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Buried Deep: Hokum (2026)

08 Friday May 2026

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With Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy continues his ascent as one of contemporary horror’s most distinctive voices — a storyteller deeply attuned to atmosphere, folklore, and the psychological wounds that fester beneath grief.

Following the unnerving precision of his earlier work, McCarthy delivers perhaps his most accessible feature to date, but crucially, accessibility does not come at the expense of identity. Hokum still bears all the hallmarks of his cinema: oppressive mood, fractured psyches, dark humour, and mythology that feels less invented than unearthed.

This is horror that creeps rather than lunges.
A ghost story told through rot, memory, and rebirth.

The Inn as Psychological Mausoleum

The premise is deceptively intimate. Novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to become entangled in whispers surrounding a witch tied to the building’s infamous honeymoon suite.

But McCarthy understands that isolated settings are never merely locations. They are psychological extensions of the characters trapped within them.

The inn in Hokum becomes a liminal space suspended between mourning and transformation — a decaying threshold where unresolved trauma manifests through folklore and hallucination alike. Every creaking corridor and dimly lit room feels infected by memory.

The one-location approach works beautifully here, amplifying the claustrophobia while forcing the audience into the same suffocating emotional space as Ohm himself.

Folklore as Emotional Architecture

What separates McCarthy’s work from more conventional supernatural horror is the way he embeds folklore into the emotional core of his narratives.

The mythology in Hokum never feels expositional or over-explained. Instead, it exists like oral tradition — fragmented stories passed down, distorted through fear and repetition. The witch haunting the inn becomes less a singular entity and more a manifestation of communal grief and inherited guilt.

McCarthy understands an essential truth about folklore:
its power lies not in certainty, but in ambiguity.

The horror emerges from what cannot be fully understood.

Grief, Decay, and Rebirth

Beneath its supernatural framework, Hokum is fundamentally a film about grief — specifically the way grief reshapes identity.

Ohm’s journey is not simply about uncovering the inn’s secrets, but confronting the emotional debris left behind by loss. McCarthy explores mourning as something cyclical and transformative, where death inevitably gives rise to reinvention, however painful.

This theme of rebirth surfaces repeatedly through the film’s recurring rabbit iconography — creatures traditionally associated with fertility, resurrection, and transition between worlds. Here, the rabbit imagery becomes deeply uncanny, suggesting both vulnerability and metamorphosis.

It is one of the film’s most effective symbolic threads, quietly reinforcing the idea that trauma changes us into something new… whether we wish it to or not.

Humour in the Darkness

What makes Hokum particularly compelling is its willingness to puncture its own dread with moments of dry, almost uncomfortable black humour.

McCarthy has become increasingly adept at balancing tonal shifts without collapsing the atmosphere entirely. The humour here does not undercut the horror; it humanises it. It reminds us that absurdity often accompanies grief, that fear and laughter are not opposites but uneasy companions.

This tonal elasticity gives the film texture, preventing it from disappearing entirely into self-seriousness.

Damian McCarthy’s Rising Voice

With Hokum, McCarthy further establishes himself as part of a modern wave of horror filmmakers reclaiming atmosphere and folklore as vehicles for deeply personal storytelling.

There are traces of classic ghost stories here, certainly, but also something distinctly contemporary in the film’s focus on emotional inheritance and psychological fragmentation.

More importantly, McCarthy continues to trust the audience — resisting over-explanation in favour of mood, suggestion, and symbolism. In an era where many horror films feel compelled to spell out their mythology, Hokum allows mystery to remain unsettlingly intact.

The Prognosis:

Hokum is another strong entry in Damian McCarthy’s growing body of work — a haunting, folkloric meditation on grief, identity, and transformation wrapped inside an eerie one-location nightmare.

Atmospheric, psychologically rich horror that finds beauty in decay and terror in rebirth.

