Tag Archives: Horror movies

When Apes Strike Back: A Brief, Bloody History of Killer Ape Cinema

08 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by in Best Movies and Shows

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

There is something uniquely unsettling about the cinematic ape. Neither fully beast nor recognisably human, the ape exists in a liminal space where intelligence threatens instinct and instinct threatens civilisation. When apes turn violent on screen, it is rarely just spectacle—it is metaphor. Fear of regression. Fear of science. Fear of nature remembering its strength.

As Primate prepares to join this strange lineage, it’s worth tracing how killer ape cinema has evolved: from pulp exploitation and natural horror, through prestige allegory, to blockbuster spectacle and outright absurdity.

The Apex of Fear: Apes as Allegory

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Franklin J. Schaffner’s landmark film is not a “killer ape movie” in the crude sense, but it is foundational. The apes are not monsters; they are inheritors. Their violence is institutional, judicial, scientific. What terrifies is not their savagery but their civilisation—one that mirrors humanity’s worst impulses.

Every ape-on-human act here carries ideological weight. This is not about claws and teeth; it is about power structures. Nearly every killer ape film since has echoed this anxiety, whether consciously or not.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

The modern franchise reclaims that allegorical power. Caesar’s apes are tragic, political beings whose violence emerges from betrayal and fear. While not “killer apes” in the exploitation sense, the film’s emotional complexity elevates simian aggression into something operatic. Violence is framed as consequence, not novelty.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

This latest entry leans further into myth-making. Apes as kings, generals, tyrants. Here, the killer ape becomes historical force—a reminder that dominance is cyclical. Humanity is no longer prey, but footnote.

Verdict: Essential context. These films legitimise the ape as cinematic threat by grounding it in philosophy rather than pulp.

Nature Turns Hostile: Apes as Environmental Horror

In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro (1985)

Possibly the most literal killer ape film ever made. Tens of thousands of starving baboons descend upon humans during a drought. It’s messy, bleak, and strangely prescient. Environmental collapse creates violence, not evil. The apes are not villains—they are survivors.

Despite its rough edges, the film taps into a genuine eco-horror vein later seen in shark, insect, and reptile cinema.

Blood Monkey (2006)

A late-era attempt to graft Jurassic Park aesthetics onto primate horror, Blood Monkey is disposable but emblematic of the genre’s exploitation phase. Science meddles. Apes mutate. People die. The film has little to say beyond spectacle, but it shows how the killer ape had become a direct-to-video creature feature staple.

Verdict: Relevant as cautionary tales—nature retaliating against human arrogance.

Laboratory Nightmares: Apes and Scientific Hubris

Monkey Shines (1988)

George A. Romero’s most psychologically disturbing work may also be his quietest. Ella the monkey is not a rampaging beast but a resentful, possessive intelligence shaped by experimentation. The horror lies in emotional transference and loss of autonomy.

This is killer ape cinema at its most intimate and uncomfortable.

Link (1986)

An underrated British horror gem where a super-intelligent orangutan becomes lethally territorial. The film weaponises intelligence rather than mutation, suggesting that awareness itself may be the most dangerous upgrade of all.

Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)

Mexican exploitation at its most lurid. A heart transplant turns a man into a masked ape monster. It’s crude, sensationalist, and morally dubious—but deeply influential in cementing the ape-man as grindhouse staple.

Panic in the Tower (1990)

A lab-escape narrative filtered through teen horror clichés. The killer baboon is more slasher than animal, stalking corridors like a furry Michael Myers.

Verdict: These films form the psychological backbone of killer ape cinema—where the true horror is not the animal, but the experiment.

Giants, Gods, and Spectacle: When Apes Become Myth

King Kong (1933 / 2005)

Kong is not a killer ape—he is a tragic one. Violence is secondary to romance, spectacle, and colonial metaphor. Yet his influence on the genre is incalculable. Every giant ape that follows owes him a debt.

Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake amplifies Kong’s emotional register, transforming destruction into operatic tragedy.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

This iteration strips Kong of romance and repositions him as apex guardian. His violence is righteous, directed outward at greater monsters. Here, the killer ape becomes protector—a shift that reflects modern genre sensibilities.

Rampage (2018)

Pure popcorn nonsense. Genetic tampering turns a gorilla into a skyscraper-smashing kaiju. Fun, loud, and completely unconcerned with metaphor, Rampage represents the genre’s absorption into blockbuster bombast.

