed to care about. It’s a cynicism that makes so much sense for this universe and individuals who have been around for centuries and seen it all.

That being said, those who are hoping for more of a direct adaptation of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned are going to need to be a little more patient. Much like how the series’ first two seasons are companion pieces and halves of a longer story, The Vampire Lestat leaves its Akasha (Sheila Atim) teases to its final episodes. These perfectly set up a hypothetical fourth season, which would presumably tackle the rest of Damned’s material.

Jacob Anderson as Louis De Pointe Du Lac – The Vampire Lestat – Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

It’s amazing that Letstat’s whole rockstar persona functions as a petty, egotistical response to regain control of the narrative so that his songs are the definitive text that usurps Daniel’s novel. It’s the perfect distillation of Lestat as a character and one that facilitates a deeply entertaining and even campier season of television that goes places that would have previously been impossible. The series’ evolution remains one of the most fascinating and impressive things about this season.

The Vampire Lestat’s rebirth is a reflection of life’s cyclical nature and how everything old is new again. This is highlighted both explicitly and subtly through not just the season’s messaging, but also through some clever and ambitious casting choices. Several actors pull double duty this season. This could easily be a disaster in less-skilled hands, and yet it’s never a distraction here. If anything, it manages to beautifully enhance the series’ obsession with duality.

The series digs deeper than ever into its characters, but the filmmaking artistry has never been better. It’s a self-indulgent display of aesthetic extremes that underscores how much care is put into every single frame. Much of this season is presented like a rock band doc that shifts between different film styles. It’s such a natural fit that meshes with the series’ broader tendency to be a cinematic magpie. There are so many different directions that The Vampire Lestat could take for its band material. The decision to explicitly pull from Madonna: Truth or Dare is so gonzo but perfect. It’s a strong way to put Lestat on a pedestal and simultaneously demystify him as his many sides are portrayed through the season’s fractured, nonlinear meta-narrative.

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt – The Vampire Lestat – Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

To this point, there’s so much effort going into Lestat’s music. These are immaculately written by Daniel Hart, and they all feel like actual songs that could top charts and get audiences screaming and dropping drugs, even without any vampire glamor influencing their opinion. It’s hard territory to authentically nail, and it makes all the difference that The Vampire Lestat knocks it out of the park in this department and features a season that’s full of genuine bangers, rather than one half-decent song that’s repeated ad nauseam. It also doesn’t hurt that this season Baz Luhrmanns the fuck out when it comes to these grandiose musical spectacles. 

Sam Reid embodies the rock star persona so effortlessly that it’s wild to think that this wasn’t always the role that he was playing. It fits him as snug as leather pants. Lestat’s fame becomes so intense that there are literally people cosplaying as him in crowds so that his ego can reach even more untenable heights. This artificial future is powerfully juxtaposed against Lestat’s past, including some key formative moments from his life. There’s also a heartbreaking confrontation that arguably hits even harder than season two’s best moments. It’s so encouraging and exciting to see that The Vampire Lestat continues to top itself and that its best work is not behind it. It’s still finding new ways to thrive.

The series’ narration has always been on point. However, it’s easy to forget just how precise every word is and how perfectly Rolin Jones sticks the landing with his interpretations of these characters and Anne Rice’s universe, while still making it his own. ”Serving cunt has its consequences” might also be the most Lestat line to ever Lestat. Alternatively, the new role Daniel takes on as the director of a Lestat documentary is such a fun position for him to slide into that it becomes another playful echo of the past. It all reinforces the idea that we filter ourselves through the company we keep and that there’s conflict when we’re confronted with the truth.

The Vampire Lestat is everything you could want and then some. It’s a moving meditation on fame, fandom, and legacy that pushes its characters and relationships to their most satisfying places yet. Admittedly, this season throws a lot of new characters at the audience, but this never feels overwhelming or that this influx of new faces is superfluous.

I genuinely don’t know how these seven episodes could be any better. It’s the best Anne Rice adaptation to date and a series that truly feels like it’s just getting started and has greater highs to hit. Bring on the Queen of the Damned.

The Vampire Lestat premieres on June 7 on AMC and AMC+.

The post ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Bares Its Soul With A Rock N’ Roll Blood-Soaked Spectacle [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

MOLE, a new psychological horror game from Off Black Creations, fully delivers on this feeling, throwing you onto a Slavic post-war drilling machine with gloriously retro buttons and levers for you to play with, while managing to deliver a first-person, psychological horror story.

You play a navigator onboard a deep-bore vessel that’s in a fight for survival to keep the colossal machine and the mission going. Set in an alternate 1980s, it’s a world where a calamity has struck the world, and the answer lies deep below the ground. Following in the footsteps of a previous mission, you and your crew are trying to reach the source of a strange signal, one that seems to be having a disastrous effect on your mental state as you go further and further from humanity.

While you don’t interact with your crew in person, MOLE finds other ways to dig into its main character and interesting world. Without getting too much into it, it quickly becomes clear that the reason you are on this mission is to help pay off medical debt accrued after your son passed away.

It’s a heavy topic, but it adds a deep layer of grief to this cosmic horror adjacent setup, making it feel more nuanced in the process. Even though you don’t dig too much into other characters on the vessel, there’s a lot to chew on exploring the protagonist’s damaged psyche as the Signal gets its claws in him.

A Retro-Futuristic Drilling Vessel with Personality

The majority of the game takes place on the vessel, which is nicely rendered in a low-fi art style that brings home its retro aesthetic. This place is cramped, rusty, and moments away from falling apart, but it’s brought to life by 80s-style mechanical interfaces. Big CRT monitors, reel-to-reel tapes, and manual controls immediately convey the world it’s trying to create. There’s a unique focus on cartridges that are used for everything from room keys to data storage, making for a unique hook that makes the setting feel so much more alive and distinct. Even the game’s opening menu forces you to interact with these cartridges to start the game, weaving it thoroughly into the DNA of the experience.

Breaking up the time on the ship are flashback sequences that show you elements of your tragic life before taking this doomed mission. The closer you get to the Signal, the more past and present start to bleed into each other, transitioning to flashbacks in a surreal fashion, often mixing hallucinations with fact. After spending so much of the early portion of the game on the vessel, it felt like other locations were nice little surprises to keep me on my toes. It’s an effective storytelling technique that not only enhances the dread of the current situation but also effortlessly fills in the character’s backstory.

Both of these settings work in concert to deftly control the pacing and tone. The feeling of the vessel is so claustrophobic and catastrophic, with extremely cramped corridors to navigate and even tighter vents to call through. One nice mechanical touch is that you have to keep re-pressing forward to continue crawling rather than just continually holding it, emulating the feeling of squeezing yourself through an impossibly small space.

When you go to more traditional spaces in the flashbacks, it should feel like a relief to be in a wider space, but the somber and occasionally horrifying tone of these flashbacks does not allow you a moment of emotional respite. Constantly shifting across the many tones of the feel-bad spectrum keeps the game consistent without getting exhausted by just one.

Why MOLE‘s Process-Driven Puzzles Are So Satisfying

All the narrative elements are strong, but what makes this game work so much for me is the tactile nature of its puzzles. You feel like an operator on this massive, old vessel, desperately following step-by-step directions to interact with the many interfaces that keep it (just barely) running. Directions are often presented diagetically, with in-universe signs next to various stations that walk you through each switch flip and button press in a way that still leaves room for you to figure things out. The most satisfying part of it all is that many of these interactions require you to do the mouse movement to turn a dial or pull a lever, making it feel immersive in a very hands-on way.

To give you an example, one of the first things you’ll have to do is restore the lights in the floor you’re on (the game will not let you pass through dark spaces, making this a clever gating mechanic) by interacting with a fusebox. There are four slots, one for each of the four floors, and you pop in the one fuse you have into the correct floor. You then need to set the dial to the number of fuses installed, hold a button for a few seconds, flip four out of the eight switches, then pull a lever. It’s nothing overly difficult, but you end up doing it so many times that the first time you do it without referencing the instruction panel, it gives you the satisfying feeling of pattern recognition.

Since your role on the vessel is pilot, the most complicated recurring task in front of you is setting the navigation. It’s a multi-stage process that involves moving a cassette from console to console and dialling in a bunch of different values based on terminal readings. I love having a process-focused game like this that really puts you in the shoes of the role through its mechanics, and this one feels really great because of how tactile things are.

The important part about setting up a process-focused game like this is finding ways of meaningfully escalating things, and MOLE does a good job of forcing you to do these tasks under pressure as the game goes on. It’s the perfect way to reward mastery, making it feel like a satisfying flex of your skills to punch in the navigation sequence or swap out fuses while time is of the essence. It finds smart ways of taking the very specific interaction models they’ve built and adding tension within that framework, rather than adding other mechanics in a way that would feel out of place or extraneous to the scope of the game.

Chase Sequences Undermine Some of the Game’s Strongest Ideas

One element of tension that was less successful for me was the chase sequences in the game. Since this is a horror game, it goes without saying that there’s a threat aboard this vessel, but personally, it didn’t feel like it belonged in the game as much.

Getting chased by monsters in a horror game is a mixed bag sometimes, because the line between scary and frustrating can be crossed very quickly. The first time it showed up, it was a nice surprise that got a jump scare out of me, and I was able to make it to safety before it caught me, which felt tense and exciting.

Near the end of the game, there’s an extended sequence where you’re pursued by the same enemy, but this one was less successful for me. The area you’re being chased through, which starts to get surreal, is very dark in a way that hampered my ability to get through without being caught. I would get to an intersection, and would barely be able to see which way was a viable path forward.

After failing here a couple of times, I actually ended up changing the game’s brightness setting from 1.4 to 2.8 to give me even a fighting chance to make my way to safety. This was an example of that mechanic crossing over into frustration, as I found myself saying “oh come on” out loud anytime I took a wrong turn because I couldn’t see. It’s good in theory, but the actual context of how it plays out is lacking in execution.

A Powerful Psychological Horror Story That Occasionally Overstays Its Welcome

By the end of the game, I found myself really impressed with the way it explored some really deep themes within the context of its contained story. Ultimately, MOLE is a tale of grief and loss, examining the lengths we go to hold onto the past and the terrible effect it can have on our mental state if not done in a healthy manner. The surreal flashbacks put you directly in the shoes of a man going through the horrific loss, allowing you to figure out the exact circumstances of your son’s death, making it feel all the more tragic as you put together what’s going on. It’s not entirely novel, but the way it’s presented feels like it adds to the overall effect.

Some of these sequences went on a little too long, dampening their impact, and sometimes the surrealism felt a little too much like it was reaching for symbolism rather than focusing on the situation at hand, but overall, the narrative is definitely one of the game’s strengths. MOLE runs about four and a half hours, and it’s possible that trimming a bit off that runtime would have benefited it in both focus and pacing.

Scenes like standing in a phone booth making tough calls stand out in my mind way more than surreal chases through shifting landscapes, and a bit of editing might have been able to keep the focus on the former while still making the right amount of space for the latter.