  • Saul Muerte

Faith in the Fire: Heresy (2026)

29 Wednesday Apr 2026

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There is a quiet severity to Heresy, a film that understands that true horror rarely announces itself with spectacle. Instead, it festers — in doctrine, in fear, in the fragile structures of belief that govern isolated communities. Premiering as a Shudder exclusive, this medieval folk horror leans into atmosphere and allegory, delivering a compact yet thematically dense meditation on faith, repression, and the unseen forces that thrive in both.

The Weight of Belief

Set within a remote Dutch village, Heresy wastes little time establishing its suffocating world. This is a society bound not just by geography, but by rigid religious doctrine — where faith is less a comfort and more a mechanism of control.

At the centre is a young woman caught in the crossfire between personal conviction and communal expectation, portrayed with quiet intensity by Anneke Sluiters. Her performance anchors the film, embodying both vulnerability and a simmering resistance that threatens to rupture the oppressive order around her.

Supporting turns from Len Leo Vincent and Reinout Bussemaker reinforce the film’s central tension — figures who oscillate between protectors of faith and enforcers of fear.

Folklore as Fear Language

Where Heresy distinguishes itself is in its use of folklore as both texture and threat.

The woods that loom on the outskirts of the village are more than a setting — they are a repository of whispered myths, ancestral warnings, and half-forgotten truths. The film draws on the traditions of European folk horror, where superstition and reality blur into something indistinguishable.

Witchcraft here is not simply an external evil, but a projection of collective anxiety. It is the language through which the village explains its suffering — failed crops, illness, unrest — and, more disturbingly, justifies its cruelty.

In this sense, Heresy aligns itself with the lineage of folk horror that sees mythology not as fantasy, but as a mirror of societal fear.

Compression and Constraint

At a brisk runtime, the film packs an impressive amount into its frame: hardship, religious suppression, gendered control, and the ever-present spectre of the supernatural.

Yet this compression is both its strength and its limitation.

There is an urgency to the storytelling — a sense that the narrative is racing to articulate its ideas before time runs out. While this lends the film a certain intensity, it occasionally comes at the expense of deeper exploration. Themes are introduced with potency, but not always given the space to fully resonate.

Aesthetic of Austerity

Visually, Heresy embraces restraint. The palette is muted, the compositions stark, reinforcing a world stripped of comfort. Interiors feel claustrophobic, exteriors indifferent. Light is scarce, and when it appears, it feels less like hope and more like exposure.

The sound design complements this austerity, favouring silence and ambient unease over overt musical cues. It is a film that understands the power of absence — of what is suggested rather than shown.

The Horror Within

What lingers most is not the presence of dark forces in the woods, but the behaviour of those within the village walls.

Heresy suggests that fanaticism is its own form of possession — that belief, when weaponised, can be as destructive as any supernatural entity. The true terror lies in how quickly fear transforms into persecution, how readily communities turn inward to purge what they do not understand.

The Prognosis:

Heresy is a thoughtful, if slightly constrained, entry into the folk horror canon — one that balances atmosphere and allegory with a commendable sense of purpose.

A compact and compelling meditation on faith, folklore, and fear, where the line between the supernatural and the societal is unsettlingly thin.

  • Saul Muerte

Heresy Premieres Exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ Friday 1 May

Death Never Looked So Good: Tales from the Crypt Rises Again

27 Monday Apr 2026

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There are horror anthologies… and then there is Tales from the Crypt — a series that didn’t just push boundaries, it gleefully dismembered them, stitched them back together, and laughed in your face as the blood pooled at your feet.

Now, with its resurrection on Shudder, a whole new generation is about to discover what made this corpse such a vital, beating heart of ‘90s horror television.

And for those of us who grew up on it?
This is less a rewatch… and more a reunion with an old accomplice.

The Crypt Keeper Cometh

Front and centre — always — is the grotesque ringmaster himself: Crypt Keeper, voiced with deliciously deranged glee by John Kassir.

He wasn’t just a host.
He was a provocateur. A comedian. A corpse with better timing than most living actors.

Each episode began and ended with his signature brand of pun-laden sadism — a tonal mission statement that told you exactly what you were in for:
this was horror with a grin… and a knife behind its back.

