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Cosmic Horror meets found footage in the parasomnia-infused Dream Eater. Documentarian Mallory and her boyfriend Alex retreat to a snowy cabin, celebrating Alex's 30th birthday. There, they hope to relax and get relief from Alex's violent sleepwalking episodes. Unfortunately, fate would have it that something ancient and evil is behind his psychological traumas, and Mallory struggles to make sense of it before it destroys them both.
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Director Cristian Ponce's terrific Brazilian chiller A MOTHER'S EMBRACE weaves an eerie nursing home filled with mysterious residents, something weird winding through water, and trauma from childhood into a suspenseful, mysterious work with a riveting third act.
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The Daemon was a perfect vessel to be unleashed at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. The debut feature from Devino and Yohe taps into all of the key tropes of Cosmic Horror: coping with inner demons, battling psychoses and grief, dreams from the underworld, and elder gods rising from the deep. Add in some wonderfully grotesque body horror and you get a banger of a movie. Plus: we get Azathoth. If you know, you know.
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This is not a dream, this is really happening...Apartment 7A , a prequel to the 1968 horror masterpiece Rosemary's Baby, is GOOD!
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Set firmly in the sub-genre of Inheritance Horror, Voice of Shadows witnesses the ordeals of a young couple who've just inherited a large estate. While it might not be the most innovative thing you've ever seen, it's a decent and gorgeous looking haunted house romp.
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Strange Darling is a masterclass in story narrative, full of breathtaking surprises and harrowing thrills. JT Mollner applied the non-linear storytelling cinema rules from Tarantino and Nolan to the horror genre and succeeded brilliantly. In a year that thus far has struggled to impress horror fans, Strange Darling is destined to be a classic. A fair warning, though: as impressive as this movie is, its use of sexual violence may be severely triggering for some audiences.
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In The Bunker, an alien fleet has arrived on Earth. Dr. Michelle Riley has been assigned to work in a deep underground bunker to find a bio-weapon that will kill the invaders and save Earth's human population. Isolation, alien schemes, and team dysfunction threaten to ruin the project's success. Some nifty effects and visuals offset a script that sometimes drifts into melodrama. The Bunker had its world premiere at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival.
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I'm not the first to write this, and I won't be the last. Alien: Romulus plays like a greatest hits album... in space. It is a return to form, for those pining for the feels of the first two movies. At times, it can feel a bit fan-service heavy, but Fede Alvarez knows a thing or two about how to craft a scary horror film. We are graced with two of the best new characters to be added to the franchise: River and Andy, who you lock into from their first moments on the screen.
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Horror/comedy #ChadGetsTheAxe brings together four social media influencers as they live stream their exploration of a notorious 'murder house'. Does the event bring them all the fame and fortune they crave or is it true that #ChadGetsTheAxe?
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Booger is a body horror/comedy treatise on grief and loss. Anna's best friend Izzy has just died in a tragic bicycle accident. The only remnant from their relationship is Booger, a cat that the two Brooklyn roommates took in. When Booger bites Anna and runs away, Anna becomes the proverbial crazy cat lady in more ways than one. Grief and comedy are a tough pairing, and this story struggles to marry the two competing themes. Booger just played at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival.
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Birthrite is a slow-burning American Folk Horror tale of a pregnant woman who inherits a New England home with a hidden occult legacy. She and her girlfriend struggle to start a family with the specter of a curse hanging over them. Birthrite had its world premiere showing at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival 2024.
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Repeat after me: Nothing good comes from conducting a séance! In Scared to Death (2024), a horror film crew conducts field research by invoking a seance in an abandoned orphanage with a sordid past. Bad idea! This breezy fun film is full of familiar seance tropes and charming characters. Though it doesn't introduce anything groundbreaking to the genre, it is solid entertainment from front to back. Scared to Death had its world premiere at Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale.