Verdict: Spectacle-driven entries that dilute fear but expand scale.

Absurdity and Parody: When the Genre Eats Itself

Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape! (2004)

A micro-budget splatter parody that knows exactly how ridiculous the concept has become. It doesn’t undermine the genre—it autopsies it.

Mad Monster Party? (1967)

Not killer ape cinema per se, but illustrative of how apes were absorbed into pop-horror iconography by the late ’60s.

Verdict: Not essential, but proof that killer apes are culturally flexible—even laughable.

Outliers and Near Misses

Congo (1995)

Technically a killer ape movie, spiritually a corporate jungle adventure. The grey gorillas are terrifying in concept but undercut by tonal confusion and animatronic stiffness. A fascinating failure.

Ad Astra (2019)

The infamous space-baboon sequence is memorable but tangential. A jump scare, not a genre entry.

Why Killer Apes Endure — And Why Primate Matters

Killer ape films persist because they strike at something deeply primal: the fear that intelligence does not guarantee moral superiority. That evolution is not ascent, but competition. When apes attack, cinema asks whether humanity deserves its place at the top.

From allegory (Planet of the Apes) to exploitation (Night of the Bloody Apes), from eco-horror (Kilimanjaro) to blockbuster spectacle (Rampage), the genre has splintered but never vanished.

If Primate is to matter, it must choose which lineage it belongs to. Will it embrace pulp, philosophy, or paranoia? The history of killer ape cinema suggests that when these films work best, they don’t just show apes killing humans—they remind us how thin the line between them has always been.

  • Saul Muerte

Top ‘Fresh Kill’ Horror Films of 2026

28 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Best Movies and Shows

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Anticipating the Next Wave of Fear

If 2025 marked a consolidation of horror as a serious critical form — a year of restraint, inheritance, and psychological rigor — then 2026 promises escalation of a different kind. Not louder, necessarily, but broader. The forthcoming slate suggests a genre increasingly preoccupied with systems: religion, legacy franchises, folklore, surveillance, bodily autonomy, and historical memory. Sequels coexist with reinventions; prestige auteurs collide with grindhouse traditions; and horror’s long-standing obsession with the past intensifies into something closer to cultural archaeology.

What follows is not a ranking of box-office potential, nor a speculative list of shocks, but a curated survey of the most critically promising horror films currently scheduled for 2026 — projects that suggest where the genre may be headed, formally and ideologically.

1. Untitled Jordan Peele Project

Jordan Peele’s continued absence of detail has become its own form of authorship. Since Get Out, Peele has positioned secrecy as a conceptual extension of his work — a refusal to allow audience expectation to pre-empt meaning. Whatever form his 2026 project takes, it is almost certain to engage with systems of power, visibility, and American myth-making, filtered through genre architecture.

Peele’s films operate less as allegory than as diagnosis, embedding social critique within meticulously constructed genre frameworks. Anticipation here is not rooted in premise but in method: the expectation that horror will once again be used to interrogate what America refuses to name.

2. Untitled The Exorcist Project

Director: Mike Flanagan

Mike Flanagan’s involvement with The Exorcist franchise suggests a decisive tonal shift away from bombast and toward interiority. Flanagan’s strength has always been his ability to locate horror within grief, faith, and unresolved trauma — concerns deeply aligned with The Exorcist’s theological underpinnings.

With Scarlett Johansson and Jacobi Jupe attached, the project signals a focus on relational dynamics rather than spectacle. If successful, this could mark a rare revival: not of a franchise’s iconography, but of its existential seriousness.

3. The Mummy

Director: Lee Cronin
Expected April 17, 2026

Lee Cronin’s reinvention of The Mummy appears poised to reject colonial adventure tropes in favour of familial horror and bodily unease. The disappearance-and-return narrative frames the monster not as ancient spectacle, but as an invasive presence within the domestic sphere.

Cronin’s work has consistently emphasised corruption through intimacy — the idea that horror enters through love rather than conquest. This approach could finally liberate The Mummy from pastiche, reimagining it as a story of loss, identity, and irreversible change.

4. Scream 7

Director: Kevin Williamson
Releases February 27, 2026

With Kevin Williamson returning to direct, Scream 7 represents a rare case of a franchise turning inward rather than outward. The focus on Sidney Prescott’s daughter reframes the series’ meta-commentary as generational inheritance — asking what it means to pass trauma, notoriety, and survival forward.

Rather than parodying contemporary horror, Scream 7 appears positioned to interrogate its own legacy, transforming self-awareness into something closer to reckoning.