EC Comics DNA: Morality With Bite

Adapted from the infamous EC Comics of the 1950s, Tales from the Crypt carried forward a very specific ethos:

Bad people will suffer.
And they will suffer poetically.

Greed. Lust. Jealousy. Betrayal.
Every sin had its price — and the show delighted in collecting.

What made it land wasn’t just the comeuppance, but the ironic symmetry of it all. These weren’t random acts of violence; they were carefully constructed moral traps snapping shut.

A Playground for the Bold

What truly set the series apart was its ability to attract — and unleash — top-tier talent.

Directors like Robert Zemeckis, Tobe Hooper, and William Friedkin brought their distinct voices to the format, often experimenting in ways that traditional cinema wouldn’t allow.

And then there’s the cast — an almost absurd roll call of talent:

Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, John Lithgow, Christopher Reeve, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Buscemi, Brooke Shields — all stepping into this macabre sandbox.

Even behind the camera, names like Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael J. Fox took turns directing.

This wasn’t just television.
It was a creative free-for-all.

Gore, Guts, and Glorious Excess

Freed from the constraints of network censorship, Tales from the Crypt revelled in its HBO-backed excess.

The gore was unapologetic.
The language unfiltered.
The tone wildly unpredictable.

One week you’d get pitch-black comedy.
The next, a genuinely unsettling psychological descent.
Then a full-blown creature feature just for good measure.

It was this tonal elasticity that made the series so addictive — you never quite knew what flavour of horror you were about to consume.

The Anthology That Shaped a Generation

Long before the current resurgence of anthology horror, Tales from the Crypt set the template:

Self-contained stories.
Bold creative voices.
A willingness to be weird, nasty, and darkly funny.

You can trace its DNA through modern successors, but few capture that same gleeful irreverence.

Why It Still Matters

Revisiting Tales from the Crypt now, there’s a refreshing lack of restraint. It doesn’t second-guess itself. It doesn’t sand down its edges. It simply commits — to the bit, to the gore, to the punchline.

In an era where horror can sometimes feel overly polished or self-serious, this series remains a reminder that the genre can be:

funny, vicious, stylish… and just a little bit mean.

With its arrival on Shudder, Tales from the Crypt isn’t just being revived — it’s being reunleashed.

And if you’re willing to step back into its coffin-shaped world, one thing becomes immediately clear:

Some stories never die.
They just wait… for the right time to dig themselves back up.

  • Saul Muerte

Tales From the Crypt Series Premieres Exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ Friday 1 May on Shudder

Blood in the Water: Killer Whale Goes for the Throat

17 Tuesday Feb 2026

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There’s an compelling idea lurking beneath Killer Whale: a trauma drama dressed up as a creature feature. Director Jo-Anne Brechin frames her survival thriller around grief, survivor’s guilt and damaged ambition, using the rampaging orca less as a monster and more as an externalisation of unresolved pain. It’s a thoughtful angle in theory — but one that struggles to stay afloat amid the film’s more formulaic genre trappings.

The story follows Maddie (Virginia Gardner), a gifted cellist whose life stalls after a violent robbery leaves her hearing impaired and her boyfriend dead. A year later, a guilt-ridden holiday to Thailand with her friend Trish (Mel Jarnson) spirals into nightmare territory when an abused captive orca is unleashed into a secluded lagoon. What begins as an emotional reckoning quickly pivots into familiar killer-creature beats: stranded swimmers, tightening geography, and a predator circling with mechanical persistence.

Brechin deserves credit for attempting to graft psychological weight onto a well-worn subgenre. The early passages, which explore Maddie’s fractured identity and her complicated relationship with sound and silence, hint at a more introspective film. Gardner carries these quieter moments with conviction, grounding the character’s grief in a way that feels authentic. Yet once the survival mechanics kick in, the emotional throughline becomes increasingly submerged beneath routine suspense staging.

Compared to the great killer-creature touchstones — from the elegant dread of Jaws to the lean efficiency of modern aquatic thrillers — Killer Whale feels caught between ambitions. The orca itself is an effective symbol of exploitation and rage, but the visual execution varies wildly, with tension undercut by uneven effects and repetitive attack rhythms. The lagoon setting promises claustrophobia but rarely capitalises on its full spatial potential, resulting in sequences that feel more cyclical than escalating.

