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Scream 7 (2026): Ghosts of Woodsboro: When Nostalgia Becomes the Killer

23 Saturday May 2026

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What’s your favourite scary movie?

Nearly thirty years after Scream reinvented the slasher genre, that question still echoes through horror cinema like a taunt from beyond the grave. Entire generations of fans have grown up alongside Ghostface. They have survived sequels, reboots, legacy-quels, television adaptations, and enough meta-commentary to fill an entire film studies curriculum.

With Scream 7, the franchise returns to perhaps its most familiar face: Neve Campbell‘s Sidney Prescott. It is a decision that feels both inevitable and deeply symbolic. As modern horror increasingly mines its own history for inspiration, Scream 7 asks whether a franchise built upon deconstructing nostalgia can continue surviving by embracing it.

The answer, much like the film itself, is complicated.

The Return of Sidney Prescott

The return of Sidney was always going to be the headline. For many fans, she remains the beating heart of the franchise. Not merely a final girl, but one of horror’s most enduring survivors. Across decades of violence, manipulation, and unimaginable personal loss, Sidney evolved from traumatised teenager into a symbol of resilience. Bringing her back carries undeniable emotional weight.

The film wisely understands this. Rather than reducing Sidney to a cameo or nostalgic accessory, it places her firmly at the centre of the narrative once more. The threat against her daughter provides a natural extension of the franchise’s long-running exploration of generational trauma and inherited fear.

Yet this choice also highlights a growing tension within modern horror. How many times can the same character endure unimaginable suffering before the trauma itself begins to lose meaning? At a certain point, survival becomes expectation rather than triumph. The wounds remain. The impact diminishes.

Kevin Williamson Finds His Voice Again

Perhaps the most fascinating element of Scream 7 is not Sidney’s return but the presence of Kevin Williamson behind the camera. For decades, Williamson’s voice has defined the DNA of Scream. His scripts transformed slashers from simple body-count entertainment into self-aware reflections on horror itself. Long before “meta” became an industry buzzword, Williamson understood audiences wanted more than scares. They wanted conversation.

The move to the director’s chair gives Scream 7 a distinctly different energy from recent instalments. There is a confidence in the dialogue, a familiarity with the franchise’s rhythms, and an understanding of what made the original so culturally significant. The film frequently feels like Williamson reflecting on his own creation. Not always successfully. But often compellingly. In many ways, Scream 7 functions as a conversation between the franchise’s past and present. Sometimes those conversations become arguments.

The Stu Macher Problem

No discussion of Scream 7 can avoid the elephant in the room. Or perhaps more accurately, the corpse in the attic. For years, fans have speculated about the possible return of Stu Macher, despite his apparent demise in the original film. The theory became one of horror fandom’s longest-running debates, fuelled by conventions, interviews, online speculation, and increasingly elaborate attempts to explain how a teenager crushed beneath a television might somehow survive.

Scream 7 finally addresses that mythology. Whether viewers embrace the decision will largely depend upon their tolerance for nostalgia-driven storytelling. On one hand, the return provides genuine excitement and taps directly into decades of fan investment. Horror has always thrived on myth-making, and few characters have inspired more speculation than Stu. On the other hand, bringing back the dead risks undermining the grounded reality that once distinguished Scream from its supernatural contemporaries. The franchise built its reputation on exposing horror clichés. Now it occasionally indulges them. The irony is difficult to ignore.

Nostalgia as Comfort Food

Modern horror franchises increasingly resemble family reunions. Familiar faces return. Old references resurface. Legacy characters reclaim the spotlight. Audiences cheer because they recognise what they loved twenty or thirty years ago.

Scream 7 understands this dynamic completely. The film is packed with callbacks, emotional echoes, and reminders of the franchise’s rich history. Some work beautifully. Others feel less like storytelling and more like fan service carefully engineered for social media reactions and opening-night applause. This creates one of the film’s central contradictions.

The nostalgia often delivers its strongest emotional moments. It also prevents the franchise from fully evolving. Every glance backwards is a step not taken forward. The result is a film caught between reinvention and preservation, never entirely comfortable choosing one over the other.

Trauma Fatigue

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by Scream 7 concerns trauma itself. The franchise has always been interested in psychological scars. Sidney’s journey was revolutionary because it treated survival as something messy and ongoing rather than triumphant and complete. But nearly thirty years later, trauma has become one of horror’s dominant languages. From elevated horror to prestige television, characters constantly process grief, abuse, anxiety, guilt, and emotional damage. Trauma is no longer subtext. It is text. Front and centre.

