The RackaRacka boys have delivered again with another twisted take on the horror genre.
Where most modern horrors have become predictable, Bring Her Back keeps you guessing—delivering tense scenes, cover-your-eyes moments, and genuine shocks rather than cheap jump scares.
You feel every bone crack and every piece of skin tear, thanks to ingenious stunt work and makeup effects, bolstered by incredibly savage sound design. It’s easy to see why some of the body horror may be too much for the faint of heart—featuring one of the most brutal moments I think I’ve ever seen on screen.
The Philippou brothers, Danny and Michael (Talk To Me), excel at finding great young talent, and this is no exception. The cast includes a group of up-and-coming stars alongside Sally Hawkins, who delivers an unsettling performance (and a flawless Aussie accent). For a pair of lads who come across as nutters in every interview they do, the brothers show surprising maturity—especially in their camerawork and originality.
Like most horror films, it’s a very clear allegory, but it’s still entertaining. There were moments that could’ve been a bit clearer without needing to spell everything out—but then again, I suppose we’d have had nothing to discuss in the car park afterwards.
The Prognosis:
You may need an exorcist to remove this movie from your brain—not just because of the body horror, but because you’ll probably be trying to piece the puzzle together the whole ride home.
Premiering Exclusively on Shudder, AMC+ and HIDIVE – Friday 30 May “In a world ruled by vampires, only a half-blood dares to hunt them.”
When Vampire Hunter D premiered in 1985, few could have predicted the cultural ripple effect it would have across manga, anime, and horror for decades to come. Now, forty years later, this gothic, genre-defying milestone returns with a long-awaited streaming premiere on Shudder, AMC+, and HIDIVE—offering a perfect moment to reflect on its enduring power.
Set in the far-flung future of 12,090 A.D., the film unfolds in a post-apocalyptic landscape where science and sorcery coexist, and humanity lives in fear under the rule of the vampire Nobility. At its centre is Doris Lang, a brave young woman marked for unholy matrimony by the ancient Count Magnus Lee. Her only hope lies in the hands of a mysterious wanderer known only as D—an enigmatic vampire hunter with a tragic secret etched into his very bloodline.
Directed by Toyoo Ashida and based on the novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi with iconic illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano, Vampire Hunter D was a revelation for its time. It merged the aesthetics of Western horror—Dracula, Frankenstein, Lovecraft—with a distinctly Japanese post-apocalyptic flair, opening a door to global audiences that had rarely encountered horror anime in this form. The film’s blend of violence, melancholy, and romanticism felt alien and refreshing—an animated Gothic western that flirted with sci-fi, body horror, and dark fantasy.
The horror in Vampire Hunter D is not just visual—it’s atmospheric. Shadowy castles, mutated creatures, and the decaying elegance of the vampire Nobility all serve to create an air of terminal beauty, where death and corruption linger in every frame. The film pulses with dread, not just from its antagonists, but from the melancholic burden D carries as a dhampir—caught between two worlds, never at home in either.
Manga, and later anime, would absorb and amplify these motifs. Vampire Hunter D helped normalise horror as a serious mode within manga storytelling, inspiring a lineage that includes Berserk, Hellsing, Claymore, and Attack on Titan. Its DNA can be traced through the decades, proving that gothic horror, when stylised with poetic nihilism and speculative world-building, could resonate far beyond Japan.
Though animation has since evolved in leaps and bounds, there’s a charm in Vampire Hunter D’s hand-drawn grit—a visual texture that feels inseparable from its era and identity. It may lack the polish of modern anime, but it makes up for it in atmosphere, tone, and mythic presence.
The Prognosis:
As it celebrates its 40th anniversary with a new generation of fans ready to rediscover it, Vampire Hunter D still holds its scythe high. Part horror, part tragedy, and wholly influential, it remains a cornerstone of horror anime—and proof that even in a world of monsters, the greatest fear often lies within the hero himself.
Retrospective Review bySaul Muerte
Vampire Hunter D premieresexclusively on Shudder, AMC+ and HIDIVE – Friday 30 May
Robert Wise’s gothic thriller endures as a somber meditation on moral decay, elevated by Boris Karloff’s haunting performance and a creeping atmosphere of inevitable doom.