What works best is the film’s thematic intent: the suggestion that trauma, like a wounded animal, will keep circling until confronted. What doesn’t is the script’s tendency to spell out these ideas while relying on stock genre decisions that blunt their impact. Characters make frustrating choices less out of psychological necessity than narrative convenience, and the pacing sags in a middle stretch that should be tightening the screws.

The Prognosis:

Killer Whale never entirely bores, and its central metaphor gives it a faint pulse beyond standard creature-feature thrills. But the disconnect between its emotional aspirations and its execution leaves it feeling like a sketch of a stronger film — one where trauma and terror might have truly reinforced each other, rather than competing for the spotlight.

  • Saul Muerte

Killer Whale will be available to rent on digital platforms from Feb 20.

Wendigo (2001) and Larry Fessenden’s Quiet Place in American Folk Horror

22 Thursday Jan 2026

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American horror has always struggled with its own mythology.

Where European cinema leans effortlessly into castles, covens, and inherited superstition, American folklore remains fragmented — scattered across Native legend, Puritan fear, frontier violence, and the unresolved guilt of colonisation. Monsters here are rarely elegant. They are born of hunger, cold, isolation, and the uneasy sense that the land itself remembers what we have tried to forget.

Wendigo is one of the rare American horror films that attempts to take that legacy seriously.

Folklore in the Margins

Based on Algonquian legend, the Wendigo is not merely a creature but a concept: a spirit of starvation, greed, and moral collapse, born when humans consume more than they should — flesh, land, or power. It is a monster inseparable from colonial history, ecological dread, and cultural trespass.

Larry Fessenden, ever the scholar of marginal horror, understands this instinctively.

From its opening moments, Wendigo resists the trappings of mainstream genre cinema. There are no easy shocks, no baroque effects, no grand set-pieces. Instead, the film unfolds as a low-key domestic tragedy — a city family retreating to the countryside, bringing with them the casual arrogance of outsiders who believe nature is merely scenery.

When an accidental shooting ignites the film’s chain of events, the horror that follows feels less supernatural than inevitable.

Fessenden’s America

By 2001, Larry Fessenden had already established himself as one of American indie horror’s great caretakers — a filmmaker less interested in spectacle than in preservation. Through films like Habit and his later work on The Last Winter and Depraved, Fessenden has acted as both archivist and advocate for a strain of horror that treats myth as cultural memory rather than genre decoration.

Wendigo fits squarely within that mission.

This is not a film about a monster in the woods so much as a film about trespass: moral, ecological, and cultural. The family’s intrusion into rural space, their careless handling of firearms, their unthinking disruption of local rhythms — all feel like small sins accumulating toward punishment. When the legend of the Wendigo finally surfaces, it feels less like summoning than consequence.

In theory, this is rich terrain.

The Problem of Restraint

In practice, Wendigo struggles to fully embody the power of its own mythology.

Fessenden’s commitment to understatement, while admirable, often becomes a liability. The film withholds too much, too often. The creature remains largely abstract. The rituals feel gestural rather than revelatory. What should accumulate as dread instead drifts into ambiguity.

The central performances are competent but muted, and the domestic drama — meant to ground the supernatural — never quite achieves the emotional density required to make the horror resonate fully. The film gestures toward trauma, guilt, and moral rupture, but rarely pierces them.

When the Wendigo finally asserts itself, the moment feels conceptually powerful but cinematically undernourished.

Indie Horror as Preservation

And yet, to judge Wendigo purely by conventional standards would be to misunderstand its place in the larger ecosystem of American horror.

This is not exploitation. It is not entertainment-first. It is an act of cultural stewardship.

Fessenden belongs to a lineage of American indie filmmakers — alongside figures like Kelly Reichardt (in her own register), Jim Mickle, and later Robert Eggers — who treat landscape as archive and myth as history. He is less concerned with thrills than with keeping endangered stories alive, even when their cinematic translation proves imperfect.

