Gossip Goblin creator Zack London takes his GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS AI-driven universe to the big screen with a 107-minute sci-fi horror feature that seems destined to ignite as much debate as fascination. By Seth Metoyer | More Horror Artificial intelligence has already kicked open the doors of filmmaking. On December 4, it walks into movie theaters. The official trailer has arrived for GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS, the new science-fiction horror feature from Zack London, better known online as Gossip Goblin. Set within the same universe that has helped London's short-form work rack up more than a billion views across social media, the film takes his strange, synthetic vision into feature-length territory with a story about disposable bodies, commodified consciousness and humanity attempting to evolve beyond the flesh. And yes, this one is going to be controversial. The film arrives at a moment when AI's role in art remains one of the most combustible conversations in entertainment. Questions surrounding authorship, employment, training data, performance and what exactly constitutes human creative work have moved well beyond tech circles. They now sit squarely inside film, music, publishing and visual art. GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS isn't tiptoeing around that conversation. The production uses generative AI extensively as part of its filmmaking process, while the team behind the movie emphasizes that human writers, performers and artists remained involved throughout its creation. Human voice actors provide the characters' performances, and an international production team reportedly handled the creative and technical decisions behind the finished film. The publicity campaign has described GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS as the first AI-generated feature to reach theaters. That particular distinction gets murky quickly. Other AI-generated feature projects have already screened theatrically, making the historical "first" considerably harder to define than a press-release headline might suggest. What is clear is that GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS represents another significant step toward AI-generated filmmaking entering conventional theatrical distribution rather than living exclusively on YouTube, experimental platforms and the festival circuit. Written by London and Jacob Batchelor, directed by London and produced by Edward Saatchi, the film unfolds on NiiroCradle, a world where physical bodies have essentially become interchangeable vessels and human consciousness has become a commodity. The official synopsis reads: “On NiiroCradle, where bodies are disposable and consciousness has been commoditized, four interconnected stories collide with the horrifying consequences of humanity’s attempt to transcend the flesh.” That's fertile horror territory regardless of how the images reached the screen. Body horror has spent decades asking what happens when technology, identity and flesh stop respecting their assigned boundaries. Cronenberg built a career digging around inside that wound. Cyberpunk has been interrogating variations of the same existential problem since long before anyone could type a prompt into a generative model. Here, however, the production method gives the premise an additional layer that borders on performance art. We're watching a movie about humanity using technology to transcend physical limitations, created through technology currently challenging our assumptions about human creative limitations. That irony practically writes its own graduate thesis. The trailer offers a surreal blend of futuristic cities, altered bodies, synthetic environments and characters inhabiting a world where identity appears frighteningly fluid. There's an uncanny quality running through the imagery, and in horror, uncanny can become an asset very quickly. Whether audiences embrace that aesthetic or reject it will become part of the experiment. And make no mistake, GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS will likely divide people before many of them see a single frame beyond the trailer. Some viewers will approach it fascinated by what independent filmmakers can now accomplish with tools that didn't exist in remotely comparable form a few years ago. Others will see the production methodology itself as a line they have no interest in crossing. Both reactions make this release culturally interesting. More Horror has always lived in a genre built by people testing boundaries, from practical-effects artists inventing new ways to mutilate latex bodies to digital filmmakers discovering what cheap cameras could accomplish outside the studio system. AI represents a radically different disruption with considerably larger questions attached to it. Those questions deserve scrutiny right alongside whatever creative possibilities emerge. So we're curious. We want to see what happens when something created through this production model has to survive 107 minutes on a theater screen, where spectacle can't hide behind a 30-second social-media clip and storytelling has to carry the film. GODS DON’T GIVE GIFTS opens in theaters December 4, 2026. Watch the official trailer below. Directed by: Zack London (Gossip Goblin) Written by: Zack London, Jacob Batchelor Produced by: Edward Saatchi Genre: Science Fiction / Horror Rating: R Runtime: 107 minutes In Theaters: December 4, 2026

MoreHorror.com Some horror movies begin with a creaking door, a deserted road or a bad decision in the woods. HUMAN starts with something far more contemporary: a woman alone after midnight, exhausted, staring into a screen and looking for a little digital distraction. Then the night goes completely off the rails. Dark Sky Films will release HUMAN, the new horror film from director Matt Stuertz, in select theaters and across VOD and digital platforms on October 23, 2026. The film will also receive a West Coast premiere on October 22 at the Laemmle Glendale, with members of the cast and crew scheduled to attend. The film follows Dani Ferris, played by Jackie Kelly, during what begins as a quiet late-night stretch away from home. She is exhausted, isolated and looking for a brief escape online. Instead, she gets pulled into a blood-soaked supernatural nightmare where relationships collapse, threats multiply and the night keeps finding new ways to get worse. Dark Sky describes HUMAN as a single-night thriller built around escalating tension, emotional chaos and an unapologetic amount of bodily fluid. That last part feels worth emphasizing. The film arrives after festival appearances at FrightFest and Obscura Film Fest, where its mix of psychological instability, practical effects and tonal unpredictability appears to have left an impression. One Night, No Safe Ground The central setup gives HUMAN an immediate pressure-cooker quality. Dani remains trapped in a constantly shifting emotional landscape populated by friends, lovers, enemies, weapons, heartbreak and supernatural forces she cannot fully understand. The official synopsis reads like someone fed a relationship crisis, a midnight panic attack and a supernatural siege into the same blender. “It’s past midnight and Dani Ferris is all alone. Away from home. Tired as hell.” From there, the night spirals through love, hate, life, death and what the film describes as “things a hell of a lot more super than natural.” Stuertz appears to lean hard into instability here, using the compressed timeline to keep Dani moving from one emotional and physical threat to another. The film reportedly embraces abrupt tonal shifts as part of that experience, keeping the audience as unsteady as its protagonist. From Matt Stuertz, Director of Tonight She Comes HUMAN was directed and produced by Matt Stuertz, whose previous work includes Tonight She Comes and RWD. David Neiss wrote the screenplay and also serves as a producer alongside David Christopher Pitt. Jackie Kelly leads the cast as Dani Ferris, joined by Brock Russell, Cecily Dowd, Jeffrey Decker and Mia Sydney. Kelly has previously appeared in films including Hag, In Memory Of and Oscar Tango Hellwater, while Russell previously worked with Stuertz on Tonight She Comes. The film runs 107 minutes. Blood, Body Horror and Late-Night Paranoia Early critical response has focused heavily on the movie’s unpredictability and practical-effects work. Reviews coming out of its festival run have described the film as relentless, hallucinatory and deliberately uncomfortable, with particular attention paid to its bodily-fluid-heavy effects. That makes HUMAN sound less interested in politely creeping under your skin and more interested in kicking the door in around 1:17 a.m. The premise also taps into something distinctly modern. Screens now fill the dead hours when sleep refuses to cooperate. Isolation no longer means silence. You can be completely alone while connected to everyone, and that strange contradiction gives horror filmmakers an enormous playground. HUMAN appears ready to take that ordinary midnight ritual and turn it into a long, ugly night Dani Ferris will never forget. Dark Sky Films releases HUMAN in select theaters and on VOD and digital platforms October 23, 2026. The film’s West Coast premiere takes place October 22 at the Laemmle Glendale.

