Beyond Fest 2026 Slate Bringing 81 Feature films to Its Roster MoreHorror.com Los Angeles’ massive celebration of genre cinema has unveiled its complete Beyond Fest 2026 slate, bringing 81 feature films, major premieres, restorations, anniversary screenings and an extraordinary roster of filmmakers and actors to theaters across Los Angeles. Opening-night events begin September 23, with Beyond Fest programming continuing through October 6 at the Egyptian Theatre, the MUBI Theatre at the Aero, Directors Village and the MUBI Theatre at Los Feliz 3. Presented by MUBI and programmed and produced in partnership with the American Cinematheque, the 2026 festival includes 10 World Premieres, four North American Premieres, seven U.S. Premieres and 28 West Coast Premieres. And for horror fans, this year's lineup gets appropriately feral. V/H/S/MIXTAPE Leads a Massive Horror Slate One of the biggest genre events on the schedule will be the World Premiere of V/H/S/MIXTAPE, the latest entry in the long-running horror anthology franchise. The new installment assembles an eclectic group of filmmakers and artists including RZA, Flying Lotus, Ernest Dickerson, Tobias Forge, David Moreau and Renee Zhan. Beyond Fest will also host a special screening of Crystal Lake, the new series taking audiences back into the mythology surrounding Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th. Brad Caleb Kane will attend the event, which pairs naturally with a repertory screening of the original Friday the 13th. Mike Flanagan will arrive with members of the cast of Carrie for the West Coast Premiere of the first two episodes of his new Prime Video adaptation of Stephen King's novel. The horror continues with the West Coast Premiere of Mike P. Nelson's giant-snake nightmare Beware Boiúna, with Jessica Rothe appearing in person. Maika Monroe returns to increasingly strange territory with Zachary Wigon's Victorian Psycho, while Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer bring the bloody Drag to Los Angeles accompanied by Lucy DeVito, Danny DeVito and Greg DeVito. Joshua Giuliano's slasher reinvention River receives its West Coast Premiere, while Adam Egypt Mortimer brings Pathetic Fallacy, starring Kid Cudi and Jessica Rothe. Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, the filmmaking duo behind Starry Eyes and 2019's Pet Sematary, return with nature horror film The Swallow. Jordan Downey's mystery-horror The Cycle, Samjad's vampiric action-gore film Half, Rebekah McKendry's vampire tale Sundown, Óscar Martín's nuns-and-vampires nightmare Upiro, Koji Shiraishi's occult horror Kinki, Alison Eve-Hammersly's found-footage film Erie, Sean Hogan's supernatural true-crime nightmare The Dark Gets In and Britt Falardeau's Hinter further expand an already enormous genre lineup. Robert Eggers Celebrates a Decade of Darkness Robert Eggers will take over the Egyptian Theatre for a day-long retrospective tracing his first decade as one of contemporary horror cinema's most distinctive filmmakers. Beyond Fest will screen The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman and Nosferatu chronologically, with Eggers appearing in person to discuss his work. The event will also give audiences an exclusive first look at material from Eggers' upcoming film Werwulf. For horror fans who watched The Witch quietly crawl out of the woods in 2015 and then watched Eggers build an entire cinematic language around folklore, madness and historical obsession, that's one hell of a victory lap. M. Night Shyamalan Takes Over Beyond Fest Beyond Fest is also mounting a major retrospective devoted to M. Night Shyamalan, with the filmmaker appearing in person during screenings spanning his career. The program includes The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Visit, Split, Glass, Knock at the Cabin and Trap, among others. Few filmmakers have spent nearly three