Despite having some gripes with the pacing and chase sequences, MOLE was a surprisingly rich experience that I finished in about two sittings. Its setting feels so lived in and well thought out, allowing the drama that unfolds to feel real and grounded, even when things slip towards cosmic horror. While it wanders a bit in the climax of the story, it wraps up in a satisfying manner, with a great credits sequence that brings everything to a strong close.

The immersive, process-focused puzzles draw you in, putting you directly in the shoes of a tragic character caught in a horrific situation. Fans of games like Mouthwashing and Iron Lung should definitely take notice, because MOLE is another great psychological horror game for you to dig into.

Code provided by publisher. MOLE will release June 15 on Steam.

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An analog found footage cold open in 1990 gives an unsettling glimpse at the off-kilter dread that awaits wayward travelers before introducing Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner operating on a steady diet of rage and regret. So much so that he regularly sees Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) to help him find a way out of his self-made life prison. Just as she coaches him to recognize his repeating patterns so he can then forge new pathways, his quirky furniture store presents him with the opportunity to do exactly that.

Late one night, Clark discovers he can slip through the basement walls, leading him to an expansive extension of the store he never knew existed.

The further he explores, though, the more peculiar things get.

There’s nothing subtle about the script that sees its two lead characters conversing over the looping patterns we can trap ourselves in before they find themselves stuck in a mundane cosmic purgatory that doubles as a metaphor for the labyrinthine human mind. It’s even reflected in background details, including The Neverending Story playing on a background television set. And like the mind, the mysterious furniture store backrooms present endless possibilities, forgotten and distorted memories, and a surreal setting with no borders or tether to physical reality.

Yet that lack of subtlety suits Kane Parsons’ debut well, considering how acutely his leads latch onto their characters’ palpable and profound sense of loneliness and isolation. There’s an impressive confidence in the young filmmaker as he methodically entrusts his quiet worldbuilding and talented leads to carry the dramatic weight.

More impressive is the way Parsons mines tension and rattles nerves from empty, brightly lit rooms adorned in yellow wallpaper. The vibes are seriously off in this place, but, like Clark, it’s impossible to look away even as the mundane rooms begin to distort into truly inspired nightmarish uses of uncanny valley.

The production design in Backrooms is as incredible as it is disturbing, and Parsons takes full advantage of the larger budget. As reality becomes more and more unstable, the more alive and intricate Parsons’ filmmaking becomes. Breathtaking transitions and camera trickery further disorients the sensory assault. It’s all so unnerving yet keeps you fully on the hook, made more engaging by cryptic storytelling and a general unpredictability. 

But the Backrooms is a place with no easy explanation; this is the type of existential horror that operates at its best when intentionally vague. Screenwriter Will Soodik presents a more conventional third act that clashes with Parsons’ overarching cryptic vision, one that’s not visceral enough compared to the unnerving build-up. Not helping is the inscrutable coda teasing the obvious: we haven’t even begun to explore the Backrooms, really. That leaves one of its leads with an unfinished arc and a ton of unanswered questions, a move that feels deflating after such a strong front half.

Still, Kane Parsons’ strong eye for composition and visual storytelling marks him as a filmmaker to watch. It’s clear that the young filmmaker has a strong grasp of the mythology he’s building, even if he keeps that mostly close to the chest. Fans of the Backrooms web series will find plenty of Easter eggs and details to deconstruct and decipher, too.

Backrooms is at once complex and sparse, but never repetitive. It might be set in 1990, but it effectively captures modern anxieties and isolation in a way that frequently makes your skin crawl. While the journey ultimately loses steam by its cryptic end, Parsons’ visual representation of the human psyche disturbs like no other.

Backrooms is now playing in theaters from A24. 

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This is basically universally true of any halfway competent horror movie, but unfortunately for many, potential energy is most, if not all, of the energy they can muster. There is loads of potential energy in sMOTHERed, the new Shudder original from directors Kevin Rahardjo and Rafki Hidayat, and it translates to something compelling early on. Sadly, all that potential never quite manifests into anything more, leaving us with a half-baked film that, decent squares aside, squanders all the goodwill it builds in the setup. 

And the setup really is quite compelling. Alif (Rio Dewanto) is a Jakarta-based artist who, after a serious car accident, is struggling with partial amnesia brought on by head trauma. His wife Nadine (Faradina Mufti) and son Emir (Jordan Omar) are supportive when he comes home from the hospital, even as he reveals he doesn’t necessarily remember the issues rumbling beneath his marriage before the accident. Before he has time to truly reacclimate, though, Alif gets a long-awaited visit from his mother, Aminah (Vonny Anggraini). Mother and son haven’t seen each other since Alife left home to seek his fortune as a teenager, and she’s never met her daughter-in-law or her grandson.

So, when she arrives, Aminah dives into her grandmotherly duties, brightening the family home even as Alif is plagued by nosebleeds, strange visions, and bits of his pre-accident life he still can’t explain. Perhaps it’s the memory loss, or perhaps it’s Aminah herself, but the more he digs in search of the truth, the more Alif starts to wonder if the woman in his house is actually his mother. 

There’s a lot of talent here, including Indonesian horror legend Joko Anwar (Impetigore, Satan’s Slaves) co-writing and producing. Throw in the film’s roots in an Indonesian folk tale, and it feels like we’re on the way to some stirring psychological drama with a little folk-horror mixed in. For the first half of the film, that’s exactly what we get. Rahardjo and Hidayat prove adept at composing shots (though the lighting often looks a bit flat) and, more importantly, at working with their cast, exacting tremendous emotional detail out of early scenes.

This is the story of a man whose entire recent life, and chunks of his distant past, has become a mystery to him, and so it’s a detective story even as it’s a surprisingly emotional tale of a man trying to reconnect, trying to be better than his former self as a husband, father, and son. Dewanto brings a ton of depth to this side of the story, as Alif’s visions and complaints of strange voices intensify, he never fails to keep us caring about this wounded man desperate to heal. 

It’s what happens next, after setting this remarkable emotional baseline, that starts to fragment the film, spinning it out into certain directions that are promising, and others that feel like duds. The more convinced he becomes that something in his life is not quite right, and the deeper he digs, the more the film threatens to topple its delicate human balance. For a brief handful of scenes, the film seems to forget its original tone entirely, branching off into a small-time crime film, which would feel more like an organic evolution if it didn’t then wildly swing in a different direction again.

Characters in the ensemble fade out, and the emotional tension they bring fades with them, until by the time the film builds to its big reveal about the secrets Alif has kept, it feels both underdeveloped and overdue. At 99 minutes, sMOTHERed still feels like multiple movies smashed together in the edit, leaving its back half littered with dead ends and stalls, which diminish its emotional returns. That said, there are some creepy little moments still lingering in there, so the film doesn’t entirely lose its sense of atmosphere.

This is made all the more frustrating in the case of sMOTHERed because, in the build-up to this derailment, we saw just how well everything was working. The cast has great chemistry, the dynamic between characters is complex and believable, and the emotional hooks of the film are firmly embedded.

Then it all just breaks down, piece by piece, leaving us with a classic case of potential energy squandered in a film’s back half. Still, that potential is pretty impressive, and I’ll be very interested to see what these filmmakers come up with next. 

sMOTHERed premieres May 29 on Shudder.  

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To say that a lot has changed in the ensuing 46 years is an understatement. Today, slasher devotees hail Terror Train as an early forward thinker in the subgenre, a film that plays within the established rules of the game while also daring to try new things with the form at a time when that form was still being set in stone. Many cult films stay cult films even as they find a bigger audience, but others find a more mainstream following when curious viewers realize that they missed something special. Thanks to a new 4K from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Terror Train seems destined to find its permanent place among the best slashers of the golden age. 

As film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson point out early in their excellent commentary, one of two on the disc – on the film, Terror Train stands out for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important is the presence of cinematographer John Alcott. Alcott spent the late 1960s and early 1970s building a reputation as one of the most gifted DPs of his era, thanks to several films with the legendary Stanley Kubrick, including A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and he brought all of that legendary talent to bear on Terror Train.

Working with director Roger Spottiswoode, Alcott imbues the film with often stunning beauty, painting shadows in among the firelight of the prologue sequence and the bright lights of a party train traveling by night across the Canadian landscape. His knack for shooting horror and framing slasher kills is on full display in this new restoration. The colors pop, the costumes are glossy and exciting, the expressiveness of the characters comes through, and yet the film loses none of its gritty, low-budget charm. As Nelson and Heller-Nicholas point out, the film was rushed through production in a matter of weeks in order to get tax credits lined up, giving it a seat-of-your-pants energy that’s buoyed by Alcott’s consummate professionalism and artistry. 

Terror Train is also, I was pleased to find upon rewatching this disc, a wonderfully mean-spirited slasher at a time when the subgenre was still all over the place, finding its footing amid rising box office demand. Like fellow Canadian classic Black Christmas before it, the film goes for the throat from the very beginning, putting its characters in absolutely merciless situations that are made all the more dread-inducing by the theatricality of the party on board the title train. Like My Bloody Valentine, which would arrive from Canada in early 1981, it’s a film that balances tremendous mirth and showmanship with pure brutality, from the opening prank to the final kill.

This new restoration highlights all of that and more, revealing a film that seems destined to reveal more depth with each new generation of fans. 

There’s so much potential exploration in this restoration, in fact, that I came away wishing the disc offered a little more in the way of behind-the-scenes flair. The features we do have, including both commentary tracks, are excellent, but I wanted to go deeper, and the features just aren’t there.

Maybe another future box set will shine an even brighter light on Terror Train‘s intricacies and the way this rushed, frantic production managed to deliver such a compelling piece of Canuxsploitation. As it is, though, this is a gorgeous restoration ornamented with solid special features, and it deserves a place on every slasher fan’s shelf. 

Terror Train is available now in 4K UHD from Kino Lorber.

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Victorian Psycho introduces Winifred Notty in 1858, as she travels to the sprawling Ensor House for her new role as governess to Mr. and Mrs. Pounds’ (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson, respectively) children, Drusilla (Evie Templeton) and Andrew (Jacobi Jupe). Neither the Pounds nor their robust staff, including the children’s naive nurse Ms. Lamb (Thomasin McKenzie), seems to connect that their new hire’s previous job ended in catastrophe for her wards. Nor that her arrival coincides with a series of strange events and staff disappearances.

But something is very wrong with Winifred Notty.

Director Zachary Wigon (Sanctuary), working from an adapted screenplay by the novel’s author, Virginia Feito (Mrs. March), breaks his bloodthirsty satire into digestible chapters, the first of which introduces Winifred as the story’s narrator as she deceptively declares herself to the audience as the sanest person she’s ever met. That’s shortly before she consumes a collected trophy from a previous job: a severed ear. 