In the gothic shadows of Edinburgh, 1831, a sinister trade thrives — one that chills the blood more than any imagined phantoms. Robert Wise’s The Body Snatcher, marking its 80th anniversary, stands as a sombre meditation on guilt, complicity, and the monstrous lengths to which men will go in the name of progress. Though often overshadowed by the grander horror spectacles of its era, this adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story endures as a morally murky, quietly insidious thriller — elevated by the formidable presence of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
The film pivots on the uneasy relationship between Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), a respected physician harbouring a damning secret, and Cabman Gray (Boris Karloff), the gleeful ghoul who supplies MacFarlane’s medical school with an illicit flow of cadavers. Karloff, at the height of his late-career potency, embodies Gray not as a stock villain but as a leering, almost Shakespearian figure — a spectre of the past MacFarlane cannot exorcise. In a film largely devoid of supernatural elements, it is Karloff’s performance that provides the true horror: the inexorable pull of guilt and moral decay.
At its core, The Body Snatcher is not merely about grave robbery, but about the corrupting influence of rationalisation. Dr. MacFarlane convinces himself that his ends — advancing medical science — justify the sordid means. Yet, as Wise’s patient, sombre direction emphasises, no amount of rationalising can protect the soul from rot. Each step MacFarlane takes toward “noble progress” leaves another moral wound festering beneath his polished exterior.
Bela Lugosi, reduced by this time to smaller, often pitiable roles, appears briefly but memorably as Joseph, an opportunistic servant who attempts to blackmail Gray — with predictably grim results. Though Lugosi’s screen time is limited, his gaunt visage and desperate demeanour deepen the film’s atmosphere of inevitable downfall.
Robert Wise, making his solo directorial debut after serving as editor on Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, crafts a film of remarkable restraint. Eschewing the sensationalism suggested by the lurid poster art (“GRAVES RAIDED! COFFINS ROBBED! CORPSES CARVED!”), Wise opts instead for creeping dread — long shadows across stone alleys, whispered threats in hushed taverns, the simple, chilling sound of hooves clattering in the misty night. His style foreshadows the sophistication he would later bring to The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Haunting.
Thematically, The Body Snatcher grapples with the commodification of death — how the needs of the living exploit and desecrate the dignity of the dead. Yet the deeper horror lies not in the graveyards, but in the human heart’s capacity for compromise. In Karloff’s Gray, we see not merely a villain, but the embodiment of conscience corrupted beyond repair — a mirror to MacFarlane’s rationalised decay.
The Prognosis:
Eighty years on, The Body Snatcher may not deliver the frenetic thrills modern audiences often crave, but its slow, inexorable descent into moral ruin lingers. It is a film les–s about what men do in darkness, and more about how they learn to live with themselves afterward — or fail to.
In an age where the ethics of progress are more fraught than ever, The Body Snatcher whispers a grim reminder from the grave: the past never stays buried for long.
The crown may glitter, but this prom queen is all tulle and no terror.
Fear Street: Prom Queen stumbles into Netflix’s horror lineup with limp energy and even less imagination. Gone is the confident, genre-savvy edge that defined Leigh Janiak’s 2021 trilogy—a trio of interconnected films (1994, 1978, and 1666) that managed to surprise and delight by leaning into horror history while crafting its own mythology. That trilogy was vibrant, bloody, and bold—elevating RL Stine’s teen-friendly chills into something slick and cinematically compelling. With Prom Queen, the fall from Fear Street grace is as loud as it is underwhelming.
Janiak’s absence is keenly felt. What once felt like a love letter to horror has been reduced to a colourless cash-in, trading atmosphere and tension for hollow homage and tired tropes. Director Matt Palmer brings little visual flair or tonal conviction, and the script lacks the spark that made the earlier films feel alive with danger. There’s a fundamental disconnect between the material and its adaptation—as if it’s been lifted from the shelf and passed through a soulless streaming algorithm before making its way to screen.