Scream 7 attempts to continue that tradition, yet occasionally feels trapped by it. The emotional wounds remain theoretically devastating, but audiences have become so accustomed to trauma narratives that the impact can feel strangely muted. This is not necessarily the film’s fault. It may simply reflect a broader cultural shift.

Perhaps horror has spent so long examining trauma that viewers have become desensitised to its narrative power. What once felt revelatory now feels expected. The challenge facing Scream 7 is that it simultaneously critiques and participates in this phenomenon.

The Problem With Looking Back

The original Scream succeeded because it felt dangerous. It challenged established rules. Mocked convention. Questioned audience expectations. It looked forward while dismantling the past. Scream 7 often does the opposite. It celebrates the past. Protects the past. Revisits the past.

There is value in that approach, particularly for longtime fans seeking emotional closure. Yet there are moments when one cannot help wondering what Scream might become if it stopped examining its own reflection. The franchise remains clever. It remains entertaining. But it occasionally feels trapped inside its own mythology. A victim of the very legacy it once gleefully deconstructed.

The Prognosis:

Scream 7 is an enjoyable, thoughtful, and frequently engaging return to Woodsboro that benefits enormously from the presence of Neve Campbell and the creative influence of Kevin Williamson. It understands the emotional attachment audiences have to Sidney Prescott and delivers enough suspense, wit, and self-awareness to satisfy longtime fans.

Yet it also exposes the limitations of nostalgia-driven storytelling. The return of familiar faces, the continued mining of past trauma, and the reliance upon franchise mythology create diminishing returns where innovation once flourished.

The original Scream asked where horror was going.

Scream 7 spends much of its time asking where it has been.

The answer remains entertaining.

Whether it is enough is another question entirely.

  • Saul Muerte

Desire, Identity, and DIY Nightmares: The Serpent’s Skin (2025)

14 Thursday May 2026

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There is something undeniably fascinating about the emergence of Alice Maio Mackay as a modern underground horror voice.

In an era where independent genre cinema often bends toward algorithmic familiarity or nostalgia-driven imitation, Mackay’s work feels defiantly personal — rough around the edges, fiercely expressive, and deeply invested in stories of identity, transformation, queerness, alienation, and emotional vulnerability. Her films do not merely use horror as metaphor; they inhabit it as lived experience.

With The Serpent’s Skin, Mackay once again returns to those recurring thematic obsessions, crafting a supernatural relationship horror steeped in desire, insecurity, and bodily transformation. The result is a film bursting with sincerity and ambition, even if its execution occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its ideas.

Horror as Emotional Expression

At its core, The Serpent’s Skin is less concerned with demonic mythology than emotional rupture.

The narrative — centred on two young women whose growing romantic connection awakens supernatural powers and inadvertently unleashes a destructive evil — functions primarily as a framework for exploring intimacy, repression, guilt, and self-perception.

As with much of Mackay’s work, the horror emerges from emotional instability rather than external threat alone. The demon haunting the film feels symbolic of unresolved trauma and insecurity — a manifestation of emotional damage infecting the relationships around it.

This approach gives the film a deeply personal energy, even when its storytelling becomes uneven.

The Voice of Alice Maio Mackay

What continues to distinguish Alice Maio Mackay is the clarity of her voice.

Her cinema exists within a fascinating lineage of queer DIY horror filmmaking — openly embracing melodrama, camp, supernatural iconography, and emotional rawness while rejecting the polished sterility that often dominates contemporary independent horror.

There is an immediacy to her work that feels refreshingly unfiltered.

Mackay’s films frequently centre outsiders searching for identity and belonging within worlds that threaten to reject or consume them. In The Serpent’s Skin, desire itself becomes transformative and dangerous, blurring the boundaries between liberation and destruction.

The film understands that vulnerability can be terrifying.

Style Over Structure

Where The Serpent’s Skin falters somewhat is in its narrative cohesion.

The mythology surrounding the demon and supernatural powers often feels underdeveloped, with certain emotional and narrative beats arriving before the film has fully earned them. Tonal shifts occasionally create a sense of fragmentation, as though the film is torn between intimate character drama and heightened supernatural horror without fully reconciling the two.

Yet paradoxically, some of these imperfections also contribute to the film’s charm.

There is something admirable about a filmmaker prioritising emotional honesty and thematic expression over rigid structural precision. Mackay’s work rarely feels calculated. It feels instinctive — driven more by feeling than formula.

Bodies, Desire, and Transformation

Like much queer horror, The Serpent’s Skin uses supernatural transformation as a metaphor for internal change.

Desire leaves marks here — emotionally, psychologically, physically. Characters shift and unravel under the weight of longing, shame, and unresolved past trauma. The film repeatedly frames identity as fluid, unstable, and vulnerable to corruption, reflecting the anxieties tied to self-discovery and emotional dependence.