In that sense, Wendigo is less a failure than a partial success: a film that reaches for something rare in American horror, even if it cannot quite grasp it.

The Prognosis:

Wendigo remains a fascinating but flawed entry in the canon of American folk horror.

It lacks the visceral impact of its European cousins, and the narrative control to fully harness its mythology. But it compensates with sincerity, scholarship, and a genuine respect for the dark stories embedded in American soil.

Some myths refuse to die.

Even when poorly told, they continue to haunt — not because they are frightening, but because they are true.

  • Saul Muerte

Top 13 Killer Films of 2025: Horror, Form, and the Politics of Endurance

25 Thursday Dec 2025

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In 2025, horror cinema continued its decisive shift away from spectacle toward structure. Rather than functioning as vehicles for shock, the most compelling works of the year positioned fear as a sustained condition — something embedded within systems, bodies, and histories. These films do not simply represent terror; they organise it, asking spectators to endure rather than react, to interpret rather than consume.

Across this selection, horror emerges as an analytic mode — a means of interrogating authority, inheritance, technology, and perception itself. What follows is not a list of crowd-pleasers, but of films that demonstrate how the genre continues to function as one of contemporary cinema’s most rigorous critical tools.

13. Ash

Ash occupies a transitional space between experimental media art and narrative cinema, foregrounding sensation over causality. Flying Lotus privileges rhythm, texture, and sonic density as primary conveyors of meaning, destabilising conventional narrative comprehension in favour of affective immersion.

The film’s significance lies less in its storytelling than in its refusal of interpretive clarity. Ash treats disorientation as a structuring principle, aligning the spectator’s cognitive uncertainty with the film’s thematic concern for alienation and fragmentation. In doing so, it advances a mode of sci-fi horror that operates phenomenologically, privileging experience over explanation.

Ash (2025): A Sensory Voyage from a Singular Artist

12. The Rule of Jenny Pen

Situated within a tightly regulated institutional space, The Rule of Jenny Pen examines how authority produces horror not through excess, but through routine. The film’s power derives from its attention to systems of control that are normalised rather than questioned, rendering violence bureaucratic and cruelty procedural.

Rather than positioning its antagonist as aberrant, the film implicates the structure itself. Performance and restraint are key formal strategies here: menace accumulates through micro-gestures and withheld action, forcing the spectator to recognise how institutional power becomes most terrifying when it is administered calmly and without spectacle.

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025) – A Chilling Game of Fear and Manipulation

11. Dangerous Animals

Dangerous Animals strips survival horror down to its most elemental components, foregrounding endurance over escalation. The film’s pacing resists the logic of set-piece thrills, instead cultivating a slow accretion of threat that mirrors the bodily exhaustion of its characters.

What distinguishes the film is its refusal to sentimentalise victimhood. Predator and prey are rendered as unstable positions rather than fixed identities, suggesting violence as a latent condition rather than a moral rupture. In this sense, Dangerous Animals operates as an examination of instinctual hierarchy, locating horror within the mechanics of survival itself.

10. Keeper

With Keeper, Osgood Perkins continues his exploration of isolation as a spatial and psychological condition. The film’s austere formalism — marked by elongated takes, sparse dialogue, and an emphasis on negative space — transforms setting into a form of narrative pressure.

Rather than offering mythological coherence, Keeper relies on emotional continuity. Ritual functions not as exposition but as repetition, reinforcing the sense of entrapment that defines the film’s affective core. Horror emerges gradually, not through revelation, but through the suffocating persistence of the unresolved.

Keeper (2025) — Osgood Perkins and the Slow Bleed of Mythic Terror

9. Sun

Sun rejects legibility as an organising principle. Its aggressive visual strategies — saturated colour, disjunctive editing, and sensory overload — position the spectator in a state of sustained assault, aligning form with thematic inquiry.

The film treats identity as unstable and perception as corrosive. Rather than constructing horror through narrative causation, Sun deploys excess as a destabilising force, implicating contemporary media saturation in the erosion of subjectivity. The result is a work that positions horror as experiential collapse rather than narrative event.