More Horror correspondent Diana Prince checked into Crystal Lake early as Beyond Fest at the Egyptian Theatre at American Cinematheque screened the first two episodes of Peacock and A24’s new Friday the 13th series. By Seth Metoyer | More Horror There are certain places in horror where you already know something terrible happened before you even see the blood. The Bates house. Elm Street. That lonely stretch of Texas highway where picking up hitchhikers remains a terrible life choice. Then there’s Crystal Lake. More Horror correspondent Diana Prince was repping More Horror at Beyond Fest in full glam, Jason plush and mask in hand, for an early look at CRYSTAL LAKE, Peacock and A24’s new Friday the 13th prequel series. Beyond Fest screened the first two episodes October 2 at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre, followed by a Q&A with series creator and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane. The evening then took things back to 1980 with a 35mm screening of Sean S. Cunningham’s original Friday the 13th. For a franchise built around returning to the same cursed patch of New Jersey wilderness, that pairing feels appropriate. First, a look at where Kane wants to take the Voorhees mythology. Then, straight back to the movie that started carving it into horror history. Q&A with Brad Caleb Kane at advanced screening of Crystal Lake at Beyond Fest Q&A with Brad Caleb Kane at advanced screening of Crystal Lake at Beyond Fest An Early Trip Back to Crystal Lake Diana came away from the first two episodes impressed, particularly by how quickly the series establishes both its body count and a larger mystery. “I was so excited to see this, and I was not disappointed! In just the first two episodes, there are already some fun kills and plenty of intrigue to make me curious about where they’re taking it. It’s in good hands with showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, so I’m super hyped to see the rest of the series.”— Diana Prince, More Horror correspondent That “where they’re taking it” part may prove to be the real hook. CRYSTAL LAKE moves backward through Friday the 13th mythology and puts Pamela Voorhees at the center of the story. Linda Cardellini stars as Pam, still consumed by the drowning death of her young son Jason nearly a year earlier. When two strangers arrive asking questions about her past, things begin to unravel around Crystal Lake and the people living there. Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) appears in Crystal Lake Season 1. Photo: Matt Infante/PEACOCK Anyone who has seen the original Friday the 13th knows where Pamela’s story eventually leads. That foreknowledge gives the series an interesting problem to solve. Kane isn’t working toward a mystery whose answer has remained buried for 46 years. Horror fans already know Pamela Voorhees. We know Jason. We know the camp. We know what happens when teenagers start behaving like teenagers anywhere near that lake. The unexplored territory lies in everything surrounding that mythology. What happened to this family before Camp Crystal Lake became synonymous with slaughter? Who was Pamela before grief swallowed her whole? What else was happening in this town before a hockey mask became one of the most recognizable objects in horror? That’s where CRYSTAL LAKE gets room to wander into the woods. Pamela Voorhees Takes Center Stage Cardellini leads the eight-episode series as Pamela Voorhees, with Callum Vinson appearing as young Jason. William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins and Gwendolyn Sundstrom round out the principal cast. Kane serves as creator, writer, showrunner and executive producer after previously serving as co-showrunner on IT: Welcome to Derry. Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees during Crystal Lake Season 1. Photo: Matt Infante/PEACOCK The official trailer makes the connection to the original film immediately recognizable. Summer camp optimism gives way to Jason struggling in the water, Pam’s grief and the creeping sense that something much uglier already lives beneath the postcard surface of Crystal Lake. Peacock has leaned heavily into the atmosphere of early slasher cinema, right down to the late-’70s/early-’80s texture surrounding the characters. And according to Diana, viewers won’t have to wait six episodes for the blood to start flowing. You can expand the mythology, dig into family history and build a long-form mystery, but sooner or later somebody has to make an extremely poor decision near a sharp object. Camp Opens October 15 CRYSTAL LAKE premieres Thursday, October 15, exclusively on Peacock, with all eight episodes arriving at once on Peacock TV. For now, Beyond Fest audiences have seen only the first two chapters. Diana’s reaction suggests Kane has found a way to play with a mythology horror fans have spent decades dissecting while still leaving enough unanswered questions to drag us deeper into the woods. After more than four decades of sequels, resurrections, fake-out deaths, Manhattan detours, trips to Hell, trips to space and one particularly hostile encounter with Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th is going home. CRYSTAL LAKE premieres October 15 on Peacock. Photo: Diana Prince at Beyond Fest. CRYSTAL LAKE production imagery courtesy of Peacock.

By Seth Metoyer | More Horror Going into Naked Alien Massacre, I had almost no idea what I was getting myself into. There wasn't a traditional trailer to prepare me, just a title, a synopsis and the knowledge that writer-director Tim Chizmar had spent years trying to bring this strange little monster into the world. A title like Naked Alien Massacre announces itself pretty loudly. You expect blood. You expect nudity. You probably expect something designed specifically to offend somebody's aunt. What I didn't expect was to come out of it thinking quite so much about body image, vulnerability and the assumptions people carry into a culture they don't really understand. I'll own that last part. I've spent more than fifteen years producing, watching and reviewing independent horror films for More Horror, and I've seen plenty of movies use nudity as the cinematic equivalent of a flashing neon sign. Going in, I wondered whether Naked Alien Massacre would simply use the nudist setting as an excuse to get naked people onscreen between buckets of blood. I'm also far removed from the organized naturist world. I'm a metal and rock-and-roll guy with some hippie DNA rattling around in there, living on the California coast where counterculture never completely packed its bags and left. Still, naturism isn't a culture I knew much about firsthand. That actually made the movie more interesting to me. More Than a Naked Gimmick Chizmar has a genuine history within the naturist community, and that background gives Naked Alien Massacre a perspective that immediately separates it from ordinary exploitation fare. He has spoken publicly about discovering naturism after working as a nude art model in college and later becoming more deeply involved with naturist culture. The movie itself spent years evolving before Chizmar finally got it in front of cameras. You can feel that history in the finished film. *Minor Spoilers Below The story follows Allair Buck, played by Keight Leighn, an art student carrying some serious discomfort around nudity and vulnerability. She develops feelings for nude model Matt Mudwalker, played by Christopher Michelli, who eventually introduces her to a naturist community far outside her comfort zone. The film spends real time with Allair's hesitation. She sees nudity through the cultural baggage most of us inherit. Sexuality, embarrassment, judgment and fear all get tangled together. Matt and the people around him simply live within a different relationship to their bodies. Then the aliens arrive. And Naked Alien Massacre gleefully drives the car straight through the guardrail. These extraterrestrial predators have a particular problem with clothing, which turns the film's naturist premise into an actual survival mechanism. Taking your clothes off can literally save your life. Somewhere, a 1950s censor just rolled over in his grave. The joke works because Chizmar built something underneath it. The nudity gradually stops feeling like the spectacle suggested by the title. Bodies simply become bodies. Young people, older people, different shapes, different sizes. The film treats nakedness as an ordinary part of the environment, and that normalcy does more to communicate its body-positive perspective than any speech ever could. That became one of the biggest surprises for me. I expected the naturist element to provide the gimmick. Instead, it provides the heart. Then Come the Aliens, Gore and General Insanity Thankfully, Naked Alien Massacre also remembers the other half of its title. Once the horror kicks into gear, Chizmar embraces the kind of practical-effects chaos that makes independent genre filmmaking so much fun. Monsters fill the screen, blood splatters, bodies are mangled, and the scene turns gruesome—all brought to life by the visual effects of Ben Hall and the special effects of Robert Bravo. Exactly as nature intended. The practical effects give the film texture. Independent horror works best when you can almost feel the rubber, slime and fake blood through the screen. Digital perfection rarely carries the same strange charm as something somebody actually built, painted, covered in goo and shoved in front of a camera. There is a wonderfully old-school midnight movie spirit running through the entire production. At several points I found myself thinking that Naked Alien Massacre would have fit perfectly into the world of Elvira. You can practically see her introducing this thing, raising an eyebrow at the title and dropping a joke that somehow slipped past the censors. That comparison feels especially appropriate because the film understands the relationship between horror and fun. Chizmar never treats the ridiculous premise as something he needs to apologize for. He commits to it. A movie called Naked Alien Massacre should know exactly what kind of movie it wants to be. This one does. A Cast That Understands the Movie They're In The performances help hold everything together. Keight Leighn gives Allair enough vulnerability and personality to make her journey work. Her discomfort with nudity provides the audience with an entry point into the naturist world, while her growing relationship with Matt gives the movie emotional footing before everything explodes into extraterrestrial carnage. Christopher Michelli brings an easygoing quality to Matt that works particularly well. The character needs to feel comfortable within this environment without turning into some walking manifesto for naturism, and Michelli keeps him human. Lisa Ann Berain, Al Burke, Melody Munson, Juliana Acosta, Jeremiah Benjamin and the larger ensemble contribute to the communal energy surrounding the central characters. Cat Prodigy also appears in the film as Mistice Stankiewicz and contributes music to the project. Chizmar's direction deserves credit here as well. Material this heightened can fall