By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com SPOILERS THROUGHOUT Hope opened in U.S. theaters September 9 through Neon. This review is based on the U.S. theatrical cut screened at AMC. Na Hong-jin has not directed a feature since The Wailing ten years ago. That is a long time to sit with high expectations. For roughly the first hour of Hope, I was ready to say the wait had been worth every day of it. The movie is beautiful immediately. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who also shot The Wailing, gives Hope Harbor the weight of a real place before anything arrives to tear it apart. The compositions are controlled without feeling stiff. The camera knows when to take in the entire village and when to stay close enough to catch somebody thinking, lying or realizing they may be completely screwed. Hope Harbor is a remote South Korean fishing village near the DMZ, but the feeling is familiar. It has some Amity Island and Widow's Bay in its blood, along with every weather-beaten town sitting on a cold northeastern coastline where fishing, trade, gossip and old grudges keep the place alive. Everybody knows everybody. The police chief is not some distant authority. He is the guy people bother because a cow is dead in the road. That cow has been ripped apart by something large enough to make the locals joke about a tiger wandering down from North Korea. Police chief Bum-seok sends his cousin Sung-ki and a group of hunters into the woods while he heads toward town. Communications are down, most outside help has been diverted to nearby wildfires and what begins as a strange animal attack starts getting much bigger. Na lets it build. The opening forty or fifty minutes, I did not have a watch on it, are as good as anything I have seen in a while. The movie takes time with the people, their work and the way they talk to one another. It does not treat characterization as dead space before the monster arrives. The character building is the suspense. We understand what this town feels like on a normal bad day, which is why it matters when something impossible comes through and makes the day considerably worse. The dialogue may be the strongest part of the movie. It is funny, plainspoken and full of the interruptions, insults and unfinished thoughts that make people sound as if they knew each other before the screenplay started. The rhythm reminded me of good American small-town movies, not because these Korean characters have been flattened into Americans, but because Na understands the same basic truth. In a small town, affection and aggravation are usually sharing a cigarette. People argue while working. They make jokes at the wrong time. They know exactly which nerve to hit because they have been hitting it for years. Even the exposition tends to arrive through personality instead of a character walking into a room and explaining the plot to the slowest person there. Considering how large and strange the movie eventually becomes, that grounding is not a small accomplishment. Hwang Jung-min is outstanding as Bum-seok. He makes the police chief funny without turning him into a clown and frightened without turning him useless. Bum-seok begins as a recognizable small-town authority figure, cynical, foul-mouthed and comfortable enough in his position to seem half asleep inside it. Then he finds wrecked buildings, mangled bodies and vehicles being tossed around by something he cannot see. Hwang plays the fear honestly. Bum-seok is not a movie cop who becomes an action hero the second danger appears. He looks overwhelmed because any sane person would be. He keeps moving anyway. That difference is where the performance gets its humanity, and much of its comedy. The jokes come from a real person trying to hold onto a normal reaction after normal has packed up and left town. Hoyeon is also very good as the rookie officer Sung-ae. She gives Bum-seok somebody capable to work against and keeps the police side of the story from becoming a one-man panic attack. There are a lot of characters moving through this 157-minute movie, yet most of them register as people instead of future bodies. That matters once the creature begins cutting through them. Eum Moon-suk nearly walks off with every scene he gets as Yang-bae, the town's offbeat carpenter. He is the sort of man who can turn a dead animal in a freezer into a business plan before anybody else has finished asking what it is. Every small town has some version of this guy. Maybe not with an alien corpse next to the frozen food, but close enough. Then there is Zo In-sung as Sung-ki, Bum-seok's headstrong cousin and the hunter leading the men through the forest. Zo is good early, when Sung-ki still thinks he understands what he is tracking. He gets much better as that confidence is stripped away. By the final stretch he is outstanding, especially during the horseback action and the desperate fight through the woods. He sells the physical work, but more importantly, he sells how quickly bravery becomes