Few environments can be as quietly brutal as a group of adolescent boys left to navigate the fragile space between childhood and adulthood. The Plague, the feature debut from writer-director Charlie Polinger, taps into that unsettling social ecosystem with an unnerving sense of authenticity, crafting a coming-of-age drama that plays like a slow-burn psychological horror.
Set against the competitive backdrop of a boys’ water polo camp in the summer of 2003, the film follows twelve-year-old Ben as he attempts to integrate into the camp’s unforgiving social order. Everett Blunck captures the unease of a boy desperate for acceptance, only to find himself pulled into the group’s cruel fixation on Eli — an isolated camper whom the others brand as contagious, referring to him with chilling simplicity as “The Plague.”
What begins as childish teasing slowly reveals itself to be something far more disturbing.
A Study in Toxic Masculinity
Polinger’s film isn’t interested in conventional horror tropes. Instead, the true terror lies in the social dynamics of the boys themselves. Within this tightly wound, male-dominated environment, power is established through humiliation, conformity and cruelty.
The film scrutinises the early formation of toxic masculinity with uncomfortable precision. Strength is equated with dominance. Vulnerability becomes a weakness to be mocked or punished. And the desire to belong — particularly at such a fragile age — becomes a powerful motivator for moral compromise.
Ben’s gradual complicity in the torment of Eli becomes the film’s central tragedy. The cruelty isn’t born from malice so much as fear: fear of exclusion, fear of being the next target, fear of standing apart from the pack.
It’s an unsettling reminder that the pressures of social acceptance can be just as dangerous as outright hostility.
The Horror of Adolescence
Polinger frames the story almost like a psychological fable about adolescence. The rumour of “The Plague” itself operates less as a literal illness and more as a metaphor — a childish myth that allows the boys to rationalise their behaviour while maintaining the illusion of innocence.
The film’s atmosphere subtly leans into genre territory. Long stretches of uneasy silence, tense glances between characters and the oppressive heat of the summer camp create a creeping sense of dread. At times it feels closer to social horror than traditional drama, echoing the uncomfortable emotional territory explored in films like Carrie and Raw.
The difference here is that the monsters are not supernatural — they’re simply boys learning the wrong lessons about what it means to become men.
A Strong Ensemble of Young Performers
Much of the film’s effectiveness comes from its young cast, who bring a naturalistic authenticity to the story. Everett Blunck anchors the film with a quietly affecting performance as Ben, capturing the anxiety and moral confusion of a boy desperate to fit in.
Opposite him, Kenny Rasmussen’s Eli becomes the film’s emotional centre — a painfully believable portrait of the outsider whose difference makes him an easy target.
Meanwhile Joel Edgerton, appearing as the camp authority figure “Daddy Wags,” adds an intriguing layer to the dynamic, embodying the distant adult presence that looms over the boys’ social ecosystem without ever fully understanding it.
A Telling and Timely Reflection
At its core, The Plague is less about childhood cruelty and more about the systems that quietly nurture it. The film exposes the unspoken rules that shape male identity from a young age — rules that reward aggression, punish empathy and demand conformity at all costs.
It’s a telling and topical story, particularly in an era increasingly willing to interrogate the cultural roots of toxic masculinity.
While the film occasionally lingers too long in its quieter moments, its thematic weight and strong performances ultimately make it a compelling and thought-provoking watch.
The Prognosis:
An uncomfortable yet insightful exploration of peer pressure, masculinity, and the terrifying cost of wanting to belong.
Saul Muerte
The Plague will be screening in Australian cinemas from Mar 12.
In an era where video game movies usually chase blockbuster spectacle, OBEX heads defiantly in the opposite direction. Written, directed by, and starring Albert Birney, the film is a surreal, low-fi fantasy that feels less like a conventional adventure and more like a fever dream about loneliness, digital escapism, and the strange places our minds wander when reality becomes unbearable.
Fans of Birney’s earlier cult oddity Strawberry Mansion will recognize the sensibility immediately: handmade visuals, melancholy humour, and a fascination with the porous boundary between imagination and waking life.
A Quest That Begins With Loss
Birney plays Conor, a thirty-something recluse whose existence is almost entirely mediated through a computer screen. His two anchors are video games and his beloved dog Sandy. When Sandy mysteriously disappears, the loss shatters the fragile routine that defines Conor’s life. His search leads him somewhere unexpected — into the very game he has been obsessively playing.
