Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Blackout is a fair-to-middling werewolf movie. With much respect to horror Godfather Larry Fessenden, this movie struggles to get out of second gear. The werewolf makeup is effective, and there are some gory scares, but weak supporting characters and excessive exposition bogs down this effort.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
The Letter sumptuously recreates the era of H.P. Lovecraft's 1930's New England. This languidly paced mystery feels like a Call of Cthulhu adventure, set in an elaborate mansion, and stocked with scheming characters with old grudges. This little indie film has big aspirations and ambitions but could have used a little streamlining. Prepare yourselves for lots of exposition and dark musings in period dialogue, while appreciating the fine details and rich textures.
The Horror Community lost a Titan on Friday. Tony Todd, The Candyman, passed away at age 69 from complications of a lingering illness. He was the most iconic black character horror actor in history. The gravelly-voiced performer boasted over 256 IMdB acting credits to his name, but he will be remembered mostly for his horror roles that he was in from 1986 up to this day. The Scariest Things presents a review of his most iconic roles.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Things Will Be Different mashes together three tropes that require finesse and careful mechanics. The film fuses a bank heist, a time paradox, and a "don't cheat fate" theme, creating an intricate and complex plot. The story strings together an array of plot threads that could throw time out of balance. It elegantly presents its plot, but inevitably it challenges the audience to keep pace with the story.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire documents a string of unsolved grisly murders in California's Inland Empire. This faux documentary is at once both sensational and plausible, treated as a real account of a heinous cosmically influenced serial killing spree. This film is hugely disturbing and is coated with a thick layer of bloody possible sauce.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
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.
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Nanny is a gripping immigrant tale oozing with drama but light on horror. Anna Diop conveys the trauma of a mother struggling with the separation from her child, where supernatural events act as ominous harbingers.
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
A Quiet Place: Day One scales up the franchise experience in a big way, but it still delivers a wonderfully intimate story. Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn make for an improbable but appealing pair that radiates empathy amongst the chaos of an alien invasion apocalypse.
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
In Ghost Game, a trio of mischief-makers stakes out an old manor with a dark legend surrounding it. Their goal: stay in the house without the new residents discovering them. Internal relationship conflicts, a disturbed resident family, and the potential of a supernatural haunt upend their Ghost Game efforts. A solid cat-and-mouse thriller with fun haunted house tropes propels this film, which was the centerpiece of the Portland Horror Film Festival.