survival when the hunter finally understands he is the smaller animal. Michael Abels' score knows when to push and when to leave the village alone. It builds tension without announcing every incoming scare, then settles down long enough for the quieter character scenes to breathe. A lesser score would spend two and a half hours screaming that something terrible is nearby. Abels understands that calm can make the next burst of violence hit harder. When the creature is finally revealed, the CGI works better than I expected. There are moments when its digital nature is obvious, but this is also a massive creature throwing cars and ripping through a town. At some point, I understand that a suit and a clever shadow are not going to do the entire job. More importantly, Na and Hong build a physical world around it. The actors have wreckage to move through. The streets have weight. The camera gives us scale, geography and a believable sense of where the creature is in relation to the people trying not to die. Good visual effects are not only about the surface of the monster. They are about whether the rest of the scene convinces us it is there. For most of Hope, I believed it. The first major attack is exciting because the movie has earned the chaos. It spent nearly an hour teaching us the shape of Hope Harbor, then lets the creature smash that shape apart. Cars fly. People fire at something they barely understand. Bum-seok scrambles through the damage. The action remains funny in places, but the humor does not cancel the danger. That balance is hard, and Na keeps it under control for an impressively long time. The movie also understands that a monster story becomes less interesting if the creature exists only to be shot. The late revelation that Yang-bae killed an infant alien and stuffed it in his freezer reframes the destruction. The enormous creature was not randomly attacking the village. It was a mother looking for its child. That is a good twist. It is cruel, sad and not entirely expected, at least not in the way Na delivers it. It forces the humans to reconsider the story they have been telling themselves. They thought an invading monster had attacked innocent people. In reality, human ignorance and greed started the bloodshed. The creature is still killing people, but the word monster suddenly has more than one address. If Hope had stayed with that idea, this review probably would have a score beginning with an eight. Instead, the final half hour begins dragging a different movie through the door. Sung-ae reveals that three more adult aliens are loose. Sung-ki and the hunters find a spacecraft filled with infant creatures. Another ship falls through a portal and crashes into a mountain. Then the film cuts to J'aur, an alien empress played by Alicia Vikander, and her bodyguard Ma'veyyo, played by Michael Fassbender. Ma'veyyo tears out his own beating heart as part of a plan to resurrect the dead child. That is a lot of mythology to throw at us after more than two hours spent with a police chief, a hunter and a town trying to survive one creature. The reversal itself is great. The expansion around it is where the movie loses me. Suddenly there are alien titles, royal relationships, new ships, new rules and a much broader cosmic story arriving just as the story I cared about should be coming to a close. It feels less like the end of Hope and more like the beginning of whatever movie might follow it. The CGI also becomes more distracting during these final alien scenes. Earlier, the effects had a filthy physical world and frantic human behavior holding them in place. Here the imagery becomes cleaner, stranger and more sentimental. It reminded me of Avatar, and I do not mean that as a compliment. The grounded, funny creature movie gives way to earnest space opera in a hurry. Lord, we were doing so well. There are still great moments in the final stretch. Sung-ki's horseback escape and his fight beside the police vehicle are huge, ridiculous and fun. Zo In-sung rises to the scale of it. Bum-seok and the remaining villagers still matter. The film does not completely abandon the people who got it there, and the mid-credits scene confirming Sung-ki survived gives the audience one welcome bit of relief. But the emotional center has shifted. Hope Harbor stops feeling like the whole world and becomes one location in a larger alien story. Maybe that expansion is the point. Na has certainly made something ambitious enough to keep growing. I just liked the smaller movie more, even when that smaller movie included a giant creature throwing automobiles. That frustration should not erase how much Hope gets right. Hong Kyung-pyo's cinematography is consistently beautiful. Michael Abels gives the film a patient, responsive score. The dialogue is funny and alive. Hwang Jung-min gives the movie a police chief worth following, Eum Moon-suk turns the village oddball into something memorable and Zo In-sung owns the late action. For most of its runtime, Hope is a confident, character-driven monster movie that understands people are more interesting before the screaming starts. Its final turn does not ruin it. It does pull me away from the town, the people and the beautifully simple question that had carried the film: what happens when ordinary people encounter something too large and strange for their world? The answer was already working. Then the movie looked toward the stars and started explaining the next question. 7.7/10