5. Terrifier 4

Director: Damien Leone
Expected October 1, 2026

By its fourth entry, Terrifier has evolved from cult provocation into a sustained endurance experiment. Leone’s commitment to practical effects and confrontational violence resists prestige horror’s current trend toward refinement.

What makes Terrifier 4 compelling is not escalation, but persistence. It exists as a countercurrent — forcing a conversation about the limits of spectatorship and the uneasy pleasure of excess.

6. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Director: Nia DaCosta
Releases January 16, 2026

Nia DaCosta’s entry into the 28 universe signals a shift from outbreak panic to post-collapse power structures. The move toward organised gangs and world-altering discovery suggests a franchise finally confronting its long-term implications.

DaCosta’s sensitivity to social hierarchy and myth-making positions The Bone Temple as less survival horror than political horror — a study of what replaces civilisation after fear becomes normalised.

7. Clayface

Director: James Watkins
Expected September 11, 2026

Clayface’s shape-shifting mythology offers fertile ground for horror rooted in identity instability. James Watkins’ involvement hints at a psychological approach rather than comic-book spectacle, reframing the character as tragic figure rather than villain.

The horror here is not transformation, but indeterminacy — the terror of never knowing where the self ends.

8. Evil Dead Burn

Director: Sébastien Vanicek
Expected July 24, 2026

With its plot under wraps, Evil Dead Burn remains one of the year’s most intriguing unknowns. Vanicek’s involvement suggests a grittier, more confrontational sensibility — potentially pushing the franchise toward nihilism rather than slapstick.

The challenge will be maintaining Evil Dead’s anarchic spirit while adapting it to contemporary horror’s more controlled brutality.

9. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
Releases March 27, 2026

The sequel expands the first film’s class satire into something closer to mythic competition. By multiplying families and stakes, Here I Come risks dilution — but also offers the opportunity to transform satire into operatic cruelty.

If successful, it could become a dark fairy tale about inheritance, entitlement, and survival economics.

10. Werwulf

Director: Robert Eggers
Expected December 25, 2026

Eggers’ medieval werewolf film promises a return to folklore as lived belief rather than cinematic trope. Set against fog, superstition, and communal paranoia, Werwulf appears positioned as a study of fear as social contagion.

Eggers’ commitment to linguistic and historical authenticity suggests a film less concerned with transformation than with the terror of collective conviction.

11. Thread: An Insidious Tale

Director: Jeremy Slater
Expected August 21, 2026

Time travel as grief mechanism reframes the Insidious universe around consequence rather than shock. The central conceit — rewriting tragedy — situates horror within parental desperation and moral compromise.

If handled with restraint, this could become the franchise’s most emotionally coherent entry.

12. Wolf Creek: Legacy

Director: Sean Lahiff
Expected 2026

By shifting focus to children surviving in Mick Taylor’s territory, Legacy reframes the franchise around endurance rather than nihilism. The Australian landscape once again becomes indifferent, vast, and complicit.

The film’s success will hinge on its ability to balance brutality with perspective — horror as survival, not spectacle.

13. The Bride

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Releases March 6, 2026

Gyllenhaal’s reinterpretation of Bride of Frankenstein foregrounds politics, gender, and radical transformation. Set against 1930s social upheaval, the film positions monstrosity as emancipatory rather than aberrant.

This is Frankenstein as social revolution — a reclamation of agency rather than a cautionary tale.

14. Resident Evil

Director: Zach Cregger
Expected September 18, 2026

Cregger’s involvement suggests a deliberate move away from franchise excess toward claustrophobic immediacy. A courier trapped in a hospital outbreak recalls survival horror’s roots: isolation, confusion, and bodily threat.

If successful, this could be the franchise’s first genuinely frightening reinvention.

15. Psycho Killer

Director: Gavin Polone
Releases February 20, 2026

Positioned as procedural horror, Psycho Killer explores violence through aftermath rather than spectacle. By centring a police officer navigating personal loss, the film aligns horror with grief and investigation rather than shock.

Its promise lies in restraint.

16. Victorian Psycho

Director: Zachary Wigon
Expected 2026

This gothic narrative of a governess amid disappearing staff evokes The Turn of the Screw through a feminist lens. Horror emerges gradually, through atmosphere and implication rather than revelation.

The film’s strength will lie in ambiguity: whether monstrosity is external, internal, or socially constructed.