The titular game, OBEX, becomes both portal and psychological mirror. To rescue Sandy, Conor must traverse its strange landscapes and confront a demon named Ixaroth, but the journey is less about heroic triumph than existential unraveling.
Like many of the film’s most effective moments, the premise works metaphorically: the game world is not merely a fantasy environment but a projection of Conor’s inner life.
Early Lynchian Echoes
There’s an unmistakably David Lynch-adjacent energy to the film’s tone — particularly the director’s early work, where narrative coherence often gives way to texture and mood. OBEX embraces dream logic. Scenes drift in and out of one another. Dialogue occasionally feels like fragments of a half-remembered conversation. Objects carry an eerie symbolic weight.
The aesthetic reinforces this atmosphere. Birney favours tactile, lo-fi visual effects and handmade set pieces that feel closer to experimental art installation than mainstream fantasy cinema. The game environments have the uncanny texture of forgotten 1990s PC graphics filtered through a surrealist lens.
Rather than striving for realism, OBEX leans into artificiality — and in doing so creates something oddly hypnotic.
Gamification as Psychological Descent
Where OBEX becomes particularly interesting is in its use of gaming mechanics as narrative structure. Levels, quests, and encounters mirror Conor’s emotional state. Progression through the game doesn’t feel triumphant; it feels obsessive, as if he’s spiraling deeper into a digital labyrinth.
This gamified framework also becomes commentary on escapism. Conor retreats into OBEX not just to save Sandy but to avoid confronting the emptiness of his real life. The deeper he goes, the less clear the boundaries between player and character become.
The film never fully explains the metaphysics of its world — wisely so. OBEX functions best when experienced as a symbolic landscape rather than a literal one.
Sound, Texture and Handmade Weirdness
Adding to the film’s dreamlike texture is its score, recorded by Josh Dibb, founding member of Animal Collective. The music drifts between ambient melancholy and eerie electronic pulses, giving the film a sonic identity that feels both nostalgic and otherworldly.
Combined with Birney’s deliberately rough visual style, the soundtrack enhances the sensation that OBEX exists somewhere between retro gaming nostalgia and avant-garde fantasy.
A Strange but Compelling Indie Journey
OBEX won’t be for everyone. Its narrative can feel deliberately opaque, and viewers expecting a traditional fantasy adventure may find themselves disoriented by its meandering dream logic. Yet that same refusal to conform is also its greatest strength.
Birney has crafted something personal, odd, and unmistakably independent — a film that feels like it emerged from the margins of cinema rather than its mainstream centre.
OBEX stands as an intriguing curiosity: a surreal digital odyssey that captures the strange emotional gravity of games, memory, and loneliness.
And like any good quest, it leaves you wondering whether the real journey happened inside the screen — or inside the player.
Premiering exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ on 27 February, Crazy Old Lady arrives at a moment when Argentine horror is no longer a niche curiosity but a steadily rising force within global genre cinema. Directed by Martín Mauregui, the film won Best Director in the Horror Competition at Fantastic Fest and screened at the Sitges Film Festival, signaling its pedigree within the festival circuit.
Argentina’s Expanding Horror Identity
Over the past decade, Argentine horror has carved out a distinct tonal space — one steeped in psychological dread, moral decay, and socio-political unease. Films like Terrified (Aterrados) and When Evil Lurks, both from Demián Rugna, have demonstrated a willingness to confront spiritual rot with startling brutality. Meanwhile, works such as The Last Matinee have blended nostalgia with escalating carnage.
Crazy Old Lady situates itself within this movement but opts for a more intimate chamber-piece approach. Gone are demonic outbreaks or grand supernatural set-pieces. Instead, the horror is confined to a single home — and to a single voice.
The House as a Psychological Trap
The premise is elegantly simple: on a storm-lashed evening, Pedro answers a desperate plea from his ex-girlfriend to watch over her senile mother, Alicia. What begins as reluctant caretaking morphs into entrapment when Alicia refuses to let him leave. From here, Mauregui crafts a claustrophobic duel between youth and decay, autonomy and obligation.
The house becomes less a haunted space than a psychological maze. Doors lock. Power flickers. Corridors stretch under dim lighting. Yet the most unnerving element is Alicia herself.
Generational Trauma as Curse
At its core, Crazy Old Lady explores generational trauma — the emotional inheritance passed down like an heirloom no one wants. Alicia’s ramblings oscillate between fragility and cruelty, revealing buried resentments and manipulative patterns that echo through her daughter and now ensnare Pedro.
