By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com Spoilers Ahead Deathwoods is now streaming exclusively on Screambox. I appreciate the drive-in opening. Everybody is doing the whole “thing from the past” thing now, but it made me laugh, so fine. Then Jessa Jupiter Flux shows up as Suzie. That gives it a point. Not because her being there suddenly makes the movie better, obviously. Sorry, Uncle Lloyd. I have a soft spot for Troma and the scrappier end of independent horror. Not every movie needs to be a cinematic masterpiece. Sometimes the exact opposite can still be fun, and I was willing to meet Deathwoods on that level. Jake Kopronica and Deryk Wehrley directed Deathwoods, with Kopronica and creator Scott Conner handling the script. Scott, Kyle, Jessica and Michelle take a camping trip into the woods surrounding Old Hickory, Tennessee. Scott is recovering from a breakup, his friends want to set him up with Michelle, and the area comes with an old story about the Wallace family and something grotesque that may still be living out there. The setup is not complicated. If you have seen more than a few slashers, you could probably finish it yourself. The movie does not mess around getting to the sex and death. Everyone in that opening group is dead before the main camping trip even begins. Some of the gore is decent enough, though a lot of the violence is sold through sound, editing or a camera that looks away at a helpful moment. Low budget, I get it. Suzie's death is the first effect that made me sit up a little. It shows what the filmmakers can do when they actually put the damage on screen. The film follows that with a run of scenes that are sexist even by the standards of the movies it is copying. At the Slick Pig, Scott and Kyle establish that they are the good guys by beating up a pair of assholes after the men harass Michelle. Cool, bro. Bruce, who runs the place, is still the best character in this stretch because he seems to have wandered in from another movie where people occasionally talk like human beings. After the opening massacre, Scott wakes from a nightmare in which Katie appears murdered while lying on top of him. The film later establishes that she vanished after a huge fight. No note. No voicemail. No closure. Everyone around him keeps calling it a breakup. The movie is obviously setting up a mystery. Fine. It is still strange that his friends treat a sudden disappearance like the kind of baggage a camping trip and a setup can fix. The acting is about what I expected, and the dialogue is on par with a traditional slasher movie. At one point, one character asks, “Okay, so what do we do?” Another answers, “I'll tell you what we're gonna do.” Riveting. Conversations lurch from one required line to the next, and people often sound like they are saying placeholder versions of whatever a slasher character should say before the next plot beat. Most of the group feels designed to annoy us until somebody finally kills them. Jaren J. Lewis' cinematography is nothing to write home about, but it does not need to be. The film has a cheap grindhouse look and does not pretend otherwise. I kept telling myself that Deathwoods knows what it is, which is true. After a while, though, that started sounding less like praise and more like an excuse. Knowing what you are is the starting point. You still need taste, timing and judgment. Then the checklist really gets moving. Swimming? Of course. A spooky story around the campfire? Yep. Then there is an ominous bearded man burning a missing person poster, Michelle choosing a walk by herself instead of swimming and a stupid game that sends people running into the woods alone at night. Surely nothing bad will happen. The hillbillies return, now accompanied by what I can only call hill-ladies. Their names are Earl and Junior because apparently they had to be. The killer's mask looks like it escaped from a Mushroomhead video. By this point, I could practically hear the screenplay checking boxes. During Kyle's campfire story, the movie cuts to a flashback where a woman accused of cheating says she was raped. Jesus. The movie barely gives that revelation time to register before moving on. A lot of slashers make the mistake of trying to build fear through dialogue, and Deathwoods goes all in on it. People ask questions, call out names, explain what might be happening and scream about whatever just happened. The movie rarely allows a sound, an empty frame or the woods themselves to hold tension. Slow down and let things breathe. Silence and distance can be scarier than another person announcing the danger out loud. By the time this group of adults starts playing hide and seek in the woods, my main thought was: please, just start killing these idiots. Thankfully, the movie eventually listens. Kyle's death is particularly satisfying, partly because I was more than ready for somebody to shut him up. It also lets the practical effects speak for themselves. Other deaths happen mostly offscreen or are sold through audio and a cut, so the better kills made me wish the movie had trusted its effects more often. The ominous bearded man walks in like the movie's big mystery. I had the broad idea figured out almost immediately: he is not the killer; he is hunting the killer for reasons of his own. When those reasons become clear, it does not change much. He has a beard and a job to do in the plot. There are several characters like that. There is a certain crowd in horror culture that will probably have a much better time with this than I did. The mask has some personality, a few of the kills deliver and the affection for old slashers does not feel fake. Making and finishing a feature on a small budget is hard, and I respect the people who do it. But effort cannot be the final measurement. I still have to judge the movie that ended up onscreen. Oh, and the twist. The movie saves one more revelation for the end and explains it through a long monologue that seems determined to make sure nobody misses anything. By the time the explanation finishes, the reveal feels less shocking than inevitable. Then the movie circles back to the taco joke and ends. Deathwoods has one standout early effect, a few kills that work and a mask that I will probably remember. It also has generic characters, rough performances and dialogue that never stops announcing itself. It knows the slashers it loves scene by scene, but affection is not a point of view. By the end, I was not thinking about the Wallace family, the legend or the killer. I was thinking about the better movies it kept reminding me of. 4.4/10 A screener of Deathwoods was provided for review purposes.