And that’s a shame, because Prom Queen comes from decent stock. RL Stine’s original novel, while perhaps lighter on the bloodshed, delivered the kind of pulpy suspense and teen melodrama that made his work addictive for a generation. The story’s premise—deadly competition for the school crown—was ripe for a satirical or sinister update in the post-Carrie, post-Mean Girls horror landscape. Instead, the film barely flirts with either, delivering a painfully formulaic slasher that neither frightens nor surprises.
The kills, such as they are, feel half-hearted and predictable. Characters are introduced only to be dispatched minutes later, never afforded personalities beyond archetypes. Suspense is conspicuously absent, replaced by a mechanical rhythm of setup and slash that grows increasingly tiresome. It doesn’t help that the film plays it incredibly safe—never leaning into camp, nor darkness, nor even irony. It simply exists, like a photocopy of a photocopy, drained of the ink that once gave the franchise bite.
India Fowler stands out, her performance as Lori Granger offering flickers of emotion and control that the film doesn’t deserve. She does what she can with thin material and walks away mostly unscathed. The Newton Brothers’ score is another high point—synthy, nostalgic, and oddly elegant—almost a haunting echo of the trilogy’s sharper sound design. But these are isolated gems in an otherwise barren crown.
The Prognosis:
Fear Street: Prom Queen is a disappointing return to a once-promising franchise. It neither honours its roots nor pushes the story in new directions. Instead, it limps across the finish line with little to say and even less to feel. If this is the future of Fear Street, it may be time to turn back.
Gordon Hessler’s somber, atmospheric horror marks a transitional moment as American International Pictures’ Poe cycle edges toward a darker, more violent future.
By the end of the 1960s, the gothic horror cycle popularized by American International Pictures was showing distinct signs of wear. Lavish yet increasingly formulaic, the once-groundbreaking Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe collaborations — most notably directed by Roger Corman — had set a high-water mark earlier in the decade. The Oblong Box, directed by Gordon Hessler and released in 1969, represents both a continuation and a mutation of that tradition: a film steeped in the tropes audiences had come to expect, but tinged with a harsher, more morbid tone reflective of the cultural shifts at the end of the decade.
Although marketed heavily as another Poe adaptation, The Oblong Box in fact has little to do with the author’s original short story, borrowing only the title and the general theme of premature burial. Nevertheless, its atmosphere — a decadent English estate rotting under the weight of ancestral sins — fits neatly into the aesthetic universe cultivated by AIP’s earlier Poe pictures. Vincent Price, ever the consummate performer, slips comfortably into the role of Julian Markham, a man haunted by familial guilt and constrained by social appearances. Price’s presence alone is enough to anchor the film in the familiar tradition of velvet-draped madness and doomed legacies.
However, The Oblong Box also marks a departure from the more theatrical, florid excesses of Corman’s earlier works. Hessler, stepping into the director’s chair after Michael Reeves’ untimely death and dissatisfaction from AIP’s executives, brings a colder, more clinical eye to the material. The film’s violence is more explicit; its themes — colonial guilt, fratricide, exploitation — emerge less as melodramatic devices and more as genuinely disturbing undercurrents. It is a film less concerned with Poe’s romanticised morbidity than with a burgeoning appetite for psychological and physical horror.
Christopher Wicking’s screenplay weaves in an uneasy undercurrent of imperialist critique, with the disfigured Sir Edward (played in part by Alister Williamson, though Price’s star power overshadows him) embodying the physical and moral consequences of colonial exploitation. The masked figure, red cloak swirling in the night as he seeks revenge, foreshadows the more explicit grotesqueries that would dominate British and European horror into the 1970s.
While The Oblong Box does not reach the stylistic heights of earlier Corman-Poe entries like The Masque of the Red Deathor The Pit and the Pendulum, it nonetheless offers a compelling portrait of a genre — and a studio — in transition. Hessler’s film is handsomely mounted, if at times unevenly paced, and buoyed significantly by Price’s unerring ability to balance camp and gravitas. His Julian Markham is neither pure villain nor misunderstood hero, but a man slowly being devoured by forces he can no longer control, much like the American International Pictures horror line itself, inching toward its inevitable decline.