This thematic throughline proves far more compelling than the film’s literal mythology.

The true horror is not possession.
It is emotional exposure.

A Rising Cult Voice

Despite its flaws, The Serpent’s Skin reinforces why Mackay remains such an intriguing figure within contemporary independent horror.

She represents a generation of filmmakers reclaiming genre cinema as a space for deeply personal storytelling — unconcerned with mainstream expectations and more interested in emotional truth, queer identity, and artistic self-expression.

Not every experiment fully succeeds, but the sincerity behind the work is undeniable.

And increasingly, sincerity itself feels radical.

The Prognosis:

The Serpent’s Skin is an ambitious, emotionally charged supernatural horror film that further cements Alice Maio Mackay as one of underground horror’s most distinctive emerging voices.

Narratively uneven but thematically rich, the film thrives most when embracing its raw emotional vulnerability and DIY gothic sensibilities.

  • Saul Muerte

The Lost Decade Reclaimed: In Search of Darkness: 1990–1994

13 Wednesday May 2026

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For decades, horror discourse has treated the 1990s as a wasteland.

A strange cultural dead zone wedged awkwardly between the blood-soaked excess of the 1980s and the postmodern self-awareness ignited by Scream. Conventional wisdom has long suggested the genre lost itself during the early half of the decade — caught between fading slasher formulas, shifting audience tastes, and an industry uncertain how to evolve.

But In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 arrives not simply to celebrate the era, but to challenge that narrative entirely.

Over the course of its sprawling six-hour runtime, the documentary reframes the early ‘90s not as horror’s creative collapse, but as one of its most fascinating transitional periods — a fragmented, experimental stretch where filmmakers pushed the genre inward, toward psychology, existentialism, body horror, and metafiction.

This was not horror dying.
It was horror mutating.

Horror Between Two Worlds

The early ‘90s existed in the shadow of exhaustion. The slasher boom had burnt itself out, practical effects-driven creature features were becoming financially risky, and mainstream studios increasingly struggled to market horror outside familiar formulas.

What emerged instead was something stranger and more intimate.

The films explored throughout In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 reveal a genre wrestling with identity itself. Many of these works are steeped in paranoia, decay, and fractured realities — reflecting both the cultural anxieties of the era and horror cinema’s own uncertainty about its future.

And that uncertainty became fertile ground for experimentation.

The Hidden Gems of the Forgotten Era

One of the documentary’s greatest strengths is its excavation of films too often overshadowed by louder genre landmarks.

The Exorcist III emerges as a perfect example — a film long buried beneath the legacy of its predecessor, yet now increasingly recognised as one of the most unnerving studio horrors of its decade. Its procedural structure and existential despair transformed demonic horror into something mournful and deeply human.

Likewise, Nightbreed stands as a fascinating reclamation project. Once misunderstood and butchered by studio interference, Clive Barker’s monster epic now feels radically ahead of its time — a queer-coded dark fantasy about outsiders, persecution, and identity.

The Rise of Psychological and Meta Horror

Perhaps the most fascinating thread running through the documentary is how many early ‘90s horror films became deeply self-reflective.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare effectively dismantled and reconstructed slasher mythology years before Scream would popularise meta-horror. Meanwhile In the Mouth of Madness saw John Carpenter crafting an apocalyptic vision of fiction infecting reality itself — a cosmic nightmare about media consumption, authorship, and madness.

These were films no longer content with merely scaring audiences.
They wanted to interrogate horror itself.

Even The Dark Half and Body Snatchers channel anxieties surrounding fractured identity, distrust, and societal collapse. Horror had become increasingly psychological, reflecting a world entering the uncertainties of a new decade.

Body Horror, Flesh, and Mutation

Return of the Living Dead 3 transformed zombie horror into tragic body mutilation romance. Body Melt — an especially welcome inclusion given its Australian cult status — weaponised suburban satire through spectacular biological collapse, feeling like a sunburnt cousin to the work of David Cronenberg.

Then there is Cronos, where Guillermo del Toro quietly announced himself as a visionary auteur by transforming vampirism into a meditation on mortality, obsession, and innocence corrupted.

These films understood that horror’s true battleground is often the body itself — unstable, vulnerable, constantly changing.

Anthologies, Gothicism, and Lovecraftian Shadows

Two Evil Eyes united George A. Romero and Dario Argento under the banner of Edgar Allan Poe, while Necronomicon embraced anthology horror through a distinctly Lovecraftian lens.

Meanwhile, films like Dark Waters and Nadja leaned heavily into dreamlike gothic atmosphere, rejecting mainstream accessibility in favour of hypnotic art-horror abstraction.