17. Iron Lung

Director: Mark Fischbach
Releases January 30, 2026

Adapted from minimalist survival horror, Iron Lung translates isolation into cosmic dread. Its confined submarine setting and apocalyptic mythology suggest horror as existential endurance.

The challenge will be sustaining tension without relief — an experiment in atmospheric extremity.

18. Ruby, Ruby

Director: Ursula Dabrowsky
Expected 2026

An Australian ghost story rooted in injustice and reclamation, Ruby, Ruby frames haunting as consequence rather than curse. The cemetery setting positions memory as a site of entrapment and resistance.

If handled with restraint, it could join the lineage of Australian horror that privileges melancholy over menace.

Closing Cut

The horror films of 2026 appear less concerned with novelty than with continuity — of trauma, myth, and unresolved systems. Whether through folklore, franchise, or speculative futures, these projects suggest a genre increasingly aware of its own history and responsibilities.

If 2025 taught us how horror cuts, 2026 may show us where it scars.

  • Saul Muerte

The Home (2025) — Senility, Surveillance, and the Long Memory of Evil

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

James DeMonaco has always been fascinated by systems—how they rot, how they fail, and how violence seeps through their cracks. From the blunt social allegory of The Purge to the leaner, meaner contours of his later work, DeMonaco’s cinema operates in a state of controlled paranoia, convinced that institutions are not safeguards but incubators. The Home feels like a natural extension of that worldview, a film obsessed with corridors, rules, and the slow revelation that something malignant is being politely maintained behind closed doors.

The premise is deceptively modest. A troubled drifter takes a job at a retirement home. The residents are strange. The caretakers are stranger. The fourth floor is forbidden. This is familiar territory—The Home traffics in the grammar of institutional horror—but DeMonaco filters it through a jittery, conspiratorial lens. The building is less a location than a system of concealment, its bland hallways buzzing with the low-grade menace of withheld information. Every locked door feels like a threat. Every smile reads as camouflage.

The film’s manic energy is largely carried by Pete Davidson, whose casting initially seems like provocation but gradually reveals a sharp, unsettling logic. Davidson plays the protagonist as a man permanently braced for impact, his body language twitchy, his eyes scanning for exits that may or may not exist. He weaponises his familiar cadences—half-joking, half-defensive—until they curdle into something desperate. This is Davidson stripped of irony, and while the performance is uneven, it is never uninteresting. His character’s foster-care trauma bleeds into the film’s institutional dread, turning the retirement home into a warped echo of the systems that failed him as a child.

DeMonaco leans hard into paranoia, sometimes to the film’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment. The Home is thick with suggestion—rituals half-glimpsed, whispers behind doors, glances held a second too long—but it often mistakes accumulation for escalation. The mystery coils inward, doubling back on itself, feeding the sense that the protagonist may be uncovering a conspiracy or simply unraveling under its weight. The film wants to exist in that uncertainty, but its third act can’t quite resist explanation, flattening some of the unease it works so diligently to cultivate.

Visually, the film is austere and oppressive. The retirement home is rendered as a liminal space where time has curdled—neither alive nor dead, neither nurturing nor openly hostile. DeMonaco’s camera prowls rather than observes, peering down hallways like it expects to be noticed. The forbidden fourth floor looms as an almost abstract concept, a vertical metaphor for buried memory and institutional secrecy that the film circles obsessively.

Yet for all its ambition, The Home struggles to fully reconcile its ideas. The social commentary—about neglect, aging, and the expendability of those who fall through institutional cracks—is present but underdeveloped. DeMonaco gestures toward something corrosive and systemic, but the film’s manic intensity sometimes drowns out its own argument. What remains is a mood piece that crackles with unease but lacks the narrative clarity to make its paranoia feel truly revelatory.

The Home is not a failure so much as an overextended diagnosis. It captures the sensation of discovering that the rules you trusted were never meant to protect you, but it can’t quite land the final indictment. Still, in its jittery energy, uneasy performance, and claustrophobic design, it offers a compelling if flawed entry in DeMonaco’s ongoing exploration of American institutions as haunted houses.

The Prognosis:

A film that trembles with suspicion and half-remembered trauma—unnerving in the moment, frustrating in retrospect, and never entirely at ease with its own revelations.

  • Saul Muerte

Shelby Oaks (2025) — When Found Footage Loses the Plot

14 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of found-footage horror, investigative mystery, and internet-age urban legend—a convergence that has produced some of the genre’s most enduring works. Unfortunately, Shelby Oaks doesn’t synthesise these influences so much as stack them on top of one another, resulting in a film that is ambitious in intent but disastrously unfocused in execution.