From there, Victorian Psycho draws clear parallels and inspiration from Bret Easton Ellis’ popular horror satire novel as an unreliable narrator wreaks havoc upon the rich. Unlike Patrick Bateman, though, Winifred Notty’s murderous compulsions are real. Winifred has a hidden agenda at the Ensor House, one she resolutely attempts to keep hidden even as she fights to repress her dark side while avoiding the jealous wrath of Mrs. Pounds. 

Monroe latches onto Winifred’s inner duality and conflict with aplomb. Winifred is the type who tries and frequently fails her social normality tests, just as often as she’s prone to impulsive violence. Monroe’s gleefully macabre mischievousness transforms the sociopath into a quirky, unpredictable monster that’s almost too easy to root for. That’s especially the case anytime Monroe’s Winifred gets caught in the icy crosshairs of Wilson’s effective Mrs. Pounds; it’s this imbalanced power dynamic that propels the lean 90-minute runtime toward its bloody finale and reinforces the unsubtle eat-the-rich themes.

Also helping is the snappy editing by Dustin Chow and Lance Edmands, along with cinematographer Nico Aguilar’s stylish camerawork, which enhances the quick-witted humor and propulsive pacing. Victorian Psycho looks like a stately gothic period horror movie, but with the rapid fire attitude and personality of a contemporary feminine psychopath. 

Less effective is the film’s climax. Victorian Psycho‘s steady build toward its promised bloodbath instead gets constrained by source novel deviations and a reluctance to unleash an unrepentant Winifred in full psychopathic glory. Instead, Winifred’s slaughter comes visually hampered by a conscience, one that feels at odds with the delightfully macabre character that’s won viewers over by the third act. It feels like a pulled punch, considering how much tongue-in-cheek fun Victorian Psycho has with unshackling its leading lady from the stuffy societal norms of the Victorian era.

It likely doesn’t help that Victorian Psycho is as straightforward and streamlined as Feito’s novel. There’s not a lot of thematic meat on its bones, making the flaws more noticeable. Still, what it lacks in depth, Wigon’s latest more than compensates for with infectious style, wry amusement, and a tour de force performance by Monroe as a fully unleashed sociopath who manages to charm despite her affinity for cruel violence. 

Carnage becomes pretty dang delightful in Monroe’s capable hands. Victorian Psycho operates on familiar slay grounds, but it’s an absolute blast thanks to its zany style and deranged sense of fun.

Victorian Psycho made its world premiere at Cannes and releases in theaters on September 25.

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As a fan of these unapologetically absurd films with cheap effects and bizarre storylines, I was understandably excited when I first saw the trailer to Jon Keeyes’ supernatural thriller Speed Demon. After all, this more action-oriented take on the exorcism subgenre feels exactly like the sort of flick I’d pick out from the “weird” DVDs at the back of Rogers Video in the days before streaming. However, Keeyes’ movie isn’t exactly what you might expect judging from Speed Demon’s marketing.

In the film, we follow the troubled nun Sister Lu (Katie Cassidy) as she embarks on a high-speed train ride with her mentor and experienced exorcist Father Novak (William H. Macy). Unfortunately for the bickering duo, an archeologist also happens to be making the trip alongside a cursed statue of the demon king Asmodeus. What follows is a high-stakes test of faith as Asmodeus escapes his inanimate prison and takes control of the speeding train.

It’s ultimately up to Sister Lu to confront her past in order to save the lives of the desperate ensemble of terrified passengers surrounding her before they all reach a hellish final destination.

An unexpected combination of Speed and The Amityville Horror, Speed Demon’s premise conjures up imagery from nunsploitation classics and even the supernatural action-horror flicks of the 2000s (such as Francis Lawrence’s Constantine), but Keeyes’ movie is a lot less over-the-top than you might initially expect. While Sister Lu’s characterization and Asmodeus’ interactions are delightfully exaggerated, the film’s overall tone and atmosphere are disappointingly tame.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the film’s polished photography and even some of the relatively impressive CGI (at least for a modest horror production), but it feels like the screenplay here fails to grasp the true entertainment value of its absurd setup. Despite a few brief moments of inspiration – like when Sister Lu is forced to confront her substance abuse problem or when one of the most annoying side characters decides to step up and become a hero – the narrative ultimately stumbles into familiar genre pitfalls and relies on the same old tropes we’ve seen a thousand times in other exorcism movies.

While there is an interesting ensemble of supporting characters here to both aid and hinder our intrepid nun, one of the biggest issues with the film is casting. William H. Macy is certainly a joy to watch as a jaded exorcist trying to keep his protégé on the right path, but he’s not in the film as much as I would have liked, and Cassidy feels like she was miscast in a role that requires equal measures of grit and traditional religious devotion. There are also a handful of stilted line deliveries from minor characters that really take you out of the experience during a couple of pivotal scenes.

That’s not to say that Speed Demon isn’t an enjoyable film, as there are a handful of effective scares and memorable character moments here. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers couldn’t quite come up with the appropriate vibe for the subject matter. I thoroughly enjoyed watching our lead nun face off against the demon and his zombified thralls (and the idea of a woman having to take on a traditionally masculine role in order to protect those around her has plenty of merit, especially in this religious context), but I feel like all of these ideas would have been more entertaining if they had shown up in a less solemn project.

In fact, the insistence on taking everything so seriously ends up highlighting some of the less intelligent aspects of the script. I may not have been a star pupil in Catholic School, but I paid enough attention to know that the film’s depiction of church doctrine is far from accurate. Not only that, but there are plenty of leaps in logic concerning the operation of the train itself and how Asmodeus is keeping everyone trapped. These things could have easily been hand-waved away in an unrepentant B-movie, but it’s a lot harder to justify lapses in narrative judgment when your film expects audiences to take things so seriously.

That’s not the entire story, however…

Speed Demon does a complete 180° when it comes to its action-packed finale, with the last fifteen minutes or so feeling so comparatively bonkers that they must be seen to be believed. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the best part of the movie, but suffice to say that the ending alone is worth the price of admission, even if it also serves as an example of why the flick would have been better had it committed to the absurdity throughout the entire runtime.

Your enjoyment of Speed Demon will likely depend on your tolerance for overly ambitious filmmaking, but I think there’s enough creativity on display here to warrant a watch despite some minor gripes with the flick’s tone. It may not be a groundbreaking genre experience, but I’d certainly be on board for a sequel expanding on that ridiculous ending.

Speed Demon arrives in theaters, On Demand, and Digital on May 31.

The post ‘Speed Demon’ Review – Exorcism-on-a-Train Horror Isn’t as Silly as it Sounds appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Unnur’s life revolves largely around two things: Work, where she’s hopefully due for a big promotion, and attachment to an emotionally unavailable man. Her life is small but, she insists, satisfying, free of complications but also prickling with moments of loneliness. When a black cat shows up at her door, she sees a problem to be quickly solved, and soon tracks down its owner: Asta, another local woman with her own issues. When the cat, named Io, turns out to be pregnant, Unnur and Asta are drawn into an unconventional petsitting arrangement to maximize the animal’s comfort, and what started as a small act of neighborly kindness soon becomes an unlikely friendship. 

But Unnur’s not the only one dealing with a man she has to make excuses for, and soon her bond with Asta is given the ultimate test, a bloody trial that’ll either bond them forever or ruin their lives. 

From the outside looking in, Dead Weight seems to fit most comfortably into the realm of revenge horror, the story of two women who decide they’ve finally had enough and act, however reluctantly, on that emotion. But Knútsdóttir doesn’t take the most direct route to getting us there, even if she’s always consciously playing with the expectations of the subgenre and the noir-tinged elements of her saga. Her prose is at once contemporary and hard-boiled, and the very nature of her approach casts Unnur, who narrates the whole novella, as a kind of detective out to solve not just Asta’s issues, but the puzzle of her own existence. 

This is where things get tricky, because even by the standards of a novella, it takes Knútsdóttir a little while to get to the horror goods here. There’s a lot of wind-up in Dead Weight, so much that sometimes it feels like the tension starts to slack just slightly. I suspect a re-read would solve this particular issue for me, but at first glance, it feels, momentarily, like the story might be treading water. 

When what Knútsdóttir’s really after kicks in, though, those concerns are quickly forgotten, and the beauty of Dead Weight is in its ability to deliver an emotional dagger at unexpected, often staggering moments, sometimes without an ounce of violence. Unnur sets out to solve Asta’s problems, but of course, her own issues – her relationship, her focus on work, her insistence that she’s figured everything out in contrast to her new friend’s messy life – are an even more compelling case to be solved.

The best narrative trick Knútsdóttir pulls in the book is setting the stage for a revenge story and spending most of the word count delivering a gripping psychological drama punctuated by the folklore-laden specter of a black cat crossing Unnur’s path. We get to see Unnur not only deal with her issues, but also come to realize they are issues before our eyes, all within the span of 100 pages. 

This, combined with Asta’s lingering troubles, creates a thread of tension that tightens throughout the first two acts of this narrative, and it’s so effective that you almost forget the brutality promised by the book’s premise and its opening pages. When that brutality finally circles back around, it smacks you in the face with remarkable, icy intensity, delivering one of the year’s best horror finales.

Dead Weight is available May 26 wherever books are sold. 

The post ‘Dead Weight’ Book Review – Brutal Icelandic Horror Noir appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The recent Absolute Batman has circumvented this concern by existing at the beginning of a new universe, but sometimes the best instances of Batman are miniseries that pick and choose when in Batman’s history they want to set their story in order to ignore whatever status quo is in place at the moment. This gives the story a timeless feel without allowing you to get distracted by trying to figure out who the mayor is or which Robin is active at the moment.

The strongest example of this in the past few years is Dark Patterns, a 12-issue miniseries written by Dan Watters and drawn by Hayden Sherman. In addition to excellent creator-owned books from Watters like The Seasons Have Teeth, Coffin Bound, and Home Sick Pilots, he had a great foray into the Batman corner of the DC universe with Arkham City: Order of the World, a creepy miniseries that had echoes of Grant Morrison’s classic Arkham Asylum: Serious House on a Serious Earth. Sherman has also been on a hot streak, drawing both the Annihilation-inspired Into the Unbeing and the Eisner Award-winning Absolute Wonder Woman. It’s a dream team that comes together to tell a moody series of tales that give me that classic Batman feel.

While Dark Patterns is a 12-issue miniseries, its greatest strength is that it’s divided into four distinct three-issue story arcs that each stand on their own. It feels like modern comics have become so focused on long-form storytelling, so it’s refreshing to see a title that’s telling a focused tale that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Not only are they bite-sized stories, but they are ones that focus on my two favorite aspects of Batman: creepy villains and street-level detective work.

The story’s stakes definitely do rise by the end, but it never gets to the point where a supervillain and their army hold the city hostage through fantastical means. Dark Patterns has that level of groundedness associated with the Christopher Nolan films, making for a refreshing counterpoint to the often grandiose scale of the main Batman books.

Hayden Sherman’s Art Gives Gotham a Distinct Visual Identity

Before delving into the plot of each of these arcs, I have to give Sherman their props on the art, which is consistently a highlight of the series. Not only are the designs of the villains, new and old, great, but they have some of the most interesting page layouts to bring the action to life. Their unique panel shapes bring to mind the J.H. Williams-drawn run of Detective Comics that focused on Batwoman, one of my all-time favorites.