The Prognosis:
The Oblong Box stands as a fascinating artifact: a twilight entry that hints at both the glories of AIP’s earlier successes and the darker, less forgiving horror that the 1970s would embrace. It is not the purest distillation of Price’s talents nor Poe’s nightmarish imagination, but it remains a solemn, atmospheric bridge between eras — a coffin-laden corridor leading toward the more brutal horrors to come.
Rusty Cundieff’s ambitious anthology remains a culturally charged, uneven, yet fiercely memorable fusion of nightmares and societal critique.
“Welcome to hell, motherf**ers.”* Those iconic words, delivered with an unsettling smile by Clarence Williams III’s unhinged mortician, still ring with biting relevance thirty years later. Tales from the Hood, Rusty Cundieff’s 1995 horror anthology, remains a curiously potent, if uneven, cultural artifact — a film that collides supernatural horror with the harsh, lived realities of systemic racism, gang violence, and social decay.
On the surface, the film trades in the familiar structure of anthology horror — not dissimilar to Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt. Yet what sets it apart is its urgent social consciousness. Each of the four segments, framed by a macabre funeral parlour visit by three hapless drug dealers, acts as a parable reflecting the nightmares of Black America. The tone is as volatile as it is ambitious: earnest yet sardonic, horrific yet grimly satirical.
“Rogue Cop Revelation”, the first tale, hits with brutal directness. A rookie Black police officer witnesses the savage beating and murder of a respected Black civil rights activist at the hands of his white colleagues — a sequence disturbingly resonant with real-world atrocities. While the story embraces a cathartic, supernatural revenge motif, its anger at a broken system is palpable. If anything, its morality is blunt to the point of didacticism, but the rawness of its conviction is hard to deny.
The second segment, “Boys Do Get Bruised”, momentarily shifts into a more intimate, almost fairy-tale-like horror. A young boy’s fear of a “monster” at home gradually reveals itself as an allegory for domestic abuse. David Alan Grier, typically known for comedic roles, is chillingly cast against type here, delivering a performance that feels authentically monstrous. The creature effects — modest by mid-’90s standards — take on a symbolic weight, emphasising how horror can be a child’s only language for trauma.
“KKK Comeuppance”, easily the most satirical and visually grotesque of the tales, feels both inspired and overindulgent. A virulent racist Southern politician, clearly modeled on the likes of David Duke, meets his end at the hands of a plantation’s haunted dolls — vessels for the souls of the enslaved. While the story occasionally lurches into caricature, its fiery blend of absurdity and rage fits the material’s heightened tone. The practical effects, particularly the puppetry, have aged with a charming, eerie patina.
The final major story, “Hard-Core Convert”, stands as the most conceptually ambitious, if narratively muddled. Chronicling the psychological “reprogramming” of a vicious gang member, the segment attempts to wrestle with internalised racism and the cyclical violence endemic to marginalised communities. The “shock therapy” sequences, underscored by archival footage of racial violence, remain harrowing, even if the moral thrust feels heavier-handed than necessary.
Rusty Cundieff, alongside executive producer Spike Lee, crafts a volatile cocktail of genre thrills and sociopolitical commentary. Yet, like many anthologies, Tales from the Hood struggles to maintain tonal consistency. Some stories feel thematically rich but visually cramped, others visually imaginative but narratively thin. Still, the film’s ambition — to fuse entertainment with genuine social critique — is laudable, particularly in a horror landscape often content with apolitical escapism.
The Prognosis:
Tales from the Hood endures not merely as a time capsule of mid-’90s anxieties but as a prescient reminder of horror’s potential as protest. Its unevenness, perhaps, is a reflection of the chaotic reality it sought to confront: a world where nightmares are no longer confined to dreams but stalk the streets in broad daylight.
In an era when the lines between fiction and reality blur with alarming frequency, Tales from the Hood still stares unflinchingly into the abyss — and invites its audience to do the same.
Four decades on, Craven’s made-for-TV sci-fi horror remains a flawed but fascinating blend of cryogenics, corporate greed, and cautionary terror.
By 1985, Wes Craven was still deep in the throes of building his horror legacy. Having just reshaped nightmares with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven pivoted into made-for-TV territory with Chiller, a cautionary tale that tiptoes into sci-fi horror. While it never reaches the stylistic or thematic potency of his best work, Chiller remains a curiosity worth revisiting—particularly on its 40th anniversary—for its oddball blend of futuristic fears and Reagan-era yuppie dread.