apart quickly when actors appear to inhabit different movies. He keeps everyone operating within the same bizarre universe, somewhere between creature feature, splatter comedy, naturist celebration and drive-in lunacy. The movie gets strange. Everybody seems to know it. The Music Gives It Another Layer of Personality I also really enjoyed the musical identity of the film. Composer Guthrie Lowe gives Naked Alien Massacre a score that fits comfortably alongside the movie's collision of horror, comedy and low-budget creature-feature energy. The score knows when to support the tension and when to let the movie's stranger personality take over, which matters in a film constantly walking between genuine horror and gleeful absurdity. The original songs add another layer to that personality. Cat Prodigy performs two tracks in the film, "Save Me," which she also wrote, and "Naked Alien Massacre - Runaway," written by Cat Prodigy and Mio Killz Thomas. The latter feels especially appropriate for a movie where running from extraterrestrial killers while shedding your clothes eventually becomes a perfectly reasonable survival strategy. Chizmar himself also gets into the musical action with "The Nudels of Nudeland Theme Song," written and performed by Chizmar and carried over from his earlier film The Nudels of Nudeland. Charles Perkins contributes "The Lovely Way You Are," giving the soundtrack yet another voice and reinforcing the project's homemade, communal character. That variety could have turned into musical whiplash, yet it fits a film this proudly eccentric. The soundtrack feels less like a collection of tracks attached afterward and more like another extension of the world Chizmar built around the movie. I particularly liked the opening credits design and title presentation by Ben Hall as well. Between Lowe's score, the songs and the visual design, Naked Alien Massacre establishes its attitude early. Before the story really gets moving, the movie has already told you exactly what kind of strange neighborhood you've wandered into. The Runtime Could Use a Sharper Knife My biggest criticism comes down to pacing. The cut I watched runs around an hour and forty minutes, and parts of the movie give scenes more room than they need. Some tightening through the middle would help the comedy hit harder and allow the horror sequences to arrive with greater momentum. There is a leaner creature feature hiding inside this version. I'd take the editorial knife to a few stretches, tighten conversations that have already communicated their point and keep the story moving toward the alien mayhem. That kind of trimming could make the movie considerably stronger without sacrificing its characters, message or weird personality. The raw material works. It simply needs a slightly faster pulse in a few places. For a film looking toward distribution, that tighter version could become an even easier sell. The premise alone belongs on a streaming thumbnail somewhere at two in the morning, daring somebody to click it. And people absolutely will click it. It's called Naked Alien Massacre. Come on. Weird, Bloody and Completely Comfortable in Its Own Skin I walked away from Naked Alien Massacre smiling. It delivers monsters, gore, vulgarity, nudity, gross-out humor, practical-effects carnage and exactly the sort of independent genre insanity its title promises. Somewhere inside all that blood and alien goo, Chizmar also sneaks in something genuinely affectionate toward the naturist community he has spent years representing. That sincerity changes the movie. The nudity eventually becomes ordinary. The characters become people. The outrageous premise becomes an unexpectedly effective vehicle for talking about embarrassment, acceptance and the cultural baggage surrounding the human body. None of that prevents Chizmar from spraying blood everywhere. Balance. Naked Alien Massacre feels handmade, personal and proudly strange. It carries the scars and fingerprints of independent filmmaking, and I mean that affectionately. You can feel people behind the camera trying things, building things, getting weird and creating the movie they actually wanted to see. There are films that polish themselves until every dangerous edge disappears. Naked Alien Massacre comes from another planet entirely. It's weird. It's bloody. It's funny. It's surprisingly sweet. And it is completely comfortable in its own skin. Naked Alien Massacre will premiere in Las Vegas in early November 2026 before pursuing distribution.

By Seth Metoyer | MoreHorror.com Accursed had me comfortable with its setup pretty quickly. Friends pile into a van for a desert getaway, a strange car follows them, and a stop at an isolated gas station introduces a counter attendant named Jason. That name alone earns a little smile from anyone who grew up watching people make terrible vacation decisions in horror movies. By the time the suspicious vehicle parks outside, the film has established exactly the kind of roadside unease I enjoy: somebody knows more about this trip than the people taking it. I settled in expecting a masked killer and some desert carnage. Accursed delivers on that expectation, then works its way into occult territory, where the characters’ relationships and the circumstances surrounding the trip become considerably more troubling. The familiar setup gives the movie a useful foundation. I liked watching it build something increasingly strange on top of it. Starring Paris Dylan, Gabriel Sousa and Danny Trejo, the film centers on Emma, whose getaway with friends comes with some personal complications. Nightmares and a lingering sense of unease follow her into the weekend. Around her, the group drinks, jokes, flirts and carries on with the loose confidence of people who assume they have their whole lives ahead of them. Anyone watching a horror movie knows how quickly that confidence can become a liability. Trouble at the Lake-House The cast does a solid job with the group dynamic, and the production looks slick. The visuals stood out to me early, particularly the way the desert setting establishes distance from anything resembling help. Once the friends reach the place where they’re staying, the film has already made the surrounding emptiness feel like part of the problem. The score supports that atmosphere and handles the escalation well. There’s also a playful Jaws nod during the pool scene that I appreciated. Little touches like that fit a movie this comfortable working through familiar horror conventions. The virginity conversation belongs to that tradition too. Decades of slashers have trained audiences to pay attention whenever characters start discussing sex, and Accursed gives that conversation a purpose as Emma’s experience takes a supernatural turn. During an intimate encounter with her boyfriend, Mason, Emma sees something demonic in him. It’s an unsettling intrusion into a scene that already carries some vulnerability, and it changes how we read the danger around her. The car following the van and the creepy gas station belong to a recognizable world of human threats. Emma’s vision opens up another possibility, one that the movie develops as the weekend falls apart. I liked that progression. The supernatural material enters through Emma’s experience, giving the film room to complicate its premise while the immediate physical threat keeps closing in. A Mask, a Blade and Some Effective Carnage A noise outside sends the guys out to investigate, and the initial false alarm lets everybody breathe for a moment. Then an arrow through the head settles the question of whether they have company. From there, Accursed gets down to the bloody business of trapping its characters somewhere remote with a figure hunting them. The masked attacker wears black and carries a large, tactical-looking blade. His appearance has an almost paramilitary quality, which suits the way he moves through the situation. He looks equipped for a job, and that gives the stalking scenes an unpleasant sense of purpose. The practical effects deserve credit here. I thought the wounds and kills looked convincing, with enough physical detail to give the violence some bite. That matters in a movie built partly around the pleasure of watching a slasher setup unravel. When the carnage arrives, the effects help it land. Danny Trejo enters as the situation grows more desperate, bringing a warning about the approaching midnight deadline. His arrival gives the film a welcome burst of pulp-horror energy. Trejo has the kind of screen presence that makes a frantic warning sound like information earned through experience, and his character helps widen the story beyond the immediate problem of surviving the masked man. The Road Leads to a Ritual The occult material gives Accursed its most interesting turn. As the larger situation comes into view, the film starts dealing with ritual, sacrifice and people who treat somebody else’s life as an instrument of divine purpose. That religious certainty adds another layer of ugliness to the violence. The people involved have a justification ready, and they intend to follow it through. This stretch brought The House of the Devil and Rosemary’s Baby to mind. Those comparisons describe the territory the movie enters: hidden agendas, bodily vulnerability and the discovery that people around a young woman understand her circumstances far better than she does. Accursed approaches those ideas through the bloodier machinery of a remote-location slasher, which gives the final act a different energy. I’ll leave the central betrayal and the details of the ritual for viewers to discover. They give earlier scenes fresh meaning, and part of the fun comes from realizing how much of the weekend somebody else has arranged. Emma’s role in the story also becomes more complicated as the film pushes past the usual survival scenario. The ending adds a curious wrinkle. Its shift in perspective left me turning over how the closing scene connects to everything that came before it. I found that transition a little abrupt, though it was kind of cool in retrospect as the final image gives the ambiguity something worth considering. It’s the sort of ending I’d enjoy discussing with somebody who had just watched the film. A Lean, Bloody Weekend I also appreciated the roughly 80-minute runtime. That length suits this story. The film gives the friends enough time to establish their relationships, builds trouble around them and moves into the violence while the setup still has momentum. I’d happily see more horror filmmakers embrace that kind of economy. A movie like this benefits from knowing when it has delivered its goods. Overall, I dug Accursed for the most part. The cast holds together, the production looks good, the music works, and the practical effects give the carnage a satisfying physical presence. Its familiar desert-road setup offers an easy way into a story that grows more sinister as the weekend progresses. I showed up for the creepy gas station and masked-killer chaos, but the ritual horror added a little extra to mull over afterward. It’s nothing groundbreaking, yet it’s worth tossing on in the background via a streaming service.