decades generating this much argument, admiration, reevaluation and cultural conversation around genre cinema. Beyond Fest is giving Los Angeles audiences the chance to revisit that evolution where Shyamalan's movies work best: inside a packed theater. The Devils Finally Arrives One of the festival's great cinematic excavations comes courtesy of Ken Russell's The Devils. The controversial 1971 masterpiece will screen simultaneously in 35mm at the Egyptian and Aero theaters, presenting a newly restored and reconstructed version created according to Russell's specifications. For cult-film devotees, The Devils has spent decades occupying almost mythical territory — a film infamous for censorship, mutilated releases and the difficulty of seeing Russell's full vision properly presented. Beyond Fest appears ready to open the cathedral doors. Lynch, Begotten, The Host and More Return in 4K Restorations also play a major role in this year's festival. The North American Premiere of the 4K restoration of David Lynch's Wild at Heart joins a special screening of Mulholland Drive. E. Elias Merhige's transgressive 1989 nightmare Begotten receives the West Coast Premiere of its new 4K restoration with Merhige attending. Bong Joon Ho's creature classic The Host celebrates its 20th anniversary with the World Premiere of a new 4K restoration. Beyond Fest will also host the theatrical premiere of the 4K restoration of Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx, introduced by Bob Odenkirk, along with restoration premieres for Crowley and Michele Soavi's The Goodbye Kiss. Michael Mann will appear for the World Premiere of his new 4K cut of Miami Vice, commemorating the film's 20th anniversary. Don't Breathe and Green Room Turn 10 Somehow, an entire decade has already passed since two of the 2010s' nastiest pressure cookers hit theaters. Fede Álvarez returns for a 10th-anniversary screening of Don't Breathe, joined by Rodo Sayagues, Stephen Lang, Danny Zovatto and Dylan Minnette. Jeremy Saulnier brings Green Room back to the big screen for its own anniversary celebration. Babak Anvari's Under the Shadow also receives a 10th-anniversary screening with Narges Rashidi appearing in person. Jamie Lee Curtis, Al Pacino, Danny DeVito, RZA and More The guest list stretches well beyond horror. Jamie Lee Curtis will attend the West Coast Premiere of Sender alongside David Dastmalchian and Rhea Seehorn. Danny DeVito joins multiple events, including a rare 70mm screening of Hoffa, while director Martin Brest participates in screenings of Beverly Hills Cop and Scent of a Woman, with Al Pacino attending the latter. Dolph Lundgren appears for the documentary Dolph: Unbreakable paired with Universal Soldier. RZA premieres an episode of his new series Saturday Afternoon Kung-Fu Theater – Born Invincible before a new 4K restoration of Master of the Flying Guillotine. Other filmmakers and guests scheduled to appear include Michael Mann, James Gray, Bruce Dern, Conor Oberst, Matt Berry, Duncan Jones, Sung Kang, Fede Álvarez, Stephen Lang, Jessica Rothe, David Dastmalchian, Rhea Seehorn and many more. Beyond Fest Head of Programming Evrim Ersoy describes this year's festival as a celebration of cinema capable of bringing major filmmakers, emerging voices, restorations and repertory events together under one roof. That philosophy has always made Beyond Fest interesting. Genre cinema never lived inside one neat little coffin. Horror bleeds into exploitation, science fiction collides with arthouse cinema, cult movies become canonical, and films once treated like radioactive contraband eventually receive immaculate 4K restorations. Beyond Fest 2026 begins with opening-night screenings September 23 and continues through October 6 across multiple Los Angeles venues. Tickets and complete scheduling information are available through BeyondFest.com and the American Cinematheque.