The premise is chilling in theory: a wealthy industrialist, Miles Creighton (Michael Beck), is cryogenically frozen following his death, only to be reanimated a decade later. But something essential is missing. His soul, it seems, didn’t make the journey back. What follows is a slow-burning descent into sociopathic cruelty as Miles—emotionless and spiritually hollow—reclaims his corporate empire with cold precision and increasingly inhuman behaviour.
Craven attempts to explore the intersection of science and morality, a theme that’s ahead of its time, especially with its allusions to cryogenics and post-death technology. Yet the execution often feels flat. The pace plods, the scares are minimal, and the dialogue teeters on the melodramatic. Still, beneath its TV-movie trappings, there’s a sinister subtext bubbling away—one that critiques 1980s capitalist hubris, the soulless nature of corporate power, and the terrifying idea that a man without a conscience might thrive in a world that rewards ambition over empathy.
There’s also a surprising thread of subtle, almost darkly comic undertones as Miles navigates the modern world with ice-cold detachment. Craven flirts with irony here, but never fully commits—leaving the film in tonal limbo.
While Chiller is far from essential Craven, its place in his filmography offers insight into the director’s restlessness and willingness to experiment, even on the small screen. For a deeper dissection of the film’s flaws and hidden charms, the Surgeons of Horror podcast delivers a thoughtful and entertaining autopsy, peeling back the layers of what could have been a more potent moral thriller.
The Prognosis:
Chiller serves less as a forgotten gem and more as a time capsule—one that freezes a moment in Craven’s career when he was still probing the boundaries of fear and consequence, even if the results didn’t fully thaw into form.
Grief, guilt, and resurrection collide in this modest but emotionally raw Shudder original, anchored by Colby Minifie’s compelling performance.
Shudder’s The Surrender, directed by Julia Max, delivers a slow-burn horror that uses its modest means to tell a deeply emotional—and at times unnerving—tale of grief, guilt, and letting go. While the film initially struggles under the weight of its low budget, it gradually finds its footing as it surrenders itself to the emotional and psychological turmoil at its centre.
At the heart of the story is the fraught relationship between a grieving mother and her daughter Megan (Colby Minifie), as they wrestle with the sudden death of their husband and father. Desperate and broken, the mother enlists a mysterious stranger to bring her husband back from the dead. What begins as a misguided act of love quickly spirals into something much more brutal and unnatural.
The supernatural elements are understated at first, and admittedly, the film’s visual limitations are most noticeable in its early scenes. But what The Surrender lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in its performances—particularly Minifie’s. As Megan, she delivers a performance grounded in realism and vulnerability, guiding the audience through the stages of grief with raw authenticity. Her arc—resisting, confronting, and eventually accepting the horror unraveling around her—anchors the film and gives its title real weight.
Director Julia Max plays with mood and silence rather than jump scares, and the atmosphere becomes more effective the longer we sit in it. The film’s title becomes a double-edged term: surrender to grief, surrender to love, and ultimately, surrender to what can’t be undone.
The Prognosis:
While it never fully transcends its genre or budget, The Surrender is a thoughtful entry in the grief-horror subgenre that lingers in the mind more than expected. For those patient enough to give in, there’s something genuinely resonant beneath the blood and shadow.
Movie Review by Saul Muerte
The Surrender is streaming on Shudder from Fri 23rd May.
Peter Cushing delivers his darkest turn as Baron Frankenstein in Terence Fisher’s brutal, uncompromising portrait of ambition unmoored from humanity.
Few characters in horror history have undergone as grim an evolution as Hammer Films’ Baron Victor Frankenstein. By 1969, the once-charming and impassioned scientist had metamorphosed into something altogether colder, crueller — and never more so than in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Marking one of the studio’s boldest and bleakest entries, Terence Fisher’s film plunges audiences into a chilling moral abyss, anchored by Peter Cushing’s most malevolent portrayal of the Baron.