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com SPOILERS THROUGHOUT Goody Goody begins streaming exclusively on Shudder September 18. Goody Goody understands something a lot of demon baby movies forget. Childbirth does not need a demon to become body horror. The demon is almost rude for showing up. I have a wife and children. I have stood on the other side of that room while somebody I love did the bleeding, breathing, pushing and hurting. There is a particular kind of uselessness to it. You can hold a hand, say the reassuring thing and try not to look as scared as you are. None of that gives you any control over what the body decides to do next. So, yes, the opening of Goody Goody hit me pretty hard. Writer and director Raymond Creamer does not offer a polite introduction. Goody is in labor, the pain is real and something feels wrong before the supernatural part has even clocked in. The movie got anxiety out of me early, and it did it honestly. That is a good place for a horror movie to start. Goody and her husband, Jayson, have chosen a home birth in an isolated house during a winter storm. Sarah, the midwife, warned them about the location and the distance from a hospital. Goody wants the birth she imagined, though, and Jayson's sister Candace is there to help. It probably sounded beautiful when it was still a plan: warm water, quiet woods and the people they chose nearby. Then the snow comes down, the power goes out and a medical professional says they need to leave. I do not think the movie is arguing that every home birth is reckless. It is more interested in the point where an ideal hardens into something dangerous. Goody wants this experience so badly that every warning begins to sound like an obstacle instead of information. There is something painfully human in that. People do it all the time. We fall in love with the version of life we planned, then get angry when reality refuses to read the script. The film has already established most of that before the title sequence. An early conversation between Sarah and Goody is staged around a mirror, keeping the women visually connected while separating them inside the frame. I like that shot because it has an opinion. They are looking at the same birth from two different realities. Goody sees the experience she wants. Sarah sees all the things that can go wrong and knows she will be the one standing in the blood if they do. One composition does work that a worse movie would hand to a page of dialogue. Tristan Noelle's cinematography is probably the strongest part of Goody Goody. Limited location movies can start showing their budget pretty quickly. The same wall comes back, and the same hallway walks into another scene wearing a fake mustache. Everything gets covered in close-ups because there is nowhere left to put the camera. That does not happen much here. The house keeps changing as Goody's condition gets worse. Rooms that initially feel private and warm begin to feel small, airless and very far from help. Then the power dies and the movie somehow gets prettier. Candlelight is a cinematographer's dream until somebody actually has to photograph it. Faces need to stay readable, shots need to match and the darkness has to feel like darkness without turning the movie into a black rectangle. Noelle pulls it off. The candlelit interiors and the exterior work in the snow look pretty darn good, especially for a film spending most of its time trapped in one house. Some of its prettiest images arrive while a woman is going through absolute hell. Movies are funny that way. That control carries into the exterior work after the outage. Shooting a dark winter exterior beside candlelit interiors is the kind of problem that can make separate parts of a movie look as if they wandered in from different productions. Noelle keeps them together. The location never feels like a cheap house the production happened to have access to. It feels like the worst possible place these people could be. Colleen Foy is the anchor as Sarah. She gives the character professional focus without turning her into one of those movie experts who always has the answer until the script needs her not to. Sarah knows enough to be terrified first. You can see her trying to keep doing the job while the job mutates into something with no training manual. Foy is especially good when Sarah has to swallow her fear and give the next instruction anyway. Panic is a luxury when everybody else has decided you are in charge. Zoe Renee gets a nice early monologue as Candace, Jayson's