MoreHorror.com Frank Henenlotter’s gloriously unhinged cult horror-comedy Frankenhooker is getting the 4K UHD treatment. Synapse Films will release Frankenhooker on October 13 in separate 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray editions, bringing Henenlotter’s outrageous 1990 spin on the Frankenstein myth back in a newly restored presentation. Starring James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, and Louise Lasser, Frankenhooker follows grieving medical student Jeffrey Franken (Lorinz), whose attempt to resurrect his deceased fiancée Elizabeth (Mullen) sends him down a path involving unconventional medical experimentation, New York’s sex-work scene, dismembered body parts, and the sort of grotesque practical-effects mayhem that could only come from the filmmaker behind Basket Case and Brain Damage. The result became one of the stranger gems of early-’90s cult horror: part mad-scientist movie, part splatter comedy, part Times Square fever dream. Henenlotter takes Mary Shelley’s familiar premise, drags it through the neon grime of late-20th-century New York, and emerges with something entirely his own. The cast also includes Louise Lasser (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers), legendary horror host John Zacherle, Lia Chang (Big Trouble in Little China), Charlotte Kemp, Jennifer Delora (Robot Holocaust), and Heather Hunter. A New 4K Restoration The new 4K Ultra HD edition features an all-new 2025 Dolby Vision 4K restoration created from the archival uncut original 35mm vault materials. Synapse’s Blu-ray edition marks the film’s return to the format and includes the complete 85-minute uncut feature, utilizing the same new 2025 restoration. Both editions also dig into the wonderfully bizarre history behind the film with a collection of supplemental material. Special features include: Audio commentary with director Frank Henenlotter and makeup effects designer Gabe Bartalos A Salad That Was Once Named Elizabeth — Patty Mullen featurette A Stitch in Time: The Make-Up Effects of Frankenhooker — Gabe Bartalos featurette Turning Tricks: Jennifer Delora Remembers Frankenhooker Jennifer Delora’s Frankenhooker Photo Scrapbook Theatrical trailer And, of course, Frankenhooker carries one of the greatest endorsements ever associated with a cult horror movie: “If you see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker.” — Bill Murray More than three decades later, Henenlotter’s stitched-together monster still occupies its own wonderfully sleazy corner of horror history. Now Synapse Films is giving the film a restoration worthy of all those flying body parts. Frankenhooker arrives on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray October 13 from Synapse Films. Watch the official trailer:

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com Portal to Hell arrives on Digital and VOD September 8, 2026, from Cineverse. There’s something inherently miserable about being a bill collector. Nobody wants to hear from you. Nobody is happy you called. You’re probably interrupting dinner, work or whatever brief period of the day that person managed to forget they owe somebody money. Still, somebody has to do it. That somebody is Dunn. Trey Holland plays him as a guy already beaten down by the routine before Portal to Hell introduces anything supernatural. The movie doesn’t waste much time either. Dunn goes to his local laundromat, discovers something glowing and generally infernal inside one of the machines and calmly tells Ed, the woman working there, “I think there’s a portal to hell in your laundromat.” That whole opening stretch is funny because nobody reacts the way people in movies normally react to a portal to Hell. Dunn investigates it. Ed seems mostly irritated by the inconvenience. Everybody feels it out like somebody reported a plumbing problem. That deadpan approach is where Portal to Hell got me, and I was surprised by how genuinely funny this movie is. Not horror-comedy funny where I recognize the place somebody wrote a joke and understand what they were attempting. Actually funny. A weird pause or somebody giving a completely reasonable response to an insane situation lands before the punchline even arrives. Holland deserves a lot of credit for that. Dunn is essentially the straight man wandering through an increasingly ridiculous moral problem, but Holland never plays him like he knows he’s in a quirky horror comedy. He’s quiet, slightly awkward and believable enough that the stranger everything becomes, the funnier his normal reactions are. I hope this gets him more work. The premise is beautifully simple. Dunn discovers the portal, learns that a demon has arrived to collect his terminally ill neighbor Mr. Bobshank, played by Keith David, and eventually finds himself with an opportunity to save him by sending other souls in his place. From there, writer-director Woody Bess keeps testing Dunn’s belief that people can basically be divided into good and bad. Dunn starts making decisions that seem pretty easy when they’re theoretical. Somebody is bad. Hell exists. Send the bad person to Hell. Except people get harder to categorize when they’re standing in front of you. That’s where the movie becomes more interesting than I expected. After Dunn has crossed certain