The horror lies not only in her sadistic “games,” but in the suggestion that her worldview — her bitterness, her warped moral logic — has already seeped into the next generation. Words linger long after they’re spoken. They calcify. They shape behavior.
Mauregui repeatedly frames Alicia in tight close-ups as she mutters aphorisms that feel both cryptic and venomous. These fragments of speech function almost like incantations, embedding themselves in the atmosphere. In this sense, the film’s haunting is linguistic rather than spectral.
It’s a compelling thematic hook, even if the script occasionally circles its ideas without deepening them.
Mauregui’s Controlled Minimalism
Martín Mauregui directs with restraint, favoring sustained tension over sudden shocks. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes to a fault, but his control of confined space is impressive. The storm outside acts as sonic punctuation, underscoring Pedro’s isolation.
Where the film falters slightly is in escalation. The psychological cat-and-mouse dynamic promises a crescendo of either shocking revelation or cathartic confrontation. Instead, the climax feels muted — more simmer than explosion. For some viewers, this restraint will read as sophistication; for others, as hesitation.
Still, Mauregui’s festival recognition feels justified. There’s a clear authorial voice at work — one attuned to emotional cruelty rather than spectacle.
A Solid Entry in a Strong Movement
Crazy Old Lady may not reach the ferocity of When Evil Lurks or the nerve-shredding intensity of Terrified, but it contributes to the ongoing evolution of Argentine horror by narrowing its focus to the domestic sphere. It suggests that sometimes the most enduring hauntings are not demons or ghosts, but the toxic narratives families pass down through generations.
Not a breakout masterpiece, but another confident step in Argentina’s increasingly compelling horror renaissance.
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.
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.
There are cult films, and then there are accidents of cinema — features that achieve immortality not through design, but through coincidence, misreading, and sheer historical mischief. Troll (1986) belongs squarely in the latter category: a film remembered less for what it is than for what it accidentally prefigured, misinspired, and became associated with long after its modest ambitions had curdled into kitsch.
And yet, behind the latex ears and ill-fated wizardry stands a filmmaker worth far more respect than this film’s reputation allows.
The Craftsman Behind the Curtain
John Carl Buechler remains one of genre cinema’s great unsung artisans. A gifted special effects designer who helped shape the tactile horrors of Friday the 13th Part VII, Re-Animator, and countless exploitation staples, Buechler belonged to that dying breed of filmmakers who understood monsters as objects — sculpted, painted, and animated by hand.
Troll was his directorial debut, and it bears all the marks of a craftsman promoted too quickly to magician.
There is, undeniably, a handmade charm to the film. The practical effects — crude as they are — possess a sincerity now absent from much digital fantasy. The creatures are physical. The makeup is tangible. You can see the fingerprints of labour in every prosthetic and puppet. But good intentions, sadly, do not summon good storytelling.
The Myth of the Boy Wizard
It is impossible to discuss Troll without addressing the elephant — or rather, the bespectacled boy — in the room.
Long before Hogwarts, long before J.K. Rowling, this film introduced a young protagonist named Harry Potter. The coincidence is so outrageous it has since become the film’s primary cultural legacy. The connection is legally irrelevant, narratively meaningless, and yet historically irresistible. In hindsight, Troll reads like a bootleg prophecy — a cheap VHS oracle accidentally whispering a name that would one day dominate popular culture.
Of course, this Harry Potter is no chosen one. He is a bland, passive child adrift in a narrative that barely knows what to do with him. Magic here is not destiny, but disorder — a grab bag of spells, potions, and goblin politics that never cohere into a convincing mythology.
What remains is not mythology, but meme.
Band, Bono & B-Movie Business
As ever, hovering behind the chaos is Charles Band, Full Moon’s impresario of low-budget fantasy and high-concept nonsense. His influence is everywhere: the tonal instability, the commercial opportunism, the sense that the film is less telling a story than testing a product line.
Troll feels engineered less as a film than as a franchise prototype — a world to be exploited, sequelised, and merchandised. That it eventually spawned the infamously unrelated Troll 2 only underlines how little creative coherence existed at the foundation.
Adding to the oddity is the presence of Sonny Bono, whose performance is less acting than cameo-as-curiosity. He drifts through the film like a misplaced sitcom ghost, never fully belonging to the fantasy world around him, and inadvertently reinforcing the film’s tonal confusion.