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com SPOILERS THROUGHOUT Someone involved with Buddy must have spent an ungodly amount of time watching children’s television. Barney, Dora the Explorer, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, probably every aggressively cheerful show where a smiling thing teaches children how to share while adults pretend this is all perfectly normal. Casper Kelly doesn’t just remember those shows. He understands their machinery: the smiling adults, bright primary colors, gentle lessons, repetitive songs and that weird forced positivity where everybody is having fun because the show says everybody is having fun. Then he takes little pieces of all of it, especially Barney, and starts twisting. Frankly, he does it almost perfectly. Buddy begins inside It’s Buddy!, a children’s television show from 1999 starring a giant orange unicorn named Buddy. Keegan-Michael Key provides the voice, and the whole thing looks and sounds remarkably convincing as cheap late-’90s children’s television. The clothes are right. The sets are right. The video texture is right. Even the little bits of filler and educational nonsense feel like something I could have stumbled across on television as a kid. That accuracy matters because parody works better when the filmmaker actually understands the thing being mutilated. One of the kids, Josh, doesn’t want to dance. That’s it. He just doesn’t feel like doing the dance, which is probably one of the most authentic things a kid could do in this world of mandatory happiness. Buddy does not appreciate this. The movie doesn’t waste much time letting the cracks show. The quick turn involving Nurse Nancy is great because Kelly doesn’t spend half the movie teasing us with whether Buddy might secretly be dangerous. We know what kind of movie we bought a ticket for. Let the unicorn get to work. “You murdered the nurse.” Yeah. He did. The fire sequence works. The mailman stuff works. Watching Buddy dance around with a dead body somehow works. There’s a fine line between an actual horror-comedy and a 95-minute joke that amounts to “What if Barney murdered people?”, and Buddy stays on the right side of that line because Kelly knows the material down to the bones. The real joke isn’t simply that Buddy kills people. It’s that he can do horrible things and still maintain the same cheerful, faintly condescending personality of a children’s television host who cannot comprehend why you don’t want to sing along. That’s much creepier. The 1999 setting is also exactly right. Put this in the present and half the joke disappears. The late ’90s were still this weird period where children’s television could be cheap, tactile, colorful and slightly unsettling without anyone intending for it to be unsettling. Then Buddy makes its first major move and leaves that world behind. Kelly changes the visual language along with the story, moving through 1.33:1, 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 as the realities shift. The boxier television image makes It’s Buddy! feel contained and artificial, and when the frame opens up it genuinely feels as though somebody changed the channel and we’ve fallen into another kind of movie. Then Cristin Milioti shows up as Grace, and the movie suddenly has an emotional center I wasn’t expecting. Milioti has been killing it lately, and at this point saying she’s good almost feels redundant. There’s a moment where Grace becomes fixated on an empty chair at the dinner table because she knows, without being able to prove it, that somebody should be sitting there. Her screaming at that empty chair is one of the most haunting things in a movie that also contains a murderous unicorn. The chair is just empty. That’s enough. Topher Grace plays her husband, Ben, and he remains extremely good at playing a smart-ass who can make being technically reasonable feel incredibly irritating. As Grace becomes convinced that something impossible has happened to their family, Ben mocks how far her thinking has gone, asking what’s next, conspiracy photos all over the wall connected by strings. It’s funny because, from his perspective, what she’s saying sounds completely insane. A television unicorn has somehow taken their child and erased the evidence that the kid ever existed. Unfortunately for Ben, he’s in a Casper Kelly movie. The television sequence that follows is wild. Kelly plays with the boundary between the television image and Grace’s reality in a way that feels tactile and deeply wrong. The screen isn’t just a spooky object anymore. It becomes a physical border between worlds. Meanwhile, the children outside Buddy’s world are discovering all sorts of normal human things they apparently never had to deal with inside a children’s television show. At one point Strappy, the talking backpack voiced by Patton Oswalt, asks, “What’s a penis?” Perfect. Then Clint Howard appears. Fucking Clint Howard. Now we have Clint Howard hanging around with Willie, a marionette voiced by Michael Shannon, which is already the kind of casting decision that makes me happy this movie exists. Then somebody makes out with the puppet. The flowers are drugs. The kids start tripping. Sure. What I appreciate is that it never feels like Kelly is reaching into a hat and pulling out random weird shit because random automatically equals funny. There’s recognizable children’s-story logic underneath everything: friendly characters encountered along a journey, a talking companion, a strange man in the woods, magical flowers, a destination everybody believes will solve their problems. Kelly knows exactly what he’s perverting. That’s where Buddy separates itself from a lot of nostalgia-based horror. There’s a difference between remembering that Barney existed and understanding how Barney worked. Kelly understands the cadence, repetition, forced participation and relentless reassurance of children’s television. Something like Pee-wee’s Playhouse was already about two inches away from a fever dream before anybody added murder. Once you know the rules that well, breaking them becomes much more satisfying. The movie isn’t flawless. There are moments after leaving the original It’s Buddy! setup where I missed the simplicity of that first section. The more mythology the film starts building, the greater the risk that the wonderfully stupid purity of “Buddy is not happy with you” gets buried underneath a bigger story. But Kelly keeps finding new directions before the idea goes stale. And then there’s the third act. I know it says SPOILERS THROUGHOUT at the top of this review. I still don’t want to tell you what happens. You should see it. The final stretch is wild, and part of why it worked for me was realizing the movie still had another gear after I thought I understood how strange it was willing to become. I don’t want to rob anybody of that realization just so I can describe every beat. What I will say is that Buddy isn’t afraid to look ridiculous, and that willingness to take a genuinely stupid idea seriously enough to execute it well is becoming one of my favorite things about horror right now. I keep saying we’re in another golden age of horror, and I’m definitely not the only person saying it. Maybe “golden age” gets thrown around too easily, but horror still feels like one of the few genres where filmmakers are routinely allowed to take creative risks and get really fucking weird with them. Apparently that can mean Clint Howard in the woods with a Michael Shannon puppet while children eat psychedelic flowers and a homicidal orange unicorn hunts them. That’s healthy. I don’t want every horror movie to be Buddy. I’m not even sure anybody other than Casper Kelly should attempt something like Buddy. I just want more movies willing to take this kind of swing. Kelly’s Too Many Cooks already showed how good he is at taking familiar television language and slowly poisoning it. Buddy feels like that impulse given feature-film resources and enough room to become much more ambitious. Sometimes that extra room works against him, but more often than not I was impressed by how controlled the movie remains while appearing completely out of control. The technical side deserves a lot of credit for that. Cinematographer Zach Kuperstein has to make several visual worlds feel distinct without reducing them to obvious filters, while editor Josh Ethier somehow keeps the movie coherent as it keeps mutating into something else. It takes good filmmakers to make something this stupid. I mean that as a compliment. The cast understands it too. Milioti gives the movie genuine emotional weight. Topher Grace knows exactly how irritating to make Ben without turning him into a cartoon. Key’s voice keeps Buddy cheerful enough that his violence stays funny and uncomfortable instead of becoming generic mascot horror. Patton Oswalt is a backpack. Michael Shannon is a puppet. Clint Howard is Clint Howard. What else do you need? I went into Buddy expecting something fun and got something stranger, meaner and considerably more inventive. Kelly knows his subject material well enough that the parody never feels like somebody vaguely remembering children’s television and adding blood to it. He knows where the comfort came from. That’s why he knows where to stick the knife. Add Buddy to the must-watch horror list for 2026. I’ll probably be thinking about that third act for a while. 7.9/10 Critical Screening was provided a screener of Buddy for review purposes.