By Seth Metoyer | More Horror If killer dolls have taught horror fans anything, it’s that apparently no object is too small, plastic, or absurdly innocent-looking to become a homicidal nightmare. Now director Mark Savage is throwing Jeffrey Dahmer into the toy box. Uncork’d Entertainment will release JEFFREY DOLLMER on Digital and On Demand on November 3, introducing horror audiences to a killer doll reportedly possessed by the spirit of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Yes. That is genuinely the movie. And judging from the trailer, Savage and company appear fully aware of how wonderfully unhinged that premise sounds. Dahmer Goes Full Killer Doll The film begins in 1991, with Dahmer discovering a doll and attempting a ritual designed to transfer his spirit into it. Authorities capture him before he can complete his plans, leaving the doll locked away in police evidence for decades. Eventually discarded, the doll makes its way back into circulation. In the present day, someone accidentally summons the spirit connected to the doll, which then becomes fixated on a young model who resembles its former owner. When she travels to an isolated photo shoot, the possessed doll follows her, transforming the location into a hunting ground for the models and crew. In other words, we’ve entered territory somewhere between supernatural slasher, killer-doll movie and unapologetic exploitation horror. That combination alone has my attention. Mark Savage Returns to the Dark Side Mark Savage directs JEFFREY DOLLMER from a screenplay by John Doolan (Popeye the Slayer Man, Remains) and Jeff Miller (Clowntown, Ouija House), based on a story by Miller. Miller also produces. I’ve known Mark for years, and he remains one of the most knowledgeable film buffs I’ve encountered. Spend enough time talking movies with him and you quickly realize you’re dealing with somebody who genuinely lives and breathes cinema, particularly the stranger corners where horror, exploitation and cult filmmaking overlap. His 2017 film Purgatory Road is still one of my favorites from his work. The grisly Southern horror tale centers on a murderous priest, wonderfully portrayed by the ever-reliable Gary Cairns, and his brother as they run a mobile confessional across Mississippi. It perfectly highlights Savage’s knack for taking an unusual premise and diving deep into much darker territory. That history makes JEFFREY DOLLMER especially interesting. Savage understands the vocabulary of exploitation cinema, and this premise practically arrives wearing a neon sign reading, “Go completely insane with this.” Meet the Cast The film stars Charlie Trepany, Chey Crieger, Juliana Destefano, Adam Huss, Eva Hamilton, Tom Parnell, and Brian Joseph Mange as Jeffrey Dahmer. Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick also makes a cameo appearance. The title itself makes the movie’s intentions pretty clear. This looks built for horror fans who miss the era when video-store shelves could sell you an entire movie with one outrageous piece of cover art and a title that made you immediately reach for the box. Sometimes horror needs that energy. Watch the JEFFREY DOLLMER Trailer The trailer promises possessed-doll mayhem, models trapped at a remote shoot, supernatural carnage and enough deliberate absurdity to suggest everyone involved understood exactly what kind of movie they were making. JEFFREY DOLLMER arrives on Digital and On Demand November 3 through Uncork’d Entertainment. Uncork’d currently lists the film among its November 2026 releases and describes it as the story of a doll possessed by Dahmer’s spirit stalking models on a secluded set. Watch the trailer here: For anyone who has ever looked at Chucky and thought, “You know what this genre needs? An even stranger true-crime exploitation detour,” apparently somebody heard you.

