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.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
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Frogman injects some fresh air into the somewhat stale shaky cam horror sub-genre. A trio of friends go in search of the elusive cryptid, the Frogman of Loveland Colorado, and manage to uncover something sinister. Well drawn characters and properly edited shaky cam standards combine for one of the best found footage films in years.
★★.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.
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 ★★★★★
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.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
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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 ★★★★★
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It’s not a sharksploitation film unless someone yells “get out of the water!"
★★★ out of ★★★★★
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As uber-auteur Stanley Kubrick once famously opined “Everything has already been done. Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.” Christmas horror has been done. Space alien zombies have been done. Christmas and zombies have been done. Have they been done together under the banner of the worst holiday there is? May be not.
★★★ 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.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
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Make no mistake, 2023’s Enys Men will fall into the annals of polemic filmmaking. Much like its recent brethren, Skinamarink, this film will have people talking, shouting, and even throwing a couple haymakers. Truly a "love it or hate it" outing at the movies.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
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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 ★★★★★
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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 ★★★★★
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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.
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.
★★★★ 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 ★★★★★
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.
★★.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 ★★★★★
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Imagine if Terrance Malik directed a horror film. This isn’t the start of a bad joke with an equally bad punchline. Would it have gore? Chainsaws? Over the top supernatural happenings? Or would it be a somber and contemplative affair? If you know the films of Terrance Malik then you know the answer.
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.
★★ out of ★★★★★
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This is a film that is definitely on the right side of history. It also contains a sharp and laser-focused social commentary around LGBTQ+ justice. T Blockers also puts forth a poignant and editorialized storyline that sadly is undone by a wild lack of focus. Even at an hour and 14 minute run time, and with a varied series of storylines, the film still felt long.
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.
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 ★★★★★
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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 ★★★★★
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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 ★★★★★
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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.