Booger (2024) Review: Popcorn Frights Film Festival

★★.5 out of ★★★★★

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.

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Birthrite (2024) Review: Popcorn Frights Film Festival

★★★.5 out of ★★★★★

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.

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Scared to Death (2024) Review: Popcorn Frights F.F.

★★★.5 out of ★★★★★

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.

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Popcorn Frights Announces Second Wave of Programming for Hybrid Festival

Popcorn Frights Second Wave is here! Highlights include the inaugural Golden Skull Award presented to Horror Legend Tony Todd at a Special Presentation of CANDYMAN; an “Up All Night with Freddy” Closing Night marathon featuring all seven ELM STREET films presented overnight; and the unveiling of the Festival’s Virtual Program premiering 20 feature films
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Rippy from The Red

Trailer Alert! THE RED

Bouncing into theaters (in Australia and New Zealand) just in time for Halloween, we've got Rippy the giant zombie kangaroo!
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Wooden Man in Oddity

Oddity Interview with Director Damian McCarthy

Oddity is the scariest horror movie of 2024. It crushed the film festival circuit, drawing acclaim at SXSW, Overlook, BiFan, and Fantasia Fest. The director, Damian McCarthy, took some time to talk with The Scariest Things to tell us about how he crafted the surprise horror hit of the year.
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Nanny (2022) Review

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

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.

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Popcorn Frights Announces First Wave of Programming with FREE in-theater admission! WOW!

Highlights include the World Premiere of BEEZEL as well as STRANGE DARLING starring Kyle Gallner on Opening Night; 11 feature film World Premieres including SCARED TO DEATH starring Lin Shaye; a 35th Anniversary Presentation of SOCIETY and the First Showing of the “Lost First Cut” of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 with director Brian Yuzna; a Right “2” Remain Silent Double-Bill of MANIAC COP 2 and PSYCHO COP RETURNS with William Lustig and Adam Rifkin; a 25th Anniversary Presentation of Martin Scorsese’s BRINGING OUT THE DEAD; and a Special Presentation of IFC Films’ SKINCARE starring Elizabeth Banks.
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The 2024 Thingy Awards: Podcast Episode 185

The 2024 Thingy Awards! It is time for the Mid-Year Scariest Things grand celebration: Once again, we surveyed and received votes from our favorite fans and industry contacts to determine the best horror movies of last year. If there were a couple of themes from last year: Possession and Australia. We got a lot of both in 2023, and it was GOOD. It was one of the best years for horror in the past ten years!
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MaXXXine (2024) Review

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Ti West gives audiences the film they deserve

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Nosferatu (2024) Trailer Alert

Nosferatu is getting a proper big-time treatment in 2024. If you are going to make a period-piece horror film, there is no better person to put in charge than Robert Eggars. The trailer has just dropped, and the film will be released on Christmas 2024. Early Impression? It looks AMAZING.
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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) Review

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

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.

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Longlegs (2024) Promo Posters and Trailer Alert

Already hailed as the scariest movie of 2024, the much anticipated Longlegs will be released theatrically on July 12. The Neon marketing push is going all-out in preparation for the film, including four startling posters and a banger of a trailer. The trailer spoils nothing but sets an ominous tone for what will come.
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Ghost Game (2024) Review: Portland Horror Film Festival

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

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.

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Joseph’s Review: The Moor

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

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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Joseph’s Review: The Crazy Family

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

Intensity 🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

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 (2024) Review: The Portland Horror Film Festival

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

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? Review (2024): Portland Horror Film Festival

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸, with sexual assault trigger warnings.

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 (2024) Review: Portland Horror Film Festival

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

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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