The character illustrations themselves bring to mind the style of Tim Sale‘s The Long Halloween, with a bit of Batman: The Animated Series mixed in, but presented with unconventional angles and extremely human poses that emphasize Batman as a man rather than the near-supernatural being he’s often portrayed as. I came to the book as a fan of Dan Watters, but ended up being just as blown away by Hayden Sherman.

While each story can stand on its own, with only the final story somewhat building on events from the previous three, there are throughlines throughout the entirety of Dark Patterns that make it feel like a cohesive piece. Right from the beginning, we see a city that’s gone feral. Kids playing deadly games. Wild dogs roam the streets. A building on fire. In the opening narration, Batman, who at this point is three years into his career as the Caped Crusader, acknowledges that “there are heinous things in Gotham I can do nothing about.”

The stories focus on forgotten people, individuals the city has left behind to fend for themselves, with Batman trying to sort out how to find some form of justice for them in whatever way he can. One thing I love about this Batman is that he is fallible, often taking quite a beating over the course of these stories. None of these elements is new to Batman, but Watters uses them as a solid foundation for very contemporary stories. 

Meet One of Gotham’s Creepiest New Villains in “We Are Wounded”

The first story, titled “We Are Wounded“, introduces a terrifying new villain. It all starts with a horrific crime scene. Pathologist Dr. Sereika presents Batman and the reader with the body of a man found stabbed in every major nerve cluster, done with precision to keep him alive as long as possible. As Batman investigates, it leads him on a collision course with the killer, who has nails, rebar, and spikes stabbed through his body in a way that narrowly misses all his vital organs. Not only is he a ghastly sight, but he presents a huge challenge for Batman: there’s no place to strike him that won’t cause the many pieces of metal to kill him.

Dubbing him the Wound Man, named after the famous medieval medical manuscript drawing, this case takes Batman to an area outside Gotham known as the Town Without Screams, where corporate neglect resulted in a chemical spill that caused the entire town to no longer be able to feel pain. With the help of reporter Nicky Harris, who becomes a recurring character in the miniseries, he uncovers a tragic tale of greed and coverups, leading to a surprisingly sympathetic origin story for such a monstrous-looking villain.

“We Are Wounded” shows us a perfect blueprint for what this series is going to be going forward. The mix of horror and detective work is on display from the beginning, and the writing and art contribute to both of these elements equally. The Wound Man is a conceptual nightmare, a numb man looking to make people feel pain for taking away his ability to feel it, that’s brought to life with one of the most striking visual designs I’ve seen for a new villain since the Court of Owls. Just the sight of all the nails and spikes in him is enough body horror, but it’s clear that their placement was designed with care by Sherman for maximum effect, including a pattern of nails embedded in his face that almost mimics a mask.

The detective vibes of the story are not only conveyed by the intriguing legwork that Batman does to hunt the new villain, but also through the noir-esque locations and framing that Sherman uses to portray the action. The first arc is so important to a comic run to both hook readers and give them a taste of what’s to come, and “We Are Wounded” is a masterclass in opening chapters.

“The Voice of the Tower” Turns Gotham Into a Haunted House

After introducing a new villain in the first story, the second arc, “The Voice of the Tower“, decides to reinvent an old one by cleverly working with Ventriloquist and Scarface, an antagonist pair that always feels a bit like a cheap punchline. At the beginning, it doesn’t even seem like a Scarface story, introducing us to the soon-to-be-demolished Bledin Towers, where residents have refused resettlement packages and holed up in their homes, refusing to leave. The situation has escalated to the point where they’ve killed a police officer, so Batman infiltrates the apartment complex in an effort to save another cop that’s being held hostage by unknown forces within.

Once he gets inside, he finds Scarface, not accompanied by his normal Ventriloquist Arnold Wesker, and breaks the villainous dummy, only to hear Scarface’s voice reverberate through the tower. At this point, several residents armed with Tommy guns don Scarface masks and attempt to kill Batman.

The mystery of what’s going on in Bledin Tower is a compelling one, forcing Batman to question if the building itself is perhaps possessed by the spirit of Scarface. It’s one part haunted house, one part The Raid, seen through the lens of Batman, making for a compelling arc that feels unlike any other Scarface story I’ve read before. Batman feels truly out of his element and overwhelmed here, with Sherman’s panel layouts emphasizing the labyrinthine nature of the tower as he tries to untangle the truth. Action. Horror. Mystery. “The Voice of the Tower” has it all, balanced perfectly to set itself apart from “We Are Wounded” while still maintaining the previously established mood.

The Rookery Explores Gotham’s Cycles of Violence in Unconventional Arc “Pareidolia”

The third arc, “Pareidolia“, begins with a battered Bruce Wayne talking to Gotham, trying to make sense of the rash of fires that have been plaguing the city, theorizing that it’s the city itself trying to burn him out as though he were an infection. From his window, he sees another blaze and decides he’s had enough and will deal with this one. Police aren’t rushing to this fire because it’s in the Rookery, a neighborhood in Old Gotham that’s been decimated and neglected by the city at large.

It’s a maze of ramshackle houses rebuilt out of temporary materials with several places that have no running water or proper electrical wiring. When Batman finally gets to the husk of a building left behind by the blaze, he finds a body left in a dryer, which resembles a macabre method of execution used by the Red Hood Gang decades ago.

“Pareidolia“, as the book tells us, is the name for how we perceive patterns where there are none, and Batman spends this arc trying not to go down a rabbit hole as he attempts to find the killer. His descent into the history of the Rookery brings him back to both Dr. Sereika and Nicky Harris, all while the neighborhood violently rejects his presence. It’s a story that doesn’t turn out exactly as you, or Batman, expect it to, with a tragic conclusion that is far more intimate than anticipated.

There are some real standout pages here from Sherman, particularly the series of pages that are topped with headlines of Batman’s desperate campaign in the Rookery paired with striking panels of his actions. It’s the most unconventional story in the collection, both in content and in structure, but it’s effective in driving its point home about the forgotten people of Gotham.

“The Child of Fire” Delivers a Haunting Finale

The final arc, “The Child of Fire“, reveals the titular new villain as the source of the city’s rash of fires. After the conclusion of “Pareidolia“, Bruce is completely spent, with Alfred helping him as he recovers from a fever. As the blazes continue, Batman attempts to push past his sickness and chase down this new villain, who seems to be trying to recreate the Great Fire of Gotham, a 1835 blaze that originated in the financial district and reshaped the city.

This is definitely the highest stakes that the book reaches, but it still remains grounded in detective work as Batman attempts to figure out the identity of this unsettling villain.

The Child of Fire’s image is almost the exact opposite of the Wound Man. Rather than spiky and horrific, they look soft and comforting, wearing a fireproof suit that looks comparable to the Michelin Man’s body. The doll mask they wear gives them an off-putting child-like visage, especially creepy when seen peering through the flames. The arc incorporates the classic Batman villain Firefly in a way that immediately allows you to see the difference between the two villains, with the Child of Fire being more philosophical and high-minded. There’s an almost mythological aspect to this story, something many Batman tales like to play with, but it still feels rooted in reality, even when it’s at its most dreamlike.

There’s a phenomenal sequence in the second issue of the arc where Batman, still suffering from his fever, is swinging through Gotham, seeing and hearing flashbacks of the Great Fire. Sherman’s layouts do an amazing job of alternating between the past and the present, with a strong visual variation provided by excellent work from colorist Triona Farrell. It’s a harrowing scene that not only delivers exposition about the history but also sets high stakes for Gotham. “The Child of Fire” is a wonderful finale, feeling like a culmination of everything that’s happened in the three previous, disparate tales, doubling down on the strengths of the entire series in a big way.

Batman: Dark Patterns feels like an audition for Detective Comics, one that the team passed with flying colors. It’s both classic and experimental, feeling old-school in structure but forward-thinking in execution. Not every story needs to shake the foundation of Gotham City forever, and Watters understands how to make smaller-scale stories that resonate on a more personal and existential level. He’s currently still in the Batman corner of the DC universe, writing the ongoing Nightwing series, while Sherman continues as the regular artist on “Absolute Wonder Woman“.

Both of those series are excellent in their own right, but I can’t help but hope these two will be back together again writing Batman, because Dark Patterns demonstrated that this team will go down as one of the finest to write the character.

The post ‘Batman: Dark Patterns’ Harkens Back to Old-School Detective Stories With Haunting Style [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

After an effective cold open that sees a road trip among friends run afoul of the eponymous entity, Passenger introduces young couple Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) as they pack up their Brooklyn apartment and embark on a new van lifestyle, roadtripping across the country. But their novice experience leaves them exposed to danger, and crossing paths with the ill-fated opening sequence vehicle on a rainy night leaves them vulnerable to a demonic entity that latches on and refuses to leave them in peace.

Llobell and Scipio as the central couple are perhaps too precious and adorable for a film like Passenger. Maddie and Tyler are so wholesome that they gift each other with Bob Ross bobbleheads before a major life upheaval. The type that plot sickeningly sweet marriage proposals and offer unwavering support. They’re also almost completely devoid of conflict.

The script by Zachary Donohue (The Den) and T.W. Burgess (Mister Howl) bides its time acclimating to the van life with a novice pair who take nearly half the film to drum up any kind of drama or conflict to break up the increasingly formulaic haunting they’ve stumbled headfirst into. While Maddie and Tyler are endearing, they’re also extremely uninteresting.

Lou Llobell as “Maddie” and Jacob Scipio as “Tyler” in Passenger from Paramount Pictures.

That quickly becomes a glaring problem as Passenger doesn’t have much to say about its entity, either. The underserved Melissa Leo does pop up now and again as a veteran nomad more savvy to the road’s supernatural threats, injecting much-needed energy and urgency in a film that’s as laid back as its peripheral van life characters. But there’s not a lot of exposition for Leo to deliver, aside from vague formulaic warnings that propel the couple further along their fight for survival.

This is ultimately where Øvredal’s strengths as a filmmaker pick up the slack, compensating for the sparse mythology and plotting with stunning vision and set pieces. You can count on Øvredal to find inventive ways to frame a scene and raise visual interest. A scenic wooded screening of Audrey Hepburn’s Roman Holiday transforms into a breathtaking vision of terror. The film’s climax injects scale and awe with its scale and eerie imagery. And endless praise should be heaped on Passenger for its ability to capture night and darkness with rare clarity.

Joseph Lopez as “The Passenger” and Lou Llobell as “Maddie” in Passenger from Paramount Pictures.

As gorgeously well-crafted and tactile as Passenger is, it’s ultimately undone by a screenplay that offers nothing new aside from putting its haunted house on wheels. Joseph Lopez does make for a haunting vision as the demonic entity, but Passenger never really fleshes this character out beyond superficial, undefined motives. Without anything for the audience to latch onto here, both character-wise and lore-wise, the barrage of jump scares winds up mostly toothless. 

