#horror

#horror

There's a refreshing lack of subtext and pretension to this week's gory creature feature Primate, a straight-to-the-point riposte to the glum, trauma-heavy horror films we've been enduring of late. Rather than following his genre peers who are busy aiming for the lofty heights of Don't Look Now and Possession, British director Johannes Roberts is happy to give gen Z their very own Shakma, the goofy 1990 schlocker about a baboon driven wild by an experimental drug.

Given the closed finale of Scott Derrickson's "The Black Phone," it seemed a horror hit that was unlikely to produce a sequel but Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill topped that original with this clever follow-up, a movie inspired by both the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise and the cult classic "Curtains," among others. Ethan Hawke's Grabber has been reimagined as a Freddy Krueger figure, a boogeyman haunting the dreams of Finney and Gwen as they try to uncover the truth about his early crimes.

On 25 November, award-winning Italian developer Santa Ragione, responsible for acclaimed titles such as MirrorMoon EP and Saturnalia, revealed that its latest project, Horses, had been banned from Steam - the largest digital store for PC games. A week later, another popular storefront, Epic Games Store, also pulled Horses, right before its 2 December launch date. The game was also briefly removed from the Humble Store, but was reinstated a day later.

I throw a doll at a zombie's head, dispatch it with a roundhouse kick to the jowls as I watch my friends sweep demons off the floor in vortices of blood, and celebrate by returning to town and petting a dog. All in the name of passing a college assignment that I'm juggling alongside deciphering a millennia-old apocalyptic prophecy and making new friends.

Scored to the upbeat romantic sounds of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love is Strange, a brief collage from a ghostly POV hops and skips through time, as various women across the decades and centuries become enamored with some ghostly, unseen figure, but each romance soon curdles. Awkward silences abound, speaking volumes even in musical montage. These things happen, after all. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They drift apart. It ends in bloodshed.

I.C.E. agents are horror fans too, right? It seems like you'd have to be to voluntarily risk your reputation for a hobby most famously associated with slasher villains. Sure, there are the red-blooded Americans who say they joined up to salute a bigoted version of Superman that never existed. But when I want to talk to Dean Cain, I prefer walking directions to the most publicly pathetic man in Las Vegas.

A blackbox marketing campaign, secret screenings, and very limited press helped power the secrecy around "Weapons" to $267 million worldwide for Warner Bros. The August release, now streaming on HBO Max, is written and directed by Zach Cregger, now a horror wunderkind very much on the Jordan Peele-cut path: He started in comedy, as a co-founder of The Whitest Kids U' Know,

You can find everything online these days, and people know that, but they're tired of picking books from anonymous star reviews,

"To learn what we fear is to learn who we are," Guillermo del Toro wrote last week, in an essay for The Atlantic about Mary Shelley's eternally spooky novel Frankenstein. The director, who just released a film adaptation of the classic, has made a career of investigating the depths of horror, which he considers "one of the last refuges of spirituality in our materialistic world."

The latest edition of Steam Next Fest is over, and Steam has shared its list of the 50 most-played demos from the week-long event. This year's list was pretty heavy with horror, adventure, RPG, and simulation games. And surprisingly, only a few roguelike and racing titles. One of the most unusual titles was Final Sentence, a battle-royale typing game that has a fatal ending for any player who can't keep up with the pace.

Michael Chaves, 135 minutes The film that reportedly represents the final saga of Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) ended up being one of the biggest movies of the year, making almost half a billion dollars worldwide after its September release, more than any other in this series (despite the worst reviews). Based on the Smurl haunting in the '70s and '80s, the success of Last Rites just proves how much people still love this franchise.

The best horror stories are those that don't rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn't its eponymous effigy; it's realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance's maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine.

That's the case with Carimara: Beneath the forlorn limbs, a compact horror gem all about peeling apart the layers of a mystery to find all the secrets skittering beneath. Some of what makes Carimara great is right there on the surface. Its sound and visual design are stunning, among the best I've encountered this year. Every texture in the game, from the floorboards to the bizarre monster designs, feels worn and real, illuminated by gorgeous candlelight and the glow of the moon.

As autumn settles in, HBO Max is embracing the Halloween season with an October programming slate that delivers everything from new originals to cult horror classics. The streaming platform is turning its focus toward fright, nostalgia, and cinematic depth, offering an unmatched mix of films, docuseries, and premieres that perfectly capture the spirit of the season. This year's headliner is IT: Welcome to Derry, the much-anticipated spinoff of Stephen King's legendary horror universe, set decades before the events of IT.

One of the first screens you see in Silent Hill f is a smorgasbord of content warnings. And while I largely consider myself to have a pretty high threshold, those warnings should be heeded, as Silent Hill f has one of the most singularly gruesome moments I've ever seen in a video game.

The horror-focused streaming platform Shudder is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a new Blu-ray bundle featuring some of the platform's best original films from its first decade--including fan-favorites like Light Night With The Devil, VHS/94, Skinamarink, and more. The collection also includes special features for each movie and all-new exclusive packaging. The Shudder 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition Blu-ray launches for $120 on November 11,

This weekend, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson star in their last Conjuring movie, and that makes me want to say boooo. All good things must end, but boooo. (Spooky pun unintended.) But I can say yay to Splitsville, a dry comedy about a pair of dysfunctional couples finally going wide for all to see. There's also an Office spinoff out, but maybe I'll wait until there are nine seasons to binge on Peacock. Here's everything!