The central hook is a familiar one: the disappearance of Riley Brennan and her sister’s increasingly obsessive attempt to uncover what happened. On paper, it’s a solid spine—personal stakes fused with creeping dread. In practice, the film never decides what kind of horror story it wants to tell. It borrows liberally from the breadcrumb-style investigation of The Blair Witch Project, the faux-documentary escalation of Lake Mungo, the cursed-media mythology of Sinister, and the online-conspiracy aesthetics of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Rather than coalescing into something cohesive, these elements clash, constantly resetting the tone and momentum.

The found-footage framework, already a precarious format, becomes especially unwieldy here. The film toggles between mockumentary interviews, handheld investigation, archival clips, and conventional narrative scenes without any clear internal logic. What should feel immersive instead feels arbitrarily assembled, as though the film were endlessly re-editing itself in search of an identity it never quite finds. Tension dissipates not because the scares fail, but because the narrative keeps stopping to reinvent its own rules.

Worse still, the mystery at the film’s core grows less compelling the more it is elaborated. Each new revelation muddies the waters rather than deepening the dread, until the supernatural threat becomes a vaguely defined catch-all evil—more concept than presence. The obsession that should drive the story forward instead mirrors the film’s own fixation on referencing better works, mistaking accumulation for escalation.

To Stuckmann’s credit, Shelby Oaks is not without flashes of promise. A handful of isolated sequences suggest a filmmaker with a genuine affection for the genre and an understanding of its visual grammar. But affection alone is not authorship. Without discipline, restraint, or a unifying vision, the film collapses under the weight of its influences.

The Prognosis:

Shelby Oaks feels less like a horror film than a collage—an anxious attempt to be every successful found-footage mystery at once, and in doing so, failing to be anything at all. What begins as a missing-person story ends as a noisy, overextended hot mess, its sense of dread smothered by its own excess.

  • Saul Muerte

Faith, Fear, and Familiar Demons — Diabolic Tests the Limits of Australia’s “Elevated Horror

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Australian genre cinema has been pushing at the boundaries of horror for over a decade now—restless, ambitious, and eager to prove that its terrors can hold their own on the world stage. Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic certainly aspires to sit within that tradition. A visually confident piece that leans into the current wave of “elevated” folk horror, it promises grand spiritual torment and supernatural vengeance but settles, unfortunately, into familiar rhythms.

Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) seeks a miracle cure for her mysterious blackouts, joining a fundamentalist healing ritual that inevitably stirs something far darker. From there, Diabolic unfolds as a study in paranoia and possession, invoking the cursed lineage of witches, faith, and the female body as battleground. Phillips, who previously demonstrated a keen eye for atmosphere, drenches his frames in shadow and ritualistic imagery—a visual style that sometimes outpaces the screenplay’s thin sense of dread.

The problem lies in pacing and predictability. The film spends its first act buried beneath exposition, taking too long to let the horror breathe. By the time the vengeful spirit emerges in earnest, much of the mystery has already withered. Its narrative beats—visions, confessions, cursed objects, and escalating hysteria—feel telegraphed, echoing better works from The Witch to The Wailing.

Still, Diabolic finds some salvation in its performances. Elizabeth Cullen anchors the chaos with a quiet, unflinching intensity, grounding the supernatural in something believably human. Her descent feels lived-in, even as the story around her becomes increasingly schematic. John Kim and Mia Challis provide competent support, though their characters are largely ornamental to the central exorcism of guilt and power.

Where Diabolic succeeds is in its texture—the way the camera lingers on faces during moments of dread, the ritualistic hum of sound design, and the sense that Phillips genuinely wants to explore faith as both salvation and curse. Yet it struggles to escape the trappings of the genre it reveres. What could have been a new cornerstone of Australian occult cinema ends up merely competent: handsomely shot, occasionally haunting, but ultimately too cautious to transcend its own formulas.

The Prognosis:

By the time the final act’s firelight fades, one is left admiring the ambition rather than fearing the outcome. Diabolic isn’t unholy—it’s just undercooked.

  • Saul Muerte

Special Event Screenings

In Australian Cinemas From November 20
PARTICIPATING LOCATIONS

Possession Without Passion: The Missed Potential of An American Haunting

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Possession knows no bounds,” the tagline warns, though sadly, the film’s imagination does. An American Haunting attempts to bring the notorious Bell Witch legend to cinematic life, boasting the acting pedigree of Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, yet even their combined gravitas can’t save this otherwise weightless ghost story from dissipating into the fog.