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com SPOILERS THROUGHOUT Early in Saccharine, Hana throws a box of doughnuts into the trash and tries to make them inedible. Then she looks back at the trash. I love that moment because Natalie Erika James shoots it almost like Hana is being stalked in a slasher movie. Somewhere down there, beneath the garbage, a doughnut is waiting. Patient. Quiet. Ready to strike. It’s funny until it isn’t, which pretty much describes a lot of Saccharine. James, who also directed Relic and Apartment 7A, takes something painfully ordinary, our endless ability to make ourselves miserable over food and our bodies, and turns it into supernatural body horror. Hana, played by Midori Francis, is a medical student trapped in a cycle of binge eating, guilt, exercise and promises that this time she’s finally going to get everything under control. Then she discovers a miracle weight-loss drug called the Gray. Naturally, it’s made from human ashes. Because apparently Ozempic wasn’t horrifying enough. Hana can’t afford the real thing, but being a medical student gives her access to a laboratory and, more importantly, a donated cadaver her classmates have rather cruelly nicknamed Big Bertha. So she does what any rational person would do and starts manufacturing her own diet pills from a dead woman. This goes badly. Saccharine isn’t subtle about what it’s doing. This is a horror movie about fad diets, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, social-media fitness culture and our willingness to do increasingly insane things if somebody promises that afterward we’ll finally like what we see in the mirror. I’m okay with that. Body horror has never exactly been famous for whispering. What I appreciate is how often James finds actual cinematic ways to communicate those ideas instead of only putting them into dialogue. The film was shot by Charlie Sarroff, and visually it’s one of the stronger things about it. The color palette has this attractive, slightly artificial sweetness to it, which makes the uglier imagery underneath feel even worse. Food is photographed beautifully until suddenly it isn’t. A piece of cake can look delicious in one shot and disturbingly anatomical in the next. Human tissue starts resembling food. Food starts looking like something pulled out of a body. The movie keeps blurring appetite and disgust until eventually your stomach doesn’t quite know which signal it’s supposed to be receiving. The binge-eating sequences are where that works best. They’re gross, but not cartoon gross. Uncomfortably intimate gross. The camera gets close to Hana’s mouth. Crumbs, grease, chewing, swallowing. Food piled onto more food. There’s a desperation to it that makes the scenes difficult to watch, which is exactly why they work. You’re not supposed to sit there thinking, “Man, that looks good.” You’re watching somebody lose control. The editing helps enormously. Sean Lahiff cuts the movie with a kind of rhythmic aggression that occasionally reminded me of Edgar Wright, although without going anywhere near Wright’s level of stylistic insanity. What I liked is that James doesn’t save the fast, associative cutting for one clever montage. That visual grammar keeps appearing throughout the movie. Food, exercise, bodies, medical imagery and consumption start crashing into one another. Sometimes Saccharine understands that one cut can say more than another page of dialogue. Then there’s Bertha. Bertha is haunting. After Hana begins consuming her remains, the dead woman starts appearing around her, but James gives the haunting a clever rule: Hana initially sees Bertha through convex reflective surfaces. The back of a spoon. A kettle. Curved reflections that distort whatever they show. That’s one of my favorite ideas in the movie. You’re making a film about body dysmorphia, and your ghost can only be seen through distorted reflections. There you go. You don’t need a character to explain that one to me. The movie also has fun making ordinary food threatening. There are moments where Hana looks at discarded food with the same dread another horror protagonist might reserve for a masked killer standing at the end of the hallway. Even the building’s garbage area becomes threatening, with Bertha seeming to infect the trash itself. The movie has already established the chute and garbage as extensions of Hana’s relationship with consumption, so bringing Bertha into that environment feels appropriately disgusting. The food is coming for her, and in a way, it is. The effects are more complicated. I know what an impossible job body transformation makeup can be. I’m reluctant to beat up practical-effects artists because those departments are routinely handed assignments that amount to, “Please fundamentally change this recognizable human body and make sure nobody notices how you did it.” Good luck. But the heavier-body prosthetics in Saccharine don’t always work for me. There are moments where I stop seeing Hana and start seeing the effect. Jawlines, folds and proportions occasionally look artificial enough that they pull me out of what Midori Francis is doing. The same problem becomes even more noticeable later with Hana’s father. And Bertha herself, at certain angles, starts reminding me a little of Butterball from Hellraiser. I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult. Butterball is creepy. But once that association entered my brain it never completely left. The cadaver work occasionally has the opposite problem. Some of those exposed ribs look less like a medical-school dissection and more like somebody ordered baby backs. Maybe I was hungry. Probably not the ideal movie for that. Francis is very good, though. She keeps Hana from becoming nothing more than a delivery system for the movie’s metaphor. Hana is smart enough to understand that what she’s doing is insane, which makes watching her continue doing it more interesting. That’s addiction. Knowing better isn’t the same thing as stopping. There’s also Alanya, played by Madeleine Madden, the fitness instructor Hana is attracted to. The movie uses that attraction as another piece of Hana’s confusion over her body: does she want Alanya, does she want to look like Alanya, or has she mashed those two desires together so completely that she can’t separate them anymore? Initially, I wasn’t convinced the relationship needed as much screen time as it gets. There are stretches where it feels like the movie