Of course, there are the perennial favorites like the Easter segment in anthology Holidays, and the Easter set found footage twist on Dante’s Inferno, As Above, So Below, along with a handful of killer Easter bunny titles. 

Here are five more Easter horror movies to add to your weekend watchlists. From Satan-loving teen witches to charming horror-comedies to creature features from outer space, these titles make the holidays delightfully weird and bloody.

Read on for where to watch them.

For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.

Critters 2: The Main Course – Hoopla, Plex, Tubi

If there’s a quintessential Easter horror movie to watch this week, it’s Critters 2. Plucky hero Brad (Scott Grimes) returns to the small town of Grover’s Bend to visit Grandma just in time for the town’s Easter celebration. Too bad someone mixed up Crite eggs for regular Easter eggs. The pint-sized critters set their sights on the Easter bunny before letting loose their insatiable appetite on the town. Think of it as a delightfully entertaining Easter buffet. Co-written by David Twohy (Warlock, Pitch Black) and director Mick Garris (The Stand, Masters of Horror), Critters 2 makes clever use of the holiday. 

Family Dinner – Fandango at Home, Fawesome, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, Prime Video, Screambox

Writer/Director Peter Hengl’s feature debut combines the discomfort and cringe of awkward family dynamics at the dinner table with Easter holiday folk horror. Fifteen-year-old Simi (Nina Katlein) arrives at her Aunt Claudia’s (Pia Hierzegger) house just before Easter, hoping to get her aunt’s help to lose weight. Aunt Claudia’s strict caloric restrictions become the least of Simi’s problems when Claudia’s family starts to behave strangely. Easter brings the slow-simmering folk horror to a roaring boil. Fraught psychological dread explodes in violence.

Little Witches – Moviesphere+

1996 brought not one but two teen witch horror movies: The Craft and director Jane Simpson’s Little Witches. While the former is the stronger film of the two by far, the latter leans into R-rated occult horror. Teens stuck at their Catholic girls’ school over Easter break get into more trouble than they ever bargained for when they stumble into a buried Satanic temple and conjure up a malevolent entity. It’s a ’90s B-movie, filled with teen coven in-fighting and demonic battles, with a surprising cast that includes Clea Duvall, Zelda Rubinstein, Jack Nance, and Jennifer Rubin.

Pooka Lives! – Disney+, Hulu

The follow-up to the Christmas-centric Pooka! resurrects its creepypasta mascot for Easter. Directed by Alejandro Brugués and scripted by Ryan Copple, the plot sees a group of friends create a viral meme involving Pooka, unwittingly conjuring up the killer mascot for some horror insanity. Social commentary on cancel culture and internet behavior anchors the comedic monster movie that leads Pooka to get even weirder than before. What’s Easter without a killer bunny?

Queens of the Dead – AMC+, Shudder

Tina Romero, the daughter of late horror master George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead), makes her own mark on the zombie genre with Queens of the Dead. A zombie apocalypse breaks out in Brooklyn on the night of a giant warehouse party, where an eclectic group of drag queens, club kids, and frenemies must put aside their drama and use their unique skills to fight against the brain-thirsty, scrolling undead. The horror-comedy takes place over Easter, with the holiday’s familiar iconography providing the perfect backdrop to glam-gore fun.

The post Five Easter Horror Movies to Stream This Holiday Weekend appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

These are the best of the bunch, along with a hidden holiday title not included in their roundup!

A Christmas Carol (2019)

Pick just about any adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Christmas ghost story and it could apply to horror. The BBC’s A Christmas Carol miniseries nudges it further into horror with a foreboding atmosphere, witchcraft, and a slew of menacing ghosts and haunted memories. Guy Pearce stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser visited by a trio of Christmas ghosts to change his selfish ways or else. In a much grimmer telling of the Dickens classic, expect Scrooge to get scared straight in a much more menacing form.

Pooka!

Director Nacho Vigalondo’s holiday entry of Hulu’s Into the Dark anthology series introduced a playful new holiday horror mascot, Pooka. Unemployed actor Wilson Clowes (Nyasha Hatendi) accepts a job to don the furry Pooka suit and portray the holiday’s hottest new toy to earn a buck. It sparks a rapid mental deterioration in the process. Wilson develops two personas: one as himself and another as Pooka. Mischief turns sinister, and a body count ensues. There’s far more than meets the eye to this twisty little tale.

Pooka Lives!

Juan of the Dead director Alejandro Brugués takes the reins on this sequel, putting Pooka at the center of a viral Creepypasta slasher. The eponymous Pooka gets a beefy makeover, and the sequel leans further into dark comedy. It’s bolstered by a cast known for comedic chops, including Rachel Bloom, Wil Wheaton, Jonah Ray, and Alicia Day. Malcolm Barrett stars.