Seth's Backrooms Map. Created in Image2 Backrooms (2026) sent me down a separate rabbit hole: if a machine already knows something about the way you think, what kind of AI Backrooms nightmare would it build for you? By Seth Metoyer | MoreHorror.com I finished watching Backrooms and found myself thinking less about the mechanics of the place and more about the insult of it. The Backrooms take something ordinary, something architectural and functional, and strip away the purpose until all that remains is fluorescent light, walls, carpet, repetition and the growing suspicion that the building understands something you do not. There is a peculiar kind of horror in a universe that offers no explanation and no obvious hostility, because eventually your own brain starts supplying the missing pieces. You want the room to have meaning. You want the hallway to lead somewhere and the door to exist for a purpose. The Backrooms have always known that people feel uneasy when architecture doesn't align with your story. That's creepy. When the Maze Starts Knowing You That was the main idea rattling around in my head when I wandered into a completely separate question. Now, I'm not suggesting that Backrooms is a movie about artificial intelligence, because it isn’t, and the internet already has enough people shadowboxing arguments nobody actually made. The film simply sent me down another corridor. I started wondering what would happen if the Backrooms stopped being generic and began tailoring themselves to the person trapped inside them. Then I pushed the idea a little farther: what if you asked an AI you had already spent a great deal of time talking with to design your personal Backrooms from what it had learned about you? There is already something faintly unsettling about that premise before the monsters wander into the area. People use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and other systems for everything from research and brainstorming to personal conversations, creative work and the kind of late-night questions we once reserved for journals, long drives and unfortunate phone calls to friends. Over time, those conversations create a strange residue. Interests repeat. Fears reappear under different names. Old obsessions keep crawling back into the room. Certain questions become almost liturgical. If you talk to one of these systems long enough, it begins to recognize patterns, or at least construct a convincing model of those patterns from what you have voluntarily given it. So I decided to turn that unease into a horror exercise. I asked ChatGPT to imagine my personal Backrooms using the broadest picture it had of me across our conversations. This idea actually came from my wife and I talking about the film after we watched it together. Basically, I told Hugo (yes, I have named my GPT bot) to ignore whatever I had been talking about most recently and to give greater focus to patterns that appeared across unrelated parts of my life. I wanted memory, worldview, nostalgia, creative instincts, fear, identity, belonging, mortality, authority, contradiction and all the other little pieces that tend to follow a person around whether invited or not. Then I asked it to build the rooms, the traps, the entities and the false exits around those things. Things escalated quickly. Seth's Backrooms. Created in Midjourney 8.2 My Backrooms Remembered Too Much My Backrooms didn't begin with a monster. They began somewhere that looked almost like Montana around 1991, which already felt like a low blow. Snow sat outside. A road stretched into the dark. An old cassette played songs I recognized until the lyrics changed and began describing things that had not happened yet. Familiar places appeared with tiny mistakes inside them. A record store sold albums from bands that never existed. A church I had never attended displayed a sign that said, “WELCOME BACK.” That particular version of horror resonates with me because nostalgia has always been more significant than I’d probably like to admit. Music can reopen whole rooms in my head. Certain records, movies, objects and places can collapse decades in a few seconds, and anyone who has ever been ambushed by a song from high school in a grocery store knows the mechanism. My Backrooms took that reflex and turned it poisonous. They offered the promise of going back, then quietly suggested that the past itself had started changing the locks. Another room became something called the Museum of Unlived Lives, which may be one of the most effective ideas the exercise produced. Inside were different versions of my life arranged like exhibits: the version of me who took the safer career, the version who found greater success, the version who made different choices, the version who eventually figured everything out. One exhibit contained an older, peaceful version of myself sitting somewhere I desperately wanted to reach, except a velvet rope blocked the path and the plaque beneath him read, “SPECULATIVE RECONSTRUCTION.” Then, there were other versions of me that manifested into my own monster. Nightmare fuel. Seth's Backrooms Monster. Created in Midjourney 8.2 and Photoshop The Backrooms in that version kept returning to the same pressure point: identity. Who gets to define you, and how much of that definition comes from choices you made, choices you avoided, people who knew you, institutions that categorized you, audiences who interpreted you and older versions of yourself who would probably find the current version suspicious? A recurring figure called The Other Seth appeared throughout the map at different ages, sometimes younger, sometimes older, never chasing me and rarely speaking. He simply watched. That somehow felt worse. The architecture eventually became a maze built around authorship. One room represented conformity. Another represented a life of stability stripped of creativity. Another catalogued every project I had completed and every project I never attempted. A machine tried endlessly to explain me through profiles, preferences and predictions. The exit remained uncertain. Every level seemed to ask the same question in a different costume: if enough outside forces describe you convincingly enough, at what point do you start mistaking the description for yourself? That gave me one kind of Backrooms. I Put the Experiment Out to the Horror Community I wanted to know whether the idea would hold up once it left my own conversation history, so I turned the experiment into a short Instagram video and put it in front of the horror community. The invitation was simple: if you already use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or another conversational AI and feel comfortable doing it, ask the system what your personal Backrooms would look like based on what it has learned about you over time. I also made it clear that I was not suggesting Backrooms itself has anything to do with AI. The film simply sparked the question, and the experiment became its own strange little hallway from there. The post got plenty of attention and likes, but fewer people actually stepped through the door, which honestly makes sense. There is a difference between enjoying the concept and handing over a piece of your psychological furniture for public inspection. My wife Shannon did take the challenge, and her result ended up giving the experiment exactly what it needed: a completely different kind of personalized horror. If anyone reading this wants to try it, the invitation is still open. Run the prompt through whatever conversational AI you already use, see what kind of Backrooms it builds from your memories, fears, habits, obsessions and recurring patterns, and send me the parts that hit hardest. If you are comfortable with me quoting the response and crediting you, I would still love to hear from more people in the horror community and may include additional examples in a future update or follow-up feature. Shannon's Backrooms Map. Created in Image2 Shannon’s Backrooms Learned How to Hunt Shannon, who also goes by Cat online and who some of you may know as @snickersnee on Instagram, ran the same general experiment through her own ChatGPT conversations. Her result moved in a completely different direction, and that difference became the thing that made the whole exercise worth pursuing. Her Backrooms were less interested in biography and more interested in hunting her through perception. “Cat’s Backrooms would probably start somewhere almost comfortable: an empty California house in the late afternoon, quiet enough that she’d happily explore instead of immediately looking for an exit,” her response began. “The problem is that every room leads into another house. Kitchens open into hotel corridors, closets contain staircases, and back doors lead to nearly identical neighborhoods. There are signs of people everywhere, warm food, running showers, televisions playing, but nobody answers when she calls.” That is where her version gets smart. The empty house is not immediately threatening because solitude does not automatically frighten her. The place understands that and adapts accordingly. It does not need to chase her down a corridor when curiosity will do the work for free. “The Backrooms could use curiosity instead of force,” the response said. That line probably deserves to survive into the final version of this article because it contains the whole nightmare in seven words. Horror often works by turning a strength into a liability. Curiosity helps us survive, understand, create and discover. In the wrong room, curiosity becomes a leash. Shannon’s Backrooms keep leaving bait. A phone rings inside a sealed room. A television shows the room she is currently standing in. One of her own possessions appears inside a house she has never visited. Every clue invites another step forward until the environment stops feeling empty and starts feeling occupied by something that has been studying her. Shannon's Backrooms. Created in Midjourney 8.2 The Things in the House Get Better at Being Human That is where the inhabitants arrive. At first, they are easy to identify. Their limbs are wrong. Their faces do not quite fit. Their movements belong to bad imitations of human bodies. Some stay hidden and reproduce ordinary sounds: laughter, crying, someone calling from upstairs. Then they begin improving. “Eventually the people she encounters look completely normal, leaving her to search for tiny mistakes,” the response said. “The friendly stranger never blinks, the woman at the window repeats the same wave perfectly, the man beside her still makes footsteps after he stops walking.” There is something viciously effective about that progression because it gradually removes the one defense Shannon’s Backrooms initially allow her: observation. You can survive the first creature by noticing what is wrong. The second one requires closer attention. The third forces you to distrust the act of seeing itself. Her final section makes the psychological mechanism explicit. “She values being left alone, having control over her own space, and being able to trust her own observations. This place would corrupt all three. Solitude would stop meaning she’s alone. Curiosity would keep leading her into danger. And eventually she’d meet something so convincing that careful observation couldn’t tell her whether she was looking at a person or something that had simply gotten very good at pretending to be one.” That last idea acquires an extra layer of unease when you remember who generated it. An AI system created a horror scenario about entities that become progressively better at imitating human beings. You can hear the floorboards creak on that one without any help from me. The Nightmare Starts With What You Trust Shannon's Backrooms Monster. Created in Midjourney 8.2 This is where the experiment moved beyond the novelty of asking a chatbot for a scary story. Shannon’s Backrooms and mine look almost nothing alike, yet both follow the same principle. The nightmare identifies something the person relies on, then breaks the contract. I rely heavily on memory, identity, interpretation and the ability to maintain some distance from whatever group, institution or label wants to finish the sentence for me. My Backrooms turn those things unstable. Shannon values solitude, autonomy, curiosity and the ability to trust what she sees. Her Backrooms weaponize those things against her. That suggests a better question than “What scares you?” What do you trust? A personalized nightmare has no reason to start with your obvious fears. It can begin with the things that make you feel safe. It can take a childhood road and change the destination. It can take solitude and quietly fill the room. It can take curiosity and keep placing interesting doors at the end of increasingly dangerous hallways. It can take your ability to observe the world and populate that world with things designed to survive your scrutiny. That feels much closer to the machinery of effective horror. The best nightmares rarely announce themselves with a chainsaw in the first five minutes. They take something familiar and loosen one screw at a time. How Much Does a Machine Need to Know? The AI part of this experiment adds another uncomfortable dimension, and I think that dimension matters even for people who have zero interest in treating artificial intelligence as mystical or sentient. I don't think ChatGPT peered into my soul and found a secret room full of alternate Seths. Shannon’s system did not spiritually diagnose her through the glowing eye of some ancient god. These systems work from conversational history, patterns, context and inference. They take the material available and construct an interpretation from it. The interesting question is how much material something needs before that interpretation starts feeling uncomfortably specific. Human beings have spent centuries building haunted houses out of memory, guilt, grief, obsession and repression. Psychological horror gives interior states walls, windows and hallways because sometimes architecture explains fear better than dialogue can. A haunted hotel becomes addiction and inheritance. A town becomes guilt. A house becomes family history. The Backrooms fit neatly into that tradition because they give anxiety an address without giving it a meaning. This experiment simply changes the order of operations. Instead of a writer creating a nightmare and hoping the audience finds themselves somewhere inside it, the audience supplies the raw material first and the nightmare gets built afterward. That is where the idea starts getting strange. The Door You Would Open Anyway A personalized Backrooms doesn't need to know everything about you. It only needs enough information to understand which door you are likely to open. For Shannon, it could be a telephone ringing behind a wall in an empty house. For me, it might be a record that shouldn’t exist, sitting in a store I somehow remember. Neither room has to pull us in. We’d walk in on our own. That might be the version of the Backrooms I find most unsettling now. An endless maze can lose its power once the pattern becomes familiar. A maze built specifically around you carries a different kind of patience. It learns which memories you will follow, which sounds will make you turn around and which impossible little detail will keep you moving long after common sense tells you to stop. The scariest Backrooms might never chase you. They could just know exactly what piques your curiosity—and leave the door wide open.