In keeping with the road trip metaphors here, Passenger doesn’t really offer much in the way of a journey or a destination. Its setup is novel, but the lack of depth prevents this handsomely made haunted house road tale from ever becoming truly interesting, let alone scary.

Passenger releases in theaters on May 22.

The post ‘Passenger’ Review – A Gorgeous Yet Bland Haunted House Road Trip appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s no surprise that there are plenty of age-based horror films like Cocoon, The Leech Woman, and Old that tap into this space, not to mention genre movies like VFW, which celebrate bad-ass boomer energy. 

In this sense, Netflix’s The Boroughs isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before. It’s an eight-episode series that looks at a bunch of people who feel invisible to society, only for them to gain a remarkable purpose that won’t just change their lives, but the entire world. It’s full of futile rage against getting older that’s balanced by the reassuring freedom that comes from accepting that it’s a normal – and even empowering – experience. It’s a sci-fi horror adventure about how to find meaning, value, and community when you feel utterly alone and like you’re just marking time.

The Boroughs is guilty of coming across as “Geriatric Stranger Things” as it stumbles through often-clunky puzzle-box storytelling. There’s still a lot of heart on display in this inspirational story, even if it’s unlikely to capture a fraction of Stranger Things’ fandom and become Netflix’s next big hit.

The Boroughs. (L to R) Clarke Peters as Art, Alfre Woodard as Judy, Alfred Molina as Sam, Denis OÕHare as Wally, Geena Davis as Renee in The Boroughs. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

The new series takes an idyllic retirement community – the titular Boroughs – and transforms it into a paranormal prison where its discarded residents are turned into defenseless cannon fodder. Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) is a retired engineer with a respect for the classics who becomes the newest resident. He’s immediately skeptical of this macabre community that’s proudly billed as “a town that’s just for grown-ups.”

Cooper is a curmudgeon with a capital C who can’t even let his guard down around his family. There’s an authenticity to the formulaic-but-comfortable lifestyle that’s laid out for Cooper and his fellow neighbors. He is an empathetic character, despite his rough edges. The bristling and loss of autonomy that he experiences highlights the similarities between trauma and getting older, with both subtly affecting one’s sense of self and physical body.

It’s fair for Cooper – or anyone – to resent having their agency taken away from them. Cooper grows especially resentful of this scenario and the Boroughs’ many modern creature comforts, such as the community’s personal Alexa-esque digital A.I. helper. 

The Boroughs. Alfred Molina as Sam in The Boroughs. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

The Boroughs is a little glib when it comes to how it juxtaposes youth and modernity against the older generation in order to make its points. The same is true regarding how it approaches loneliness as a sickness and that a place like this can actually be an opportunity to live, rather than a place where people fade away and die. The Boroughs isn’t subtle about any of this, but it’s a mission statement that works more than it doesn’t, thanks to a cast that’s full of phenomenal performances.

The best thing that The Boroughs has going for it is a murderers’ row of top-tier performances. Bill Pullman, Geena Davis, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, and Alfre Woodard help round out the cast alongside Molina. Everyone really commits and is clearly having fun in these roles. It’s a delight to just watch these characters bounce off of each other and slowly open up, even when it’s mundane moments where there are no active threats.

It’s a series that’s all about celebrating life, but there’s also a really melancholy nature to all this. This isn’t wholly unexpected in a series like this, as characters reflect on their fleeting mortality and how much of their lives they have left. Wally’s (O’Hare) storyline about dealing with a terminal illness as he tries to embrace an existence of “cocktails and chaos” is particularly poignant. Each episode functions as cathartic character studies outside of the grander paranormal developments.

The Boroughs. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

The Stranger Things parallels in The Boroughs are front and center, right down to the Duffer Brothers being on board as executive producers. There are also shades of other mysterious community series like Wayward Pines, From, and even The Prisoner present here, with some Stepford Wives-esque conformity thrown in for good measure. Also, much like Stranger Things before it, The Boroughs suffers from the ongoing issue with Netflix programs where characters repeat the plot and what they’re about to do ad nauseam. It also doesn’t help that The Boroughs is airing at the same time as Apple TV+’s far superior Widow’s Bay, which nails this type of tone and genre so damn well. 

The Boroughs is at its best once it gets out of its own way, but there are still awkward affectations and unnecessary vestiges of puzzle-box storytelling that don’t feel natural. It actually feels like a series from the early 2010s during the height of the Lost copycat craze. It’s easy to picture The Boroughs as a successful contemporary to Revolution and Alcatraz, whereas its mysteries struggle to pull their weight in a modern context. 

The Boroughs. Clarke Peters as Art in The Boroughs. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

There’s plenty in The Boroughs that falls short of expectations. However, it’s not just hollow and gratuitous mystery-driven storytelling. There are satisfying answers that connect to creative mythology that explore an original idea through a curious lens. It’s also clever to connect antiquated technology and relics of the past to Cooper and company’s solution to these supernatural threats. 

It’s earliest episodes take a minute to find their rhythm and really get moving. It gradually overcomes a cumbersome start in order to become something really special and heartwarming once it does its own thing. I found myself caring less about the mystery and more about these characters. There’s inventive lore, but also some telegraphed twists. The tone is also initially all over the place as if it can’t make up its mind over whether it’s supposed to be a comedy, drama, or horror series.

The Boroughs takes a really long walk to make its points. Some people may jump ship along the way, but they’re still powerful thoughts, all the same. The season ultimately turns into a battle between compliance and rebellion that’s presented through a supernatural filter, but speaks to a universal concept. It works well enough for what it is.

There are creative monster designs, suspenseful stakes, and effective needle drops that speak to these characters. Outside of its heartfelt performances and brief flashes of inspiration, The Boroughs is unfortunately as forgettable as the very people who have been shipped off to its community.

All eight episodes of The Boroughs begin streaming on May 21, 2026.

The post ‘The Boroughs’ Is Boomer ‘Stranger Things’ For Better & For Worse [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

But this is not the limit of the horror novella, and Ito Romo‘s new book Filth Eaters proves it. A vampire story spanning a full millennium, this is epic horror in a slim volume, a book that pushes the limits of the novella in exciting ways while never losing its propulsive punch.

In a future version of New York City ravaged by floods, when vampires are a known reality and blood drinkers gain followings by broadcasting their kills on untraceable livestreams, Doro is ready for the end. He hasn’t been a vampire that long, but he’s been around long enough to know that he’s weary, that the world is falling apart because of humans who recklessly warped and destroyed it, and that he’d rather go out in a blaze of glory than watch it all fade away. But to understand why Doro feels this way, Filth Eaters has to tell much more than his story.

So, Romo’s narrative goes back, way back, chronicling the descendants in a long vampiric line that runs from the Indus River Valley to the fall of Muslim Granada to the Aztec Empire amid Hernan Cortez’s conquest. Along the way, Romo unspools his vampiric mythology with just enough detail to hook us, and plenty of room left for future explorations. We meet ancient vampires, recent converts, vampires who have evolved to give birth like humans, and much more, all while Romo explores the emotional toll such a legacy could have on a fiery personality like Doro at the edge of a dying world.

Because Romo’s novella only runs roughly 140 pages while covering a full millennium of vampiric history, we get to know these immortals in a form nearing a string of vignettes, catching them at crucial moments in their development, the linchpins around which Doro’s story turns. Because of the nature of his family line, he cannot simply reflect on his own life. He carries centuries of memories and knowledge, filling his mind to bursting, and he must look back on all of it as he contemplates the end.

So we see his recollections in flashes, in vampiric births and deaths and movements across continents, like Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in miniature. It’s a breathless narrative of big, sweeping brushstrokes across a small canvas, and yet the book retains an arresting sense of intimacy.

That intimacy comes not just from the way Romo paces out this vast narrative, but from the themes with which he’s playing. You cannot dig into the battle over Granada or the fall of the Aztec Empire or the history of New York City as this book does without considering colonialism, and by charting a course for one bloodline over centuries, Romo takes on the issue like he’s weaving a dark fable.

What is colonialism, after all, but the ultimate vampire, a force that sweeps through a populace and drains its life, mutating it into something new or wiping it off the Earth altogether. Ito Romo not only grasps this but wields it like a delicate dagger, making precise cuts in our psyche as the book moves with lightning quickness through centuries of devastation, rebirth, and regret, all leading back to Doro.

Filth Eaters is a highwire act, a magic trick, a novella so rich with detail and lore that you’ll want a five-book series in the same world even as you leave completely satisfied with what it offers. It’s an indie horror triumph, and if you love vampire fiction, it belongs on your shelf.

Filth Eaters is available May 19 from Deep Vellum.

The post ‘Filth Eaters’ Review – Ito Romo Packs Epic-Scaled Horror Into Intimate Vampire Novella appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Also like Slender Man, many video games adapted this concept to varying levels of success. One of those games, released the same year as the viral post that defined much of the accepted mythology of the Backrooms, was from indie developer Puppet Combo, the creator of games such as Nun Massacre, The Glass Staircase, and Stay Out of the House. Originally titled “Day 7“, it was distributed via their Patreon, but with the impending release of A24’s Backrooms film, Puppet Combo has decided to rebrand the game simply as The Backrooms for release on consoles.

Initially, this felt like a strange mismatch to me. Puppet Combo is really known for a grindhouse aesthetic, focusing on scuzzy, violent slasher games. Would that gel with the eerie liminal horror vibe that had been established?

While there definitely are some more gnarly elements in the final act of this hour-long game, I found that their signature style actually worked to give everything a found footage aesthetic, one that brought to mind the YouTube shorts that the feature film is based on. The PSX graphics style works perfectly to heighten the feeling of unreality, making you wonder if that thing you’re seeing in the distance is merely a trick of the low-fi filter.

Retro Style Held Back By Retro Mechanics

The retro look does a great job of setting the mood right off the bat, but unfortunately, the retro controls do not. Playing from a first-person perspective, I expected to be able to control with the traditional dual joystick layout people have used forever, but instead of left and right on the left joystick strafing, it turned my character. I understand that it’s meant to evoke the feeling of an older era, like many Puppet Combo games, but this took a bit for me to get used to.

There also appeared to be a bug that prevented me from inverting the y-axis, which I do for all games, making it take even longer for me to acclimate to the game’s controls. I saw a post from the studio’s account saying both these issues would be fixed in an upcoming update, but they were definitely barriers for me starting out.

The game’s prologue does a nice job of setting up the main character, Terrance, another thing I wasn’t really expecting from the game. It’s not the most in-depth personality, but it was nice to see some dialogue of him interacting with his coworkers or people on the subway, where he finds himself in the titular labyrinth. Dialogue sequences are charmingly low-fi, with characters popping in and standing static in front of you, only to disappear immediately when they finish.

Their models aren’t even in the world as you’re navigating, making for a slight jump scare when they start speaking. It may look pretty janky, but the old school charm works on me in a way that makes it feel endearing rather than unfinished.