Dancing with Demons: SUN Burns Toxic Masculinity Alive in the Neon Abyss

8. Companion

Companion engages with speculative horror through a register of intimacy, examining how technological mediation reshapes emotional labour and consent. The film’s restraint is central to its effectiveness; moments of unease are generated through behavioural shifts rather than overt threat.

By situating its horror within domestic and relational spaces, Companion reframes technological anxiety as an extension of existing power dynamics. The film resists dystopian exaggeration, instead suggesting that the most disturbing futures are those that emerge seamlessly from present-day norms.

Companion (2025): A Sharp Blend of Humour, Tragedy, and Tech Gone Wrong

7. Presence

Defined by subtraction rather than accumulation, Presence employs absence as its primary aesthetic strategy. The film’s minimalism forces the spectator to attend to what is not shown, transforming silence and spatial emptiness into sites of tension.

Supernatural elements are deliberately ambiguous, allowing grief and memory to function as competing explanatory frameworks. In refusing to stabilise meaning, Presence aligns haunting with psychological persistence, suggesting that terror often resides not in invasion, but in endurance.

Steven Soderbergh’s Presence: A Chilling Descent into the Unseen

6. Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back operates through narrative fracture, destabilising temporal and causal coherence as a means of articulating loss. The film demands active spectatorship, requiring viewers to assemble meaning from incomplete information.

Its body horror is not gratuitous but instrumental, externalising the violence of obsession and the desire for restoration. By refusing interpretive closure, Bring Her Back transforms confusion into affect, positioning horror as a confrontation with the limits of understanding.

“Bring Her Back” Is a Brutal, Brain-Bending Horror That Sticks With You

5. The Dead Thing

The Dead Thing frames horror as a byproduct of unresolved trauma, privileging emotional continuity over narrative propulsion. The film’s measured pacing allows grief to permeate its formal construction, rendering terror inseparable from mourning.

What emerges is a portrait of desire as compulsion — a need not to escape pain, but to remain tethered to it. The film’s restraint prevents catharsis, reinforcing the notion that some forms of suffering resist narrative resolution.

The Dead Thing (2025) – A Haunting Descent into Obsession and the Unknown

4. The Long Walk

The Long Walk is structured around repetition as punishment. Its relentless forward motion mirrors the ideological rigidity of the system it depicts, transforming endurance into a mechanism of control.

By denying reprieve, the film implicates the spectator in its logic of attrition. Horror arises not from unpredictability, but from inevitability, positioning authoritarian violence as procedural rather than spectacular. The result is a work of sustained ideological critique.

No Finish Line: The Long Walk Turns Minimalism into Masterpiece

3. Nosferatu

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu approaches adaptation as cinematic archaeology, reconstructing gothic horror through meticulous attention to texture, light, and performance. The film privileges atmosphere over innovation, treating fidelity as a form of rigor rather than limitation.

Its power lies in its seriousness of intent. By resisting irony or revisionist impulse, Nosferatu reasserts the enduring potency of myth when rendered with formal precision. The film functions as both homage and reaffirmation of horror’s classical foundations.

A Haunting Symphony of Shadows: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu

2. Weapons

Weapons fragments narrative authority, refusing to privilege any single perspective or resolution. The film’s structural ambiguity destabilises conventional genre expectations, repositioning horror as epistemological uncertainty.

Rather than delivering answers, Weapons foregrounds absence and contradiction. Its terror emerges through implication, forcing the spectator to confront the discomfort of unresolved meaning. In this sense, the film operates less as a thriller than as an inquiry into perception and belief.

Buried Truths & Walking Away: Why Weapons (2025) Matters

1. Sinners

At the pinnacle of 2025’s horror landscape, Sinners synthesises genre with historical inquiry. The film locates terror within inherited structures — cultural, racial, and familial — positioning horror as an extension of collective memory.