And then there is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in an early role that serves primarily as historical footnote. She is capable, charming, and completely underserved — a future comedic titan trapped in a film that barely knows what to do with its own plot, let alone its supporting cast.
A Film at War with Itself
The central problem with Troll is not its budget, nor its effects, nor even its camp. It is its profound indecision.
Is this a children’s fantasy? A horror film? A family comedy? A supernatural soap opera? The film answers “yes” to all, and commits fully to none. Scenes of possession and body horror sit awkwardly beside slapstick and sitcom rhythms. Threat never coheres. Stakes never settle. Even Torok, the film’s central antagonist, oscillates between menace and pantomime.
What emerges is not a failed epic, but a confused one — a film whose imagination outpaces its discipline.
The Legacy of a Miscast Spell
Troll survives not as cinema, but as artifact.
It is remembered because of a name, not a narrative. Because of a sequel, not a success. Because of careers that outgrew it, not because it nurtured them. And yet, within its rubbery frame, there remains a faint trace of Buechler’s genuine love for monsters — a craftsman trying, unsuccessfully, to become a storyteller.
In the end, Troll is less a film than a cautionary tale: about promotion before preparation, about concept without control, about how even the most gifted monster-makers can be undone by a story that refuses to behave.
The Prognosis:
A curiosity. A footnote. A miscast spell that, by sheer accident, echoes through pop culture far louder than it ever deserved.
There is something inherently seductive about family-made cinema. Not merely collaborative, not simply economical, but almost ritualistic in nature — as if filmmaking itself becomes a shared incantation passed between bloodlines. Few modern genre outfits embody this notion more fiercely than the Adams family. With Hellbender, they didn’t just announce themselves; they howled their arrival, carving a space within contemporary folk horror that felt raw, feral, and authentically unpolished.
Mother of Flies, however, arrives burdened by that legacy — and perhaps undone by it.
Horror in the Blood
John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams have, across their work, demonstrated a fascination with witchcraft, bodily sacrifice, inherited trauma, and the occult as something lived-in rather than merely aesthetic. Their films feel less written than unearthed, less scripted than summoned. In Hellbender, this approach reached its most potent expression: a coming-of-age tale steeped in pagan fury, where mother-daughter dynamics merged seamlessly with mythic inheritance. It felt dangerous. It felt discovered.
That sense of discovery is precisely what Mother of Flies struggles to replicate.
Once again, the Adams family retreat into the woods, this time following a young woman seeking salvation from a terminal diagnosis through dark magic and the guidance of a reclusive witch. It is fertile soil for their obsessions — body, ritual, desperation, the cost of power — yet the film rarely sinks its claws into them with conviction.
A Spell Half-Cast
Where Hellbender burned fast and bright, Mother of Flies smoulders — often beautifully, but frustratingly without ignition.
Atmospherically, the film remains tactile and sincere. There is a genuine commitment to texture here: the forest breathes, the rituals feel weighty, the blood not merely decorative but symbolic. The Adams family’s sincerity is never in question — they are filmmakers who believe deeply in what they are conjuring, and that faith lends the film moments of eerie gravitas.
Yet structurally, the film meanders far too long through its incantations, circling its themes without ever quite piercing them. Scenes linger where they should tighten. Symbolism repeats where it should escalate. What begins as hypnotic gradually becomes inert.
It is only in the final act — when consequences are finally allowed to surface — that Mother of Flies truly stirs. Here, the Adams family remind us of their potency: horror not as spectacle, but as reckoning. Unfortunately, by then, the film has already tested the audience’s patience too severely.
The Problem of Inherited Myth
This raises a more curious question about family-made horror itself.
There is something uniquely powerful about horror crafted by those bound not only by contracts, but by blood. Shared history allows shorthand storytelling. It encourages risk. It produces mythology that feels intimate rather than manufactured. We see echoes of this in other sibling or bloodline creatives — the Phillippou Brothers’ ferocious Talk To Me, even the generational echoes of Cronenbergian body horror.
But such intimacy comes with its own danger: when mythology becomes inherited rather than earned, ritual risks becoming repetition. Aesthetic replaces terror. Gesture replaces consequence.
Mother of Flies occasionally feels like the Adams family performing their own mythology, rather than discovering something new within it.
The Fragility of Folk Horror
Folk horror thrives on the illusion of something uncovered — an ancient story clawed from the soil rather than assembled in post-production. Once codified, once too self-aware, it becomes perilously close to costumed reverence. Hellbender felt dangerous because it seemed accidental, like lightning captured in a bottle. Mother of Flies feels careful by comparison — reverent, controlled, and therefore less frightening.
