Horror News

MCFARLANE TOYS’ Last year, McFarlane Toys’ Movie Maniacs line was quietly revived with a laughable series of figures that included characters from The Hangover, Looney Tunes, Harry Potter, and Wizard of Oz. Thankfully, the new line actually includes a horror figure, and it’s a doozy. Take a look at the brand new Pennywise plastic as featured in New Line Cinema’s smash hits It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two, both new adaptations of Stephen King’s popular book. The figure comes boxed in a diorama with the creepy house and comes...

Coming soon from Trick or Treat Studios is an official Chucky board game, previewed at Toy Fair this week and available for pre-order now from the company’s official website. In the Chucky board game, Trick or Treat previews, “gather evidence, then handle encounters with Chucky at the end of each round in an attempt to be declared the survivor.” “Each player will gather evidence about the mysterious murders that have been going on. This will give them skills and abilities to roll the dice and maybe handle an encounter with...

Netflix’s Castlevania animated series helped break barriers for not only its medium, but also the longstanding stigma that video game adaptations were doomed to fail. Castlevania gracefully bowed out after telling a complete story over the course of four seasons. However, it was revealed that the franchise would continue, albeit with new Castlevania series within the same universe, almost in a style that’s akin to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Castlevania: Nocturne is the first of these new Castlevania series and it follows Richter Belmont, Maria Renard, and a team of intrepid...

For a horror fan, the month of October is naturally designated for everything related to Halloween. So this month’s installment of Deep Cuts Rising features a variety of horror movies that take place on or around October 31st. As usual, though, these selections can generally be considered overlooked, forgotten or unknown. This month’s Halloween-themed offerings include zombies, witchcraft, killers, and more. The Midnight Hour (1985) Image: The Midnight Club (1985) Directed by Jack Bender. The Midnight Hour is a great warm-up for the Halloween season, right before diving into heavier or...

Netflix’s Castlevania animated series helped break barriers for not only its medium, but also the longstanding stigma that video game adaptations were doomed to fail. Castlevania gracefully bowed out after telling a complete story over the course of four seasons. However, it was revealed that the franchise would continue, albeit with new Castlevania series within the same universe, almost in a style that’s akin to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Castlevania: Nocturne is the first of these new Castlevania series and it follows Richter Belmont, Maria Renard, and a team of intrepid...

Are You Afraid of The Dark? The Official Podcast, a new Audible Original inspired by Nickelodeon’s beloved horror anthology TV series, is now available on Audible! You can listen to the official trailer below for a sneak preview of the brand new podcast, which brings the nostalgic terror of the classic series into a whole new medium. Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society… “Perfectly timed for Halloween, listeners will love this nostalgic revisit of the ‘90s cult-classic show, which was recently reimagined as a limited series and follows...

The tenth entry in any franchise, let alone horror, is a monumental milestone. What began in 2004 with Saw, a twisty thriller that introduced John “Jigsaw” Kramer as a mastermind trap engineer, quickly gave way to an enduring horror franchise where the traps got gnarlier and the timeline increasingly more convoluted once Jigsaw and favorite apprentice Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) were lethally removed from the equation. Both are back in Saw X, a milestone sequel that goes back to the franchise’s roots to a deeply satisfying degree. Saw X, set between Saw and Saw II,...

While the theme of Fantastic Fest this year is occultism/Satanic panic, the “junior” theme of the fest could easily be The Wrath of Troma, given that the opening night film of the festival was the long-awaited remake of The Toxic Avenger (review) and the studio is also bringing us Heidi Moore‘s Kill Dolly Kill. It’s a micro-budget film with horrendous production values and some truly terrible performances, so about what you’d expect from a modern Troma film, but a committed lead performance and some transgressive humor make for a mildly entertaining romp through...

After helping to pioneer Italy’s budding giallo genre throughout the 1970s with influential titles like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and Deep Red, Dario Argento took a brief sabbatical from the lurid thrillers to explore supernatural elements in Suspiria and Inferno. When the latter failed at the box office, he made a triumphant return to gialli in 1982 with Tenebrae (sometimes spelled Tenebre; originally released in the US as Unsane). While his American contemporaries were trying to come up...

Spooky season is not complete without a haunted house and its share of lonesome ghosts. Well, our Chicagoland readers are in luck because Bloody Disgusting and Halloweenies: A Horror Franchise Podcast invite you to see one of the greatest haunted house movies of all time on the big screen: Peter Medak’s 1980 classic The Changeling starring George C. Scott. The one-night only event takes place on Monday, October 2nd at 8:00 p.m. at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theatre. In addition to this rare screening, the night will also include an...

Welcome to the Hammer Factory. This month we dissect The Reptile (1966). While Hammer Studios has been in business since 1934, it was between 1955 and 1979 that it towered as one of the premier sources of edgy, gothic horror. On top of ushering the famous monsters of Universal’s horror heyday back into the public eye, resurrecting the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy in vivid color, the studio invited performers like Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Ingrid Pitt and so many more to step into the genre limelight. Spanning a library...

Writer/Director Dan Brown’s feature debut, Your Lucky Day, elevates a simple concept with palpable tension and intense confrontations. A convenience store at Christmastime transforms into a harrowing battleground when a winning lotto ticket emerges, creating an intense thriller filled with surprise escalations and propulsive action. It’s not just the narrative turns and bleak authenticity that makes Your Lucky Day winsome, but the Christmas caper’s daring commitment to nihilism. An average night becomes anything but for six strangers at a convenience store around Christmas. A criminal, Sterling (Angus Cloud), arrives at the store in a...

It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a tried and true, serious-in-tone creature feature, or at least one in which the creature in question is a real-world animal and not a fictitious monster. This sub-genre often finds its roots planted firmly in horror comedy or, intentionally or not, camp. So it’s refreshing that Infested (formerly titled Vermin), Sébastien Vaniček‘s feature directorial debut, takes a deathly serious approach to the material. There’s still plenty of fun to be had with these spiders, but there’s nothing funny about them. 30-year-old Kaleb (Théo Christine) is...

Few fears are more universal than claustrophobia. Many of us have probably experienced that twinge of anxiety when elevator doors close behind us, but few of us have likely ever been down in the depths of a coal mine, where the elements at play have a potentially fatal outcome. This fear is what writer/director Mathieu Turi tries to tap into in The Deep Dark, to moderately successful results. Following an 1856-set prologue in which a group of miners encounters a mysterious creature before an explosion traps them all underground, we are...