This willingness to experiment visually and tonally is precisely what makes the period so fascinating in retrospect.

Horror Searching for Its Future

What In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 ultimately captures so effectively is a genre caught in transition.

The documentary is less about nostalgia than reevaluation. Through interviews with genre icons including Heather Langenkamp, John Carpenter, Frank Henenlotter, Tim Balme, and Michael Gross, the film paints a portrait of horror cinema evolving in real time.

These weren’t safe studio products.
They were risks.
Mutations.
Experiments searching for new language.

And while not every film succeeded commercially, many of them now feel startlingly prophetic.

The Prognosis

In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 is an absorbing, deeply affectionate reappraisal of one of horror cinema’s most misunderstood eras — a six-hour excavation of forgotten masterpieces, ambitious failures, and genre experimentation hiding in plain sight.

An essential viewing experience for horror devotees, and a powerful reminder that the early ‘90s were never horror’s lost years.

They were simply waiting to be rediscovered.

  • Saul Muerte

Innocence Unleashed: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

25 Saturday Apr 2026

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There are few films that confront the audience with a question so blunt, so morally paralysing, as Who Can Kill a Child?. Directed by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, this unnerving slice of Spanish horror does not rely on elaborate mythology or baroque excess. Instead, it weaponises something far more disquieting:

Innocence itself.

The Horror of the Unthinkable

From its opening frames, Serrador signals his intent. A montage of real-world images — war, famine, suffering — grounds the film in a recognisable reality, implicating humanity long before the narrative begins. By the time the English couple arrive on the sun-drenched island of Almanzora, the question has already been posed, quietly but insistently:

What have we done to the world… and what might the next generation do in return?

What follows is a slow unravelling. The absence of adults is not immediately terrifying — merely strange, faintly uncanny. Children play, laugh, and watch. Always watching. It is in their stillness, their smiles, that Serrador finds his dread.

There is no rush to violence. Only the creeping realisation that something is profoundly, irrevocably wrong.

Sunlight as Terror

Unlike the shadow-drenched gothic traditions of horror, Who Can Kill a Child? unfolds largely in broad daylight. The Mediterranean setting — bright, open, deceptively serene — becomes a stage for unease.

Serrador understands that horror need not hide in darkness. Here, it thrives in exposure.

The empty streets, the echo of footsteps, the oppressive quiet of a village stripped of its adult presence — all contribute to an atmosphere that feels less like a nightmare and more like a waking dread. The world is visible, tangible… and entirely hostile.

Morality as the True Battleground

The film’s most enduring power lies in its central dilemma. As the threat becomes undeniable, the question ceases to be abstract.

It becomes immediate. Personal. Inescapable.

Who can kill a child?

Serrador refuses easy answers. The film does not revel in violence, nor does it offer catharsis. Instead, it traps both its characters and its audience within an ethical paradox — survival demands an unthinkable act, yet to commit it is to cross a line that cannot be uncrossed.

In this way, the film transcends its premise. It is not simply about killer children — a trope that would later be explored in films like Children of the Corn — but about the collapse of moral certainty under extreme conditions.

A Measured, Relentless Descent

Serrador’s pacing is deliberate, almost clinical. The tension builds not through escalation, but through accumulation — each moment adding weight to an already suffocating atmosphere.

If there is a flaw, it lies in this restraint. The film’s commitment to its central conceit occasionally limits its emotional range, keeping the characters at a slight remove. We observe their descent more than we fully inhabit it.

And yet, this distance may well be intentional. A buffer between the viewer and the horror they are being asked to contemplate.

Legacy of Unease

Decades on, Who Can Kill a Child? remains one of the most unsettling entries in European horror — not because of what it shows, but because of what it demands.

It asks the audience to consider the unthinkable… and then refuses to let them look away.

In an era where horror often seeks to shock through excess, Serrador’s film endures through precision. Through the careful construction of a scenario in which there are no good choices — only consequences.

The Prognosis:

Who Can Kill a Child? is not an easy film to watch, nor is it meant to be. It is a moral provocation wrapped in the guise of horror, a work that lingers not in the memory of its images, but in the weight of its question.

A chilling, sunlit nightmare that transforms innocence into terror, and forces us to confront the limits of our own humanity.

  • Saul Muerte

Playtime Turns Predatory: Dolly

23 Thursday Apr 2026

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There is a familiar rhythm to Dolly, a film that arrives wrapped in the well-worn trappings of captivity horror and slasher sensibilities, yet occasionally hints at something more psychologically curious beneath its surface. Premiering as a Shudder original, it treads a precarious line between formula and subversion — rarely straying too far from the former, but not entirely devoid of the latter.