From the outset, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is suffused with an atmosphere of stark brutality. Gone is the romanticised ambition of earlier installments; in its place stands a portrait of Frankenstein as a calculating sociopath, concerned only with his own vindication. Peter Cushing, always a master of understated menace, turns in a performance of extraordinary steeliness — chillingly urbane one moment, terrifyingly ruthless the next. His Baron is a man for whom human life is but clay to be shaped, discarded, or destroyed in pursuit of scientific triumph.
Fisher, who had been instrumental in defining Hammer’s gothic aesthetic, embraces a far colder visual palette here. The film trades ornate castles and vibrant colors for stark, drained settings — a reflection of Frankenstein’s spiritual desolation. Even the violence feels less operatic and more intimately brutal, culminating in moments that strip the mythos of any lingering romanticism.
Central to the film’s enduring controversy is the much-discussed scene in which Frankenstein rapes Anna (Veronica Carlson) — a moment absent from the original script and forced upon the production by studio pressure. Both Cushing and Carlson vehemently opposed the inclusion, and their disapproval seeps into the scene’s palpable discomfort. While ethically troubling, the moment undeniably darkens the character beyond redemption, underscoring the film’s unflinching portrayal of moral collapse. It transforms Frankenstein from a misguided idealist into a full-fledged predator — a monster not of nature, but of willful cruelty.
Carlson and Simon Ward, portraying the beleaguered couple ensnared in Frankenstein’s machinations, deliver affecting performances that heighten the tragedy. Carlson, in particular, lends a dignified pathos to a role burdened by the demands of a narrative far more nihilistic than Hammer’s previous outings.
Freddie Jones, in his first major film role as the tragic Professor Brandt, is a revelation. His performance captures both the physical fragility and the mental anguish of a man resurrected against his will, trapped within a stolen body and a crumbling mind. Jones infuses Brandt with a quiet dignity and simmering rage, crafting a character whose humanity serves as a stark rebuke to Frankenstein’s inhumanity. His confrontation with Cushing in the film’s final act offers a rare glimmer of emotional depth amid the relentless bleakness, elevating the story beyond pure gothic horror into something far more sorrowful and profound.
Thematically, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed confronts the corrosion of empathy under the guise of scientific pursuit. It suggests that evil need not spring from grandiose ambitions but from the erosion of everyday decency. Frankenstein’s destruction of lives — not in moments of passion, but through cold, bureaucratic calculation — offers a horror far more enduring than any stitched-together monster.
The Prognosis:
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed stands as a stark outlier within the Hammer canon — a film willing to fully reckon with the darkness its iconic character had always flirted with. Though marred by studio-imposed controversy, it remains a harrowing, essential entry in the Frankenstein cycle — a reminder that sometimes the true monster wears the most respectable face.
Gruesome deaths, tongue-in-cheek humour, and one last haunting turn from Tony Todd give this unexpected final chapter a shockingly fun farewell.
Okay, so what number is this? FD 14? 80? Final Destination 482?
Meh, who cares.
To be perfectly honest, I really wasn’t expecting much from this, so did it deliver? Drum roll… well, you’ll see.
The plot is: College student, Stefani, is plagued by the same super-violent nightmare night after night so investigates to find out what’s the deal. Then blah de blah, something, something about cheating death and it coming back to get you.
IRL SPOILER ALERT: Death catches up with everyone in the end.
Starring… well, I don’t know. Other than Tony Todd (in his final role before his passing) reprising his usual role, there’s no big ‘stars’… unless you count the Maya Hawke lookalike. This obviously makes the cast extra-expendable when they meet their bloody end. And boy oh boy, did they not scrimp on the blood and gore!!!
Every death is gratuitously gore-rific. The audience at the screening, the sick puppies they were, erupted in absolute fits of laughter every time one of the characters was killed.
Again, sick puppies… myself included of course.
But that’s it too. It most definitely plays for laughs. The writers are comedy and/or horror specialists. Between them they are responsible for: “Abigail”, “Ready or Not”, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” to name but a few. And they’ve had a great deal of fun with the script for this.
The Prognosis:
For me, “Final Destination: Bloodlines” was a great surprise. The makers have promised this is the final chapter of the long-exhausted franchise but hooly dooly, what a way to go out.
Now let the franchise die and head to its final destination.
Surgeons of Horror 