lines, Holland lets the character change without suddenly turning him into somebody else. The fun starts draining out of what he’s doing and he has to actually sit with it. The movie is still funny, but there’s something underneath the joke now. It also looks much better than a premise this small necessarily requires. Bess shot the movie himself, and he makes good use of a fairly contained production. The laundromat could have been nothing more than a practical location where a lot of the story happens, but the lighting gives it personality. The orange coming from the portal works against the ugly fluorescent environment, while Dunn’s apartment gets some deliberate lighting choices of its own. The frame is extremely wide, and Bess actually composes for it. Characters get pushed into corners and empty space is allowed to sit around them. It feels intentional rather than like somebody just threw black bars on an ordinary image because widescreen looks more cinematic. The color grade works too. I appreciate low-budget movies where I can tell somebody actually thought about what the thing should look like instead of stopping at whether the actors were properly exposed. Portal to Hell has that. The economy of the whole thing is smart too. A laundromat, Dunn’s place, a few other contained spaces, a portal and a relatively small group of characters. You don’t need twenty locations and a million dollars if the idea keeps giving you somewhere else to go. Michael McDonald, who I immediately recognized from MADtv, turns up as David Pepperdine and fits perfectly into this universe. Casey Deidrick’s Rip is another example of what the movie does well with smaller characters. Somebody walks in, immediately has an identity, and the scene starts going somewhere I wasn’t expecting. There’s even a running Hot Chelle Rae joke that keeps getting pushed further than I expected. It’s exactly the sort of stupid commitment this movie needs. And then there’s Richard Kind. Kind plays Chip, the demon involved in Dunn’s arrangement, and he’s hilarious. There’s a scene between Dunn and Chip that basically turns into two guys having a conversation over drinks, and it might be my favorite stretch of the movie. The dialogue just works. Kind doesn’t play Chip like some terrifying right hand of Satan. He feels like a guy who has dealt with this kind of shit before and would really appreciate it if everyone stopped making his job harder. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of treating eternal damnation like something that also involves rules, negotiations, technicalities and a guy named Chip. Keith David gives the movie its other major ingredient. Mr. Bobshank has terminal cancer, but Bess and David don’t turn him into a walking lesson about mortality. He’s funny, irritated, crude at times and recognizably human. David has one of those voices that can give almost anything gravity, which makes it even better when he’s saying something ridiculous. The relationship between Bobshank and Dunn is also why the movie’s emotional material works. Late in the film, the two get a quieter scene together, and I wasn’t expecting it to land as well as it did. The movie has spent so much time screwing around with portals, demons and deciding who deserves what that watching these two actually talk has some weight. It doesn’t suddenly stop and announce that the serious part of the movie has arrived. A lot of horror comedies get uncomfortable when they have to become sincere. Suddenly the score swells and everybody starts delivering speeches so we know the filmmakers have feelings too. Portal to Hell mostly avoids that. The dialogue helps enormously. Ed doesn’t sound like Dunn. Dunn doesn’t sound like Chip. Bobshank doesn’t sound like any of them. Even the smaller characters usually arrive with their own rhythm instead of everybody sounding like the writer wearing a different shirt. The film isn’t perfect. There are moments where the simple premise starts carrying a little more weight than it needs to, and some of the transition from absurd comedy into Dunn’s moral conflict works better than other parts. But it never lost me. I went into this with very little expectation. It was a 2025 movie that suddenly appeared in my screener inbox in 2026, and I figured I’d watch a decent little indie horror comedy, write a few things down and move on. Instead, I kept writing some variation of “this is actually funny” in my notes. Apparently I was surprised every time. Woody Bess wrote, directed and shot this thing, and he’s somebody I’m going to remember after this. Portal to Helltakes a simple concept, keeps the production manageable, builds most of its comedy around character instead of constant punchlines and eventually finds some genuine emotion without crushing the ridiculous movie around it. Holland is right there with him. Dunn could easily have become the blank guy surrounded by funnier supporting actors, especially when those actors include Keith David and Richard Kind. Instead, Holland is the reason the movie holds together. I didn’t expect Portal to Hell to be this good, and I definitely didn’t expect it to be this funny. Maybe Hell isn’t so bad. Although I’d still avoid the laundromat. 6.66/10 Critical Screening was provided a screener of Portal to Hell for review purposes.