A Familiar Game of Survival

At its core, Dolly is disarmingly simple. A young woman, Macy — played with a grounded resilience by Fabianne Therese — is abducted by a grotesque, childlike figure intent on “raising” her. The premise is unsettling in theory, tapping into distorted notions of family, control, and psychological regression.

In execution, however, the film largely adheres to a paint-by-numbers structure. The beats are recognisable: capture, resistance, escalation, and survival. Tension rises and falls in expected intervals, rarely deviating from the genre’s established blueprint.

Flashes Beneath the Surface

And yet, it would be reductive to dismiss Dolly entirely.

There are fleeting moments — brief, almost intrusive — where the film gestures toward a more complex identity. The central antagonist, portrayed with unnerving physicality by Max the Impaler, carries a disquieting blend of menace and arrested development. The idea of imposed infantilisation, of forced dependency, lingers as an underexplored but compelling thematic thread.

Similarly, the inclusion of dark humour — often abrupt, sometimes jarring — suggests a film aware of its own absurdity, even if it struggles to fully integrate that awareness into a cohesive tone.

Violence as Punctuation

Where Dolly finds its most immediate impact is in its bursts of gore. These moments arrive sporadically, punctuating the narrative with flashes of brutality that momentarily jolt the film to life.

They are effective, if fleeting — less a sustained atmosphere of dread than intermittent reminders of the stakes. In this sense, the film operates more as a sequence of peaks and valleys than a steadily mounting crescendo.

The Weight of Simplicity

The film’s greatest strength — its simplicity — ultimately becomes its limitation.

By adhering so closely to familiar genre mechanics, Dolly never quite earns the psychological depth it gestures toward. Its exploration of trauma, control, and identity remains surface-level, hinted at rather than interrogated.

Even performances from recognisable faces like Seann William Scott and Ethan Suplee feel underutilised, existing more as texture than as integral components of the narrative.

The Prognosis:

Dolly is a film caught between impulses — the desire to deliver straightforward genre thrills and the ambition to probe something darker, more psychological. It succeeds intermittently on both fronts, but never fully commits to either.

A serviceable slasher with flashes of twisted promise, where moments of gore and uneasy humour briefly break through an otherwise familiar and simplistic framework.

  • Saul Muerte

Dolly streams on Shudder from Fri 24th April.

Dark Nights Film Fest V.3: Surgery on the Soul of Modern Horror

14 Tuesday Apr 2026

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There’s a growing divide within modern horror.

On one side, the polished and palatable—the algorithm-friendly nightmares designed to deliver quick shocks and clean resolutions. On the other, something far more insidious: films that resist structure, that burrow into the psyche, and refuse to offer the audience the comfort of escape.

It’s within this latter space that Dark Nights Film Fest has firmly embedded itself.

Returning for its third iteration on October 10 at The Reservoir Cinema in Sydney, Dark Nights Film Fest V.3 continues its quiet, calculated dissection of what horror can be when it is stripped back to its rawest nerve endings. This is not a festival concerned with spectacle—it is concerned with sensation. With unease. With the lingering afterimage.

From its inception, Dark Nights has operated less like a traditional festival and more like a curatorial scalpel, carving out a space for filmmakers who exist on the fringes of genre. Those who understand that true horror is not always seen—but felt. A slow infection rather than a sudden shock.

Festival Director and Curator Bryn Tilly articulates this ethos with precision: this is not a platform for safe horror. It is a space for works that feel almost unnatural in their existence—films that challenge, provoke, and destabilise.

And in many ways, this philosophy aligns with the core of what Surgeons of Horror has long explored: the idea that horror, at its most potent, functions as a form of psychological excavation. A peeling back of layers to expose something uncomfortable, something unresolved.

Dark Nights Film Fest V.3 sharpens this focus even further through its pared-back, single-night format. There is no excess here—only intention. Each film selected is part of a carefully constructed experience designed to immerse audiences in a continuum of dread, where the boundaries between stories begin to blur into a singular, oppressive atmosphere.

It’s also worth noting the festival’s continued commitment to nurturing new voices—not only through its short film program but via its unproduced screenplay competition. In an industry often dominated by established names and recognisable formulas, this remains a vital artery for fresh, unfiltered perspectives to emerge.

Recognition from Dread Central—which listed Dark Nights among the “90 Best Genre Film Festivals on Earth – 2025”—only reinforces what many within the horror community are already beginning to understand: that this is a festival less concerned with growth in size, and more invested in depth of impact.

Because horror, in its purest form, has never been about comfort.

It is about confrontation.

It is about forcing an audience to sit with something they would rather avoid.

Dark Nights Film Fest V.3 doesn’t just programme films—it curates experiences that linger in the subconscious, resurfacing long after the screen has gone dark.