I Trapped the Devil

Writer/director Josh Lobo’s Christmas film is a haunting portrayal of grief and familial guilt. When Steve’s brother and sister-in-law unexpectedly show up at his door to celebrate the holidays, they’re alarmed to discover he has a man locked in his basement. Steve insists he’s captured the devil. Paranoia and psychological terror are carried deftly on the shoulders of its three leads; this is brooding yuletide horror at its best.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

A holiday horror story that hearkens back to Santa’s darker roots, this Finnish fantasy horror follows Pietari, a boy whose belief in Santa is the very thing that will save everyone when an archaeological dig unearths the real thing. Too bad the real thing is the stuff of nightmares. Filthy elves galore, reindeer, gingerbread, and one monstrous version of Santa bring the yuletide fun and chaos. If you’re looking for a charming holiday horror movie that goes big on holiday motifs and iconography, albeit in a twisted way, this pick is for you. 

The Lodge

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s follow-up to Goodnight Mommy carries over the theme of children misbehaving. A family trip to the remote family lodge for Christmas becomes a harrowing voyage into potential madness when soon-to-be stepmom Grace (Riley Keough) is left alone to take care of step-children Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh). When the children seem to be making peace with Grace, a blizzard knocks the power out, trapping them all with Grace’s dark past. Moody and atmospheric, The Lodge is bleak horror. Nothing about this holiday horror movie is merry or bright.

New Year, New You

Sophia Takal’s season one episode of Into the Dark brings tension and violence to New Year’s Eve. A New Year’s Eve party among old friends begins as a benign trip down memory lane but soon turns deadly as old grudges resurface. Suki Waterhouse and Carly Chaikin take cattiness to a new, lethal level as frenemies.

XX

This anthology features four segments of horror, but only the first is holiday-related. Jovanka Vuckovic’s “The Box,” based on Jack Ketchum’s short story of the same name, sees a family stricken by an unexplained illness after taking a peek at a stranger’s present on the train. Christmas is bleak for this family.

The post 8 Holiday Horror Movies to Stream on Hulu This Month! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Dating back to October 2018, Hulu and Blumhouse‘s “Into the Dark” has dedicated itself to unleashing a brand new holiday movie every single month, the anthology series thus far extracting horrors from holidays like Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and Valentine’s Day, as well as more “deep cut” holidays like Daughter’s Day and the Ides of March. If you can think of a holiday off the top of your head, there’s probably an episode of “Into the Dark” to go along with it. In some cases, given how long the show has been running, there are even two different episodes for a single holiday. Like, for example, Christmas.

Both seasons of “Into the Dark” have featured Christmas-themed films, the first of which was Nacho Vigalondo’s Pooka! back in December 2018. In the film, a standout offering from the horror anthology series, a struggling actor takes on a seasonal holiday job as the mascot for the year’s hottest new toy, Pooka. Long story short, the actor’s life quickly descends into madness, and it’s ultimately revealed that the evil Pooka was, well, little more than a figment of a fractured mind’s imagination. Not that “Into the Dark” had ever been concerned with sequels, but Pooka! left virtually no room for any sort of follow-up; though the titular character did become the series’ very first homegrown “horror icon,” spawning a following all his own.

Given the popularity of Pooka, the character has been resurrected for this month’s Alejandro Brugués-directed Pooka Lives!, thus far the only film in the “Into the Dark” project that has a direct tie to a previous film from the series. It’s also the only one to break tradition and come up with its own holiday to tie into, the fictional Pooka Day. Not exactly a sequel to Pooka!, Brugués’ Pooka Lives! exists in a world where the Pooka doll is a mega popular children’s toy, created by a woman who eventually went mad and murdered her husband before setting herself on fire. That spooky backstory paves the way for Pooka becoming a viral internet meme, and what starts out as a Creepypasta-style hoax ultimately becomes very, very real.

Immediately establishing itself as something of a rebuke of internet “cancel culture,” the present-day events of Pooka Lives! begin with the introduction of Derrick (Malcolm Barrett), a writer who has been effectively “cancelled” by an internet mob out to destroy him. Fleeing New York City to escape the vitriol that’s been blowing up his phone and wreaking havoc on his mental state, Derrick returns to his hometown, where he reunites with childhood friends Matt (Jonah Ray) and Molly (Felicia Day). It’s during a late night drinking session, joined by other childhood friends Bennie (Gavin Stenhouse) and Susan (Lyndie Greenwood), that the gang hatches a plan to use the viral nature of internet message boards to create their own Momo-type character. And they find all the inspiration they need in the popular Pooka doll.