While I enjoyed the vibe that these interactions set up in the beginning, I did not enjoy getting through it. Before you get to the titular location, you spend some time going from your office to the subway, and this location felt really easy to get lost in. It was not clear where I was supposed to go, and I felt like I only stumbled upon the subway entrance by happenstance. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a thematic feeling, prepping me for the feeling of getting lost in the Backrooms, but I found it more frustrating than interesting, especially with the slow walk speed. I was holding the run button the entire time, and even that didn’t quite feel fast enough.

A Liminal Walking Simulator

It should go without saying that most of the game is about exploring the Backrooms, navigating the seemingly endless space to progress to different story beats. It does a good job of creating the illusion that there are lots of different ways for you to go while actually being pretty linear. Branching paths quickly lead to dead ends, ensuring you stay on the critical path to keep the story rolling. That’s not to say you can’t get turned around given the intentional sameness of the environments, but there’s just enough landmarking that you can keep moving forward even if you get lost for a moment.

That’s mostly it as far as gameplay goes. It fairly firmly sits in the genre of spooky walking simulator, forcing you to wander from beat to beat. Eventually, you find a purse that allows you to drop coins like breadcrumbs, which are crucial for being able to backtrack when the story asks you. This mechanic is a fun little twist that feels thematically in line with the lost-in-a-liminal-space vibes it’s going for. It’s a welcome addition that gives you at least a little bit of agency, something that the game lacks by design.

Despite having a mostly repeating set of environment pieces, the game finds clever ways to have things break down as you explore further. The uncanniness of the Backrooms itself is played up when things start glitching, again taking advantage of the retro aesthetics to give you a feeling of reality falling apart at the seams. Needless to say, you’re not alone down there, leading to some creepy encounters and strange happenings. These are the strongest elements of the game, with a good understanding of what makes the premise work.

To break things up, there’s a dream sequence in the game that once again gives us a glimpse into the character while also providing some liminal horror of its own. Taking place at a funeral, it shows Terrance interacting with family members as a child, getting lost while playing an ill-advised game of hide and seek at the funeral home. The concepts of the Backrooms bleed into this setting, creating some of the more effective parts of the game both narratively and tonally. This takes place pretty early in the runtime, and I wish they had found more space for these types of sequences, as they offer a good break from the monotonous location.

The Final Verdict: An Atmospheric but Slight Creepypasta Experience

While the build is solid, I feel like the ending is very abrupt, especially given the extremely short runtime of the game. The climax does a good job of paying off some elements, but it escalates so quickly that it doesn’t feel natural to me. There’s a strange confrontation at the end that all takes place via menus, which technically works fine but doesn’t really feel all that satisfying.

I literally exclaimed “that’s it?” at the end of the game, as it felt like it had just gotten going at the moment it ended. I don’t really know much about the production of the original game, but I’m a little surprised Puppet Combo didn’t go back and add a bit more to the end to make this console version stand out more.

I’ve seen a lot of people online say that this release feels like a cash-in on the upcoming film, and it definitely is, albeit one that was created about three years before the Kane Parsons short films came out. I don’t begrudge Puppet Combo for spending resources on a console port of this and timing it with the film, but I wish there were more care taken with the package.

While I’m glad to hear that the control issues are being addressed, it feels like a little extra work to extend the game would have helped it fully take advantage of the concept. I enjoyed the atmosphere created in this version of the Backrooms, with the low-poly graphics enhancing the vibe, but it feels like it never has a chance to fully get going.

Review code provided by publisher. The Backrooms is out now on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series.

The post Puppet Combo’s ‘The Backrooms’ Exudes Atmosphere, But Ultimately Feels Lacking [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Devil May Cry is blissfully lost in the 2000s, and it effortlessly taps into the pop culture aesthetic that was present when Devil May Cry first landed on the PlayStation 2. Netflix’s series continues to tonally nail the gaming franchise’s style and ethos, even if the storytelling, world-building, and characters don’t always mesh with their source material counterparts. After a promising debut, the second season is just as strong as the first, if not even a little better once it discards some of the first season’s unnecessary baggage and grows more confident in its writing.

After season one’s chaotic cliffhanger, Devil May Cry doesn’t waste any time as it launches right into new nightmares. Dante and company must assemble demonic artifacts so that Mundus can be defeated and Hell on Earth doesn’t literally come to pass. It’s a solid enough foundation for an eight-episode season of television that never stops moving or looking ahead as a result. Devil May Cry’s second season is well-paced and never strays from its grander purpose and the apocalyptic clash that it culminates in. It’s also appreciated that it doesn’t needlessly draw out Dante and Vergil’s reunion. Rest assured that these two cross paths – and blades – well before the season’s end.

Devil May Cry S2. Johnny Yong Bosch as Dante in Devil May Cry S2. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

The storyline seems to largely be pulling from Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening, albeit while still taking many liberties with the source material. This means a heavy focus on Vergil this season, who gets to pick up a lot of the slack while Devil May Cry demonstrates a surprising degree of restraint before Dante reenters the picture. This impressive act of withholding is only possible because Devil May Cry now has Vergil – and Lady, for that matter – to lean on for its signature absurdist action spectacles. 

This season also adopts a structure where Dante and Vergil’s childhoods are juxtaposed with their fractured relationship in the present. This helps reflect the full complexity of their relationship and just how far it’s fallen. It’s an approach that’s hardly revolutionary, but it still gives this season a little extra dramatic juice and an emotional center that makes sure that it’s more than just heightened battles of good versus evil. That being said, Vergil’s backstory and the fate that he’s subjected to are truly awful and a fitting depiction of Hell.

Devil May Cry spends a lot of time telling characters that loved ones are weaknesses and impediments against perfection, only to then reinforce that unity is always better than destruction. A family member’s shortcomings are just an opportunity for someone else to step in and pick up the slack. That’s what family is. This may seem glib and obvious, but Devil May Cry really interrogates the power and meaning behind that word. Everything in Devil May Cry’s second season boils down to family.

Devil May Cry S2. (T) Ray Chase as Mundus and (B) Robbie Daymond as Vergil in Devil May Cry S2. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

This makes it all the more interesting that these episodes entertain the deeply cynical idea that malevolent corporations are using two superpowered siblings as bargaining chips against each other. Their divine purpose ultimately fuels corporate profits and market dominance. The Devil May Cry games were always deeply sarcastic and sardonic, but this adaptation is decidedly more nihilistic about society, even when it’s not being taken over by hell demons.

This season also really leans into the self-aware propaganda that’s released by DARKCOM in an effort to appease the masses and control the narrative, that’s all very Robocop-coded. It’s an interesting element for season two to expand upon as the series tries to broaden its scope and add a few more irons into what’s already a very crowded fire. That being said, most people aren’t going to get overly excited by lengthy boardroom scenes with bureaucrats. There are also some heavy-handed moments that involve the liberation of innocent demons that feel forced and a little too “Saturday Morning Cartoon” for Devil May Cry. They’re just sporadic enough that they’re never a real distraction. 

This is Devil May Cry, so at the end of the day this is a series that needs to truly deliver on extravagant action setpieces. Fortunately, the second season still kicks off with a bombastic assault on brutal hell beasts – all while the soundtrack blares with Papa Roach and Evanescence. From that point forward, Devil May Cry continually raises the bar for its carnage. Studio Mir does great work with this property, but the chaotic carnage still falls short of the impossibly high standards that Powerhouse set with Netflix’s Castlevania series.

There are really gruesome, exaggerated sequences that deliver a level of brutality that’s hard to find in this style of animation outside of Invincible. At the same time, it’s so impossibly removed from reality that it functions like a manic fever dream. At one point, Dante fires a rocket launcher and then rides the missile into battle. There are some messy massacres with soldiers that allow for a more reckless body count. Devil May Cry oddly succeeds as a loving tribute to the works of Go Nagai.

Devil May Cry S2. Johnny Yong Bosch as Dante in Devil May Cry S2. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

This second season works just as well as a companion piece to Devilman Crybaby as it does for any game from the Capcom franchise, especially when it comes to the season’s concluding clash. On the topic of the final fight, it’s the type of nonsensical pandemonium that gamers have come to expect from any of Devil May Cry’s boss battles.

On a grander scale, it’s impressive how this season handles Mundus as the central antagonist. It’d be very easy for Mundus to operate like some superfluous shadowy figure who barks orders from afar without actually proving his power. Devil May Cry uses the bulk of its premiere to highlight Mundus’ incomprehensible power and why he’s such an apocalyptic threat. Mundus’ God-like nature and the enormity of all this bring Netflix’s Blood of Zeus to mind, which admittedly had a lot more to say with its exploration of omnipotence and mankind’s fragility. 

This season suffers from being slightly repetitive with so many battles that come down to the same blade-based combat and choreography. Devil May Cry sometimes expects the introduction of an exaggerated weapon to be enough to replace creative strategies and clever plot twists. Repetition aside, this season features some genuinely unique demon designs, even if a lot of this blood-soaked carnage blends together. The design for Jester is eerie perfection and considerably more distinct than season one’s White Rabbit.

Devil May Cry’s second season is an easy weekend binge that maintains the madcap tempo of the first season. Winning chemistry between Dante and Vergil, as well as a narrative that isn’t afraid to put other characters in the spotlight, helps this season overcome some of the past season’s hurdles. This is a tight, economical season that doesn’t overstay its welcome, but part of the charm and impact is weakened the second time around. This season’s world-building teases plenty of more adventures to come. Two seasons in, Devil May Cry needs to be careful not to become a parody of itself, which at times already feels like a parody, and still find ways to raise the stakes.

If nothing else, Devil May Cry is the best television series you’ll see this year that blares Korn during its final showdown.

Season two is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Devil May Cry’ Season 2 Is a Double-Barreled Blast of Demon-Slaying Debauchery [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The foolish wish maker in Obsession is Bear (Michael Johnston), a shy, sensitive type whose closest friends are his co-workers at a music store. He’s been trying to confess his enduring love for childhood friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but can’t seem to work up the nerve. He makes a stop at a specialty shop before the latest group meeting, armed with intentions to finally make a move. Instead, Bear makes a casual but wistful wish on a novelty item, unaware that it’s a supernatural token with the ability to grant his heart’s desire.

It works, and Nikki instantly changes her entire personality as lovesickness takes root.

Inde Navarrette quickly becomes Obsession‘s not-so-secret weapon in this increasingly disturbing masterclass of wish-fulfillment horror. Early introductions to the core characters present a crystal clear picture of Nikki as feisty, independent, and uninterested in Bear beyond their platonic friendship. But where Navarrette truly impresses is her disturbing portrayal post-wish. At first, Nikki seems caught in a manic breakdown, unsettling in itself, but that slowly gives way to more sinister behaviors as it becomes clear that Nikki isn’t Nikki anymore.

Worse, the real Nikki occasionally breaks through the hollow, love-stricken shell. 