The award-winning indie horror-thriller from writer-director Lila McLaughlin arrives on Amazon and Fandango September 22 through Buffalo 8 Distribution. MoreHorror.com There’s something inherently wrong about an abandoned property in the middle of nowhere. Too much silence. Too much history. Too many places for old secrets to wait. That's what sits at the center of Don’t Let Them Out, an independently produced psychological horror-thriller written and directed by Lila McLaughlin. Following a limited theatrical run through September, the film arrives on Amazon and Fandango on September 22 through Buffalo 8 Distribution. The story follows a struggling woman who travels to an inherited family property with one very practical goal: sell the place and use the money to escape her mounting debts. The property has other plans. Once she arrives, she begins uncovering sinister family secrets and finds herself pulled into a terrifying scavenger hunt where each discovery drags her deeper into paranoia, psychological terror and an increasingly inescapable nightmare. Don’t Let Them Out leans heavily into slow-burn dread, isolation, liminal spaces and generational trauma, using the desert property itself as part of the film’s psychological pressure cooker. What begins as a possible financial lifeline gradually transforms into something claustrophobic, despite all that open space around it. The film has also built a reputation for getting inside viewers’ heads. Theater audiences have reportedly described it as a “mindfuck” and warned that “it’ll mess with your head,” while also praising its jump scares, twists and unpredictable story. McLaughlin says that psychological unease drove the film from the beginning. “It’s essentially been called a ‘mindfuck.’ I wanted to make the kind of psychological horror-thriller that finds its scares in the relatable anxieties and fears many of us share, building genuine suspense and jolting moments that make you look over your shoulder, long after the film ends.” The movie stars Bonnie Root, whose credits include Cruel Hearts, No Way to Live and Cold Case; Louis Ferreira of House of David, Shōgun and Breaking Bad; and Emily Rios, known for Breaking Bad, Snowfall and If Beale Street Could Talk. Behind the camera, McLaughlin assembled an impressive post-production team as well. Editor Eric Strand previously worked on Donnie Darko, while senior colorist Henry Santos and DigitalFilm Tree bring credits that include Where the Wild Things Are, Napoleon Dynamite and Her. Robert Reider handled sound design, with credits including Isla Monstro and Gaslighter, while Alec Puro composed the score following work on projects including American Horror Story, Black Summer and Spin the Bottle. The indie horror-thriller has already picked up three Best Feature awards from festival appearances including Arizona International Film Festival, LA Femme International Film Festival and Dark Matter Film Festival. Don’t Let Them Out continues its limited theatrical run through September before arriving on Amazon and Fandango September 22 through Buffalo 8 Distribution. Follow the film on Instagram at @dontletthemoutfilm and visit DontLetThemOut.com for more information. Written and Directed by: Lila McLaughlin Starring: Bonnie Root, Louis Ferreira, Emily Rios Release Date: September 22, 2026 Distribution: Buffalo 8 Distribution

The Changeling, Cemetery Man, Santa Sangre and hundreds more begin streaming in September MoreHorror.com BloodStream is about to get a whole lot stranger. The horror, thriller and cult streaming platform has announced a major partnership with Severin Films that will bring more than 300 titles from the legendary cult-film label to BloodStream beginning in September. The massive catalog expansion arrives during Severin Films’ 20th anniversary year and pulls from two decades of the company rescuing, restoring and reintroducing some of the wildest, darkest and most unconventional films from around the world. For horror fans, this is a serious haul. Among the titles heading to BloodStream are Peter Medak’s haunted-house classic The Changeling, Michele Soavi’s beautifully bizarre Cemetery Man, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal Santa Sangre, Álex de la Iglesia’s horror-comedy favorite The Day of the Beast, along with Soavi’s The Church and The Sect. The collection stretches far beyond the familiar names, digging deep into supernatural horror, slashers, giallo, folk horror, exploitation cinema, creature features and the kind of cult oddities that have built Severin its fiercely devoted following. Other films included in the partnership include Anthropophagous, Absurd, Patrick, Next