sister, and becomes more important as the situation collapses. Her work with Foy gives the final stretch its desperation. They keep searching for one more practical thing they can do even after the birth stops behaving like anything practical. Love and good intentions are not a hospital, but they are all these women have left. Samantha Robinson is a little more uneven as Goody. Early on, some of the softness feels put on, almost as if Goody is still performing the calm, beautiful version of motherhood she planned for herself. A few lines come across cheesier than I think the movie intends, and the dialogue does not always help her. I wanted a little less serenity and a little more person. Once the contractions intensify and the power fails, Robinson is outstanding. The performance becomes frighteningly physical. Pain strips away the version of Goody she was trying to present and leaves somebody trapped inside a body she no longer understands. Then something appears to crawl beneath her stomach. Oh boy. The effect works because it does not replace Robinson's performance. It corrupts it. The pain was already difficult to watch, and now the body itself seems to be keeping a secret from the woman living inside it. That is where Goody Goody finds its best horror. The creature is not frightening only because it is demonic. It is frightening because Goody cannot get away from it. It is under the skin, behind the pain and on its way out. Goody's monologue in the birthing pool gives Robinson another strong moment. By then, the movie has made it pretty clear that this is not a normal baby, and I started wondering whether Goody and Jayson knew more than they had admitted. I do not think the film ever gives us enough reason to believe they did. Jayson is no longer there to help by the time Sarah and Candace face the worst of it, and his absence leaves a hole beyond the obvious practical one. I did not need somebody explaining the mythology to death, but I wanted a little more about why this family, why this birth and whether any choice beyond the location brought them here. The final twenty minutes are hard to watch, and not because they are boring or because the movie has fallen apart. I mean I physically caught myself bracing for it. By that point I was no longer sitting there admiring the composition or thinking about where the camera was placed. Sarah and Candace are trying to save Goody, the room has become a mess of pain and fear, and the movie has earned the right to make the audience uncomfortable. The effects team does strong work when the baby finally comes out. The image of the creature being pulled from Goody is the one that stays with me. Wow. Sometimes the honest critical vocabulary runs out and that is what is left. The thing is nasty, sad and unreal, but the human desperation around it keeps the moment from becoming a simple monster reveal. Then Sarah bites through the umbilical cord. That was a little much for me. The extraction had already done the damage. The baby was enough. Believe me, the baby was enough. The film had gotten the reaction and then reached back into the wound for one more. I do not mind gross, but by then it felt extra. Some viewers will probably love that moment. I was already sold before the teeth came out. The ending is surreal and leaves several questions lying around the room. I am fine with ambiguity. Horror should not always hand us a folder explaining the demon, its childhood and what it hopes to accomplish in the next five years. Still, there is a difference between mystery and a missing piece. I was not always sure which one Goody Goody had given me. The dialogue has a similar problem in a few of the quieter scenes. It is not awful, but it occasionally sounds written in a movie that otherwise feels sweaty and immediate. Once the labor becomes dangerous, the actors have something physical to fight and the words matter less. Earlier, when the movie needs conversation to build character, some of those lines sit there waiting to be acted. Demonic pregnancy is not fresh territory, and Goody Goody does not completely reinvent it. What separates the movie is its interest in the labor itself. A cheaper, dumber version would treat childbirth as a delivery system for the monster and spend eighty minutes waiting for the creature. Creamer understands that the body, the isolation and the terrible distance from help are already the movie. The demon just makes the situation official. This is an effective limited location horror film with strong cinematography, committed performances and a final act that made me cringe more than once. The mythology could use another piece, some of the dialogue needs another pass, and Robinson takes a little time to find the version of Goody that works. None of that erases what the movie does well. I did not love Goody Goody. I did feel it, sometimes in places I would have preferred not to. For this movie, that counts for quite a bit. 6.3/10 A screener of Goody Goody was provided for review purposes.

