Horror Movies
The Dark and the Wicked Is 2020: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Two siblings venture out to their remote family farm, where their father is slowly dying and their mother is unraveling from grief. Something else is happening, though. There’s a darkness behind the sorrow, an evil slowly poisoning the soil… Something Wicked This Way Comes: Grief is on the mind. Thanks to our ensuing pandemic — and really, the collateral damage of our current administration — we’re a populace poisoned with misery. So much so that it’s become an appendage of our day-to-day, something we’ve had to deal with to check in and check out without losing our minds. In a timely twist of fate, grief has also informed some of this year’s most affecting films, be it Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods or Natalie Erika Jame...
Brea Grant’s Lucky Gets Blunt on the Ways We Fail Women: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: On the surface, Lucky is a quirky slasher with an intriguing premise. May (Brea Grant) is attacked night after night by a masked man and no one in her life seems willing or able to help. The elevator pitch for this film must have been relatively simple: “What if you were being attacked and no one cared.” Yet hidden in this premise is a depressing truth and an unflinching look at the experience of dealing with trauma as a woman in America. Grant, who also wrote the script, goes all in on the metaphor, following it long past its logical fallacies to deliver a message that has been coded and hidden for far too long. Lucky may be heavy-handed, but by breaking the boundaries of believability, director Natasha Kermani deliver...
10 Years and 10 Questions with William Sadler: On Bill and Ted, Tales from the Crypt, and Never Fearing the Reaper
William Sadler is a man of many faces. He’s played good guys. He’s played bad guys. He’s been the President of the United States. He’s played an illiterate convict with a heart caked in soot. There’s just no limit to what he can and cannot do. This weekend, he returns to the underworld in the highly anticipated sequel Bill and Ted: Face the Music. As the board game-failing, bass-jamming Reaper, Sadler brings some much-needed humility to Hades. Once again, he steals every scene. In anticipation, we connected with the veteran actor to revisit those faces across 10 Years and 10 Questions. Given his eclectic and exhaustive resume, it was next to impossible to squeeze everything in within the allotted 20 minutes, but we tried our damndest. So, enjoy the stories we did get below. 1989 <img ar...
Scream Reboot Stabs a 2022 Release Date
Unwrap your 2022 Garfield calendar because you’ve got a date in Woodsboro, California. According to Bloody Disgusting, Spyglass Media Group and Paramount Pictures have confirmed their forthcoming Scream reboot will arrive on January 14th, 2022. The date follows this past week’s recent casting additions. Both Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega have signed on for the next chapter, joining past alumni in Courteney Cox and David Arquette. Although it’s expected that Neve Campbell will follow suit, the heroine of the blockbuster horror franchise has yet to officially commit. As previously reported, Ready or Not filmmakers Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett will direct the fourth sequel. They’ll be working from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) and Guy Busick (Ready or Not). Even b...
The 25 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2020
“New year, new decade, new films, right?” That was January, back when we were still looking ahead at 2020 with blind optimism and ill-fated excitement. Sigh, hindsight is 20/20 they say, right? Who knew. At the time, we had 50 exciting new titles we were anticipating, most of which have since been either postponed, dumped to VOD, or relegated to a limbo state. It’s been an unnerving year for the film industry, to say the least. A year fraught with shutdowns, furloughs, layoffs, bankruptcies, and re-evaluations. All of that change has prompted a seismic shift in how everything’s run across the media landscape, and no one truly has a grip on things just yet. Odds are they won’t for quite some time. Because of this, anticipating anything right now — let alone anything in pop culture — seems l...
Unearth Is a Slow Burn Metaphor for Parasitic Capitalism: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Kathryn Dolan (Adrienne Barbeau) and George Lomack (Marc Blucas) head neighboring rural families struggling to make ends meet in a crumbling economy. Tensions arise when one family signs a contract allowing fracking on their land, but their fates intertwine when this decision inadvertently releases a parasite previously locked within the earth. John C. Lyons and Dorota Swies’ tale of economic horror presents a compelling if uneven picture of the devil’s bargains working class people are often forced to make in order to survive. Parallel Parasites: Unearth is a timely metaphor in the midst of a pandemic which has crippled the US economy. We meet both families when they’re tottering on the edge of financial ruin and ...