of Kin, Turkey Shoot, Vampyros Lesbos, Zombie Holocaust, Psychomania, The Manson Family, The Peanut Butter Solution, When the Wind Blows and Kier-La Janisse’s acclaimed documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. “Severin Films was founded on the belief that genre films speak a common language of transgressive entertainment,” Severin founder David Gregory said. “Twenty years later, we continue to evolve that global mission by rescuing, restoring and releasing the boldest and best of entertainment with sharp edges for streaming, physical media and like-minded audiences. We’re now proud to share it all with BloodStream.” BloodStream founder Shaked Berenson called the Severin library exactly the kind of catalog the service was built to showcase. “Severin has spent two decades rescuing, restoring and celebrating movies that might otherwise have disappeared,” Berenson said. “This is exactly the kind of catalog BloodStream was created for.” BloodStream Lead Programmer Heidi Honeycutt also emphasized the historical significance of bringing such a large section of Severin’s catalog onto the platform. “Their films are deeply important to fans of genre cinema and to film history,” Honeycutt said. “Adding more than 300 of them at once is a huge step toward building the most complete and adventurous horror streaming library possible.” Founded in Los Angeles in 2006 by David Gregory, Carl Daft and John Cregan, Severin Films has grown into one of the most recognizable independent labels specializing in overlooked, provocative and unconventional genre cinema. Its library now includes more than 500 films and television projects from across the globe. That history makes this more than a routine streaming-content dump. Severin has spent years functioning as a kind of cinematic excavation crew, pulling forgotten movies out of damaged prints, obscure distribution histories and cult-film limbo. Putting hundreds of those titles into one easily accessible streaming library opens a pretty deep rabbit hole for anyone willing to crawl into it. The Severin Films collection begins rolling out on BloodStream throughout September, with additional curated collections and filmmaker spotlights planned for the fall. BloodStream offers a free ad-supported option along with ad-free and Early Access subscription plans. The service is available through the web, mobile devices and major connected-TV platforms. Visit BloodStreamTV.com for additional information and availability.

By Damian Hex, MoreHorror.com I’m a fan of the good possession-within-the-family-moving-to-a-new-house trope. Truly, I am. So I couldn't resist watching and writing about a movie called CHAT directed by Ole J Hartmann. As always, I want to include a disclaimer in my reviews: this piece contains spoilers. In this economy, where everything feels expensive, buying a house often means selling your soul to the devil for a bargain and quite literally in this film. The story follows the Cadieux family, consisting of three members and soon to welcome a fourth, as the mom is pregnant. The family includes Brad, the father (Carter Sirianni), Michelle, the mother (Alexis Schrepple), and their son, Michael (Grant Griffin). They stumble upon a too-good-to-be-true deal on a new, fully furnished home. From the beginning, the film makes it clear that something heinous happened in that house before the Cadieux family moved in, creating a sense of helplessness and vulnerability that makes viewers like me feel uneasy. Ole J Hartmann plays the shady real estate agent who sold the cursed house to the family. The movie assaults us with uncomfortable close-up shots and dead bodies. CHAT taps into a theme I can't get enough of: discovering the tragedy that made this place cursed. As with any unsuspecting family, obvious clues reveal that something isn’t right. In this case, we notice a dead animal in the yard’s trash, random maggots on the floor, and an overpowering smell of bleach. Sometimes, we ignore the red flags around us until it’s too late. More on that later. While I found the concept of a tablet inhabited by a demon named Beelzebul, disguised as an AI chatbot, funny and different, I felt misled. When Michael discovers the tablet and makes a “friend,” I expected a gradual relationship to form between him and the AI demon. I imagined Michael acting as a constant conduit for the demonic entity. Instead, their rapport felt superficial. After Michael recited the summoning/possession spell at Beelzebul's request, their interactions diminished, lacking a deeper connection. Brad falls victim to possession (thanks to his son’s recited words), and glaring signs point to something