Night Tide Brings a Mysterious Hellbox and Demonic Terror to the Drive-In Writer-director Devon Commons brings demons, a cursed family history and a deadly night at the drive-in together in this supernatural horror film. MoreHorror.com Independent horror filmmaker Devon Commons is currently in production on Night Tide, an upcoming supernatural horror feature built around a mysterious hellbox, a long-buried family secret and demonic forces that emerge when night falls. The film follows Mark Willard, a man whose connection to the supernatural reaches back to his father, Swan Willard. Years earlier, Swan encountered dark forces associated with a mysterious box and creatures known as the demons of the tide. He eventually escaped their world, though the darkness continued to follow the Willard family. By 1996, Mark has grown into adulthood carrying a history that his friends know very little about. He joins Beth, Windows, Sharon, Charles and Roger for what should be a simple birthday celebration at a drive-in theater. Their night takes a darker turn after they encounter an older woman named Barbara, who appears possessed and warns them about an approaching tide. The warning soon becomes reality as demonic forces descend on the drive-in and turn the celebration into a fight for survival. The survivors eventually flee into the woods and seek shelter inside an abandoned house connected directly to Mark’s past. The house once belonged to his family, and his father’s involvement with voodoo and the mysterious box apparently opened a gateway to something beyond their world. From there, paranoia, possession and bloodshed begin tightening around the group. At the center of Night Tide sits the film’s biggest question: What exactly is the mysterious hellbox? Commons wants that mystery hanging over the film as audiences begin encountering the first teaser footage. The box connects Mark’s present to his father’s past and appears tied directly to the demons emerging from what the story calls the “tide of night.” The production also brings veteran actor Clifton Powell into the film as its narrator. IMDb currently credits Powell in that role, alongside Kyle Leatherberry as Mark, Ali Burch as Barbara, Greyson Huneycutt as Beth, Caleb Schulman as Charles and Emma Byrd as Sharon. IMDb CLIFTON POWELL: According to Commons, Powell told him during production that he had never taken on this kind of in-person narrator role before, something that helped shape the casting choice. Commons has also told More Horror that John Kassir, forever embedded in horror history as the voice of the Crypt Keeper, is set to join the cast. Kassir does not currently appear among the film’s public IMDb credits, so for now that casting news comes directly from the filmmaker. The demonic side of Night Tide is beginning to take shape as well. IMDb credits Gwen Walker as Lead Demon Gladys and Donald Morgan as The Tosser, two of the creatures Commons has singled out as figures to watch as the mythology of the tide develops. IMDb Commons sees those creatures as part of a larger mythology built specifically for Night Tide. The combination of demons, supernatural bargains and Kassir’s planned involvement will naturally bring certain genre associations to mind, though Commons has described the film as his own take on demonic horror, centered around the hellbox, the Willard family and the mysterious forces that return with the tide. The footage currently circulating offers an early look at a production that remains underway. Commons told More Horror that some of the teaser material functions as test footage rather than finished scenes intended for the completed movie. That makes the teaser below exactly what an early indie-horror glimpse should be: a door cracked open just wide enough to see something moving on the other side. So we’ll throw Devon Commons’ question directly to the horror crowd: What do you think the hellbox is—and how deep into the Night Tide would you dare to go? Night Tide is currently in production. IMDb lists Devon Commons as writer and director, Terror Vision Pictures as the production company, Atlanta, Georgia as the filming location and a 90-minute runtime. IMDb Follow writer/director Devon Commons on Instagram at @authordevon25 for updates on the film. NIGHT TIDE TEASER TRAILER:

