★★★★ of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This is a BRUTAL film with the biggest capital B that there ever was. Revenge with a capital R and blood with another capital B. NOTE: This film is not for the faint of heart!
★★★★ of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
28 Years Later is an exceptional cinematic achievement replete with iPhone footage, goat cams, and lots of drone footage. The problem is Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s non-sequitur approach to the film has audiences ending up feeling like they’ve watched three films instead of one. Each act of the film ends up almost being an entirely different film.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Companion is one big love triangle. Literally and figuratively. It deftly balances a series of human and non-human relationships, while at the same time trying to thread a very delicate needle between comedy, horror, and the sci-fi thriller genres.
★★ out of ★★★★★
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There’s only question that needs to be asked about 2024’s remake of Speak No Evil. Why?
★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This is the first horror film in 2025 that you can safely skip. To be clear, it’s a good looking production with a great soundtrack, but The Wolf Man is one of the poorest excuses for a werewolf you’ll ever lay your eyes on.
As we've already opined aplenty, 2024 was something of a bell curve year. Lots of horror films fell right in the middle. Not too hot and not too cold. Just moderate chills with a hint of terror.
Turns out the graphic designers and the studios were largely on the same trajectory with with their fav' hype tool -- the HORROR MOVIE POSTER! Some good, some bad, but a whole lot of them parked smack-dab in the middle of the spooky bell curve.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
This one’s a real puzzler. On the one hand it’s a full-on gross-out B-movie, with questionable acting and an equally questionable plot. On the other hand Terrifier 3 is a real achievement. The gore is certainly like nothing you’ve ever seen before — unless you already watched Terrifier 1 and 2 -- and the mean-spirited depravity is something to behold. This is a film that would have Herschell Gordon Lewis, Tom Savini, and Lucio Fulci hunched over a stain-soaked toilet.
If "meh" was a year...it'd be 2024. Post pandemic, political strife, the lingering effects of the writer and director's strikes, the rise of AI, and the violation of the most sacrosanct American icon -- Mickey Mouse.
While there was a lot of great genre content being churned out in 2024, the highs weren't really high and the lows weren't terrible low. This year sat right in the middle of a rather tepid bell curve.
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Be. Careful. What. You. Wish. For. The most quaint and playful of all the horror tropes is on full display in this masterful piece of body horror. Not your run of the mill body horror either. This is capital “B” body horror that would even make David Cronenberg blush.
★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
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While there’s a surprising lack of Rottweilers, The First Omen is chock full of reproductive rights, secularism, mental health, religious repression, and a gang of scares — most of them well deserved. Most importantly, The First Omen is a GREAT horror film that will make even the most hardened horror heart thump.
★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Is it a thriller? A sci-fi abomination? A psychedelic mishmash? A video game? An affront to Toho’s original vision? A horror film? Seriously, what the hell is this? Truth be told, it’s really of all these things crammed together in a gargantuan hodgepodge of CGI lunacy. Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a wildly chaotic film with an equally wild plot that makes little to no sense. Scratch that…no sense.
As we’ve said before, pulling off a horror comedy is one of the most precarious feats a director can attempt. The feat is made all the more difficult when it’s done on a micro-budget with limited to no resources. Easter Bloody Easter manages to walk this tight rope with aplomb, while pulling in one of the coolest Black Sabbath horror references since the semi-eponymous Black Sabbath in 1963.
Easter Bloody Easter is the new horror film from first time director, Diane Foster.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
As we’ve said before, pulling off a horror comedy is one of the most precarious feats a director can attempt. The feat is made all the more difficult when it’s done on a micro-budget with limited to no resources. Easter Bloody Easter manages to walk this tight rope with aplomb, while pulling in one of the coolest Black Sabbath horror references since the semi-eponymous Black Sabbath in 1963.
"Dario Argento: Panico" delves into the enigmatic world of horror maestro Dario Argento, chronicling his influence on the genre. While shedding light on Argento's creative process and personal influences, the documentary overlooks pivotal aspects like his iconic soundtracks and collaboration with George Romero. The film explores the intricate duality of Argento's artistic vision and personal intricacies.