being off. Dad becomes pale, can’t stomach food, and clearly needs an exorcist, yet Michelle somehow fails to notice. This illustrates how someone can ignore warnings, hoping whatever situation they’re in will work out. Amid all this possession, the film introduces Michelle’s dad (Christopher Fusselman), a man grappling with religious psychosis/trauma. We see snippets of his life as he lives alone in a room cluttered with tattered Bible pages and filth. He eventually arrives at the Cadieux’s unholy home to confront the AI demon he shares history with (what a gag). Unfortunately, things don’t end well for Grandpops. One thing I enjoyed was watching how negative energy slowly disintegrates a family's safety and well-being. The film explores multiple layers, including possession, pregnancy, child struggles, generational trauma, and a father's concerns about the paranormal. Some viewers may relate to one or two aspects, or maybe even more. Yikes. The climax occurs when the possessed father attempts to take his wife’s life while the kid witnesses it, evoking concern from the audience. I won’t delve into the specifics, but domestic violence often leads to more violence and, sometimes, death. I truly felt for the kid. You can experience the ending on your own; here’s a hint: the shady real estate agent shows up again at the end of the film. I might change my thoughts on certain parts after watching the movie more than once, and I may notice details I missed the first time. Either way, the overall message explores what greed does to a person, and how that can affect others around them. Some parts of the film feel rough around the edges, but it remains understandable. CHAT is available on Prime Video, so watch it. Just remember to turn off your tablet if you have one. 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

By Seth Metoyer, MoreHorror.com The fear of being unable to help your own child gives The Spirit Lock an unsettling place to begin. Before the occult promises and ritual warnings take hold, there’s already something painfully human driving the story: a family running out of answers. This brooding indie supernatural film builds its horror around that vulnerability, exploring how desperation can make even the most ominous offer sound like hope. At the center is a parent searching for help for their son, Cole. Conventional answers have offered little comfort, and the possibility of a ritual intervention brings its own dangerous appeal. The warnings are there. So is the promise that something can finally be done. That tension gives the film its hook: when someone you love is suffering, how carefully are you really listening to the terms? The Spirit Lock takes its time working through that question. This is a slow burn, with much of its appeal resting on atmosphere, emotional strain, and the uneasy relationship between supernatural belief and personal desperation. The pace asks for patience, but it suits a story in which fear has time to settle in and influence people’s decisions. Viewers looking for relentless momentum may find that approach less satisfying; those drawn to intimate, character-driven horror will have more to connect with. The family dynamics give that dread somewhere to take root. Exhaustion and strained communication make the domestic material feel integral to the horror. These are people struggling to reach their child and each other, and the distance between them makes the promise of outside help increasingly seductive. The ritual carries weight because the need behind it feels recognizable. The lead performance is crucial to making that connection work. There’s a grounded vulnerability here that keeps the emotional stakes close, even as the material moves into occult territory. Fear, frustration, and the need to believe there is still an answer give the performance its pull. That human center helps the film’s supernatural elements feel consequential. The ingredients will be familiar to fans of ritual horror: ominous promises, uncertain consequences, and the possibility that the search for salvation has opened a door best left closed. The Spirit Lock finds its strongest footing in the emotional pressure behind those ideas. Its interest lies in what makes someone willing to cross that threshold—and how frightening it is to recognize the impulse. A slow-burn nightmare with family anguish in its bones. The Spirit Lock delivers an intimate, unsettling experience for viewers who like their supernatural horror rooted in human vulnerability. The occult supplies the threat, but a parent’s fear of failing their child gives it teeth.

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.