Pooka Lives!, scripted by Ryan Copple, is quite smart in the way it plucks the title character out of December 2018’s “Into the Dark” film and works overtime to firmly establish him as a bona fide horror icon for the internet age. No longer merely a children’s toy or a costume, Pooka has now morphed into a Slenderman-like creature with a lore and mythology all his own, and what’s most fun about the concept for Pooka Lives! is that it affords Blumhouse the opportunity to really play with the character and, in many ways, completely reinvent who and what he even is. The general gist of Pooka Lives! is that the power of the internet can literally create monsters if enough people believe in them, and throughout the film Pooka takes different forms based on different descriptions that have gained popularity on a Reddit-like message board. He’s cute and cuddly at first, but by the end of the film Pooka has been skinned of his fur, gaunt and looking more like a Wendigo than a stuffed animal.

It’s an interesting and clever approach to bringing Pooka back to life, and it’s precisely the sort of lore-building that’s going to allow the character to endure for many years to come. It was pretty clear right off the bat that Hulu had their own horror icon on their hands with Pooka, and it’s great to see them really digging in their heels and having some fun with the character. And Pooka Lives!, above all else, is indeed a whole lot of fun. Alejandro Brugués, known for the horror-comedy Juan of the Dead and the standout slasher segment of the anthology film Nightmare Cinema, is an absolute perfect fit for a movie such as this one, and he fully embraces the creepy-yet-whimsical nature of the doll at the center of the story.

It helps that Pooka Lives! has a bit more going for it than mere creature feature shenanigans, though it certainly has a good deal of those too. Copple’s script, laced with fun dialogue that the excellent cast uses to bring genuinely likable characters to life, has a bit of an angry edge to it, calling out the sort of toxic social media culture that continues to destroy lives on an almost daily basis. We eventually learn that Derrick’s career was tanked not because he did anything wrong but merely because he dared to write a book about social media influencers, drawing the ire of a top YouTuber in the process. Once he sics his legion of nearly a million followers onto Derrick, well, our hero pretty much has no choice but to head for the hills – ironically, it’s that same obnoxious influencer who Derrick later uses to spread the #PookaChallenge that ultimately ends up summoning forth a real-life nightmare demon.

The social commentary that Copple weaves into the script gives Pooka Lives! more depth than perhaps the tale even needed, allowing it to pitch perfectly reflect the time period it was made in and released into. The things we say on the internet have consequences, even if it may sometimes seem like we’re all just shouting silliness into the void. Is it so hard to imagine that we have the power to literally create monsters? Are we already doing just that?

If there’s one downside to Pooka Lives! it’s that the budget doesn’t quite allow for Brugués to get as wild as he presumably wanted to. Too much of Pooka’s gruesome handiwork is relegated to off-screen deaths, and the movie suffers from that pesky problem of cutting to the credits right when it’s flirting with the idea of going full-tilt with the concept. The final battle sequence plays out through end credits animation rather than live-action, and it seems pretty clear that the budget just didn’t allow for the movie to see itself through to its own conclusion. And while one could argue that leaving you wanting more isn’t exactly the worst crime a movie can commit, it’s nevertheless a bummer that such a bonkers finale is never actually shown. On the plus side, there’s plenty of room to continue the story in a potential follow-up film. And with a fun group of characters at the center of things, I’d love to see it.

A little bit creepy and a whole lot of fun, Pooka Lives! is further confirmation that there’s at least one thing about “Into the Dark” that will stay on the minds of fans for years to come.

And his name is Pooka.

The post [Review] Hulu’s First Homegrown Horror Icon Returns in the Fun Follow-Up ‘Pooka Lives!’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Set to premiere on April 3rd, “Pooka Lives!” is directed by Juan of the Dead‘s Alejandro Brugués and turns the popular children’s toy into a horrific Creepypasta come to life.

In Pooka Lives!, a group of thirty-something friends from high-school create their own Creepypasta about Pooka for laughs, but are shocked when it becomes so viral on the Internet that it actually manifests more murderous versions of the creature.

The cast includes Felicia Day (Supernatural), Wil Wheaton (Stand By Me), Malcolm Barrett (Timeless), Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Jonah Ray (Mystery Science Theater 3000), Lyndie Greenwood (The Expanse) and Gavin Stenhouse (Black Mirror).

Take the #PookaChallenge and watch the nightmarish trailer premiere below!

The post “Pooka Lives!” in Nightmarish Trailer for “Into the Dark” Sequel [Video] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Pooka will return this April, we’ve learned today, in “Into the Dark: Pooka Lives”!

Alejandro Brugués (Juan of the Dead) directs the film, written by Ryan Copple.

In Pooka Lives, a group of thirty-something friends from high-school create their own Creepypasta about Pooka for laughs, but are shocked when it becomes so viral on the Internet that it actually manifests more murderous versions of the creature.

The cast includes Felicia Day (Supernatural), Wil Wheaton (Stand By Me), Malcolm Barrett (Timeless), Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Jonah Ray (Mystery Science Theater 3000), Lyndie Greenwood (The Expanse) and Gavin Stenhouse (Black Mirror).

Pooka Lives will premiere on April 3rd.

The post Fan Favorite “Into the Dark” Character Will Return This April in Hulu’s ‘Pooka Lives’! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.