“I think you’re trying to make sense of something and there’s no sense to make.” There is a subgenre that exists unnamed (so far as I know) and largely unexamined in modern horror cinema. In it, groups of usually young adult protagonists – the same age as its ostensible target audience – are menaced and picked off by a supernatural force or curse that operates according to reliable yet arbitrary mechanics. Examples plucked from memory more or less at random include Stay Alive (2006), Ouija (2014), Wish Upon (2017), Truth or Dare (2018), Polaroid (2019), The Puppetman (2023), and even movies th ..read more

Next up on Tales to Keep You Awake is yet another science fiction episode, this one set in the distant future of 2026, some twenty years after Americans founded and then abandoned colonies on Mars – does everyone remember that happening twenty years ago? It is once again adapted from a story by Ray Bradbury and, like “The Rocket” before it, is another of the sad, sleepy fables that Narciso Ibanez Serrador has said are his favorites. “The Wait” has a fairly predictable twist in the tail that is somewhat oddly belabored by the script, but it is nonetheless difficult to suggest that Serrador isn ..read more

What happens when Bill Skarsgård is given free rein to method act without being hampered by dialogue? When the more-is-more attitude of any number of Nic Cage’s recent performances is embraced by one of the most emotive actors currently working, you get an unexpected delight of violence, mayhem, and absurdity. Absolute, non-stop brilliant nonsense is the result if you are willing to buy into the conceit. Boy Kills World’s performance as part of Panic Fest 2024’s closing night is bonkers in all the best ways. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions An action-packed chest thumper of a thriller features ..read more

Poison for the Fairies is one of those movies that has been on my radar for so long that I can no longer remember how it originally got there. Chances are, it was recommended by someone who was comparing it to the early, Spanish-language films of Guillermo del Toro – if it wasn’t recommended by Del Toro himself. The comparison makes sense, even if this tale of toxic friendships, childhood imagination, witchcraft, and the (not always beneficent) power of storytelling has more in common with some other films that we’ve covered here in the past, most notably Celia (1989) and The Reflecting Skin ..read more

Them Season 2: The Scare, set in 1991, seemed like a completely different story than Season 1 of Them. Prime Video’s Anthology series was sold as stand-alone stories. This time, police officer Dawn Reeve(Deborah Ayorinde) is a divorced mom of a teenage boy who is investigating a string of grisly murders in Los Angeles. Simultaneously, we are introduced to Edmund Gaines(Luke James), an early thirties struggling actor whose mental health is seriously in question. Creator Little Marvin uses the same mix of supernatural dread and the underlying terror of living with racism and sexism in America. D ..read more

Shudder’s Late Night With The Devil dropped last week, and those who hadn’t seen it were treated to the mind-melting insanity of the last act. The controversy surrounding the film’s AI aside, it is a unique film that uses the forbidden tape trope to good effect. As most found-footage films do, it uses the unknown and a smartly pointed camera to inform and manipulate the viewer. By the end, everything you thought you knew is questioned. Jack Delroy(David Dastmachian of Suicide Squad) hosts a second-rate late-night show called Night Owls. Despite his best efforts, he never reached the status of ..read more

If you simply read the synopsis for Infested, you might think you’re going to get a cheesy and perhaps funny B movie, a-la Eight Legged Freaks or even Tarantula. However, director Sébastien Vanicek’s feature debut is much, much more than that. It’s an intense, nerve-jangling movie with downright menacing venomous spiders. I’ll go as far to say it’s one of the most suspenseful films I’ve seen all year, with sequence after sequence that’s pulse-pounding. I couldn’t imagine watching this one if I had arachnophobia. These spiders are nasty little critters that aren’t messing around. More important ..read more

If you haven’t read the late Rebecca Godfrey’s novel by the same name you are in for a wild and devastating ride. The opening moments set the tone for this tragic and horrifying story. It is a dark and sad fairy tale. It isn’t of the glass slippers and fairy godmother type, though. This is a Grimm fairy tale with broken dreams and destroyed children. Godfrey’s words ring ominously. They are a warning. In November of 1997, in Victoria Falls, Canada, a fourteen-year-old girl named Reena Virk went missing and was later found dead. Under The Bridge details how Reena was killed and asks serious que ..read more

When good stories mix culture, folklore, and traditional horror tropes, the results are always good. The combination offers a fresh take on old favorites. The stories are injected with creativity, and the scares are unexpected because they are told through a new lens. The Thai box office smash is a prime example of that. With The Exorcist: Believer, The Omen prequel, and Late Night With The Devil renewing interest in the possession subgenre, Death Whisperer lands on Netflix at a great time. The film is full of unexplained supernatural happenings, and the ending is sure to have left you wonderi ..read more

“Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.” Writing in the booklet that accompanies the new high-def Blu from Indicator, Ian Barr describes Snapshot as trafficking in “the free-floating dread of existing in the skin of an attractive woman in the late seventies” and “the way in which that sense of ambient threat is exponentially increased when one’s image is recorded, reproduced, and exploited – though not necessarily in that order.” Nominally a thriller, Snapshot was released internationally hard on the heels of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween and market ..read more