MoreHorror.com Horror fans who have spent years memorizing kill counts, final girls, obscure sequels and the kind of trivia that makes everyone else at the table quietly reconsider inviting them back finally have a game show built for them. Better Luck Than Chuck, a new horror-comedy trivia series created by Meredith Tummillo and Tony Wash, premieres Thursday, September 24 on YouTube, bringing together horror fandom, game show chaos and a lineup of familiar genre names. The six-episode series stars Alexis Allotta as The Widow and Adam Michaels as Charlie, her undead husband. Together, they preside over a weekly competition where horror fans battle through questions about iconic films, characters and memorable moments from across the genre. The format leans directly into the culture surrounding horror fandom. This is a community where people can debate obscure franchise continuity, identify a movie from a single practical effects shot and remember who played the third victim in a slasher they saw once on VHS in 1993. Turning that collective obsession into a game show feels almost inevitable. Better Luck Than Chuck also brings some serious horror-world credibility to the table. The season features guest question readers including Mike Flanagan, Chad Villella, Brea Grant, BJ McDonnell, Gary Sherman, Rebekah McKendry, PhD, and Anthony Cousins. Their involvement gives the show an added connection to filmmakers and creators working across contemporary and cult horror. Each episode mixes traditional game show energy with horror comedy and genre-specific trivia, while contestants compete for prizes supplied by horror brands. Scotchworthy Productions and The Line Film Company produced the series, with new episodes scheduled to arrive every Thursday throughout the Halloween season. Horror has always thrived on participation. Fans argue over rankings, test each other on movie knowledge, trade recommendations and carry entire cinematic universes around in their heads. Better Luck Than Chuck takes that impulse and puts it under the lights of a game show set, complete with an undead co-host. The season premiere arrives Thursday, September 24. Watch Better Luck Than Chuck on YouTube at YouTube.com/@BetterLuckThanChuck and learn more about the series at BetterLuckThanChuck.com.

How Horror Journalists, Influencers and Creators Are Reshaping Horror Media By Seth Metoyer, MoreHorror.com I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what exactly a horror media outlet is supposed to be in 2026. For years, the structure made sense. A filmmaker made a movie. A publicist contacted the press. A writer reviewed it, interviewed somebody involved or published the announcement. Readers visited the website or bought the magazine, and maybe they discovered something they otherwise never would have heard about. Horror had magazines, zines, websites, message boards, blogs, convention coverage and all the other little ecosystems that grew around people who loved this stuff enough to spend ridiculous amounts of time talking about it. A lot of that still exists, but something else has grown around it. The horror journalist has increasingly become the horror creator, and there are now thousands of us. When the Outlet Was the Destination I’ve been running More Horror in one form or another since 2008. I remember when the primary goal of social media was fairly simple: get somebody to click the link. You posted something on Facebook, Twitter or whatever platform mattered at the moment, and ideally the person ended up on your website. The site was the destination. Social media functioned as the road leading there. That arrangement has almost completely inverted. More Horror now has around 65,000 followers on Instagram, along with audiences across Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok and YouTube. We built much of that Instagram audience organically over years, including during a period when growing a page through consistent posting felt considerably more achievable than it does now. Today I can put a piece of horror news on Instagram and thousands of people may see it without ever visiting MoreHorror.com. They’ll comment on the movie, tag somebody, argue about whether the remake sucks, tell me the original is better and inevitably declare that horror died sometime in the 1980s. They are clearly engaging with horror media. They simply never left Instagram. That dynamic has changed the job. The Person Became the Publication Traditional horror journalism usually separated the publication from the personality. You knew Fangoria. You knew Rue Morgue. You knew Bloody Disgusting. Writers certainly developed recognizable voices, and horror journalism has always had personalities, but the masthead carried enormous weight. Social media pushed the individual forward and made the person increasingly inseparable from the publication. Now somebody can build a horror audience entirely around themselves. They review movies on TikTok, tour conventions with a phone and microphone, post horror trivia, show off VHS collections, rank slashers, interview filmmakers on YouTube, photograph haunted attractions, cosplay, react to trailers and report from premieres. Some creators make short-form videos that reach more people in six hours than a traditional horror article may reach during its entire lifespan. At some point, we have to acknowledge that many of these people are performing functions that once belonged almost exclusively to horror publications. The vocabulary gets messy. Are they journalists, influencers, creators, critics, correspondents or simply horror fans who figured out how to build an audience around what they