Fears and anxieties about isolation and loneliness haunt twentysomething Lucy (Maika Monroe of It Follows and Villains, in another fine performance) during a long night in writer/director Kate Trefry’s psychological horror short How to Be Alone. What scares us most is often what we concoct in our minds, and Trefry combines that idea with absolutely […]
Two years ago genre fans watched a couple of girls climb into a shark cage and unexpectedly descend 47 Meters Down when the cable broke and the cage dropped to the ocean floor. As their air supply dwindled the girls had to face their fears, and the sharks they had been watching, to try and […]
If you are in the mood for a brain-bending dose of existential angst and nihilist musing — and if you are not, what’s holding you back? — you need look no further than prolific filmmaker Izzy Lee’s The Obliteration of the Chickens. It is unlike any of Lee’s other works, tackling the senselessness of it […]
For those unfamiliar with the source material, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is based on a series of Young Adult novels written by Alvin Schwartz that collected a bunch of urban legend style horror stories and packaged them as something you could read aloud to your friends and then scare them silly when […]
She may not have the cinematic celebrity of some of her kaiju contemporaries, but since first hitting the big screen in 1961 MOTHRA has always had a sentimental spot in the hearts of monster movie fans. Like Godzilla, MOTHRA is the product of man’s mishandling of atomic radiation, but unlike the big lizard, MOTHRA isn’t […]
The Dutch short film The Burden (Het Juk) proves that the classic set-ups of a creepy backstory and a flashlight beam slowly moving around a dark attic are still effective horror cinema elements. Writer/director Nico van den Brink’s 15-minute chiller offers up a superb terror tale that keeps viewers guessing. Ciska (Hanna van Vliet) is […]
Director Ian Hunt Duffy, working from a screenplay by Darach McGarrigle, examines the mysterious, dark relationship between a father and his young son during a rite-of-passage boat excursion in the Irish horror short Low Tide. The result is an eerie, enigmatic effort that offers both visceral sequences as well as a sense of dread. Dad […]
Mystery writer Robin Richards (Andréa Winter) is having a bad year. Her latest novel, a sequel to her last bestseller, is not only a critical and commercial flop but is being touted by online trolls as the vilest book ever written. Suffering from a subsequent case of severe writer’s block, Richards reluctantly takes her agent’s […]
With Residual, French writer/director Damien Kazan has crafted a taut 14-minute chiller that combines a classic slasher film chase sequence with a bit of the supernatural. The result is a nifty short chock full of striking images and nail-biting moments. Sam Cavalier stars as Jay, a young woman preparing for an evening out on Halloween […]
An estranged father and daughter pick the absolute worst place and time to get together and try to iron out their problems. The time is in the middle of a category five hurricane that is slamming into the coast of South Florida. The place is the dank and disgusting crawl space underneath their now abandoned […]
Co-directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz deliver one of horror’s hardest gut punches of the year with The Lodge, a chilling tale of a suicide cult survivor and her attempt to bond with the children of her boyfriend. Some viewers considered Fiala’s and Franz’s Goodnight Mommy to be cold and distant, but their latest effort […]
In a movie where nothing is as it seems, the line between fear and disbelief can get muddled. This is the unfortunate case for Director David Ryan Keith’s new horror film, The Dark Within. Just like the character, we can’t decipher what’s real or not. Might sound great, however, when reality and time are so […]
Spiderman: Far From Home may not be the best movie to ever come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it would be hard to find a more necessary one. After suffering through the devastation left behind in the wake of the last two Avenger movies, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, fans needed a […]
The latest from director Ari Aster – Midsommar – lands in theaters this week. Many stood in awe at his freshman effort, last years hit Hereditary – I was not one of them. As you might guess – I’ve been approaching Midsommar with more than a fair share of trepidation, while others in my small […]
What is it about dolls that strikes fear into my cold little heart? From the moment I saw Talking Tina in The Twilight Zone, I knew something was amiss with recognizing life in an inanimate object. Pediophobia, the fear of dolls, is a primitive fear. To be superstitious of something similar to a person, but […]