Ryan Coogler’s formal restraint allows atmosphere and performance to carry ideological weight. Rather than externalising evil, Sinners frames it as an embedded legacy, transmitted across generations. The result is a work of rare gravity: a horror film that understands fear as something learned, remembered, and endured.

Sinners (2025) Burns Slow, Strikes Deep: A Southern Gothic Horror for the Soul

  • Saul Muerte

Drained of Dread: Abraham’s Boys Offers a Tepid Take on the Van Helsing Curse

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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Joe Hill’s short story Abraham’s Boys offered a quietly haunting coda to the Dracula mythos — a modern Gothic in miniature, soaked in melancholy and generational trauma. Unfortunately, this Shudder-exclusive adaptation struggles to translate that restrained power to the screen. What emerges is a film that mistakes heavy exposition for emotional weight and loses the eerie ambiguity that made Hill’s prose hang in the air.

Set in the American Midwest, the film imagines Abraham Van Helsing as a broken patriarch trying to protect his sons, Max and Rudy, from the supernatural horrors he once fought. It’s a bold premise — relocating Stoker’s world from the fog of Europe to the dust and decay of small-town America — but in doing so, the film sheds the very atmosphere that defined the Gothic. The Midwest may hold its ghosts, but here it feels oddly sterile, a backdrop devoid of menace or mystique.

Even more jarring is the notion that Van Helsing, once defined by faith and obsession, would settle down with Mina Harker and start a family. The choice feels not only implausible but thematically tone-deaf, undercutting the tragic consequences of their shared history. The result is a domestic melodrama stitched awkwardly to a monster myth that deserved grander treatment.

There are flashes of something worthwhile — the strained father-son dynamic occasionally hints at the emotional brutality Hill conjured in his story, and the film’s final moments attempt to reclaim some of its literary melancholy. But it’s too little, too late. Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story is a gothic without a heart, a reimagining that leaves both the horror and the humanity of its lineage drained.

The Prognosis:

A well-intentioned expansion of Joe Hill’s world that fails to capture his haunting tone or Stoker’s legacy. The bloodline runs thin.

  • Saul Muerte

Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story will be streaming on Shudder from Thurs 6th Nov.

Beyond the Crime Scene: Stuart Ortiz and the Cosmic Anatomy of Fear

20 Monday Oct 2025

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In Strange Harvest, Ortiz reshapes the language of true-crime horror, transforming the procedural form into a conduit for cosmic unease — a subtle evolution from his Grave Encounters origins.

In Strange Harvest, Stuart Ortiz — one half of the duo behind Grave Encounters — returns to the found footage-adjacent horror landscape with a surprising degree of control and maturity. Where Grave Encounters (2011) revelled in its haunted asylum chaos and digital distortion, Strange Harvest feels leaner and more deliberate, channelling that same eerie energy into a faux true-crime format that plays like Zodiac meets The Fourth Kind.

The film opens with what seems like a procedural—detectives responding to a welfare check in suburban San Bernardino—but quickly descends into something far darker. A murdered family, strange symbols written in blood, and the re-emergence of a serial killer known as “Mr. Shiny” set the stage for a horror narrative that thrives on implication and dread. Each new crime scene pushes the story further into cosmic territory, hinting at malevolent forces that exist well beyond the scope of human comprehension.

Ortiz demonstrates that he’s learned from over a decade in the horror trenches. His handling of the faux documentary format feels both grounded and authentic, using interviews, news footage, and handheld police recordings to build a layered mythology around the murders. The pacing is steady but tense, and the editing keeps the viewer in that unnerving space between realism and the supernatural — a sweet spot Ortiz has always excelled at.

While the premise is simple, that’s part of its strength. Strange Harvest doesn’t overcomplicate its narrative or chase high-concept spectacle; instead, it leans into its lo-fi authenticity, letting the horror emerge through atmosphere and suggestion. There are shades of procedural TV mixed with cosmic unease, but Ortiz ties it together with a firm grasp of tone and an eye for unsettling imagery.

It’s a testament to Ortiz’s craft that what could have been another run-of-the-mill mockumentary instead feels genuinely unnerving. Strange Harvest proves that the Grave Encounters legacy wasn’t a one-off fluke — Ortiz remains a filmmaker who understands how to weaponise form, texture, and the illusion of truth to make horror hit a little too close to home.