love? I find that less interesting than the work itself. If somebody attends a film festival, interviews a director, provides accurate information about the movie and gives an audience useful context, I care far more about the quality of what they produced than whether their press badge says JOURNALIST in sufficiently serious capital letters. Everyone Has a Broadcasting Station Now There is something genuinely exciting about this. Horror no longer needs permission from a handful of gatekeepers to exist publicly. A filmmaker in rural Illinois can release a trailer tonight and have someone in Los Angeles talking about it tomorrow. A horror fan in Dallas can build an audience around obscure slashers. Someone in New York can walk out of an advance screening and immediately tell thousands of people what they thought. A creator can cover a convention that a traditional outlet lacks the budget or staff to attend. That democratization fits horror especially well because this genre has always grown through outsiders. Fanzines, tape trading, convention tables, independent video stores, late-night television and message boards all gave people ways to tell each other about strange things they had discovered. Horror has always spread sideways, through people who found something cool and felt compelled to pass it along. Now everybody carries the distribution system in their pocket. That creates another problem, because everybody else carries one too. The Feed Is Getting Loud Spend fifteen minutes looking through horror Instagram or TikTok and the sheer volume becomes obvious. There are horror reviewers, collectors, actors, filmmakers, makeup artists, haunt performers, monster kids, poster collectors, Halloween historians, physical-media obsessives, cosplayers, podcasters, convention personalities and theme park creators. There are true-crime creators who wander into horror, horror creators who wander into true crime, and people opening mystery boxes while dressed like Ghostface. Some of these people are exceptionally good at what they do, and there are a lot of them. This creates a strange contradiction where horror may have more people creating horror-related media than at any point in its history while individual creators can simultaneously feel harder to discover. I’ve watched this happen beyond More Horror too. People who built audiences five or ten years ago sometimes become frustrated when growth slows dramatically. They still make content. Their existing audience may still enjoy it. New followers arrive much more slowly, and eventually the creator starts wondering whether anybody is listening. “Shouting into the void” has become one of those exhausted internet phrases, but it describes the sensation pretty well. You spend an hour putting something together, post it and watch the algorithm stare back at you like a dead-eyed studio executive who has already moved on to the next pitch. Followers Don’t Mean What They Used To Follower counts once represented something much closer to distribution. Someone followed your page, and there was a reasonably good chance they would see what you posted. Modern social platforms increasingly function as recommendation engines where following an account becomes one signal among many, and the platform decides what it believes somebody wants to see at that particular moment. That creates situations that would have seemed absurd years ago. Someone with 100,000 followers can publish something that barely moves, while somebody with 1,500 followers can post the right video at the right time and reach a million people. That unpredictability creates opportunity, but it also turns content creation into something resembling a slot machine where everybody keeps pulling the lever. Post another Reel. Try a shorter caption. Use trending audio. Post at 7:00. Apparently 11:30 works better now. Make a carousel. Upload the same thing as a Short. Put it on TikTok. Maybe Threads wants it. Check the analytics. Check them again. Apparently fourteen people unfollowed because you posted about a movie they don’t like. This is a very strange way to participate in culture. Horror Has Always Had a Favor Economy Horror operates heavily through relationships, especially at the independent level. A website shares somebody’s Kickstarter. A podcaster interviews a director. A reviewer covers an independent film. A filmmaker sends a screener. A creator posts a trailer. Somebody reposts somebody else’s Reel. A convention provides access. A publicist connects a journalist with talent. The entire underground horror ecosystem survives partly because people amplify one another. I like that about horror, and I’ve participated in it for years. Some of the best opportunities I’ve had came through people helping each other, passing along contacts, sharing work or simply saying, “You should talk to this person.” The Favor Starts Becoming Labor This is where the old favor economy starts to get tricky. Writing an article takes time, as does