181 Best Releases From the Genre Horror (Page 4)

It’s Christmas time, and a man at the breaking point finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. But he isn’t retired cop John McClane this time. Instead, it’s Saint Nick with a sledgehammer he’d like to swing into your bowl full of jelly. The premise of Violent Night is simple (Die Hard but with Santa), and the filmmakers mostly pull off the kill-fest thanks to some game performers and one inspired sequence.   Continue Reading →

Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, Nanny is a story about the American Dream turned gothic nightmare. It’s a film whose horror lies in a deep-rooted sense of unease. It’s the feeling in your gut that something is wrong, even when you can’t name exactly what. Worse yet, knowing this creeping dread has nothing to do with everything so obviously wrong around you. It’s something else, something you can only assume (or fear) is so much worse than you imagine. Continue Reading →

When we talk about thankless jobs, we think teacher, or nurse, jobs that society cannot function without, but which are consistently undervalued and unappreciated. But what about the humble parole officer? They get it from both sides, in which they’re treated with hostility by the clients they’re tasked with monitoring, and suspicion from polite society who believes they’re at least partially responsible for whatever said clients do going forward. If the practical challenges of being a parole officer weren’t hard enough, sometimes they’re faced with the supernatural as well, as seen in Lynne Davison’s Mandrake, which efficiently checks off all the folk horror boxes, but not much else. Continue Reading →

If Satan’s Slaves: Communion wants to be a local PSA for better management of high-rises instead of a second wringer for the Suwono family to go through, it can. There’s an elevator in the film’s setting that is home to a horrific banquet of images and sounds. There are happenings inside, outside of, and even underneath it that will get the one in your building more regular inspections and stricter compliance with the “maximum capacity” notice. Per the film, poorly maintained and overloaded lifts won’t just be an eventual Final Destination moment, it’s also how hell gets to be on Earth. Continue Reading →

Remember when conspiracy theories used to be fun? Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word, but entertaining? Once, they were limited to harmless weirdos who would gladly give a presentation on chemtrails or how many different assassins were actually at Dealey Plaza when JFK passed by, but could also at least maintain some veneer of normalcy. Then the internet made it easier for people to spend most (instead of just some) of their time discussing their favorite conspiracies, without anyone telling them that they were getting obsessed, or that what they were saying sounded insane. And then, of course, QAnon turned conspiracy theories into a kind of religion, one in which its followers were willing to kill to prove their belief. It stopped being entertaining a long time ago, and now, like a lot of things about the world in its current state, it’s just bleak and terrifying. Continue Reading →

The modern age of sequels, spin-offs, and all other franchise extensions has amplified complaints about how derivative follow-ups can be. As a result, sequels have garnered a bad reputation, and it’s not unearned.  Continue Reading →

For the brave trick-or-treaters who venture to the front door of the old abandoned MCU Manor, a spooky treat awaits. All courtesy of one of Marvel’s more obscure characters—Werewolf by Night. Continue Reading →

Where do we even begin? Continue Reading →

First things first: Hellraiser (2022) doesn’t need to be Hellraiser (1987). The goal of a remake/reboot/what-have-you should be to put a unique sheen on the material, to make it one's own, not a carbon copy of what’s already been done. That being said…it’s hard not to watch David Bruckner’s new Hellraiser without wishing just a little bit for what used to be.  Continue Reading →

Stephen King is best known for his massive novels that require weight training just to hold. Entire forest ecosystems have been destroyed so we can have The Stand on our bookshelves. These epic tales are his bread and butter, but if you want to get a pure distillation of what makes King a gifted horror writer and storyteller, check out his short story collections. They provide the strong, grounded characters facing terrifying circumstances that he’s famous for in his longer novels, but in a digestible format. He can be hit or miss (even the best writers may have stinkers when they write an astonishing ten pages a day like King) but if one short story is garbage, chances are the next one will be a fun time.   Continue Reading →

Offering classics to slashers to B-horror to genuine obscurities, the best streaming channel you're not watching has something for everyone this Halloween season. In the midst of trying to keep up with the endless #content available via streaming, I tend to forget that I have an account with the Criterion Channel, a shameful oversight considering what a goldmine of classic, foreign, and arthouse cinema it offers. It's not too shabby in the horror department either, and this October, it's offering a real treat, the "'80s Horror" collection, profiling what many fans consider the best decade for the genre. Featuring a selection of the well-known, the long forgotten, and the newly rediscovered, there's something for both gorehounds and scaredy-cats alike. Since everything the collection offers is at least watchable, the ranking ranges from "Must Watch" to "Should Watch" to "Watch If You Get a Chance." Consider your entire month sorted. Continue Reading →

