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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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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.
The Dead Thing is a slick, good looking film, but the story is a dull affair despite attempts at going for something sexy.
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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.
5 Deaths in the Ring, that is the Thing!
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Ti West gives audiences the film they deserve
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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.
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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.
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Combining folk horror with a chilling series of child murders based on actual crimes, director Chris Cronin’s debut feature The Moor makes for a truly unsettling experience.
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Madcap mayhem abounds in The Crazy Family, director Sogo Ishii’s punk-spirited dark satire on Japanese society in the early 1980s.
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The Complex Forms is a master achievement in visual design. Everything, from the stunning black-and-white cinematography to the conceptual creature designs to the stark splendor of the sets and the pulsing orchestral score, pushes the envelope for an independent film budget. The story, however, though narratively simple, is very difficult to digest in one sitting. Multiple viewings may be required to understand the plot. And even then, you may be left scratching your head in confusion.
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DID I?, the winner of the Portland Horror Film Festival's Goule D'Or (Best Feature in Festival) Award, takes an honest approach to the cruelty and ramifications of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The psychological thriller invests its time with Genevieve, a bookish junior editor at a publishing company who struggles with her alter ego, Stevie, who is a bit of a wild child. Her traumas are buried deep, and it puts several new wrinkles into the good/evil dichotomy that films that used what used to be called multiple personality disorder under the microscope.
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In the Name of God (Gudstjänst) explores how the pressure of grief can convince even the most pious among us to do horrible things. Theodor is a young priest who succumbs to a "righteous" Faustian deal, where he murders the wicked in exchange for healing gifts. It is a slippery slope that could doom his family and his priesthood. At what cost are miracles?
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The Invisible Raptor is a crowd-pleaser, plain and simple. This spoof of Jurassic Park flips the script on the behemoth tentpole franchise by not trying to do digital dinosaurs at all. Instead, The team behind The Invisible Raptor did the monster movie without the monster, and it worked brilliantly. This is a meta-movie for the Easter Egg enthusiasts, but be warned, there is so much blood and shit in this movie that it isn't for the squeamish or the kiddos! (Though the twelve-year-old me would LOVE this movie.)
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In the techno thriller Red Rooms, a model obssesses over a sensational murder trial, and searches for clues about the killer on the dark web. This French Canadian film explores society's voracious and voyeuristic desire for the darkest of true crime details, and the lengths some will go to find out the juicy, nasty details.
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The sexy body horror thriller film Kill Your Lover manifests a literal toxic relationship between a mismatched British couple who let things go a bit too far. This feature from The Overlook Film Festival will make you squirm uncomfortably. Come for the steamy sex scenes, then stay for the awkwardly painful dissolution of a partnership in body-altering collapse.
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The Canadian slasher film, In a Violent Nature, roared out of the gates with much buzz from The Sundance Film Festival and was bolstered by a menacing trailer. It has a great-looking monster, and a few spectacularly gory kills will make this movie pop and evoke fond old memories. The advance word on this movie was that it reinvented the slasher film. It's different, to be sure. The odd pacing, however, cannot be ignored, and the movie plods along with its villain for far too much of the movie. It felt like a shorter film padded to make a feature-length time. High highs. Low lows.
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A bloodied woman on the run begins a frantic chase in John Rosman's debut thriller, New Life. This film holds its cards tight for half the movie, allowing the major implications of the plot lines to simmer before revealing the root causes of the pursuit, like a bomb drop. New Life transitions from political thriller to body horror in a dramatic shift that moved me from curious to engrossed.
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Arachnophobes beware! Infested (Vermines, En français) is the pinnacle of spider horror. It is also an expertly done class struggle diatribe, using a scrappy group of young survivors of the French underclass pitted against both an infestation of fast-breeding and fast-growing venomous spiders and the law enforcement that should be protecting them.
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Sasha is a young vampire who cannot develop her fangs because she has empathy for her potential victims and refuses to kill. Her family is concerned that this jeopardizes the family lineage and legacy and urges her to make her first kill. She meets Paul, a boy with suicidal wishes, and considers him as her first kill and a humane one. This movie does all the little things right and, consequentially, nails the big things.