editing a video or creating graphics. Watching a movie eats up a couple of hours before anyone has even written a word about it. And conducting an interview means scheduling, preparing, recording, editing, and promoting. Independent horror media often performs all of this work with very small staffs. Sometimes one person does everything: writer, editor, graphic designer, social media manager, video editor, photographer and then, after all that, publicist for the thing they just spent several hours creating. I know that job pretty well. At some point the line between supporting the horror community and becoming an unpaid marketing department gets blurry. Collaboration is still enormously important, but the sheer volume of requests changes the nature of the relationship. Reciprocity starts to become even more important. Maybe We Don’t Need Another Megaphone All of this started changing how I think about More Horror. For years, growing a media outlet meant accumulating a bigger audience. More followers, more traffic and more reach were the obvious goals, and they still matter. I want More Horror to grow. I want our articles to get read. I want our posts to reach people. If we cover an independent film I believe deserves attention, I want that filmmaker to feel an actual effect from the coverage. Lately, though, I’ve become increasingly interested in another idea. Maybe the next useful step involves connecting audiences rather than endlessly trying to collect them. That thinking eventually became the More Horror Network. The idea started fairly simply. There are already talented horror creators everywhere. Some live in Los Angeles and regularly attend premieres. Some live in New York. Others are in Texas, Nashville, Las Vegas or places we haven’t reached yet. Some are excellent on camera. Some write. Some photograph events. Some make strange, funny horror videos. Some have large audiences. Some have smaller audiences with incredibly strong engagement. What happens when those people start connecting? Building Connective Tissue Instead of treating every horror creator like another competitor for the same limited pile of attention, I started wondering what happens when the infrastructure begins linking them together. A correspondent attends an event. More Horror amplifies their coverage. They introduce their audience to us. Our audience discovers them. A filmmaker gets additional visibility. Another creator discovers the filmmaker. Something moves sideways through the community instead of waiting for an algorithm to randomly bless it from above. That interests me much more than building another isolated social media kingdom. Horror already has plenty of people holding megaphones. What it increasingly needs is connective tissue. That is also where I think the distinction between journalist, influencer and creator becomes less useful. A person can wear several of those hats depending on what they are doing that day. Someone might write a review in the morning, shoot convention footage that afternoon and post a ridiculous horror meme that night. The work has become hybrid because the media environment itself has become hybrid. The person doing the work has adapted along with it. A Network of Microphones I think that may be where horror media heads next. Traditional publications will continue to be important.Websites still have a role. Long-form criticism gives ideas room to breathe. Journalists document, investigate and preserve. Creators bring personality and immediacy. Influencers can move attention quickly. Podcasts build intimacy. YouTube gives horror coverage a visual life. And yes, that quirky person on Instagram who’s seen every direct-to-video slasher from 1987 to 1994 probably knows things the rest of us don’t. Each reaches people differently, and the challenge increasingly involves connecting those points. One person covering Los Angeles cannot cover everything happening there. One website cannot watch every independent movie. One creator cannot attend every convention. No single audience will ever see everything. A network changes the equation. Instead of everybody screaming louder, you build a network of microphones. Horror Never Really Worked Alone Anyway The funny thing is that none of this feels particularly new when I look at horror history. The technology changes constantly, but the behavior underneath it has remained remarkably familiar. Someone discovered a strange movie and told their friends. Someone made a fanzine. Someone mailed a VHS tape across the country. Someone recommended a bootleg at a convention. Someone posted about a movie on a message board. Someone embedded a trailer on MySpace. Someone tweeted about it. Someone made a TikTok. Someone posted a Reel. The transmission method keeps mutating, but the impulse remains almost primitive. Horror people find strange things in the dark, then turn toward somebody else and say, “You need to see this.”

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.