Curry Barker amplifies Nikki’s erratic and increasingly violent behavior with chilling atmospherics and smart direction. Obsession is one freaky movie, especially in the night sequences that see Barker turn his romantic lead into a boogeyman for Bear. It’s often here that Barker obscures Nikki’s face as she utters eerie things, leaving you squinting and questioning whether there’s something inhuman lurking in the dark. Barker also dials up the violence to a shocking degree, offering a variety of scare tactics and off-kilter humor to keep you on your toes. 

It’s the type of brilliantly executed horror that could coast by on its ability to send shivers down your spine, but Barker ensures Obsession has substance, too. Framing the story entirely from the nice guy who is, ultimately, a morally bankrupt perpetrator, mines new ground in the well-trodden concept. Bear is the type to buy into his own lies, refusing to acknowledge his complicity in swapping out Nikki’s soul with something other, all for the sake of reciprocation. He’s so likable that it’s too easy to go along with him, at least to a certain point. Barker dangles the carrot of introspection and redemption throughout, opening up discussions of morality, autonomy, and consent. He doesn’t let any of his characters off the hook.

Obsession takes you on a wild ride. While Monkey’s Paw scenarios often yield predictable outcomes, and this outcome is practically telegraphed from the start, Barker manages to surprise with the journey itself. And it’s one insane journey paved with blood-soaked violence and no shortage of nightmare fuel. Barker acknowledges other wish-fulfillment horror, like Wishmaster in a throwaway line, but puts his stamp on the niche subgenre with frightening flair. 

Editor’s Note: This TIFF review was originally published on September 6, 2025.

Obsession arrives in theaters May 15 from Focus Features.

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For so many of us born in its aftermath but before its wider availability, John Alan Schwartz‘s film was a ghost, a film so shocking and unreachable that it might never have existed to begin with.

It would be easy now, with cult horror films on streaming services worldwide and clips of real gore and suffering a click away at all times, to feel that the film’s aura has faded. Like Cannibal Holocaust and, to a lesser extent, The Blair Witch Project, Faces of Death has been deconstructed and demystified so much that the original footage might appear now as clinical at best and hokey at worst, but somehow that’s not what’s happened. Faces of Death still retains something of that doomy, mondo reputation, and thanks to a new 4K release from Vinegar Syndrome, it actually feels downright dangerous again. 

The new disc, presented in a lovingly crafted package that includes a booklet of essays, a pair of stickers mimicking the film’s original advertising, and more, begins with standard boutique release fare. There’s a new 4K scan of the original negatives, a Blu-ray disc loaded with archival features, a new featurette interviewing fans and followers of the film from around the world, and an archival commentary track.

In typical Vinegar Syndrome fashion, this is all put together with affection, wit, and attention to detail, and if I had one major gripe with it, I’d simply say that I wish more of the features on the Blu-ray had been ported over to the 4K. Still, this is all solid stuff, and if the Faces of Death 4K stopped there, it would make a handsome addition to any collection. 

But it doesn’t. 

There’s something lurking in this two-disc set that stood out to me not just as interesting additions to the package, but as genuine enhancements to the Faces of Death experience beyond a 4K restoration. That restoration, it should be clear, looks great, and diminishes none of the haunting power of watching a real suicide shot on grainy video or following a handheld camera as it tracks hypnotically around an autopsy table, but it’s not what opened my eyes to what this film can still do as a piece of horror cinema. For that, we have to get into the sound.

You’ve got several options on this Faces of Death 4K, including the default restored soundtrack and a track featuring the original mono audio, bringing the film back to its analog roots in a way that anyone who managed to snag a copy on VHS will appreciate. But there’s also the option of turning all of that off entirely, and playing an audio track that offers nothing but the film’s half-droning, half-whimsical score. I have no idea why this feature is there, but watching Faces of Death again with that option selected, something about it felt flat-out revelatory.

After all, what do we come to Faces of Death for in the first place, when we’re young and hungry horror fans eager to test our limits and push our experiences into the most infamous of genre films? We come to it for the death, of course, and for the way the film blends the staged and the real, the dramatic and the prosaic, to create a montage of morbidity with the goal of overwhelming our senses.

Taking out the dialogue, the voiceover, and the sound effects brings the film back to the core of its impact, allowing you to focus on how it was assembled and paced, what the shots are able to achieve, how some death lingers while other death passes with the flash of a bullet. I expected to rewatch this film on 4K to admire technical specs and analysis from its admirers and students, but instead, I came away riveted by the journey the film takes us on in a way I’d never been before. 

This strange, dialogue-free Faces of Death odyssey, when coupled with the film’s many special features and a sometimes jaw-dropping restoration, is enough to reinvigorate this icon of cult cinema in ways that even its reboot could not. It’s a gem for cult horror fans, and even if you think you’ve seen it all, Vinegar Syndrome’s release proves there’s still more to see. 

Faces of Death 4K UHD  is now available from Vinegar Syndrome as a website exclusive before releasing wide on May 26.

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There’s a very unique thrill of playing the role of both director and participant in a story, and Supermassive figured out that there’s no better genre for this format than horror. After Until Dawn, their most significant contribution in this space has been The Dark Pictures Anthology, a series of smaller scale games that all take this formula into different subgenres to tell standalone tales unified by a Rod Serling-esque host that frames the drama as it unfolds.

The four games that make up the first season of The Dark Pictures Anthology had their ups and downs, but Supermassive decided to take some time off from their annual schedule to make sure the next entry was an evolution of the series. Directive 8020 is the result of that work. Not only does it keep the much loved choice-based gameplay, but it adds several wrinkles that put it more in line with more traditional survival horror games, a direction they’ve been slowly moving towards for the past few entries.

Despite having supernatural elements, the previous games have been all grounded in modern times. Directive 8020 immediately sets itself apart by moving into sci-fi horror. Set in the far future, it follows the crew of the Cassiopeia, a space vessel that’s making its way to a planet in Tau Ceti to make way for a colony ship that’s following close behind. Their role is not to land on the planet, but to do a dry run and act as a scouting mission for the real deal.

Obviously, since this is a horror game, the crew is woken up early to deal with a crisis on board. It’s clear that Supermassive is taking inspiration from Alien and The Thing, two of the most iconic sci-fi horror stories of all time, as they are confronted with a shape-shifting being that can take the form of anyone on board.

It’s a solid setup, but something like this succeeds or fails based on the strength of its characters. Fortunately there’s just enough going on to create believable relationships that you can easily slip into as your control shifts from character to character. None of them are particularly deep, but they all have their role on the Cassiopeia in a way that sets up interpersonal drama to play out as the tension ratchets up.

The actors bringing these characters to life are all up to the challenge, particularly Captain Marvel star Lashana Lynch, delivering solid performances that make some of the stiffer lines still feel real.

Choices Feel More Meaningful Than Ever

Because this is a four year space journey where people are in suspended animation for most of it, characters are introduced as they are woken up in different groups, continuing to mix up the dynamic by adding fresh faces as time goes on. It’s a smart way to have a fairly large cast without forcing you to meet an overwhelming number right at the beginning, letting the relationships breathe before things hit the fan.

As with most of these games, you have a hand in defining who they are through the choices you make. With dialogue, these are often adding flavor to the scene, showing the character as more jokey or practical based on your selections. Interestingly, each character has two Destinies they can fall into depending on how you portray them, and once these are locked in it can have narrative implications for the character going forward. Supermassive has always experimented with ideas like this, having various stats that show their traits or relationships, but this system feels more streamlined, with easier to understand consequences.

Directive 8020 introduces a text-based messaging system that everyone has built into their wrist-mounted computers, allowing you to communicate with other members of the crew instantly. I found these to be really satisfying, giving you opportunities for interactions that were less plot relevant and more about meaningfully building the relationships, making them feel more lived-in and natural. As identities become unclear when the shape-shifting presence starts to become more of a threat, there’s some really great moments of tension created using this system.

Choice again plays a big role in how things play out, allowing each of your characters to make decisions that can drastically alter the course of the narrative. These choices can have immediate consequences in the scene, or have ripple effects that won’t play out until later in the story. Each of these branching moments is marked by a UI notification so you know there were consequences to something you did, putting emphasis on the moment in an effective manner.

Some choices even warn you beforehand that they will be gamechanging, which feels particularly stressful, in a good way, when it’s combined with a ticking clock. Moments of confrontation are still resolved with the series’ signature quick time events, providing tense games of Simon Says as your characters fight for their lives.

The Turning Points System is a Smart Addition

Character interactions, dialogue choices, branching narratives – these are all mechanics that have been used in The Dark Pictures Anthology in the past, but the three years away from the series has led Supermassive to make a lot of substantial changes to the core of the game. One of the biggest among them is the Turning Points system, which allows you to rewind to pivotal moments in order to try the other options available to you.

As much as I love the possibility space that Supermassive’s brand of branching narrative design provides, I never actually find myself replaying them to see other paths, as much as I might tell myself I want to. That makes this feature very appealing, allowing you to immediately give it another go if your favorite character died due to a missed QTE or a choice you didn’t fully think through. There’s even a tab on the menu that lays out all the branching paths visually, showing you just how many different permutations of the narrative exist.

If you’re a hardcore fan of the game that wants to live with your consequences, there’s a mode that completely deactivates this, forcing you to live with the consequences for your playthrough. I always appreciate more options for the player, and this feature is a welcome one that’s there for people to use if they feel so inclined.

One of the biggest changes in gameplay is the addition of stealth mechanics, moving the much of the danger out of QTEs and into real-time action. Many times throughout the game you will be required to crouch your way through areas, hiding from the alien menace that stalks you through the ship. These sequences are never too complicated, involving just one creature to keep track of, but it’s a welcome addition, if a little undercooked. One of these sequences featured another character watching security cameras and guiding you to safety, which left me wanting more variations on the idea.

Enemy behaviors aren’t very complex, and you don’t really have a ton of tools at your disposal to deal with them, though your wrist computer can occasionally hack things in the environment to cause distractions, but the fear of getting caught is a great shortcut to creating tension. You usually get one “free” mistake where you can shock them with your cattle prod-like tool to break away, but these stealth sequences can be just as lethal as the standard QTEs, so you will need to take care. I definitely lost characters to sequences like this, but there are difficulty options that can help you deal with these moments if you’re coming to the game for more of an interactive movie-style experience.

Puzzles and Exploration Add More Traditional Survival Horror Elements

Another way they mix up gameplay is with some fairly rudimentary puzzles. There’s more of a feeling of exploration in certain spaces, with doors locked by missing batteries or unpowered wires. With your wrist computer, you’re able to scan the area, following power lines and performing tasks to restore functionality and progress forward. There’s even a little timing-based lockpicking minigame that feels satisfying to do, especially when under pressure. These aren’t the most complicated or compelling activities, but I appreciate Supermassive trying to incorporate more traditional game elements into their house style.

Some of the more compelling moments combine these puzzles with stealth, forcing you to track down batteries while also hiding from an enemy. I wish there was a little bit more resource management to mix things up, but I fear that would alienate their fans who are looking for a more casual experience. As it is, it feels like it’s trying to satisfy two audiences in a way that might not be enough for either.