is stopping to explain an insecurity the horror imagery has already communicated more effectively. By the ending, though, I understood the choice better. Saccharine has been connecting sex, appetite, attraction and consumption from the beginning. During the earlier intimate material with Alanya, James plays with that discomfort, framing desire in a way that makes you briefly wonder whether Hana wants to sleep with this woman or eat her. Sexually. Hopefully. That becomes considerably less funny by the end. Before we get there, the movie begins spinning its wheels. At nearly two hours, it repeats itself. Hana binges. Bertha appears. Hana tries to regain control. Hana binges again. Bertha appears again. The repetition has a thematic justification because compulsive behavior is repetitive by definition, and I understand the argument that making the audience feel trapped in the cycle is part of the point. I still felt the repetition. A movie can have a reason for being exhausting and still exhaust me. There are stretches where Saccharine has already made its point but keeps chewing. Sorry. Had to. The family material gives the movie more weight. Hana’s mother is thin, attentive and constantly hovering. Her father, Travis, is severely obese and largely removed from the world around him. Eventually it becomes clear that Hana’s relationship with food and weight isn’t something she picked up from an Instagram ad last Tuesday. She has been absorbing this stuff her entire life. The reveal of her father worked for me because suddenly Hana’s fixation has history. She isn’t merely afraid of being fat. She’s afraid of becoming him. That is much uglier and more emotionally complicated. The same thing happens when the movie finally gives Bertha back her humanity. Her name is Grace. For a while I had this additional sadness about the cadavers, imagining these people ending up in a medical lab because they had no money, no family or nowhere else to go. But that isn’t actually what the movie says. The memorial later makes clear that these people chose to donate their bodies to medical education. They willingly became what the professor calls the students’ “silent teachers.” That makes what Hana does to Grace worse, not better. Grace gave her body for people to learn from. Hana turns it into a weight-loss supplement. And when Josie learns about the actual woman behind Big Bertha, we find out Grace spent much of her life caring for others, struggled with her own relationship with food and never really found peace with herself. Suddenly she isn’t the giant scary corpse anymore. She was a person whom a room full of medical students reduced to a nickname because of her size. There’s something genuinely sad in that. The film seems to offer her a kind of peace eventually. I guess. Because this is still a horror movie, and peace apparently requires a considerable amount of screaming, garbage and amateur abdominal surgery. The final stretch is where Saccharine wakes itself back up. Hana discovers that she has a small benign growth on her pancreas in the same location where Grace’s cancer began and becomes convinced that cutting it out will sever their connection. Her doctor advises against surgery, so Hana decides to handle the situation herself. Because medical school apparently teaches confidence if nothing else. It’s ridiculous. It’s also effective. Watching Hana drug herself and essentially race against time to cut a growth from her own pancreas while Bertha closes in is the kind of heightened body-horror lunacy I wanted a little more of earlier in the movie. The sequence understands that by this point realism has packed its bags and left, so you might as well commit. James commits. The flesh. The cutting. Bertha. The trash. Hana desperately trying to perform surgery on herself before whatever is happening consumes her completely. It works. And for a few minutes Saccharine becomes the nasty little movie it has spent nearly two hours promising. Then it appears to give Hana an out. Grace is honored. The family seems more stable. Hana reconnects with Alanya. We get something close to a hopeful ending, which naturally means the movie is preparing to kick us in the teeth. Hana and Alanya finally come back together, and the film returns to that connection between sexual hunger and actual hunger that it had been playing with earlier. They kiss. Things become intimate. Then the chewing starts. Oh. Right. The movie wasn’t kidding. The final reveal, with Hana having literally devoured the woman she desired, is nasty and effective because it takes a metaphor the film has been using for nearly two hours and finally refuses to leave it as a metaphor. The person Hana wanted sexually, emotionally and physically becomes something she consumes. That ending worked for me more than I expected it to. It also improved the Alanya material in retrospect. I still think the relationship could have been tighter, but now it has an actual destination. Desire, appetite, admiration and self-hatred have become so scrambled inside Hana that she can no longer tell one kind of hunger from another. That’s a bleak place to leave her. And a much better ending than simply defeating Bertha and learning to love yourself. Saccharine sits in a strange place for me critically. I admire more of it than I love. The photography works. The color works. Midori Francis works. Bertha works. The distorted-reflection idea is great. The movie understands exactly how disgusting binge eating can feel from inside the person doing it, and its transformation of modern diet obsession into supernatural horror is smart enough to justify the premise. But it also runs long. It repeats itself. Some of the prosthetic work is distracting, and the film occasionally keeps explaining ideas after its images have already done the job. Still, the last act gave me more than I initially thought I was going to get. The self-surgery is absurd but memorable. Giving Bertha back her name and history adds a little humanity the movie needed, and the final payoff with Alanya makes the relationship more integral to the movie than I originally gave it credit for. From a straight filmmaking perspective, there’s a lot here I respect. As a horror movie, there’s enough here that I’d recommend it to the right audience. It never quite becomes the great version of itself that occasionally seems within reach. But that ending earns it another tenth. 6.1/10 Saccharine is now streaming on Shudder.