One of our favorite annual happenings! Picking the BEST horror movie posters of the year. It’s fair to say that graphic design in 2023 came in like a little sheep, but left as a full-blown lion. From the outrageous and grotesque to the sublime and beautiful, designers really offered some interesting stuff in 2023.
It was the best of years and the worst of years. Really, 2023 contained some of the best horror films of ALL time, but it also contained a lot of duds. Not just crappy little indy films that couldn’t scratch to nickels together, but the big boys laid down garbage all over the cinema interstate.
We may see some incredible holdover fare early in the year, followed by a dusty lull. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see some great horror films back on the scene in late 2024. Until then, here are…the Best Horror Films of 2023
With all signs pointing to the end of times, where does one started with all this demonic madness? Most importantly, which of the Damien dalliances are the creepiest and which of the films in the Omen franchise is among the very best?
Don’t worry horror fans, the Scariest Things Podcast has you covered! Without further ado, here’s the entire Omen franchise ranked, from the worst to the best!
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Films like Scream and its ilk are self-referential in a coy way that employ a major wink of the eye towards the audience. They’re cute and bashful about their oblique references to horror films of the 1970s and 80s. When a film names itself Bad CGI Gator it’s anything but coy, and instead opts for brash aesthetic that screams “I DON’T REALLY CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE TITLE OF MY FILM!”
Going back to where it all started, director Lorenzo P. Adams takes some very fun liberties and a poke a the Michael Myers mythos. Make no mistake Halloween '63 is not a comedy, but a bone chilling black and white adaptation of the night where it all began.
Can there ever be too much gore? Too many guts? Too much depravity? Rest assured Damien Leone and crew will be back to answer these questions and take us on another tortured-filled adventure with Art the Clown.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
An exceptionally silly film that breathes some new life into a rather (un)dead horror sub-genre — zombies. As We Know It takes a couple interesting pokes at horror comedy, zombies, and the process of getting to know people that you might really hate.
While last year’s the Black Phone brought vans fully back into our collective psyche’s focus, vans and their association to serial killers have been around forever. Sometimes the fears are warranted and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the fears are a highly inflated statistical figment of our imagination and sometimes they’re rooted firmly in…the truth.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
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You know the story. You’ve got the gist of the Catholic Church’s involvement in exorcisms. Little kids probably freak you out. You either terrified of demonic possession or you’re not. Point is, you probably have a well-defined idea of what the Exorcist: Believer is going offer.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
If a film title contains the word “haunting” does that automatically qualify it as a horror film? Horror has a deep and weird history with “The Haunting of…” films. Haunting in Connecticut, The Enfield Haunting, Haunting of Bly Manor, Haunting of Hill House, the Haunting of Julia, and even the Haunting of Sharon Tate. So many hauntings.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
What’s the scariest thing you can include in a horror film? Why the unknown and the unfamiliar, of course. What’s more unknown and unfamiliar than the darkest musical art form, Black Metal? Well, really nothing. That is as scary as music gets.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
A quiet and ethereal film about and equally quiet and ethereal creature. The Wendigo may be the most ill-defined creature in all of horror. Not just because the Wendigo pulls directly from many different tales of Native American lore, but the fact that the perfect Wendigo film has yet to be made. Antlers from 2021 is close, but that’s a whole other story.
★★ out of ★★★★★
Bad Things actually has some really good things going for it. Not all these things are bad. Bad Things also has one of the coolest and most well preserved 1970/80s remote travel lodge hotels. The location is perfectly roiled in soiled dreams, loneliness, and unmet expectations. The hotel is just drenched in melancholy. But sadly, that’s Bad Things biggest problem — not the melancholy, but the fact that they wasted this incredible set.
It's been 16 long years, but the wait is over! Eli Roth teased us with some exceptional grindhouse glee in 2007 when he cobbled together a faux trailer for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
We know them. We love them. They’re little rapscallions, religious zealots, and outcasts. But that’s why we love them! That said, the question is not whether we love them, but rather do we need to go back to the exact same Children of the Corn story 11 times. Really, it’s been 11 times and we’re not even counting the TV series.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
In the latest installment to the cringe-inducing horror sub-genre, Home Invasion Horror, we get a fair-to-midland entry with a little heart. Think Funny Games, but less terror, suspense, and sadism. Just some light torture and some fun cameos.