For filmmakers, the invitation is clear: abandon restraint. Reject convention. Submit the work that feels too strange, too confrontational, too much.

Because those are often the films that matter most.

Submissions are now open via FilmFreeway, with deadlines running through to August 30.

For audiences, October 10 marks an opportunity not simply to watch horror—but to undergo it.

And as any good surgeon knows… the deeper the incision, the more revealing the outcome.

  • Saul Muerte

Dark Nights Film Fest – V.3

The Reservoir Cinema, Sydney – October 10

Submissions via FilmFreeway.com/DarkNightsFilmFest

Deadlines:

Earlybird – April 30, Regular – June 21 , Late – August 2, Final – August 30  

For festival info and submission guidelines, visit darknightsfilmfest.com

The Sound of Silence: Undertone (2026)

13 Monday Apr 2026

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There is a quiet audacity to Undertone — a film that dares to strip horror back to its barest components and, in doing so, exposes both the potency and the peril of minimalism. Where many genre efforts lean into excess — of imagery, of narrative, of shock — Undertone instead retreats inward, crafting an experience defined less by what is shown than by what is felt.

It is, for better and worse, a film built on absence.

Less as Language

Minimalism in cinema is often misunderstood as restraint for its own sake. In Undertone, it becomes a language — one that communicates through negative space, elongated silence, and the careful withholding of information.

The narrative itself is skeletal, almost deliberately so, allowing themes of grief, emotional suppression, and psychological entrapment to seep through the cracks rather than announce themselves outright. Characters feel less like fully articulated individuals and more like vessels for internal states — fractured, repressed, and quietly unraveling.

This approach is undeniably immersive… but also demanding.

The Power of Sound

If Undertone has a defining strength, it lies in its sonic architecture.

Sound here is not merely accompaniment — it is the film’s primary instrument of tension. Subtle shifts in tone, the intrusion of low-frequency hums, the absence of expected auditory cues — all contribute to a sense of unease that lingers beneath the surface.

In many ways, Undertone aligns itself with traditions of psychological horror that privilege atmosphere over spectacle. It understands that fear often resides not in what we see, but in what we anticipate — and what we cannot quite place.

The result is a film that listens as much as it shows.

The Slow Burn of Suppression

Thematically, Undertone is preoccupied with what happens when emotion is buried rather than expressed. Grief, in particular, becomes a suffocating presence — not explosive, but corrosive. It manifests in the stillness, in the hesitation, in the inability of its characters to confront what lies beneath.

This is horror as internalised pressure.

The pacing reflects this intent. Scenes linger. Moments stretch. Time itself feels elongated, mirroring the psychological stasis of its characters. For some, this will read as hypnotic — an invitation to sit within discomfort. For others, it may verge on inertia.

Minimalism as Double-Edged Sword

And here lies the film’s central tension.

The same minimalism that gives Undertone its identity also limits its reach. The scarcity of overt scares, the deliberate narrative opacity, and the glacial pacing risk alienating viewers who seek more immediate engagement.

There are moments where the film feels on the cusp of revelation — where its restraint might give way to something more tangible — only to retreat once again into ambiguity. This can be frustrating, particularly when the emotional payoff does not fully match the investment required.

Yet to criticise Undertone for this is also to acknowledge its commitment. It refuses to compromise its vision, even when that vision narrows its audience.

The Prognosis:

Undertone is a film that exists in the margins — of sound, of space, of emotion. It is an exercise in restraint that occasionally teeters into limitation, but never without purpose.

A haunting, slow-burning meditation on grief and suppression, where minimalism becomes both its greatest strength and its most significant constraint.

  • Saul Muerte

Undertone is currently screening in cinemas nationwide

Bad Taste as Baptism: Fuck My Son! (2026)

04 Saturday Apr 2026

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There are films that provoke… and then there are films that weaponise provocation as their entire identity.
Fuck My Son!, directed by Todd Rohal, firmly belongs in the latter camp — a grotesque, confrontational descent into taboo that feels less like storytelling and more like an endurance test.

Adapted from the underground comic by Johnny Ryan, the film embraces its origins with unapologetic aggression. Narrative coherence is secondary. Characterisation is almost incidental. What matters here is impact — how far it can push, how hard it can hit, and how long an audience can withstand the onslaught before recoiling.

The Aesthetics of Offence

Rohal’s approach is not without craft. In fact, what makes Fuck My Son! so confronting is how deliberately constructed it is. This is not chaos by accident — it is chaos curated.