The Prognosis:

A deceptively simple yet chilling faux true-crime horror that tightens the screws through atmosphere and implication. Ortiz’s strongest solo work to date.

  • Saul Muerte

The Drowned: A Mythic Thriller That Never Quite Breaks the Surface

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Greek myths meet murky waters in a low-budget thriller that almost makes it to shore.

Samuel Clemens’ The Drowned attempts to merge myth and morality within a low-budget psychological thriller, dipping into the murky waters of Greek legend to find something ancient beneath the surface. The results, however, are mixed—an ambitious premise buoyed by striking influences but ultimately weighed down by pacing and atmosphere that never fully submerge the viewer.

Drawing on the myth of Hylas and the nymphs—immortalised in John William Waterhouse’s 1896 oil painting—Clemens reimagines the seductive call of the sea as a modern-day reckoning for guilt and greed. Three thieves hole up in a seaside safehouse after stealing a priceless painting, only to find their fourth member missing and an ominous presence rising from the tide. The film’s mythological undercurrents give it a literary backbone, but they’re never quite fleshed out enough to transform into something transcendent.

There’s a palpable sense of ambition here: The Drowned tries to swim in deep waters, blending folklore, crime, and psychological tension. Yet much like the doomed figures in its inspiration, it finds itself lured by its own reflection—entranced by imagery but unable to escape the shallows of its limited scope.

Performances by Alan Calton, Lara Lemon, and Lily Catalifo lend the feature some stability, grounding its mythic aspirations in believable tension. The cinematography occasionally captures the desolate beauty of the coast with painterly intent, echoing Waterhouse’s haunting stillness. But the low budget is keenly felt, particularly in its uneven pacing and abrupt tonal shifts.

The Prognosis:

The Drowned deserves some credit for attempting to do more than most thrillers in its range—it’s an atmospheric, if uneven, meditation on temptation and consequence. Yet, despite its mythic intentions, it never quite earns its place among the more evocative modern fables. The sirens sing, but their song doesn’t linger.

  • Saul Muerte

From Hell House to Ashland Falls: Cognetti’s Eerie Evolution

06 Sunday Apr 2025

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The Hell House LLC director slows things down for a moody, multi-perspective mystery.

A slow-burning mystery from the creator of Hell House LLC, soaked in dread and small-town secrets.

After a family tragedy, Chuck Wilson (Joe Falcone) moves to the quiet town of Ashland Falls with his wife Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea) and younger sister Isabelle (Kathryn Miller), hoping for a fresh start. But peace proves elusive as the trio becomes entangled in the unsettling lore of their new home—specifically the ominous mystery surrounding a woman named Helen Foster. As the story unfolds from the perspectives of each family member, the true nature of Ashland Falls begins to take shape—and it’s far from comforting.

Stephen Cognetti, best known for his Hell House LLC trilogy, steps away from the chaos of found-footage terror to deliver a more measured, psychological horror in 825 Forest Road. The scares are subtle, the pacing deliberate, and the dread seeps in slowly as the audience is invited to peel back the layers of each character’s experience. By splitting the narrative into three viewpoints, Cognetti crafts an eerie puzzle box of grief, guilt, and unresolved trauma, all tethered to a town that harbors something rotten at its core.

While some may find the pacing too slow or miss the jolting immediacy of Hell House LLC, there’s a quiet confidence in Cognetti’s restraint. He’s developing his voice beyond found footage, proving that he can unsettle audiences without relying on the genre’s usual tricks. The performances—especially Vermilyea as the emotionally fraying Maria—ground the film and help build a creeping sense of paranoia.

The Prognosis:

825 Forest Road may not fully capitalise on its premise, and its ambiguity might frustrate some, but it marks another intriguing step in Cognetti’s horror journey. It’s a film that whispers rather than screams—but it leaves behind a chill all the same.

  • Saul Muerte

825 Forest Road is now streaming on Shudder.