New biometric entertainment platform will use smartwatches and wearable devices to measure real-time audience reactions at horror screenings and immersive experiences. By Seth Metoyer | More Horror For decades, horror marketing has loved the physical reaction. Audiences screamed. People supposedly fainted. Moviegoers covered their eyes, jumped out of their seats and occasionally became part of the legend surrounding the movie itself. William Castle famously wired theater seats for The Tingler. The Exorcist became inseparable from stories of overwhelmed audiences. Modern horror trailers routinely turn night-vision footage of frightened theatergoers into part of the sales pitch. Now a new entertainment technology company wants to take that reaction out of the realm of anecdote and turn it into data. ScareScore officially announced its launch October 1, introducing a biometric entertainment platform designed to measure how audiences physically respond to movies, haunted attractions and other adrenaline-driven experiences in real time. Its pitch arrives with a line almost purpose-built for horror fans: “Your body is the review.” Rather than asking someone whether a movie scared them once the credits roll, ScareScore connects with smartwatches and wearable devices audiences already own and tracks physiological signals including heart rate, heart-rate variability and movement. The system establishes an individual baseline and then analyzes changes throughout the experience, eventually converting those reactions into a personalized ScareScore. The company plans to begin public activations during the 2026 Halloween season at select film festivals and location-based entertainment experiences across North America. What Happens When Horror Gets a Heart Monitor? The concept turns one of horror’s oldest questions into something quantifiable: Did the scare actually land? ScareScore says its technology can synchronize audience biometric information with what happens on screen or inside an attraction, allowing reactions to become time-coded to particular moments. A sudden heart-rate spike during a jump scare, increased movement during an especially tense sequence or the body’s recovery afterward could all become part of the resulting data. For fans, ScareScore envisions the system as both an individual experience and a social one. Users will be able to compare results with friends and other audiences, share scores and eventually participate in what the company describes as its “Global Human Scoreboard.” For filmmakers, studios, festivals and attraction operators, the more intriguing application may happen behind the curtain. ScareScore intends to provide synchronized audience-response information that can reveal exactly when measurable physiological reactions occurred rather than relying exclusively on surveys, reviews, focus groups or audience recollections after an experience ends. ScareScore founder and CEO Chris Anastas “Entertainment has spent more than a century asking audiences what they thought after an experience was over,” ScareScore founder and CEO Chris Anastas said in announcing the company. “We believe there is another incredibly valuable signal sitting right in front of us: what their bodies were doing while they experienced it.” A wearable can record physiological signals; ScareScore’s technology then interprets those signals and converts them into its scoring system. A racing heart can accompany fear, excitement, anticipation or physical movement, so the platform represents a new measurement of bodily reaction to entertainment rather than a literal machine reading the emotion inside somebody’s head. That may ultimately make the experiment more interesting. Horror has always operated in that strange electrical territory between psychology and physiology. The monster exists on the screen. The reaction happens inside you. ScareScore wants to capture the moment those two things collide. Horror Is Only the Beginning ScareScore comes from Anastas and co-founder JP Ouellette, whose backgrounds cross technology, filmmaking, immersive entertainment and horror production. Anastas previously founded SoundFi Systems, developing patented smartphone synchronization technology designed to connect personal devices with theatrical playback. SoundFi launched commercially in 2018 in connection with Sony Pictures’ The Equalizer 2, using synchronized technology for applications including personalized theatrical audio and language translation. His work later moved further into immersive horror. In 2023, Anastas helped create and write Angel of Light, an elaborate horror experience staged inside downtown Los Angeles’ historic Los Angeles Theatre. The attraction combined live performance, theatrical storytelling, sound and environmental design, placing audiences directly inside its fictional world. ScareScore takes that interest in synchronized entertainment one step further. This time, the audience itself becomes part of the signal. ScareScore co-founder JP Ouellette Ouellette approaches the equation from the filmmaking side. A writer and producer with deep roots in horror, he produced Fran Kranz’s acclaimed 2021 Sundance drama Mass, which later received the Robert Altman Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. His more recent genre work includes the horror film Do Not Watch and the Jessica Rothe-led sci-fi horror feature Affection. According to the company, Ouellette’s experience watching filmmakers depend on test screenings, surveys, reviews and box-office performance helped inspire the central question behind ScareScore: What if creators could see the physical response while an audience was actually experiencing the movie? Horror became the obvious testing ground. Fear and suspense can produce immediate physical reactions, and the genre already has a culture built around measuring intensity. Fans argue about the scariest movie ever made. Haunted attractions advertise themselves through endurance. Festivals celebrate audience reactions. Even horror marketing regularly treats a screaming crowd as evidence that a movie delivered what it promised. ScareScore essentially wants to give that conversation instrumentation. From Movie Reviews to Biometric Awards The company also plans to introduce what it calls Biometric Awards, recognizing films and entertainment experiences according to real-time physiological audience reactions. That idea could create one of ScareScore’s more fascinating wrinkles. Traditional horror awards depend on juries, critics, audiences or industry voters deciding which films deserve recognition. A biometric category would introduce an entirely different measurement: which experiences generated the strongest physical responses among participating audiences. ScareScore says the larger technology will eventually expand beyond horror into theatrical films, streaming content, theme parks, immersive attractions and other forms of entertainment. For now, horror gets first crack at the machine. The company’s initial public activations are scheduled to begin throughout the 2026 Halloween season, with additional film festival, location-based entertainment and technology partners expected to be announced. There is something wonderfully appropriate about horror becoming the proving ground for this kind of technology. The genre has always understood that watching a movie involves more than sitting quietly in front of a screen. Horror lives in clenched muscles, held breath, nervous laughter, the involuntary jump when something enters the frame half a second before your brain catches up. ScareScore is betting that those reactions tell a story of their own. Soon, your smartwatch may be taking notes while you scream. For more information about ScareScore, visit scarescore.com; follow @yourscarescore on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, X and YouTube, and download ScareScore in the App Store or your preferred app marketplace.