This does not make it a failure, but it does make it a frustrating experience — one brimming with potential, sincerity, and visual mood, yet restrained by its own solemnity.
Still Watching the Woods
Mother of Flies ultimately lands as a disappointment — not because it lacks craft or ambition, but because it fails to evolve the dark language the Adams family once spoke so fluently. And yet, to dismiss it outright would be to misunderstand its place in the larger arc of their work.
The Adams family remain one of indie horror’s most compelling bloodlines. Even in misstep, they conjure worlds few others dare to inhabit so sincerely. In a genre obsessed with inheritance, curses, and legacy, that alone keeps them worth following — back into the woods, back toward the firelight, back toward whatever spell they choose to cast next.
Saul Muerte
Mother of Flies is available to stream on Shudder from Fri 23rd Jan.
Released in the mid-1980s, when natural horror and animal-attack films were enjoying a second life on VHS and late-night television, Link occupies an unusual and often overlooked position within the killer ape subgenre. Directed by Richard Franklin—best known for his Hitchcockian leanings and his brief but curious detour into franchise horror with Psycho II—the film is less interested in primal savagery than in the unnerving implications of intelligence, hierarchy, and control.
The setup flirts with eccentricity. Graduate student Jane Chase arrives at the isolated home of an ageing zoology professor, only to discover that the household hierarchy has already been rewritten. The professor’s chimpanzees operate with eerie autonomy, while Link, an elderly orangutan dressed and treated like a gentleman’s butler, observes quietly from the margins. When one chimp is found dead and the professor vanishes, Franklin slowly inverts the power dynamic. Jane is no longer studying behaviour—she is subject to it.
Franklin directs Link with a measured, classical restraint that sets it apart from the more exploitative entries in the killer ape cycle. There is little in the way of sensational gore or overt shock tactics. Instead, tension is built through framing, pacing, and a creeping sense of domestic invasion. The house becomes a laboratory, and Jane its most vulnerable test subject. The horror emerges not from sudden violence but from the dawning realisation that the apes understand far more than they should—and may be capable of resentment, planning, and cruelty.
Elisabeth Shue, still early in her career, delivers a performance that anchors the film’s escalating unease. Her Jane is intelligent and resourceful, but never impervious. Shue excels at conveying fear through restraint, allowing the terror to register in hesitation and watchfulness rather than outright hysteria. It’s a performance that would foreshadow her later genre credibility, grounding increasingly absurd situations in emotional reality.
Terence Stamp, meanwhile, brings an off-kilter gravitas to the role of the eccentric professor. Though his screen time is limited, his presence lingers over the film, lending it an air of intellectual arrogance and ethical negligence. Stamp embodies a familiar horror archetype: the man of science who mistakes authority for control, and curiosity for dominion. His disappearance feels less like a mystery than an inevitability.
Within the broader killer ape genre, Link sits closer to Monkey Shines than to more bombastic entries like Congo or Rampage. This is not a film about nature striking back in spectacular fashion, nor is it interested in giant monsters or environmental collapse. Instead, Link taps into a subtler fear—the idea that intelligence, once nurtured and confined, may turn possessive and violent when its boundaries are tested.
That said, the film is not without its shortcomings. The third act leans into melodrama, and the film’s central conceit occasionally strains credulity. The mechanics of ape behaviour are pushed beyond plausibility, and some of the symbolism—particularly around class, servitude, and dominance—remains underdeveloped. Franklin’s restraint, while admirable, sometimes blunts the film’s impact, leaving it hovering between psychological thriller and creature feature without fully committing to either.
Viewed in retrospect, Link is a solid, thoughtful entry in the killer ape canon—more curious than terrifying, more cerebral than visceral. It lacks the cultural weight of Planet of the Apes or the grindhouse audacity of exploitation-era ape horror, but it compensates with atmosphere, performance, and an unsettling moral undercurrent.
For readers interested in the broader lineage of killer ape cinema—where Link fits alongside films that interrogate humanity’s uneasy relationship with intelligence, dominance, and the natural world—this film acts as a quiet but essential connective tissue, bridging prestige thrillers and pulp horror traditions.
The Prognosis:
A restrained, intelligent thriller that favours implication over excess, Link remains a peculiar but worthwhile footnote in the long, uneasy history of killer apes on screen.
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.
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.
Surgeons of Horror 