Björk Joins All-Star Cast of Robert Eggers’ The Northman
Hold on to your swan dress, Björk is returning to the silver screen for the first time since 2000’s Dancer in the Dark. The Icelandic queen joins the star-studded cast of Robert Eggers‘ new film The Northman, and best of all, her character has been given the evocative name “The Slav Witch”. As if that weren’t enough, her real-life daughter Ísadóra Barney has also joined The Northman and will be making her cinematic debut. Until yesterday, the casting news was a closely-guarded secret, and it seems to have been revealed accidentally. Eric Higgins, best known for a short arc on the TV series Vikings, posted a video of the casting board that included his own headshot. “There are only two times in life when your profile pic is on a wall,” he wrote, “1) You’re a wanted criminal ...
Shudder Announces 61 Days of Halloween Starting September
Shudder already celebrated Halfway to Halloween back in April. Come September, however, they’re bringing the real tricks and treats with 61 Days of Halloween, and today they’ve announced all kinds of exciting festivities. The two-month celebration will feature weekly original programming, a new Halloween special of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, a sequel to the one and only Ghoul Log, and, yes, the return of the Shudder Halloween Hotline. “We usually call October our ‘Super Bowl month’ but this year we’re starting on September 1st, so the 61 Days of Halloween will be our Super Bowl combined with Mardi Gras and Christmas,” said Shudder GM Craig Engler in a press release, who also teased a surprise at the end of the month “that will have horror fans everywhere talking.” Editors’...
12 Hour Shift Brilliantly Brings Hospital Horror to the Working Women Comedy: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Mandy (Angela Bettis) was having a bad day before her double shift at the hospital. She’s expected to provide a kidney transplant to some local gangsters. The only catch is that Mandy’s new courier Regina (Chloe Farnworth), who just so happens to be her half-cousin, has lost said kidney en route to the hospital. Frantically, they both try to get their hands on a replacement kidney as the clock keeps ticking. Fortunately for them, there’s a whole lotta fresh meat to choose from… Working 9 to 5: Angela Bettis should be familiar to horror fans, thanks to her iconic performances in a trio of Lucky McKee movies: 2002’s May, 2005’s The Woods, and 2011’s The Woman. She’s a stunning presence, who wears the stress of every one o...
What’s Streaming on Hulu in September 2020
Hulu is prepping for spooky season in September 2020. Next month, the streamer is unlocking a bunch of tricks and treats: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, James Cameron’s The Terminator, and — get this — every single movie in the Twilight series. Vamps unite! Also exciting is the premiere of Keith Knight’s new irreverent comedy series Woke. The show follows a Black cartoonist whose career success is slightly derailed when an unexpected incident changes everything in his life. What’s more, Hulu is porting over all the goodies from FX. That includes the new season from Archer and the highly anticipated fourth season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, which was postponed way, way back in April. Check out the full list below, pick up some Halloween candy, and, of course,...
The Invisible Man Reveals Truths About Abusive Relationships
Listen via Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS “He said that wherever I went, he would find me, walk right up to me, and I wouldn’t be able to see him.” Leigh Whannell’s reimagining of The Invisible Man will likely be a high point in the horror genre for 2020. Tense and terrifying, it’s also a clever and timely depiction of intimate partner violence, a topic too often kept in the shadows. Continuing our two-part series on toxic and abusive relationships, this episode of Psychoanalysis examines the lasting effects of this kind of trauma, ways to support survivors, and the complicated nature of leaving. Fair warning that this episode goes to some heavy places as we discuss our own experiences, but, as always, we ground the conv...
Peninsula Isn’t Nearly as Refined as Train to Busan: Review
The Pitch: In 2016, a near-perfect South Korean zombie flick crawled across the consciousness. Back then, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan—premised upon an extremely contagious virus turning people into man-eating monsters—reaped a whirlwind of success. When Sang-ho returned to make the sequel Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula, he couldn’t have predicted the prescient nature of his action-horror film. But amidst the resultant lockdowns and quarantines from Covid-19, the concept plays vastly different today. Following a former army captain and a small family surviving in Incheon, Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend, Mad Max, and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor. In Your Head: Peninsula opens to...
