Category: Horror Movies
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Review: ‘Penny Lane is Dead’ achieves the perfect nihilistic and cathartic blend
The mid-2000s were steeped in nihilistic destruction. Films such as Eden Lake, Martyrs, Inside, and Wolf Creek knew how to devastate, effectively exhibiting the darkest and grimmest parts of humanity. Mia-kate Russell’s Penny Lane is Dead crushes the soul with the tone and feel of its most notable predecessors. Damaged human beings so often perpetuate…
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FrightFest 2026: ‘Dead Eyes’ peers into your soul
Writer/director Richard E. Williams swings for the fences with his latest feature, Dead Eyes. Out of FrightFest, the first-person POV film lies within the same ambitious realm as Johannes Grenzfurthner’s experimental Solvent. Where Grenzfurthner tinkers with broken static and sound, Williams delights with a slicker approach, with the feeling of a hyper-stylized video game. Dead…
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FrightFest 2026: ‘Starsuckers’ sucks society dry
Writers and directors Brett and Jason Butler slice and dice parasocial relationships with Starsuckers. Out of FrightFest, the Influencer Horror film destroys the barriers between who celebrities are online and who they are in real life. Blood sprays; body parts; and a taut, thorny script sink pierces like daggers to the heart. Especially in recent…
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FrightFest 2026: ‘Blood Secret’ makes a murderer
Out of FrightFest, writer/director Cameron Francis’ Blood Secret walks the line between paranormal and slasher with acrobatic precision. Francis sets the bloody events in a single location over the course of one night. Bold creative decisions fuel the flames of his story of deception, regret, shame, and fear. The filmmaker exercises his artistic muscles with…
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FrightFest 2026: ‘Slay’ slays slashers with a sashay
Horror has always been queer. Since the early cinematic days of filmmaker James Whale, an openly gay man who crafted such queer classics as The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), horror has always been about society othering the LGBTQ+ community. Queer people have often been relegated to being monsters and strange…
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Review: ‘Cruel Hands’ lights a fire to domestic violence
Domestic violence takes shape in Al Kalyk’s Cruel Hands. Visceral anguish seeps from the TV screen and soaks into the viewer’s skin. The film, co-written with Matthew Kalyk, shares a kinship with 2020’s Hunter Hunter, both volatile stories that explode upon impact. In his 1697 play, The Mourning Bride, English author William Congreve once wrote:…
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Review: ‘Together Till the End’ makes a zombie apocalypse feel suffocating
It’s difficult to make a good zombie film these days. Flesh eaters have flooded the market for decades now, and The Walking Dead made them significantly more popular again after a bit of a lull. Writer/director Salvador Medina offers a fascinating character study into what a zombie apocalypse does to humanity, the strain it puts…
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5 Horror Movies That Made Me: Erin รine & Kyle Valle (Autonomous)
AI Horror captures the state of our reality in ways other horror subgenres do not. With their bite-sized horror series, Autonomous, actor Erin รine and director Kyle Valle explore a rideshare cab gone rogue and the real terror of the unknown. In a new 5 Horror Movies That Made Me segment, the pair share their…
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Review: ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,’ a spiritual remake of ‘Sleepaway Camp’
Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 camp slasher Sleepaway Camp still divides audiences. Many queer viewers find the surprise ending quite transphobic, while others read the twist in very different terms. However you cut it, the landmark film speaks to queer audiences very specifically and continues to be a point of heated conversation on- and offline. In their…
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Review: ‘Big Baby’ is the perfect summertime slasher
We are living and breathing a slasher renaissance right now. This year alone, we have Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Pierre Tsigaridis’ Frankie, Maniac Woman, Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death, and Radio Silence’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Now, you can add Spider One’s gloriously fun and bloody, soon-to-be…
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Horror in Frame: Spider One, Krsy Fox, & Brandon Scott (Big Baby)
Spider One’s Big Baby makes a case for one of the year’s best slashers. For slasher fans of the classic ’80s style, the indie film perfectly captures the spirit and splatter of the genre in its heyday. And there’s no shortage of commentary on podcast culture, the moral implications of murder, and the impact of…
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Fantasia 2026: ‘When You Open the Door’ slams shut immediately
Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Eriko Katagiri’s When You Open the Door moves at an agonizingly glacial pace and guns for the feeling, tone, and approach of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, but it fails to move or provoke in any significant way. It’s poetically dreary without the weight of real, affecting lyricism…
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Review: ‘Nightborn’ sprouts folk horror tentacles
Hanna Bergholm’s Nightborn marries the folk horror of Avery Crounse’s Eyes of Fire with the newborn terror of Rosemary’s Baby and the reality-melting of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! While the film feels thematically similar to dozens of films we’ve previously seen, the performances enrich the script, co-written by Bergholm and Ilja Rautsi, with a coarse emotional…
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Fantasia 2026: ‘Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson’
First-time director Nick Taylor brings special effects makeup artist Steve Johnson’s life and work to pulsing vitality in a brand new documentary. Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson peeks behind the curtain for an intimate glimpse into all the ups and downs of the business and Johnson’s personal…
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Fantasia 2026: ‘The Last Footage’ goes absolutely nowhere
Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Arkar Soe Oo’s The Last Footage packs every found footage clichรฉ into its 88-minute runtime and fails to generate any level of fear. Many filmmakers believe found footage films are quite easy to makeโgive your friends a camera and shoot. Easy peasy, right? As we’ve seen with other indie films…
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[…] However, his songs here are as relevant and crushing as ever, as queer non-binary music critic Bee Delores recently…
[…] parental instinct at its core, which Ehrlich argued lands even through the film’s excesses. B-Sides & Badlands described the…