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.
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
Zombie cinema has rarely been short of metaphors. From consumerism to social collapse, the living dead have long functioned as mirrors reflecting humanity’s anxieties back at itself. In We Bury the Dead, Australian filmmaker Zak Hilditch approaches the genre from a quieter, more introspective angle, delivering a film that is less concerned with apocalyptic spectacle and more invested in the emotional wreckage left behind when the world stops making sense.
Following the critical success of his Stephen King adaptation 1922, Hilditch once again demonstrates a fascination with grief, guilt and moral ambiguity. Where many zombie films focus on the chaos of the outbreak itself, We Bury the Dead situates its narrative in the uneasy aftermath — a world where the catastrophe has already occurred and society is struggling to process what comes next.
The premise is deceptively straightforward. After a military experiment goes catastrophically wrong, large portions of the population are left dead… or something close to it. The government attempts to contain the situation by declaring the reanimated victims harmless and slow-moving, encouraging volunteers to enter quarantined zones to recover bodies and offer closure to grieving families. It is an oddly bureaucratic approach to the apocalypse — one that immediately hints at deeper layers of deception.
Enter Ava, portrayed with steely determination by Daisy Ridley. Driven by the possibility that her missing husband might still be found within the restricted zone, Ava volunteers to join the clean-up effort. What begins as a mission rooted in grief soon transforms into a descent into a landscape where the official narrative begins to unravel.
Because the dead, it seems, are not as harmless as the military would like the public to believe.
Grief at the End of the World
At its heart, We Bury the Dead is not really about zombies. Instead, it is about the human inability to accept loss.
Hilditch structures the film almost like a road movie through the ruins of a broken society. Ava’s journey through quarantined territories becomes a physical manifestation of grief itself — a search for answers that may never come, fuelled by the stubborn hope that closure might still be possible.
The film repeatedly asks a troubling question: if the dead returned, even briefly, would we really want to let them go again?
This thematic focus places the film closer to reflective entries in the genre such as The Girl with All the Gifts or 28 Days Later, where the apocalypse becomes a canvas for exploring the emotional cost of survival rather than simply a playground for gore.
A Different Kind of Undead
The film’s interpretation of the undead also deserves mention. Rather than the traditional shambling hordes popularised by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Hilditch presents a more ambiguous threat.
Initially passive, the reanimated bodies appear almost dormant — eerily calm, as if waiting. But as Ava moves deeper into the quarantine zone, something begins to shift. The dead become restless, unpredictable, increasingly aggressive.
The slow escalation works effectively because Hilditch refuses to rush it. The horror creeps in gradually, allowing the tension to build organically rather than relying on sudden bursts of violence.
This patient pacing will not satisfy viewers looking for relentless zombie carnage, but it serves the film’s more contemplative ambitions well.
Atmosphere Over Spectacle
Visually, We Bury the Dead leans heavily into desolation. The quarantined landscapes feel eerily still, drained of life and colour. Roads stretch endlessly through abandoned territories while small settlements sit frozen in time, as though the world simply stopped functioning mid-sentence.
The result is an atmosphere that feels closer to post-apocalyptic melancholy than traditional horror.
Hilditch has always shown a strong sense of visual restraint, and that restraint works largely in the film’s favour. The horror rarely comes from the monsters themselves but from the creeping realisation that the official narrative surrounding the disaster may be deliberately misleading.
In other words, the true threat may not be the dead — but the living who are trying to control the story.
A Thoughtful Entry in a Crowded Genre
While We Bury the Dead occasionally struggles with pacing — its deliberate tempo can at times feel slightly overextended — the film’s emotional depth helps it rise above many of its genre contemporaries.
Ridley anchors the story with a performance grounded in determination and vulnerability, carrying the film through its quieter moments of reflection and uncertainty. Her journey is less about survival than about acceptance — the painful process of realising that some answers simply cannot bring comfort.