By Damian Hex, MoreHorror.com Nothing makes this horrorhead’s heart beat faster than witnessing the translation of horror video games to the big screen. Although I have a soft spot for vampires, something primal draws me to zombies. One of the first zombie games I played as a kid was Resident Evil 2 (I know it wasn't part one; I’m sorry). Naturally, I rushed to watch every Resident Evil movie adaptation in theatres. So how do you think I felt when I discovered that Zach Cregger (director of Weapons and Barbarian) would take on the eighth Resident Evil film? Just give me the T-Virus; honestly, I would happily visit Umbrella Corporation myself. Reddit partnered with Resident Evil to host a special thirty-minute preview of the movie, and I had no idea what to expect. I promise this will be a spoiler-free review, or Nemesis can come hunt me down. The tension builds fast from the start. Although I prefer slow build-ups, this was an exception, as a quick build-up makes sense in this zombie world. You'll have brief moments to breathe between traumatic events, but they'll be short enough to keep you feeling on edge the entire time. The movie balances horror and humor exceptionally well. Nothing feels too serious, and nothing veers into the realm of goofiness. The film delivers humor without being goofy, primarily due to the protagonist, Bryan (played by Austin Abrams). He masterfully delivers unintentional humor in the scariest situations. I’m not surprised that Austin fits into this film seamlessly, considering he has worked with Zach before; see Weapons. However, being comical comes at a cost, leaving you yelling at the screen for Bryan to lock TF in. I’m going to be so real: if I were Bryan, working as a medical courier traveling from hospital to hospital in the middle of a winter storm, I would find a job flipping burgers. The responsibility of carrying precious cargo, facing Mother Nature’s wrath, and eventually encountering zombies just doesn't appeal to me. But thankfully, I don’t live in a world filled with viruses and evil corporations, right? This brings me to another point about the film's overall style and how it compares to the video games. The film incorporates several video game elements. Think of it as cutscenes and gameplay, but in film format. As viewers, we discover things at the same time as Bryan, making the narrative unpredictable. We learn specific details, like how many bullets Bryan has left, allowing us to act as real-time inventory stats. We immerse ourselves in the world just as the main character does. Zach clearly expresses his love for the Resident Evil franchise. The thirty-minute preview leaves me craving more…like a zombie yearning for brains, perhaps. I am hopeful that this movie will become one of the better video game-to-film adaptations. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: Zach utilizes silence so effectively that the jump scares carry more weight. There’s no heavy reliance on a scary soundtrack. It felt like I was playing a horror video game alone in the dark while my parents slept. Resident Evil will hit theaters on September 18th. Get those tickets now, as Umbrella Corp is watching! Damian Hex is a horror-themed performer, video game tester, and media personality. As a proud queer person of color, he uses his voice to amplify marginalized voices. You can find him at screenings, nightlife events, conventions, and ghoul gatherings. When he is not outside striking terror into the hearts of innocents, you can catch him spreading the unholy word to audiences on Twitch. Speaking of Twitch, he has several favorite game titles, including Cult of the Lamb, Hollow Knight, Mortal Kombat, Parasite Eve, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Follow Damian on Instagram @damianhex

Video Review by Tia Bean for MoreHorror.com Spooky season may still be creeping around the corner, but More Horror’s Tia Bean has already started the festivities with an advance look at Gator Face, a new slice of Florida-bred creature horror that wears its genre influences proudly. The setup keeps things wonderfully simple. A group of teenagers wrapping up a day at the beach stumble across an isolated house with a disturbing message scrawled across its side. Being teenagers in a horror movie, they do the only sensible thing imaginable: they investigate. And then all hell breaks loose. That simplicity works in Gator Face’s favor. Rather than burying its premise beneath layers of exposition, the movie grabs hold of its central idea and runs straight into the swamp with it. For Tia, the resulting concoction recalls everything from Jeepers Creepers and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to a little of the sun-drenched folk-horror atmosphere found in Hereditary and Midsommar. That’s quite a horror cocktail, and Gator Face appears perfectly comfortable splashing around in it. One of the biggest standouts is the film’s visual identity. Tia praised the cinematography, locations and overall setting, calling the movie “a beautiful love letter” to both Florida and horror movies themselves. That affection for the genre seems baked into the film. Swamps, backwoods structures, junkyards and that oppressive Florida landscape give Gator Face the grimy texture of the regional horror movies that once haunted drive-ins and battered VHS shelves. Then there’s the title character himself. As Tia puts it, even if everything else somehow fails to sell you, “you need to check it out for the villain, Gator Face.” A masked killer, Florida wilderness and enough reptilian menace to make wandering away from the beach seem like a catastrophically poor life choice? Yeah, that sounds like our kind of movie. Gator Face opens in select theaters September 11, followed by a digital release September 15. Watch Tia Bean’s full More Horror video review below.

By Seth Metoyer, MoreHorror.com - The independent horror community has lost one of its longtime champions. Mike Thomas, film critic and co-founder of San Diego’s FANtastic Horror Film Festival, died August 26 following a years-long battle with kidney disease. He was 72. Thomas founded FANtastic Horror Film Festival alongside his wife, Jo Ann, in 2013. Over the next decade, the festival became a gathering place for independent filmmakers, actors, producers and horror fans, recognizing more than 300 filmmakers and performers before concluding its run in 2023. Mike built his reputation as an outspoken film critic with a particular affection for independent cinema. He could take a major studio production apart without ceremony, yet he understood something essential about microbudget filmmakers: these movies came from people spending their own money, calling in favors, losing sleep and somehow dragging a movie across the finish line. FANtastic gave those filmmakers a place where the work was valued. More Horror covered several FANtastic Horror Film Festival events over the years, making Mike’s passing especially personal for us. I also had films I produced screen and receive awards at FANtastic, so I experienced firsthand the encouragement Mike and the festival extended to independent filmmakers. I remain deeply appreciative of what Mike created and what he gave to the indie horror community. Festivals can screen movies and hand out trophies. The great ones create relationships, memories and a sense that somebody out there actually sees the work. FANtastic became that kind of place for a lot of people. That legacy comes through clearly in the tributes shared following his death. “With the FANtastic Horror Film Festival, Mike not only created a rock-solid event, he created a community,” Dread Central founder Steve Barton said. “His contributions will be long revered and remembered.” Actor Bill Oberst Jr. similarly remembered Thomas for the respect he showed independent filmmakers, while filmmakers and former festival collaborators have recalled his generosity, enthusiasm and genuine love for the people creating horror outside the studio system. Thomas suffered a stroke in 2018 and later lost kidney function, requiring hemodialysis. Through those difficult years, those closest to him said his passion for movies remained a constant. He is survived by his wife, Jo Ann, along with numerous nieces and nephews. A celebration of Mike Thomas’ life is planned for later this year in his hometown of Philadelphia. A GoFundMe has also been established to assist with celebration-of-life and final expenses: https://gofund.me/b128d1234 From everyone at More Horror, we extend our condolences to Jo Ann, Mike’s family, friends and the countless filmmakers whose lives crossed his path. Thank you, Mike, for giving independent horror a place at the table. Below is a video from 2014 featuring More Horror correspondent Dawna Lee Heising interviewing FANtastic Horror Film Festival co-founders Mike and Jo Ann Thomas as they announced the official selections for 2014's festival, held in San Diego over Halloween weekend. Looking back at footage like this now feels especially meaningful. It captures Mike doing what so many in the independent horror community will remember him for: celebrating filmmakers, building community and giving independent horror a place to be seen.

