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.
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 ★★★★★
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 ★★★★★
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.
What do we now know? Well, we now know we have a trailer and we have three pretty decent, if not a little odd, posters. The other thing we know is that Pazuzu is back to inhabit the bodies of not one, but two little girls. Take that Regan MacNeil!
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Do weird-looking albino kids give you the chills? What about oddball kids that have been indoctrinated into a religious fervor? What about strange kids set in a 1980s Giallo-esque Spanish village? Well, Tin and Tina has all this and more.
The Scariest Things Podcast had the honor of sitting down with one of the most inventive voices in horror today, Bomani J. Story, to talk about his new film the Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. The film had its premiere at SXSW and the Scariest Things Podcast was there to take it all in!
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
Part hucksterism. Part faux science. Part Unsolved Mysteries. All exploitation. This film is a sad commentary on many levels, but it’s also a fascinating peek into horror history that’s impossible to turn away from.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🚫 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
If you know horror you know Satan. You might even say horror and Satan are best pals. They’ve been hanging around for a long time always pushing boundaries and always trying something cheeky and new.
Sometimes this friendship is on the down-low and sometimes Satan gets a pinch uppity and decides to out the entire relationship. Or at least his (or her) relationship to the general public. When that happens it’s a messy and ugly affair.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and violence.
A hundred years on we’ve been blessed and not-so-blessed with hundreds, or maybe thousands or Frankenstein-related films. Remakes, reboots, re-imaginations, reworking of the Mary Shelley source material, and even re-re-working of Shelley’s book. The Frankenstein mythos has comfortable slipped into our collective horror zeitgeist.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild comedic gore.
Midway through Only the Good Survive the local sheriff and Dennis Miller impersonator (Frederick Weller) is interrogating young Brea Dunlee (Sidney Flanigan) about her involvement in a string of ritualistic murders and asks “…is this a comedy or a horror?” While the film chugs along like an Edgar Wright-inspired effort, this very sentiment is really the film’s problem. It wants to be both. Unfortunately, juggling these two juxtaposed art forms is a tricky bit of business that is almost never accomplished.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for lots of gore.
Nothing’s better when a small indy production punches WAY above its weight class — especially in the visual effects department. Sometimes the effort is a miserable failure and sometimes, yes sometimes, its indy deficiencies don’t even show for a minute.
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
Since Netflix recently teased out a new Mike Flanagan series based upon Edgar Allen Poe’s haunting short story, the Fall of the House of the Usher, we decided it was high time to jump in the way-back machine and give its 1960 forefather a discerning look. Turns out Flanagan may be on to something by following this chilling story.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Sleazy, greasy, grimy, grindhouse fare. It’s all here. Right down to a chilling and rather off-putting performance by one of the more odd actors to ever grace a horror film, Klaus Kinski. Hot on the heels of one of the all-time great horror performances in 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, Kinski sleazes his way throughout SCHIZOID!
SO. MANY. GREAT. HORROR. FILMS. THIS. YEAR! Really. Our cups runneth over with gallons of blood, guts, and scares. Interestingly, 2022 also had some really awful films. Truly awful.
But we're not here to talk about crappy films you don't want to see. Au contraire. We're here to tell YOU about the films that you'll be gabbing about well in to 2024 -- and beyond.
★★.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.
★★★★ 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.
★★.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.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for screaming and addiction recovery.
Skinamarink with real scares! Found footage follies! The year of Australian horror! Puzzle Box is the complete horror spook show!
If you haven’t been paying attention 2023 really is the year of Australian horror.
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
It’s not a sharksploitation film unless someone yells “get out of the water!"
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Influencer is the newest, hottest, and most hyped term of the last several years. Meaning many things to many people, including those that self-identify as influencers. For the rest of us it’s met with derision, disgust, and discounted as a cynical millennial side-hustle. All these things, and more, are modern truisms that we've all unwittingly had to learn about.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Hard to believe that a 25-page story could be turned into a feature length film, but it has! The Boogeyman, originally released in 1978, was a taut and rather dark affair that explored the most corrupt fears in parenting. Fast forward 45 years and the Boogeyman is back as a full-on fright-fest.
Do you know everything there is to know about the Boston Strangler? Really?!?! The Boston Strangler is an incredibly complicated tapestry of lies, mistruths, deception, greed, murder, and avarice. Using beautiful early 1960s Boston as its backdrop, this story is the pure embodiment of truth always being weirder than fiction.
To celebrate this year’s most recent take on the Boston Strangler, aptly titled the Boston Strangler, the Scariest Things went back and looked at each and every film adaptation of the Boston Strangler story and ranked ‘em all!
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸for some gnarly gore, eye gouging, and repeated head wounds.
Each and every year there’s THAT horror film that shakes things up. Hits the festival circuit and creates tidal wave-sized buzz. Sometimes it’s deserved and sometimes it’s not. In the case of 2023’s festival darling Talk to Me, the buzz is profoundly deserved.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore.
If you’ve even run across Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, or Dinah Shore you’ll know that they all roiled in a very specific talk show space in the 1970s. Talk shows were smarmy, boozy, and informal affairs that gave audiences time each day to let their hair down and forget about the doldrums of the Viet Nam War and the crushing presence of socio-economic injustice in America.
These talk shows were also incredibly competitive. Johnny Carson was king, but there was a lot of room under him to vie for advertisers and Neilson ratings. Late Night with the Devil follows that exact story line, by exploring frustrated talk show host Jack Delroy played pitch perfectly by David Dastmalchian.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and a frayed family.
Weird babysitter. Weird kid. Weird parents. A deeply weird connection to regular usage of LSD. And to top it off a weird poster. Spoonful of Sugar definitely traffics in the world of weird. Not Skinamarink weird mind you, but still firmly in the weird camp.
★ out of ★★★★★
Because of money grubbing, legal hassling, and Hollywood head-butting, we haven’t seen a Friday the 13th film since 2009. Word on the street is that the 1980 Friday the 13th originator Sean Cunningham is BACK. Just like Jason never died!!! He’s teaming up with the writer and the director from a new horror flick, the Night Driver, and they’re making a reboot/sequel/requel happen.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
HP Lovecraft dug writing short stories. Edgar Allen Poe did too. Even the great Stephen King has been known to clack out a short story or two (hundred). Most horror writers have the keen ability to take a simple concept and extemporarily expound the idea in fairly concise and confined was. Sometimes this works and sometimes there’s a lot of questions begged and a lot more exposition that’s required.
In 2020, at the height of the global pandemic, the braintrust over at Morgan Creek Entertainment, announced — with very minimal fanfare, that they’d be taking a crack at one of the most vaunted franchises of all time — The Exorcist.
To get the Scariest Things Podcast ready for 2023, and potentially the most polemic film in years, we sat down and poured through the entire EXORCIST universe. Some brilliant, some soup-soaked, some awfully-awful, and some filled with the most horrifying images ever put to film.
Merry Christmas from the Scariest Things Podcast!!! This year we’re giving you the gift that no one asked for, ever expected, and certainly one that no one ever put on their Christmas wishlist. It’s free and it’s here waiting for you. Totally unwrapped and ready to go…
We give you all the Silent Night Deadly Night films ranked! And…you’re welcome.