A change that hurt the game for me was the lack of the framing story with the Curator. I know the model for the actor, Tony Pankhurst, passed away a couple years ago, but I was really missing the character’s interjections after big narrative beats. This has always felt integral to the style of Supermassive games, with the therapist from Until Dawn and the fortune teller in The Quarry being other successful examples, and its absence was notable, though he does show up in neat little Easter Egg moments if you jump through some hoops. The seven-hour story is broken up into eight chapters, usually ending with some voice over narration from one of the characters, but it didn’t have the same “Twilight Zone”-style impact that I was used to.

Directive 8020 Struggles to Escape Its Horror Influences

It’s very clear that Supermassive had specific inspirations for this narrative, that being Alien and The Thing, and while it’s a good foundation for ideas, I wish it did more to get out of the shadow of its influences. While the space colony dry scouting mission is a strong setup, most of the threats that the game explores are so derivative that it feels like we as an audience are way ahead of the characters as far as the mystery goes, robbing the story of anything that truly surprises the player. It takes them a while to figure out that whatever is on the ship can mimic other crew members, something that’s very obvious to the player from an early stage.

This isn’t used to create moments of dramatic irony, but instead drags the pacing down a bit. I was also surprised that the who-is-real-and-who-is-an-alien concept wasn’t used more often in regards to the choice system, as that type of tension is one of the things that shapeshifter narratives thrive at.

The pacing problems are also apparent in the very structure of this type of game, even if they try some storytelling techniques to mitigate it. There’s a lack of tension in the early hours of the game because it’s clear that characters won’t be dropping too early, as it would be hard to write around their absence. This leads to some early sections of the game feeling a bit hollow, even if you are making choices that set up success or failure later down the road. Directive 8020 does remedy this a bit by including flashforwards in most of the chapters, cutting to life and death situations that take place later in the narrative in order, but it made me want more experimentation with linearity to fully take advantage of this.

The final two chapters of the game finally land on the story’s unique selling point, breaking away from the concepts laid out by its influences and creating something that feels more its own, but it happens too late to fully explore the interesting concept. Directive 8020 has some smart things to say about the way corporations treat people as disposable assets and what it means to hold onto the concept of humanity, and I feel like we don’t get a chance to fully explore it. I kept hoping it would explore certain parallels or revisit specific concepts, but in the end I got a mostly satisfying story, even if it didn’t go as in depth as I wanted into its themes.

Despite Familiarity, The Dark Pictures Anthology Moves Forward

Much like the narrative, I wish the visuals had a bit more of a unique identity. There were some neat elements of future tech, but no signature thing that would make it instantly recognizable among screenshots of other sci-fi horror space games. The graphics are great, with moody lighting and detailed environments, even if there were a few technical polish issues here and there. Creature designs are generally good, particularly when things start getting crazy around the end, though they rarely do much to set themselves apart from enemies seen in games like Dead Space or Resident Evil.

Despite my complaints about originality, this still ranks among the upper half of Supermassive’s games in my book. The new gameplay additions, particularly the stealth mechanics, do a great job of combining tension with a more active sense of player agency. The signature choice-based narrative remains solid, enhanced by the new Turning Point system that lets you freely explore other options without forcing a full replay of the game.

While I wish the narrative took more time to explore the concepts of its final act twist, it still provides a nice little thrill ride sure to entertain fans of sci-fi horror. It’s obvious that Supermassive took the time to rethink the franchise, and Directive 8020 takes more steps forwards than steps back, making me excited to see what comes next.

Review code provided by publisher. Directive 8020 launches May 12 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Steam.

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As a roguelike with no substantial metaprogression, it made pushing through each loop extremely challenging, especially when runs could run for several hours. It felt far too time-consuming to push through early biomes to get a shot at a later level, needing to spend over two hours to get another chance to learn a boss’s pattern. The arcade-y shooter gameplay was perfect, but the loop didn’t fully work for me, pushing me away from a game I loved.

Saros, Housemarque’s follow-up to Returnal, bears a lot of resemblance to its predecessor gameplay-wise, but it stands on its own narratively. It also learns a lot of lessons from Returnal, keeping the roguelike structure but making helpful concessions to make it more accessible, without sanding off any of the edges on its tough-as-nails, bullet-hell-like gameplay.

It’s definitely still not a game for everyone; the challenge level is a lot higher than your standard AAA first-party Sony game, but those who are looking for a game to test their shooter mettle will be in for a treat.

The Mystery of Carcosa and the Cosmic King in Yellow Influence

At the beginning of the game, you’re given vague notions of what’s been going on. You play Arjun Devraj, the Enforcer of Echelon IV, a ship sent to the planet of Carcosa by the Soltari corporation to follow up on the three previous colony ships that they have lost contact with. Instead of finding the colonists, they find a shifting world overrun with dangerous creatures.

On top of that, there’s something strange calling to them in the back of their mind. The air of mystery is apparent right from the beginning, with Devraj inexplicably returning from the dead, and the only way to solve it is to venture out into the hostile environment for clues to what happened and what is happening.

While Returnal, which had only one character, was a very isolating game, Saros has a whole cast that you chat with in your base. They all have different roles in the Soltari mission, a mission that’s meant to help the corporation extract a valuable energy resource called Lucenite from Carcosa. The nuanced performances from each of the voice actors help bring these characters to life as their sanity slowly unravels bit by bit. Rahul Kohli, of “Midnight Mass” and other Mike Flanagan works, is the standout as Arjun, creating a complex character with hidden motivations that are slowly revealed.

You may recognize the name Carcosa, which is associated with the Robert W. Chambers’ book of short stories titled The King in Yellow. He originally borrowed the name from an Ambrose Bierce short story called An Inhabitant of Carcosa, but the name and the titular King in Yellow went on to be referenced by H.P. Lovecraft and incorporated into the larger Cthulhu Mythos that many authors have added to since. Allusions to the King in Yellow and Carcosa have popped up in TV shows like “True Detective” season 1 and video games like Signalis.

Cthulhu has definitely hit a cultural saturation point in the past several years, so I’m glad to see something fresh have a chance to shine, even if it’s fairly functionally similar. The importance of the color yellow gives Saros an interesting visual motif to set itself apart, so the Carcosa name is definitely more than just an Easter Egg-style allusion to the work.

As I mentioned before, there’s a roguelike core to the structure of Saros, but it’s more flexible with that definition than its predecessor. There are several interlinked biomes that you’ll explore, but instead of having to start over at square one each time you die, you can pick which of the discovered areas you’d like to start in. It immediately makes the game feel more accessible, keeping your run time for a single section down to about thirty minutes, a reasonable length compared to the multiple hours you need to play continuously in Returnal.

Saros’ Roguelike Progression Feels More Rewarding

During each of your runs, you’ll start out at a base level and acquire various power-ups as you progress. Oftentimes, you’ll be given options of which to choose, allowing you to build a playstyle in your run that is catered to your needs. As you progress further in the game, the options expand, particularly for your weapons, to ensure that the game doesn’t feel stale as you run through it over and over again. I did find that later weapons were a bit more complicated in ways that I didn’t find interesting, which led to me falling back on the weapons I’d been using since the beginning rather than taking the time to learn something new, but I appreciated that fresh options were being presented.

Even though they provide you with a nice power curve throughout, the power-ups themselves aren’t always the most interesting. If there wasn’t a choice, I was often picking them up without reading them, since I likely wouldn’t be changing my tactics all that much in play. The most substantial choice you make is when presented with a new weapon. In addition to your weapon type, which ranges from pistols to rifles to crossbows, they also have a power level, so choosing between a gun you’re familiar with and a gun with a higher level is going to come up a lot.

I was a huge fan of the Horde Shotgun, and it seemed like when I had one, I would rarely run across a stronger one, meaning I either had to stick with a numerically weaker weapon or switch to one I didn’t care for as much. While I understand this is meant to be a meaningful choice, I wish they had found different ways to allow you to upgrade your weapon instead of just swapping it out. For me, the weapon felt like something I would like to pick at the start of the run, like in Hades, then upgrade with different modifiers as I go, rather than constantly changing to new weapons as they are presented to me. I can’t tell if this is a problem with the game or a problem with how I played it, but it’s something I think Housemarque could rethink in future titles.

In addition to your advancement during a run, you can now upgrade yourself at your home base after you die. Using Lucenite collected from defeated enemies, you’ll enhance three core stats, as well as purchase various modifiers that will make you more capable over time. While many debate whether this should be allowed in a roguelike, I think it’s a welcome addition that gives you a meaningful power curve that isn’t as dependent on what randomly shows up for you mid-run. Not only does it give you more agency for your improvements, but it also gives you a satisfying feeling as you get better in both stats and skills.

Saros Features Some of the Best Shooter Combat on PS5

None of this would mean anything if the combat wasn’t up to snuff, but I’m happy to report that Saros has a game feel unmatched by other shooters. You feel like a nimble dealer of death, fighting overwhelming odds with a combination of quick, precise movement and rock solid shooting mechanics. Each of the weapons has an alternate fire, which can be activated by pressing the left trigger down halfway.

It can take a bit to get used to, but since this is a PlayStation 5 exclusive, it takes full advantage of the adaptive resistance to let you know where that alt-fire point is. Saros also perfectly uses the haptics of the Dualsense to emphasize every shotgun blast and explosion to make you feel the chaos that you’re embroiled in.

Aside from just feeling great, there are some nuances to action that elevate it above your standard shooter fare. As enemies bear down on you, the screen will fill up with their multicolored projectiles, and those colors aren’t just for visual spectacle. Devraj has access to a shield that can be brought up for a limited time, and that shield can be used to absorb blue projectiles, which charges your power meter that can be used by a special weapon that’s activated by fully pulling the left trigger. The extremely responsive dodge already gives you tools to deal with the bullet hell patterns created by your opponents, but having to make the split-second decision of “dodge or shield” makes for compelling moment-to-moment gameplay.

Other projectiles will be yellow, which will give you corruption, even if you block them with your shield. This lowers your maximum health, but it can be cleared when you use your power weapon. Now you have a rhythm of “get corruption, absorb blue projectiles, clear corruption,” on top of the already challenging task of just surviving. In addition, there are red projectiles, which cannot be dodged or shielded. You will eventually be given the ability to parry them back at enemies, but Saros wisely waits to introduce that mechanic and others until later in the game, so as not to overwhelm you.

With the amount of visual information on screen and the speed at which you react to it, it seems like it should be impossible to play, but Saros is the ultimate flowstate game, allowing you to truly be in the zone when you finally find your rhythm. At times it felt like I was completely in sync with the game, reacting to things without having to think about it. Much like Cypher talking about how he sees the Matrix, I don’t see blue, yellow, or red projectiles; I just see block, dodge, and parry. It all felt like natural reflexes by the end, allowing me to get fully lost in the gorgeous spectacle of visual effects that flooded the screen without stumbling over the gameplay.