Set in 19th-century Tennessee, the film follows the devout Bell family as they are tormented by an invisible force that grows increasingly violent. Courtney Solomon anchors the narrative in a quasi-historical framing device, flashing between the period setting and modern-day correspondences — a decision that feels more distracting than illuminating. The supposed authenticity of the haunting, drawn from one of America’s most enduring supernatural legends, is buried beneath layers of slick art direction and overwrought emotional manipulation.

There are moments where the film almost succeeds. Solomon’s use of stark winter landscapes and period detail captures a genuine sense of isolation and religious repression. The interplay between faith, guilt, and patriarchal authority hints at a deeper psychological reading — particularly in the film’s controversial subtext of abuse and repression. Yet these glimpses of ambition are undermined by generic jump scares and erratic pacing, reducing what might have been an eerie meditation on American folklore into a routine exercise in gothic excess.

Sutherland delivers a sturdy, if uninspired, performance as the tormented patriarch John Bell, while Spacek provides the emotional centre as the devout matriarch, stoic but visibly cracking under the strain. Their efforts, however, are let down by a screenplay that offers them little beyond reaction shots to unseen horrors. The younger cast members, including Rachel Hurd-Wood as daughter Betsy, fare better in the moments of pure terror — though even these are undercut by inconsistent visual effects and abrupt tonal shifts.

The film’s conclusion, which attempts to blend historical tragedy with supernatural justice, arrives with the subtlety of a hammer blow. What should feel revelatory instead plays as exploitative and confused, failing to commit to either psychological realism or full-blooded horror fantasy.

The Prognosis:

An American Haunting ultimately joins the long line of early-2000s supernatural thrillers that mistake gloss for gravitas. For all its promise of ancestral dread and spectral vengeance, what lingers isn’t fear, but fatigue — a ghost story that haunts itself with the shadow of what it could have been.

  • Saul Muerte

The Evil Dead (1981): The Birth of DIY Carnage

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

There’s something unholy about watching The Evil Dead in 2025 — not because of its gore (though the film still bleeds like a fresh wound), but because it reminds us how much horror has changed… and how much it owes to Sam Raimi’s twisted weekend in the woods.

Before franchises, before multiverses, before horror was a business plan — there was a group of friends in Tennessee, gallons of fake blood, and a Super 8 camera that barely held together. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and producer Robert Tapert didn’t just make a film; they conjured one from sheer madness and duct tape. Every camera move, every shriek, every ash-smeared close-up feels like it was carved from the flesh of invention itself.

The Evil Dead isn’t just about possession — it’s about obsession. You can feel Raimi’s fever in every frame, the urge to push the medium past breaking point. Long before the word “indie” became shorthand for Sundance polish, this film was truly independent: reckless, raw, and glorious in its imperfection. Its claustrophobic energy turns the forest into a sentient entity, the cabin into a cursed organism. You can smell the wood rot, the sweat, the 16mm stock tearing in the projector.

What keeps it alive isn’t nostalgia — it’s rhythm. Raimi’s kinetic camera was punk cinema incarnate, years before digital tools democratised motion. That manic momentum, that willingness to risk everything for a shot, became the DNA of countless filmmakers who came after — from Peter Jackson’s Braindead to modern found-footage auteurs chasing the same fever dream.

Yet for all its brutality, there’s an innocence to The Evil Dead. It’s a film made by people who loved horror so much, they wanted to crawl inside it. Raimi’s signature blend of cruelty and comedy — later refined in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness — starts here as an unfiltered scream. It’s clumsy, beautiful, and unforgettable.

In a cinematic age obsessed with IP and polish, The Evil Dead stands as a reminder that horror thrives on imperfection. It’s about spirit, not studio notes. It’s about throwing your friends into the mud and making something that feels like it might actually hurt you to watch.

The Prognosis:

Horror cinema has evolved in scale and sophistication, but few films still pulse with the same unhinged energy. Raimi’s debut is a masterclass in fearless filmmaking — a symphony of shrieks, sweat, and splintered wood that reminds us why terror should never feel safe.