Pirate movies have always lived surprisingly close to horror, even when nobody bothered putting the word on the poster. Strip away the romantic mythology of buried treasure and rum-soaked rogues and you are left with people crossing enormous stretches of hostile water, disappearing beyond the boundaries of civilization and occasionally washing ashore somewhere that civilization forgot. Mahal Empire Productions leans directly into that darker territory with Cursed Waters, a new pirate action adventure now available on Amazon Prime Video, where an already desperate crew discovers that surviving a naval attack was merely the beginning of their problems. Directed by Adam Werth, who co-wrote the film with BJ Mezek, Cursed Waters follows a crew of pirates whose ship is destroyed during a brutal battle with the Navy. With their vessel gone and the authorities closing in, the survivors reach what initially appears to be the closest thing they have to salvation: a remote island far from the reach of ordinary society. The refuge quickly reveals its teeth. The island is home to a bloodthirsty cult whose rituals and secrets have been allowed to fester for generations, turning the pirates’ escape from the law into something considerably more primitive and dangerous. That setup gives Cursed Waters an interesting place inside the current genre landscape. Mahal Empire officially describes the film as a Pirate Action Adventure, and that remains the machinery driving the story, yet the premise draws heavily from the same well that has fed folk horror, survival horror and isolated-community nightmares for decades. The pirates are trapped between two worlds: behind them waits the organized violence of the Navy and the gallows that likely follow capture, while ahead sits an island governed by rituals they do not understand and people who have spent generations guarding secrets outsiders were never supposed to see. The film takes the familiar pirate fantasy of unexplored territory and restores some of the fear that concept would have carried before maps made the world feel smaller. A Genre Cast Heads Into Dangerous Waters The cast brings together a collection of familiar faces from independent film, horror and cult cinema. John Wells stars as Tiberius Shaw, while BJ Mezek appears as Drake, Wesley Cannon plays Kilgore and Greg Tally portrays Lt. Commander Jacob Bridger. The film also features Vernon Wells as the Prosecutor, Michael Paré as Captain Arnold, Glenn Plummer as Captain Bure and Sadie Katz as Credonia, with Costas Mandylor, Robert LaSardo and Tom Proctor appearing as Whale, Ed and Riley respectively. For genre audiences, several of those names carry their own history. Mandylor remains deeply associated with the Saw franchise through his portrayal of Mark Hoffman, while Katz has spent years moving through independent horror and cult film. LaSardo has built one of those instantly recognizable character-actor careers where his presence alone tends to suggest that somebody on screen is about to have a very complicated evening, while Paré and Vernon Wells bring decades of action and genre history into the mix. That gives Cursed Waters the kind of ensemble familiar to anyone who spends enough time wandering through the deeper shelves of independent cinema, where actors from different corners of action, horror and exploitation history frequently converge inside films built around concepts mainstream studios rarely touch. Behind the camera, Werth works with director of photography Michael Su, editor Kane Richard Blust and composer Mariano Saulino, with Sonny Mahal and Michael Mahal producing through Mahal Empire Productions. The completed film runs approximately 95 minutes and was produced in 1920 × 1080 HD at a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. It is currently unrated and designated for mature audiences. When the Island Becomes the Worse Option There is a certain old-world anxiety built into the idea of an island that exists outside normal authority. Long before cinema gave us radioactive monsters, masked killers and cursed videotapes, storytellers were already sending travelers across oceans toward places where ordinary rules stopped working. Maps once ended in blank spaces for a reason. The sea represented distance, uncertainty and the possibility that whatever existed beyond the horizon operated according to its own laws, gods and appetites. Cursed Waters taps into that mythology by turning landfall into another form of danger. The pirates arrive on the island while running from an enemy they already understand, then discover a threat shaped by generations of secrecy and ritual. Their situation gradually shifts from escape to survival as the crew moves deeper into the cult’s territory and closer to whatever the island has kept hidden from the outside world. The gallows begin to look almost civilized compared with what waits beyond the shoreline. That collision between pirate adventure and cult horror gives the film its strongest hook. There are ships, naval battles, fugitives and the familiar iconography of pirate cinema, yet the story carries those elements into territory where isolation becomes claustrophobia and discovery becomes something closer to trespassing. The film’s tagline, “Some treasures should stay buried,” captures that idea cleanly. Pirate stories have spent centuries convincing us that buried things exist to be found. Horror has always understood the other possibility. CURSED WATERS Is Streaming Now With Cursed Waters, Mahal Empire Productions continues building around the kind of large-concept independent genre filmmaking that thrives outside the safest studio formulas. A pirate film already represents an ambitious undertaking at the independent level, and folding a secretive island cult into that framework gives the project an identity that reaches comfortably into the More Horror neighborhood while keeping its adventure roots intact. For viewers looking for something removed from the familiar rotation of haunted houses, possession stories and suburban slashers, Cursed Waters offers a different route into the dark. It sends its characters across open water, wrecks the ship beneath them and leaves them stranded on an island whose inhabitants have had generations to perfect whatever nightmare awaits there. Cursed Waters is now available on Amazon Prime Video. CURSED WATERS Directed by Adam Werth Written by Adam Werth and BJ Mezek Produced by Sonny Mahal and Michael MahalMahal Empire Productions Runtime: 95 minutes Not Rated – Mature Audiences Now available on Amazon Prime Video Poster and key art courtesy of Mahal Empire Productions.

By Seth Metoyer | More Horror There are some cases that probably never make it onto a normal detective’s desk. A trail of brutally murdered bodies, rumors of werewolves, fading mystical powers and enough supernatural trouble to make calling the police feel almost quaint definitely qualifies. Demon Squad: Tooth and Claw, the new indie horror-fantasy sequel from writer/director Thomas Smith and Fighting Owl Films, has officially arrived, bringing paranormal investigator Nick Moon back for another trip into a world where monsters, magic and old-fashioned detective work occupy the same dark corners. The film follows Nick Moon and his partner Daisy O’Reilly as they investigate a string of gruesome killings targeting members of the city’s homeless population. The evidence points toward something distinctly inhuman, while a rival psychic begins spreading stories about werewolves and serial killers. Moon has another problem brewing beneath the surface: his own mystical abilities have started to fade. Naturally, things only get weirder from there. Check out the trailer below and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The film looks like a blast and boasts impressive production quality. Demon Squad: Tooth and Claw blends supernatural horror with detective noir, creature-feature mythology and the sort of paranormal world-building that once made shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The X-Files required late-night viewing. Smith also cites Hellboy among the inspirations behind the Demon Squad universe, which should give horror fans a pretty good idea of the neighborhood we’re wandering into here. Khristian Fulmer returns as Nick Moon, with Erin Lilley portraying Daisy O’Reilly. The cast also includes Victoria Antonelli, Michael Anthony Bagozzi, Rob Eubanks, Iona Yabut, Scott Alan Warner, Billy Culbertson and Katie Haughton. Smith directed the film, with Fighting Owl Films producing the project. What makes the story behind Tooth and Claw particularly interesting is the strange path its predecessor took to cult-film territory. The original Demon Squad arrived in 2019 as a low-budget supernatural genre mashup centered around Moon and his world of demons, monsters and paranormal cases. A few years later, the movie found itself in one of the most wonderfully dangerous places an independent genre film can land: directly in the sights of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Demon Squad became Episode 1306 of MST3K’s thirteenth season, premiering through the Gizmoplex in June 2022. That exposure introduced Smith’s handmade supernatural universe to a significantly wider audience and eventually helped generate interest in another adventure for Nick Moon and company. Rather than retreat from the experience of seeing his movie subjected to the Satellite of Love treatment, Smith and the Fighting Owl Films crew went back into the monster laboratory. The resulting sequel became a fan-funded production through Kickstarter. According to the film’s official EPK, Tooth and Claw was shot on location in Mobile, Alabama on a microbudget of approximately $20,000, leaning heavily on community support, practical filmmaking and the considerably dangerous indie-horror currency known as figuring out how the hell to make the thing work anyway. Smith describes the project as growing from his longtime fascination with folklore, urban legends and monster movies, while expanding the concept into what amounts to a supernatural “case-of-the-week” existing inside a recognizably human world. That approach gives the Demon Squad universe plenty of territory to explore. Werewolves may occupy the center of this particular investigation, but Moon’s world appears built for considerably more things that go bump, growl or whisper strange things from the other side. There’s also something fitting about an independent horror movie surviving the MST3K treatment and coming back with another chapter. Horror has always had a peculiar relationship with movies made outside the machinery of major studios. Sometimes rough edges become scars. Sometimes those scars become personality. Sometimes enough people discover that personality and somebody gets crazy enough to make another movie. Demon Squad: Tooth and Claw is that next movie. The film is now available to stream on Tubi, Prime Video and Fandango at Home, with DVD and Blu-ray editions also available. Tubi currently lists the film as a 2026 horror release directed by Thomas Smith. For horror fans whose tastes run toward paranormal detectives, werewolves, occult conspiracies, creature features and supernatural worlds assembled several blocks away from Hollywood’s billion-dollar machinery, Demon Squad: Tooth and Claw may be worth putting on the radar. And considering Nick Moon makes his living investigating things that probably should have stayed buried, something tells us this case won’t end quietly. Watch the trailer for Demon Squad: Tooth and Claw and look for the film now on Tubi, Prime Video and Fandango. Also pick up a physical DVD or Blu-ray here!