The practical creature effects, in particular, demand attention. There is a tactile, squirm-inducing quality to the film’s physical grotesqueries that places it in lineage with boundary-pushing auteurs who understand that revulsion is most effective when it feels real. Flesh stretches. Fluids flow. The body becomes both canvas and battleground.

In an age of digital sanitisation, this commitment to the physical image is perversely admirable.

Taboo as Currency

But provocation, when used as currency, quickly devalues itself.

The film’s central conceit — deliberately offensive, aggressively transgressive — initially shocks, then unsettles, and eventually… numbs. Without thematic grounding or emotional counterpoint, the transgression begins to feel repetitive rather than revelatory.

This is where Fuck My Son! falters.

The most effective works of extreme cinema often use taboo as a gateway to deeper commentary — on society, morality, repression. Here, the suggestion of meaning is fleeting at best. The film gestures toward satire, but rarely commits to it.

Know Your Audience

And yet, to dismiss the film outright would be to misunderstand its purpose.

There is an audience for this. A dedicated, discerning subset of genre fans who seek out the extreme not for narrative satisfaction, but for experiential confrontation. For them, Fuck My Son! is not a failure — it is a badge of honour. A film to be survived, debated, and worn like a scar.

It is cinema as dare.

The Prognosis:

Fuck My Son! is not interested in pleasing you. It barely cares if you understand it. It exists to provoke, to repel, and to challenge the limits of what can be put on screen.

A technically committed but narratively hollow exercise in taboo, elevated by its practical effects and sustained only by the endurance of its audience.

  • Saul Muerte

Fuck My Son will be screening at select cinemas from Apr 9 for a limited time.

Filth, Flesh and Freedom: A Brief History of Trash Cinema

Love, Blood and the Loss of Shadow: Dracula (2025)

02 Thursday Apr 2026

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There is something perversely fitting about Luc Besson tackling the story of Dracula — a filmmaker long enamoured with heightened emotion, operatic visuals, and characters driven by obsession. With Dracula, Besson does not so much adapt the myth as he attempts to drown it in longing, reframing the Prince of Darkness as a tragic romantic caught in an eternal spiral of grief, rage, and devotion.

It’s a bold swing.

But one that doesn’t always draw blood.

A Vampire in Love with Loss

Besson’s Dracula leans heavily into the oft-explored notion that monstrosity is born not of evil, but of heartbreak. The film traces Vlad’s transformation from mortal prince to cursed immortal, driven by the brutal loss of his bride and his subsequent renunciation of faith.

It’s familiar terrain — territory previously carved out with gothic grandeur in Bram Stoker’s Dracula — yet Besson strips away much of the baroque sensuality that defined that iteration, replacing it with something colder, more abstract.

The result is a film that feels emotionally intense, yet curiously distant.

Where the gothic tradition thrives on atmosphere — on shadows, candlelight, decay — Besson opts for a cleaner, more stylised visual language. His Dracula exists in a world that is visually striking, but rarely suffocating. The rot beneath the surface is implied, not felt.

And in a story like this, that absence matters.

Performances That Bleed Through the Fog

What anchors the film — what almost saves it from its own indulgence — are its performances.

Caleb Landry Jones delivers a portrayal of Vlad that is as fragile as it is feral. There’s a volatility to his performance, a sense that beneath the stillness lies something constantly threatening to fracture. His Dracula is not a figure of dominance, but of disintegration — a man hollowed out by grief and sustained only by obsession.

Opposite him, Christoph Waltz brings his trademark precision, injecting the film with moments of clarity and control. Where Jones spirals, Waltz steadies. It’s a dynamic that gives the film its most compelling exchanges — brief flashes where character overtakes spectacle.

And yet, even these performances struggle against the film’s broader uncertainty.

Style Over Myth

Besson has always been a visual storyteller first, and Dracula is no exception. The film is filled with striking imagery — battlefields soaked in blood, vast landscapes frozen in time, bodies moving through space with an almost dreamlike detachment.

But style, here, becomes a double-edged sword.

In prioritising visual expression over narrative clarity, the film allows its mythology to drift. The rules of this world — its logic, its structure — become increasingly opaque, leaving the audience to navigate a story that feels more like a sequence of emotional impressions than a cohesive arc.

This is where the film falters most.

Because Dracula, as a figure, thrives on myth. On clearly defined boundaries between life and death, sacred and profane, desire and damnation. When those boundaries blur too far, the character risks losing his shape.

And here, he occasionally does.

The Missing Gothic Pulse

Perhaps the film’s most surprising omission is its lack of true gothic weight.

For all its talk of damnation and eternal suffering, Dracula rarely feels haunted. The atmosphere — that essential ingredient of any great vampire tale — is present in fragments, but never fully realised.