  • Saul Muerte

THE EVIL DEAD – BUY OR RENT NOW

A Halloweekend Movie Marathon: The Home Entertainment Guide

25 Saturday Oct 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

Halloween rarely stays confined to a single night. The ritual of the Halloweekend—a three-day communion of darkness, nostalgia, and popcorn—has become an annual rite for horror fans. It’s a time when the barriers between the cinema and the living room dissolve, and the flicker of the television once again becomes our campfire glow. This year, as October 31st falls on a Friday, it’s the perfect excuse to transform your home into a theatre of the uncanny.

From franchise resurrections and genre experiments to reanimated cult icons and family-friendly frights, this year’s home entertainment line-up offers a spectrum of screams for every taste. Whether you crave dread-laden mythology, subversive satire, or a gentle chill that still lets the kids sleep at night, here’s your guide to building a Halloweekend Movie Marathon worthy of the season.

The Franchises Return: Evil Never Dies, It Just Streams Differently

Sequels are the lifeblood of the horror ecosystem, and 2024–2025 has delivered them with unholy enthusiasm. The Conjuring: Last Rites has become the highest-grossing entry in the franchise—proof that James Wan’s universe of haunted faith still has audiences under its spell. The film closes the Ed and Lorraine Warren saga with ritualistic grandeur, blending theological terror with operatic spectacle. It’s horror as folklore, deeply Catholic yet oddly romantic, and best watched with the lights off and the volume indecently high.

Hot on its spectral heels comes I Know What You Did Last Summer, the long-awaited sequel that trades the 1990s teen slasher sheen for something darker and more mournful. Age has crept into its survivors, and the sins of the past feel heavier, more human. Together, these two films form the perfect one-two punch for a Friday night of ghosts and guilt—two hauntings from opposite ends of the horror spectrum.

If you still have stamina after that, revisit The Black Phone. Scott Derrickson’s original remains a masterclass in slow-burn suspense, and Ethan Hawke’s masked performance feels destined to be rediscovered each Halloween.

Weapons of Fear: The New Face of Prestige Horror

For those who prefer their terror thoughtful, Weapons stands as this year’s dark horse—a meticulously constructed nightmare that unfolds with existential precision. Director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian dissects masculinity and violence through a lens of cosmic dread, proving once again that the most terrifying monsters are often human. It’s not just horror; it’s arthouse apocalypse.

And just beyond the horizon lurks HIM—available to pre-order now and set to release in early November. Word from festival circuits teases something Lovecraftian, something deeply unsettling. If Weapons is about human violence, HIM promises to explore the unfathomable violence of the universe itself. For the serious horror aesthete, these two titles belong at the heart of your Halloweekend viewing.

Horror Meets Humour: The Body Horrific

Sometimes the only way to survive the darkness is to laugh through the blood. Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, does exactly that—fusing body horror with relationship disintegration in a way that’s both hilarious and grotesque. It’s Cronenberg by way of couple’s therapy, proof that the boundaries between love and revulsion remain dangerously thin.

Then there’s The Toxic Avenger (2025), the riotous revival of Troma’s most beloved mutant. Director Macon Blair reimagines the cult classic for a new age of environmental anxiety and pop-cultural absurdity. With Peter Dinklage and Kevin Bacon leading the chaos, it’s a delirious love letter to 1980s splatter cinema—messy, magnificent, and defiantly unclean. Expect a full-length exploration of this one soon on Surgeons of Horror, because The Toxic Avenger deserves more than a mere mention; it’s a mutation worth celebrating.

Family Frights: When the Night Belongs to Everyone

For those who prefer their ghosts gentle and their monsters misunderstood, Halloween can still be a shared experience. Freakier Friday offers body-swap comedy with a spectral twist—perfect for a family-friendly movie night that nods toward the macabre without the nightmares. Meanwhile, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride remains a perennial classic, a gothic romance that continues to delight and haunt with its delicate stop-motion melancholy.

Pair these two for Sunday evening—an epilogue of warmth after the chaos, proof that the spirit of Halloween can be cosy, not just cold.

Classics Reawakened: Blood and Memory

No Halloween is complete without returning to the foundations. The Evil Dead (1981), Sam Raimi’s kinetic debut, remains one of the most visceral horror experiences ever committed to film. Its mixture of slapstick terror and relentless energy forged the DNA of modern horror filmmaking. Forty years later, its influence is still bleeding into the genre’s veins. Watching it today is like summoning the raw essence of what makes horror eternal: audacity, invention, and the thrill of transgression.