By Seth Metoyer | MoreHorror.com Reporting, and photos by Diana Prince Stephen King’s Carrie has left enough blood on the screen to make another adaptation feel like a dangerous proposition. We know the girl, the mother, the cruelty waiting at school and the night when everything finally breaks. At Saturday’s Beyond Fest screening, More Horror correspondent Diana Prince went in with that history on her mind. She came out wanting to see where Mike Flanagan takes the story next. Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque presented the West Coast premiere of the first two episodes on September 26 at the MUBI Theatre at the Aero. Flanagan and Samantha Sloyan, who plays Margaret White, joined the audience for a Q&A afterward. Summer H. Howell stars as Carrie White in the eight episode Prime Video series. Mike Flanagan and Samantha Sloyan at Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque presented the West Coast premiere of Carrie’s first two episodes at the MUBI Theatre at the Aero on September 26. “I wasn’t sure we needed another Carrie adaptation tbh, but Mike Flanagan truly found a fresh way to do it,” Diana Prince “Carrie and her mom feel different than we’ve ever seen before, and putting them in this modern world of social media and school violence adds a whole new layer. Plus, it has Matthew Lillard, and I’ll literally watch him in ANYTHING. I will definitely be checking out the rest of the series.” More Horror correspondent Diana Prince on the red carpet for the West Coast premiere of Carrie at Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque on September 26, 2026. The screening took place at the MUBI Theatre at the Aero. Her reaction gets at the challenge facing any new Carrie: the story has to reach beyond its most famous images. Flanagan’s version places Carrie in a world where humiliation can travel through a school and across a screen before she has a chance to catch her breath. Beyond Fest describes a viral bullying scandal at the center of the series, giving the familiar cruelty surrounding Carrie a contemporary reach. Diana’s response also points toward the relationship that anchors the story. Carrie and Margaret White have always made for an unsettling pair, and these first two episodes left her feeling that both characters had changed in ways worth following. Her verdict remains a reaction to the premiere chapters; the rest of the series still lies ahead. One part of this new approach has me especially curious. Flanagan described his Carrie in an interview with Teen Vogue: “open, earnest, curious and kind, and wanting to be part of the world.” That makes the bullying feel more vicious. She walks into school hoping to find a place in it, and the cruelty hits someone who still expects people to let her in. I’m looking forward to seeing how that side of Carrie develops across the rest of the series. Promotional image for Carrie via Beyond Fest. About Carrie: Mike Flanagan brings Stephen King’s novel into the social media age with a new eight episode series starring Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, Samantha Sloyan as her mother Margaret, and Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle. All eight episodes arrive on Prime Video October 7, 2026. Watch the official trailer below.

By Seth Metoyer | MoreHorror.com Reporting and footage by Diana Prince The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride returned for another season of darkness and on Friday, September 25, they opened the gates of Midnight Falls for media night and pulling guests back into that strange stretch of Halloween mythology where witches still settle old scores, the dead refuse to stay buried, and climbing onto a wagon in the middle of the night somehow feels like a perfectly reasonable recreational decision. More Horror correspondent Diana Prince was there for the opening festivities, taking in the latest incarnation of one of Los Angeles’ longest-running seasonal horror attractions and capturing footage from inside the experience. This year’s story once again unfolds within Midnight Falls, a town caught beneath the influence of the Witch of the Woods, whose spell has weakened the boundary between the living and the dead. Spirits from the underworld begin crossing over as her army gathers, turning the Hayride into a journey through a community slowly being swallowed by its own supernatural nightmare. The mythology gives the attraction more than a collection of disconnected monsters waiting beside the road. Midnight Falls operates more like a haunted little universe, where scarecrows, witches, restless spirits and corrupted creatures all feel like pieces of the same cursed ecosystem. For Diana, the biggest takeaway came down to something much simpler: the Hayride itself delivered. “The hayride was great! Best one they’ve had in the past few years,” she told More Horror following the event. The footage from media night captures the kind of atmosphere the Haunted Hayride has built its reputation around, where darkness becomes part of the set design and the spaces beyond the wagon feel deliberately uncertain. Performers emerge from the environment, theatrical lighting cuts through the night, and the entire attraction leans into the wonderfully irrational idea that whatever lives in Midnight Falls has been waiting for visitors to come through. The experience works through scale as much as individual scares, surrounding guests with movement, sound and characters instead of relying entirely on the rhythm of walking through another dark hallway waiting for something to jump from behind plywood. That has always been part of the particular charm of the Hayride itself. Haunted attractions usually force visitors deeper into confined spaces, shrinking the world until every doorway becomes suspicious. The Hayride opens everything up. Guests sit together in the open air while the darkness stretches outward in every direction, which creates its own strange vulnerability. You can see more of the world around you, yet that extra visibility gives the imagination more territory to populate. Somewhere beyond the lights sits Midnight Falls, and the Witch of the Woods apparently has an impressive lack of interest in municipal boundaries. There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about the basic idea beneath all the production design. Long before immersive horror became an industry term, people were climbing onto wagons, wandering through autumn fields and telling stories about witches, ghosts and whatever might be moving beyond the tree line. The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride takes that familiar seasonal ritual and runs electricity through it, turning the harvest imagery of Halloween into a theatrical nightmare filled with creatures, elaborate environments and performers who understand that half the fun comes from watching an audience realize exactly how trapped they are on a slowly moving wagon. Media night offered an early look at what visitors can expect throughout the 2026 season, and Diana’s verdict suggests that Midnight Falls has found its rhythm again this year. For an attraction that returns annually, evolution becomes part of the ritual. The town comes back, the Witch keeps casting her spell, another group of unsuspecting passengers climbs aboard, and Halloween gets another chance to reinvent the same ancient fear of what might be waiting outside the firelight. The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride runs on select nights through November 1, 2026. Tickets, dates and additional information are available through LosAngelesHauntedHayride.com.