By Seth Metoyer, MoreHorror.com - Mary C. Russell makes her feature directing debut with a supernatural slow-burn inspired by Irish folklore, psychological horror and something stirring beneath the water. Something strange has surfaced. THE OTHERKIND, a woman-made supernatural thriller from writer-director Mary C. Russell and producer Caroline O’Meara, has officially been released on digital platforms as of September 1, 2026. Set in a quiet lakeside town, the 73-minute arthouse horror film follows a worn-down police officer investigating the events surrounding a mysterious car crash while a young woman wrestles with an unexplained encounter at the lake. As their stories begin to converge, something otherworldly starts rippling through the community. Drawing inspiration from Irish selkie folklore, THE OTHERKIND blends psychological dread, parasitic horror and ecological anxiety into a story that favors atmosphere and unease over buckets of gore. Russell, whose previous work includes the 2015 slasher short CARVED, cites THE THING and the 1961 cult classic NIGHT TIDE among the film’s influences. THE OTHERKIND marks her feature directing debut. The production filmed on location in Crestline and around Lake Gregory in California’s San Bernardino Mountains, using the landscape—and the water itself—as an integral part of the film’s mythology. THE OTHERKIND stars Rebekah Kennedy (Traumatika, The Lincoln Lawyer), Lestonja Diaz (9-1-1: Nashville, Ressurektor), Marc Anthony Samuel (The Merry Gentleman, General Hospital) and Paris Dylan (Tiger Dick, Dying to Sleep). The supporting cast includes Muneeb Rehman, Luciana Faulhaber, Shylo Molina, Jeff Pride, Madonna Young-Magee, Laura Dromerick, Andrew Hansen and producer Caroline O’Meara. KCRW listeners may also recognize the voice of Chris Douridas, who appears as the film’s newsreader. The film picked up several festival honors on its road to release, including Best Horror/Thriller at Chicago Film Frenzy, the Blood, Sweat & Fears Award at Sin City Horror Fest, and Best Indie Film at LA International Art Film Fest. THE OTHERKIND was acquired by Studio Dome, with Gary LaBranche and Karen LaBranche of LaBranche Productions serving as executive producers. THE OTHERKIND is now available on digital platforms. Watch the trailer:

MoreHorror.com - Black Mandala has unveiled BABYBACKS, a new survival horror thriller from director Geno Marx that takes a desperate journey across the Sonoran Desert and twists it into something far more sinister. The film follows young lovers Zoe and Mateo, who flee ruthless cartel hitmen and cross the scorching desert in search of a new life in America. Their situation becomes critical when Mateo suffers a serious injury, leaving the couple exhausted, exposed and running out of options. Help arrives in the form of an older couple who offer them shelter inside their isolated rural home. The apparent refuge soon begins to feel like another kind of prison, forcing Zoe and Mateo into a brutal struggle to escape the very people who seemed to save them. Blending psychological horror, social tension and raw survival thrills, BABYBACKS moves from the open hostility of the desert into the suffocating confines of captivity. The cast includes Viridiana Márquez (Chicago P.D., Chicago Fire), Melissa Chambers (Dark Winds, Mayfair Witches), Ryan Rathbun (Oppenheimer, Babylon) and Ray Acevedo (American Sicario). Marx directs from a screenplay written with Kent Rodricks. The film also stars Alfred Gonzales, Juliana Philippi, AB Phoenix, Peter Lucas and J Diego Gonçalves, with cinematography by Frank Buono. BABYBACKS is produced by Geno Marx, Tara Tovarek and Derick Pritchard and is represented internationally by Black Mandala.

MoreHorror.com - Las Vegas already has neon, casinos, bad decisions, and enough artificial light to make Dracula file a complaint. This October, it gets a little more horror. More Horror will be on-site at Nightmare in Vegas 2, taking place October 10–11 at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Representing More Horror at the event will be creator and correspondent Tia Bean, who will be covering the convention from the floor of whatever strange things happen when horror fans take over a casino for the weekend. More Horror Goes On Location As More Horror continues expanding its creator network, we’re putting more emphasis on getting people inside the events themselves. That means less watching everything happen from behind a laptop and more boots on the ground — conventions, screenings, festivals, red carpets, haunted attractions, and horror gatherings where the genre actually lives and breathes. Nightmare in Vegas 2 gives us another chance to do exactly that. Tia will be bringing the event directly to More Horror’s audience through our social channels, giving fans a look at the personalities, attractions, vendors, cars, costumes, and general horror-fueled chaos surrounding this year’s show. Nightmare Returns to Vegas Now entering its second year, Nightmare in Vegas brings horror culture into the desert for a two-day event at the Silverton Casino. The convention runs October 10–11, 2026, with a weekend built around horror, entertainment, vendors, special attractions, and the kind of crowd that understands October should involve substantially more fake blood than respectable society usually permits. More Horror will be there. Follow @morehorror on Instagram, TikTok, and our other social channels throughout the weekend for coverage from Tia Bean and the More Horror Network. And if you spot Tia wandering around Nightmare in Vegas, say hello. Preferably before something with a chainsaw starts chasing her. Nightmare in Vegas 2 October 10–11, 2026 Silverton CasinoLas Vegas, Nevada Buy Tickets More Horror: @morehorror Tia Bean: @tiaisthcoolest on Instagram / @tiabeanthescreamqueen on TikTok Nightmare in Vegas Video

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com - SPOILERS THROUGHOUT There is something almost reassuring about a movie simply calling itself The Yeti. No subtitle. No colon. No clever mythology bullshit. There is a Yeti. Here is the movie. Expectations appropriately adjusted. Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta’s creature feature opens in Alaska in 1947, and almost immediately I liked what it was doing. There’s a commitment to the period that goes beyond throwing everyone into old coats and hoping nobody notices the zippers. The movie wants to feel like something that might have crawled out of an older Hollywood monster picture, with pulp-adventure dialogue, studio-built wilderness, exaggerated characters and just enough artificiality to make the whole thing feel handmade. The opening is especially clever. A group stranded in a snowy cabin encounters something we’re not really allowed to see yet. The attack gives us enough to understand that whatever is outside is large, angry and capable of making a tremendous mess of a human being without immediately sticking a rubber monster directly into the lens. That's smart. Creature movies tend to get themselves into trouble the second they decide we need a good long look at the creature. More on that later. The film then gives us an old-fashioned newsreel-style introduction to the rescue party being assembled after oil tycoon Merriell Sunday Sr., played by Corbin Bernsen, and famous explorer Hollis Bannister, played by William Sadler, disappear along with their expedition in the Alaskan Territory. Merriell's son puts together a collection of specialists to go looking for them, including Hollis' estranged daughter Ellie, played by Brittany Allen. The rescue-team presentation is funny and knowingly theatrical without immediately becoming parody. It reminded me of a dozen old adventure movies at once, but never so specifically that it felt like somebody was recreating another movie's homework. Then they get to Alaska. And apparently the boat has left them there. Wait. They got left there? Okay. The explanation is that the weather forced the boat away and the team is now stuck waiting for it to return. Fair enough. At least we're rid of the boat. Now we can get to the important business of people disappearing into the woods. The period dialogue is an interesting problem. You can tell somebody did the work. The vocabulary, expressions