James Nguyen hammers down the end of his bad-movie trilogy with a true stinker of birdemic proportions... and not in a fun way. (This review is part of our coverage of Fantastic Fest 2022.) With its stilted acting, incompetent screenplay and direction, and special effects that looked like someone puttering around with After Effects for the very first time, James Nguyen’s "ecological horror" film Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) became a cult favorite among bad film fanatics, especially latecomers to the hoopla surrounding The Room looking for something they could claim as their own. Continue Reading →

Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs Fixation, an uneven but fascinating psychological drama about a woman who undergoes an unorthodox version of therapy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival) Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Fixation is the kind of film that seems to have been created specifically to play in the late-night slots at film festivals. It's a dark and hallucinatory mix of Pink Floyd: The Wall, Synecdoche, New York and a offering from the Lifetime network, and while I can't exactly say I completely liked it (or could even pass a quiz regarding its particulars), it's presented with enough energy and daring that it's easy to overlook that it doesn’t quite come together in the end. Continue Reading →

It's safe to say that no one necessarily asked for a sequel to Ti West's X, especially six mere months after its release. Not because it was bad, mind you; it was actually quite good, a nifty throwback to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a hefty soupcon of Debbie Does Dallas tossed in the mix. But its tale of a ragtag amateur-porn crew besieged by a murderous old country crone envious of their youthful beauty and raging libidos hardly cried out for a followup. Yet here we are with Pearl, a prequel that dabbles in decidedly different genre homages but might just be the superior slasher of the two. Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

It can be hard to write about films sometimes. No mere words, no matter how witty, insightful, or elegant, can truly capture the experience of watching the most surprising ones. Except for movies like Zach Cregger's (The Whitest Kids U'Know) new horror/thriller, Barbarian, which I can encapsulate perfectly with a few phrases: Continue Reading →

The new horror film The Invitation opts to take a cue from Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” and hit the ground running. The very first scene of Jessica M. Thompson’s latest directorial effort depicts a woman deciding to escape a lavish home by way of suicide. With the help of a piano string and a medium-sized statue, she’s soon a corpse dangling in the living room of this mansion. Accompanied by pronounced cues on Dara Taylor’s score and claps of thunder, this demise is a striking way to kick off a movie. It’s also, unfortunately, emblematic of a critical narrative misstep from which The Invitation never quite recovers.  Continue Reading →

We’re currently in the middle of a horror renaissance, which makes it easier to forget what a bleak time the 00s were for fans of the genre. A dull selection of sequels, reboots and limp, watered down remakes of J-horror, with only a blessed few exceptions it seemed to be heading towards the same “death by ubiquitousness” as musicals had years earlier. Then, in 2009, horror was given a bizarre little jolt with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, which starts off as a standard killer kid movie, a la The Bad Seed or The Good Son, then goes gloriously off the rails, with a twist that left audiences not just surprised, but shouting “What? What? What?” at the screen.  Continue Reading →

Like many movies about people who use their phones and social media in excess, each viewer's individual enjoyment of director Halina Reijn's Bodies, Bodies, Bodies may hinge on their tolerance for Twitter jargon. Newcomer Sarah DeLappe's horror comedy screenplay is sharp and funny when it's not bogged down by an excess of 2020s slang. The heavy use of internet-speak isn't a problem for the first two acts. By the third act, though, it feels glaring.  Continue Reading →

It’s fascinating to watch a movie that could have been made any time within the past 30 years. That’s not the same thing as “timeless,” I’m talking about a movie that just feels like the script lingered in development hell for possibly decades before finally getting made, with only the slightest bit of tweaking to bring it up to date. Netflix’s new horror-comedy Day Shift could have been made in 1996, 2005 or 2012, and the only thing that would need to be changed is the cell phone technology. Like a lot of Netflix’s original content, it’s polished, yet dull, with a budget that doesn’t explain how forgettable it is. Continue Reading →

Perhaps out of fear that he will miss 100 percent of the shots he doesn’t take, Carter director Jung Byung-gil has compiled 100 shots into a single take—proverbially speaking. In the stuntman-turned-filmmaker’s latest—his first for Netflix and to feature English—every setpiece links into another; you can count on the passenger plane shootout to link up with the pig truck chase later on, and so it goes. As long as Jung scores each of these opportunities, it doesn’t matter if the bridging between moments will be smooth or rocky. Continue Reading →