In a genre often dominated by chaos and carnage, We Bury the Dead chooses a more sombre path.
It’s a zombie film about mourning.
And in that quiet, reflective approach, Zak Hilditch finds something unexpectedly powerful.
The Prognosis:
A thoughtful, grief-stricken take on the undead mythos that favours atmosphere and emotional weight over relentless action.
The found-footage format has long been one of horror’s most effective narrative devices. When done well, it places audiences directly inside the unfolding terror, collapsing the distance between viewer and victim. Yet it’s also a subgenre littered with misfires, where shaky cameras and contrived setups often undermine the illusion of authenticity. Bodycam, the latest Shudder Original from Canadian filmmaker Brandon Christensen, sits somewhere between those two extremes — a competent genre exercise that understands the mechanics of found-footage horror, even if it doesn’t entirely reinvent them.
Christensen has quietly carved out a niche within contemporary supernatural horror. His earlier films, particularly Still/Born and Superhost, demonstrated a knack for building tension through confined spaces and psychological unease. With Bodycam, he expands that approach into a story rooted in modern surveillance culture, using the now-familiar lens of police body cameras to frame a tale where guilt, paranoia, and something far more sinister begin to blur together.
The premise is deceptively simple. Two police officers respond to what initially appears to be a routine domestic disturbance call. When the situation spirals into a tragic accident, the pair make a desperate decision to conceal the truth, fearing the consequences of public scrutiny and institutional fallout. Yet as they attempt to rewrite the narrative, they begin to realise that the technology designed to document the truth may not be the only witness present.
And perhaps something else is recording.
Christensen leans heavily into the aesthetics of surveillance — dashboard cameras, bodycam footage, and fragments of security recordings stitched together to tell the story. This multi-camera structure echoes the fragmented style seen in genre landmarks like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and REC, all of which demonstrated how technological mediation can heighten a sense of realism. The trick, however, lies in convincing audiences that every camera angle exists for a plausible reason — one of the classic “dos and don’ts” of found-footage filmmaking.
To Christensen’s credit, Bodycam largely understands those rules. The body camera format itself naturally justifies the constant presence of a recording device, avoiding the common genre pitfall where characters inexplicably continue filming while their lives are clearly in danger. The immediacy of the footage lends several scenes a raw intensity, particularly when the supernatural elements begin to bleed into the frame in subtle, fleeting glimpses.
Where the film falters slightly is in its reliance on familiar beats. The escalating paranoia, the creeping suggestion that unseen forces are manipulating events, and the eventual collision between guilt and supernatural consequence follow a trajectory that seasoned horror audiences will likely recognise. Christensen proves adept at staging tension, but the narrative rarely deviates far from the established playbook.
Still, the film’s thematic core gives it an added layer of intrigue. By centring the story on police officers attempting to hide a mistake, Bodycam taps into contemporary anxieties surrounding accountability, surveillance, and the uncomfortable reality that technology can both reveal and obscure the truth. The idea that the cameras designed to protect authority figures might ultimately condemn them adds an unsettling moral dimension to the proceedings.
Visually, the film embraces the claustrophobic aesthetic that Christensen has proven comfortable with throughout his career. Much like Superhost, the tension builds through confined environments and a slow tightening of psychological pressure. Darkness becomes a character in its own right, with the limited field of vision offered by the body cameras forcing viewers to search every corner of the frame for signs of what might be lurking just outside the light.
As with many entries in the found-footage canon, the film’s success ultimately depends on how much patience audiences have for the format’s limitations. Shaky visuals, fragmented storytelling, and a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle are all part of the package.
For fans of the subgenre, Bodycam offers a solid if familiar addition to the catalogue — a tense supernatural thriller that understands the rules of the game without necessarily rewriting them.
The Prognosis:
A competent found-footage chiller that proves Brandon Christensen knows how to work within the genre’s framework, even if he occasionally plays it a little too safe.
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.
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 