and rhythms are deliberately old-fashioned. Nobody sounds like they walked out of a Starbucks in 2026 wearing a wool coat. But sometimes you can hear the acting. There's a difference between speaking in the language of another era and performing the idea of speaking in another era. A few of the actors settle into it naturally. Others give every syllable a little extra polish, like they're afraid we'll forget it's 1947 unless the dialogue arrives wearing a fedora. Linc Hand's Coates is probably the most extreme example. Coates is ridiculous. I also kind of love him. He's a scarred World War II veteran operating at roughly 115 percent intensity at all times. Someone suggests going with him and his response is: “The hell you will.” Of course it is. That's Coates. And eventually the movie starts building some actual tension. Something is moving around out there. People are hearing noises. Nobody knows exactly what they're dealing with yet. Then: Where's Dan? Half-eaten in a pile. Dan's dead? Yeah. Dan's dead. It shouldn't be as funny as it is. The movie has a strange tonal quality where I'm not always sure whether I'm laughing exactly where the filmmakers intended me to, but more often than not I was still having a decent time. There's even a split-diopter shot that made the film nerd in me perk up for a second. Nice. The cinematography from Joel Froome isn't consistently remarkable, but the movie has much more visual personality when it fully embraces the artifice of what it's doing. The filmmakers built the Alaskan wilderness, including its forest, cabin and cave environments, largely on a soundstage in Buffalo specifically because they wanted the artificial quality of old studio monster movies. Knowing that actually made me appreciate some of the snowy exteriors more. They're fake. They're supposed to feel a little fake. That's part of the charm. Unfortunately, the middle of The Yeti has a tendency to confuse character development with people standing around arguing about what they're going to do next. What are we doing? We're going this way. No, we're not. To hell you are. We should stay together. I'm going alone. You're not going alone. Repeat. Some of that is necessary. You're making a survival movie with a group trapped in the wilderness, so obviously people are going to disagree about survival. But eventually the movie starts circling conversations whose dramatic purpose was clear several minutes earlier. That's where the 93-minute runtime occasionally feels longer than it is. Other critics have pointed to similar pacing problems, particularly the amount of dialogue occupying the middle section, and I think that's where the movie loses some of the energy its opening earns. Margaret Lamb, played by Christina Bennett Lind, eventually gets the thankless creature-feature job of being the person who understands animals well enough to start explaining what the hell might be stalking everyone. Every monster movie needs somebody like this. At some point somebody has to look at a footprint and say, essentially: That's not a bear. Thanks, science. The movie is smart about withholding the Yeti for a while. We get noises, movement, aftermath and pieces of the thing rather than immediately meeting our giant furry friend in broad daylight. And I appreciated that because creature effects people have one of the most thankless jobs in horror. No offense to the practical-effects and animatronic people of the world. They're unsung heroes. But sometimes the assignment is basically: Build a nine-foot snow monster that can survive a close-up on a movie screen and please don't make anyone laugh. Good luck. Apparently the creature team spent months constructing a handmade nine-foot suit specifically for this production. It was practical, custom-built and designed for one performer. And you know what? They pulled it off. The Yeti looks pretty damn good. Not Alien good. Let's remain adults. But good enough that the movie can actually show the thing. That's important. Even when we eventually get close-ups, I never had the catastrophic moment creature features sometimes produce where the monster steps into proper lighting and you immediately wish he would go back behind the tree. The filmmakers know what they've got and mostly photograph it intelligently. The practical gore is even better. This movie brings the meat. People get ripped apart. Organs leave bodies. The Yeti does not appear particularly concerned with maintaining the structural integrity of the human abdomen. And then Margaret is literally holding onto Coates' intestines. It's ridiculous. It's disgusting. It's awesome. That's the movie I showed up for. I was sorry to see Coates go because he'd become one of the more entertaining personalities in the group, but if you're going to introduce a giant murderous Yeti, eventually somebody we actually like needs to become lunch. Otherwise what are we doing here? Later we get the obligatory little quiet moments between impending deaths, including one scene involving Booker, his radio and the vague possibility that two people may or may not make out before the movie remembers that it has a monster to deal with. There's also a gramophone spinning old records in the shelter, another tiny period detail I enjoyed. It's the kind of prop you don't technically need, but without those details a period movie starts feeling like actors playing dress-up. Eventually Booker is gone and Ellie, our increasingly Amelia Earhart-ish adventure heroine, is alone again. Brittany Allen is probably the performance that holds the whole thing together best. She manages to fit the heightened period style without constantly announcing it, and Ellie has enough actual emotional grounding through her relationship with her missing father that she doesn't feel like nothing more than the Final Girl With a Map. And then the movie reveals that Dad is William Sadler. Of course he is. Along with Bernsen and Jim Cummings, Sadler gives The Yeti one of those casts where every twenty minutes you find yourself going: Oh, hey. That guy. Corbin Bernsen doesn't dominate the movie, but his presence gives Merriell Sunday Sr. an immediate recognizable authority. William Sadler is exactly the sort of actor you want wandering around a 1947 monster movie. And Jim Cummings, playing Booker, brings his naturally odd rhythm to a movie already full of people who talk like they were raised on pulp magazines. The movie also finally lets the Yeti get properly ugly. That's where it earns a lot of its goodwill with me. From a strictly critical perspective, The Yeti isn't particularly sophisticated. The screenplay is uneven. Some performances are too broad. The pacing drags. Several conversations overstay their welcome. The family drama isn't always convincing enough to support the amount of emotional weight placed on it, and the movie occasionally gets caught somewhere between sincere period adventure and knowingly goofy B-movie. If I'm looking at it solely as cinema, there are a lot of better movies. But that's not the entire equation. I'm also a horror fan. And horror has always had a strange second scale running alongside conventional critical judgment. Sometimes I want to watch an elegantly constructed film about grief and mortality. Sometimes I want a giant furry bastard to tear somebody's guts out in the snow. There should be room for both. The Yeti has gore. It has creature effects. It has lore. It has a snowy fake-Alaska soundstage. It has Corbin Bernsen and William Sadler wandering around in an old-fashioned monster picture. It has Coates behaving like a lunatic. It has intestines. You know what you're buying. And unlike a lot of low-budget creature features, it doesn't spend 85 minutes desperately hiding the fact that it can't deliver the creature promised by the title. When the Yeti finally has to stand there in close-up and be the Yeti, the movie doesn't collapse. Kudos. Would I recommend it to somebody looking for great cinema? Probably not. Would I recommend it to a group of horror fans looking for something bloody and slightly ridiculous to put on at night? Yeah. Absolutely. Sometimes genre competence is enough. Sometimes a movie called The Yeti just needs to give me a decent goddamn Yeti. This one does. 5.8/10 The Yeti is currently streaming on Shudder.