In stepping away from the heavy shadows and oppressive dread that have long defined the character, Besson creates something more ethereal… but also less impactful.

It’s a Dracula without fangs.

The Prognosis:

Dracula (2025) is a film caught between impulses — romance and horror, spectacle and substance, myth and mood. It reaches for operatic tragedy but often finds itself lost in its own aesthetic.

And yet, there is enough here — in its performances, in its ambition — to keep it from collapsing entirely.

A visually striking, emotionally charged reimagining that gets lost in the romance, leaving its mythology and gothic soul just out of reach.

A vampire story that longs for eternity… but struggles to leave a lasting bite.

  • Saul Muerte

Steel, Sorcery and Splattercraft: Deathstalker (2026)

29 Sunday Mar 2026

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In an era where digital spectacle often overwhelms texture and tactility, Deathstalker arrives like a relic unearthed from a more visceral cinematic past. Directed by Steven Kostanski, this Shudder-exclusive fantasy-horror hybrid leans unapologetically into the aesthetics of sword-and-sorcery pulp, resurrecting a subgenre that thrives on excess, grime, and the physicality of handcrafted effects.

Kostanski, whose reputation has steadily grown through cult favourites such as The Void and Psycho Goreman, has long been recognised as a modern custodian of practical effects artistry. With Deathstalker, he reasserts that position with confidence, delivering a film that feels less like a reinvention and more like a reclamation — a reminder that horror-fantasy can still breathe, bleed and rupture in tangible ways.

A Return to Practical Alchemy

The narrative itself is deliberately archetypal. When a battle-hardened warrior, played by Daniel Bernhardt, retrieves a cursed amulet from a battlefield littered with corpses, he becomes entangled in a web of dark magick, pursued by assassins and shadowed by an encroaching evil. It is a familiar framework — one that echoes the mythic simplicity of Conan-era storytelling — but Kostanski is less interested in narrative innovation than in experiential immersion.

Where Deathstalker distinguishes itself is in its commitment to the physical image. The creatures, transformations and grotesqueries that populate this world are rendered with a devotion to prosthetics, animatronics and practical ingenuity that feels increasingly rare. Flesh tears, bodies distort, and the supernatural manifests not as weightless pixels but as textured, often repulsive forms that occupy space with convincing presence.

There is a tactile pleasure in this approach — a sense that the horror exists within the frame rather than being layered atop it.

Kostanski’s Controlled Chaos

Kostanski’s direction walks a delicate line between reverence and reinvention. His work here feels informed by the splatter traditions of filmmakers like Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi, yet it avoids slipping into mere pastiche. Instead, he channels those influences through a contemporary lens, maintaining a playful awareness of genre conventions without undermining their impact.

There is, crucially, a sense that Kostanski is enjoying himself.

That enjoyment becomes infectious. The film’s more excessive moments — of which there are many — are staged with a gleeful confidence that invites the audience to revel in the absurdity. Limbs are dispatched, creatures emerge from unlikely places, and the boundaries of taste are tested with a wink rather than a nudge.

Yet beneath the chaos lies a disciplined craftsman. Kostanski understands rhythm, allowing sequences of visceral intensity to breathe before plunging back into the grotesque. It is this balance that prevents the film from collapsing under the weight of its own indulgence.

Form Over Function

If Deathstalker falters, it does so in its narrative ambitions. The story, while serviceable, rarely transcends its archetypal foundations. Characterisation remains broad, motivations are often sketched rather than explored, and the emotional stakes never quite reach the same level of engagement as the film’s visual spectacle.

But this feels, to some extent, intentional.

Kostanski appears less concerned with crafting a deeply layered narrative than with constructing a world — one defined by its textures, its grotesqueries, and its commitment to physical effects. The result is a film that prioritises sensation over introspection, experience over exposition.

A Leader in His Field

In many ways, Deathstalker serves as a reaffirmation of Kostanski’s position within contemporary genre filmmaking. At a time when practical effects are often relegated to novelty status, he continues to push their boundaries, exploring what can be achieved through ingenuity, craftsmanship, and a willingness to embrace imperfection.

The film may not fully transcend its pulp origins, but it doesn’t need to. Its value lies in its execution — in the sheer commitment to a mode of filmmaking that refuses to disappear quietly.

The Prognosis:

Deathstalker is not a film that seeks to redefine fantasy horror. Instead, it embraces its lineage, revels in its excesses, and delivers a tactile, visceral experience that stands in stark contrast to the polished artificiality of much contemporary genre cinema.

A rough-edged but invigorating return to practical effects-driven storytelling, with Steven Kostanski once again proving himself a vital and playful force in modern horror.

  • Saul Muerte

Deathstalker will stream on Shudder from Fri 3rd April