Curtain Call: The Comfort of Fear

Halloween on screen has evolved beyond simple scares—it’s a shared ritual, a space for collective catharsis. The modern horror fan might binge on supernatural sequels, dissect social allegories, or seek comfort in gothic animation. Yet the result is the same: we gather in the dark to feel alive.

This Halloweekend, the ghosts aren’t outside—they’re waiting in your queue. So dim the lights, queue up your terror of choice, and let the screen glow like a candle in the night.

  • Saul Muerte

V/H/S/Halloween (2025): Analog Nightmares, Digital Fatigue

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Eight films in, and the V/H/S franchise has reached that strange liminal space between reinvention and redundancy. V/H/S/Halloween promises another grab bag of analog nightmares, but what it ultimately offers is a reminder that this format — and perhaps found footage itself — is struggling to justify its continued revival.

Segmented through Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, a frame narrative about a possessed soft drink, the film pulses between absurdist body horror and tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s gory, chaotic, and knowingly silly — a kind of VHS-era Cronenberg-lite filtered through Slimehouse aesthetics. It’s amusing enough, but its placement between each short becomes little more than a sugar rush: a filler designed to jolt, not haunt.

Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo aims for Barbarian-esque weirdness but collapses under its own shaky-cam chaos. It’s conceptually interesting — exploring the monstrous side of motherhood and lost innocence — yet the execution feels forced, desperate to shock rather than unsettle.

Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra is easily the standout. The [REC] director flexes his mastery of dread with a metaphysical descent into ritual horror and the supernatural. It’s slick, moody, and genuinely disorienting, proving that when the right filmmaker takes the reins, the V/H/S anthology format can still bite.

Casper Kelly’s Fun Size, however, is a regression — an infantile splatter piece that mistakes noise for novelty. Whether its deliberately bad performances are meant to parody ‘80s horror cheese or are just poorly handled is anyone’s guess, but it grates either way.

Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint ends things on a troubling note, tackling child abduction and snuff imagery with an uneasy hand. The idea — a man unwittingly complicit in a ring of video-taped killings — could have been chilling, but the tone wobbles between exploitative and hollow. It’s a grim finish that leaves you numb rather than disturbed.

And that’s the core issue here: V/H/S/Halloween feels like it’s circling the drain of its own nostalgia. The analog grime, the static, the jittery cuts — once the aesthetic of underground menace — now play like ritualised pastiche. There are sparks of invention, but they’re buried under too many loud edits and too few genuine scares.

The Prognosis:

Maybe it’s time to admit what’s been lurking behind the flicker for years: the found footage format — once raw, immediate, and terrifying — is finally running out of tape.

  • Saul Muerte

House on Eden – Where Found Footage Finally Flatlines

03 Friday Oct 2025

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Kris Collins’ House on Eden feels like a film caught between admiration and imitation. On one hand, there’s a clear love for the stripped-down mechanics of low-budget horror — a small cast, a single creepy location, a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle. On the other, its DNA is so heavily indebted to The Blair Witch Project that it struggles to escape that long shadow, never quite finding its own voice in a subgenre that has already been mined for all it’s worth.

The setup is textbook found footage: paranormal investigators Kris, Celina, and their videographer Jay stumble into an abandoned house in the woods, where unsettling sounds, missing crew members, and unnerving presences steadily erode their sanity. To Collins’ credit, the film knows how to milk tension out of a flickering flashlight and a half-glimpsed shadow. There’s a genuine appreciation for the lo-fi aesthetic, which at times gives the film a scrappy, grassroots charm.

But charm isn’t enough when the beats feel so familiar. Every missing person, every static-laden frame, every anguished scream into the darkness calls back to 1999 — but without the raw novelty or cultural punch that made Blair Witch revolutionary. Instead of reinventing the formula, House on Eden seems content to echo it, and in doing so highlights just how stale the found footage format can feel in 2025.

The biggest frustration is that there are hints of potential. The lore surrounding the house suggests something ancient and malevolent, but the film barely scratches at it before retreating into shaky cam hysteria. A stronger commitment to its own mythology might have given it some distinction. Instead, what lingers is the sense of a genre on its last legs — a reminder that what once felt like the future of horror may finally be ready for burial.

The Prognosis:

House on Eden isn’t unwatchable, and diehard found footage fans may appreciate its sincerity. But for most, it lands as a pale reflection of a classic, underscoring that sometimes the scariest thing a horror movie can show us is that the format itself might be dead.

  • Saul Muerte

House on Eden is currently streaming on Shudder.