MoreHorror.com - Independent filmmakers Devin Smock and Samuel David are closing in on the finish line for HOLLER, a character-driven horror-western set amid the backroads, fields and forgotten places of rural Illinois. Years after the dead overran the country, Ray Holly has survived by withdrawing from what remains of humanity. His days revolve around routine, whiskey and isolation—until he encounters Sydney, a pregnant young woman attempting to make her way home. Ray reluctantly agrees to guide her across a Midwest inhabited by the undead, desperate survivors and the remnants of a world that no longer makes sense. Although zombies remain a persistent danger, HOLLER is less concerned with the origins of its apocalypse than with the damaged people still living through it. The story explores grief, guilt, survival and the frightening possibility of needing someone again after losing nearly everything. Smock and David are producing the feature through Jacksonville, Illinois-based Subterranean Sound & Vision with a small independent cast and crew. Approximately 60 percent of principal photography has already been completed, including major dramatic scenes, exterior sequences and practical-effects work. The filmmakers estimate that only ten production days remain. The newly released official trailer runs just under 90 seconds and was assembled entirely from footage shot for the feature, offering an atmospheric first look at the film’s bleak rural landscape and intimate approach to post-apocalyptic horror. The Final Push The filmmakers have launched HOLLER: A Midwestern Gothic Horror-Western on Kickstarter to fund the remaining production block. The campaign’s $6,000 base goal covers two essential expenses: $4,500 for cast and crew and $1,500 for lodging. At the time of publication, the campaign had already passed that initial target, with more than $6,100 pledged by 33 backers. Funding remains open through October 23, 2026, giving horror fans an opportunity to help the production move beyond principal photography and into post-production. Additional funding will strengthen the final shoot and support the following stages: At $7,500, the production can cover meals, transportation, rentals and added production support. At $10,000, funds can begin going toward sound editing, final mixing and color grading. At $12,500 and beyond, the filmmakers can address key art, captions and other accessibility materials, festival deliverables, submissions and marketing. This isn't the first wave of support behind HOLLER. A 2025 Kickstarter raised $5,355, while private investors later contributed approximately $15,000. That funding allowed the filmmakers to assemble their team and shoot the footage now visible throughout the new campaign and trailer. Rewards for the current campaign begin at $5 and include production updates, digital stills, posters and screening invitations. Higher tiers offer signed physical posters, finishing-crew credits, screenplays, set visits, screen-used props and Associate or Executive Producer credit. Smock and David plan to complete the film and begin submitting it to festivals in 2027. For the filmmakers, HOLLER is also an opportunity to demonstrate what regional artists can create outside the traditional production hubs when local talent, businesses and communities come together behind an ambitious project. Please support independent horror films so our community can keep hearing creative voices through the media we love. Visit the Kickstarter campaign to help this Midwestern nightmare reach the finish line.

MoreHorror.com - Time fractures, the television delivers an impossible warning, and an ordinary babysitting job becomes a race against a murder that has already happened. The award-winning horror short THE BABYSITTER MURDERS: TIMING’S OFF is now streaming on Crypt TV. Directed by Orin Black, the film follows a babysitter whose quiet night takes a supernatural turn when she begins experiencing strange distortions in time—and sees a news report announcing her own murder. With only eight minutes to work its dark magic, TIMING’S OFF blends supernatural horror, slasher tension and temporal disorientation into a compact suburban nightmare. Elliot Frances Flynn stars as Grace Nichols. Flynn recently appeared as Zora in the second season of PEACEMAKER, opposite John Cena. Her additional credits include LONG BRIGHT RIVER, ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING, MARE OF EASTTOWN and Larry Fessenden’s TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE. Black co-wrote the screenplay with Gus Riley, drawing inspiration from the kinetic horror of Sam Raimi, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, along with the video games and comic books that shaped his creative voice. The short made its world premiere at the 2024 Ethereal Horror Fest in Austin, Texas, where Black received the award for Best First-Time Filmmaker. Its festival run also brought home Best Short Film, Best Director and Best Actress at the New Jersey Horror Con & Film Festival, Best Editing at HorrorHound and the Audience Choice Award at Northeast Film Festival Horror Fest. The cast also includes Giancarlo Gentile, Jake D. Williamson, Andrew Walker and William Nawrocki III. THE BABYSITTER MURDERS: TIMING’S OFF is produced by DIY or Die Productions and runs 8 minutes and 28 seconds. Watch it now on Crypt TV. WATCH HERE ON YOUTUBE!