2020s horror movies – Horror Ghouls

Sinners (2025)

Posted on April 29, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

We’re in 1932, where the twins Smoke and Stack have returned to the Mississippi Delta after having spent years in Chicago working for the mafia. They’re back with a lot of money stolen from the gangsters, and they have decided to purchase an old sawmill in order to build a juke joint for the local black community. Along the way, the bring with them other people, including their young cousin Sammie who is an aspiring guitarist. His father is pastor Jedediah, who warns him that blues music may one day invite the devil into his life. “If you keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home“, are his words of warning. Well, whatever…young Sammie still brings along the guitar and plays on the juke joint’s opening night. The music does indeed draw the attention of someone, who also appreciate music that comes straight from the soul…

Sinners is a horror period drama with musical elements. It was written, co-produced and directed by Ryan Coogler. The movie originally began development through Coogler’s production company Proximity Media in January 2024, but already the next month Warner Bros. Pictures acquired the distribution rights during a bidding war, and afterwards casting for additional roles took place in April. Ludwig Göransson, who has been a longtime Coogler collaborator, composed the film’s score and also served as an executive producer. The movie was filmed primarily in New Orleans and the surrounding areas of Louisiana. Coogler revealed that one of his major inspirations for the film was the novel Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, and a Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone episode called The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank. Another source of inspiration was his late uncle, a man named James who lived in Mississippi and loved blues music and Taylor Whiskey.

The movie has received an unanimous amount of praise, and is already deemed the best (or one of the best) horror movies of the year. Prior to seeing this film I had not only taken notice of all the praise, but also seen headlines that were comparing it to From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), which set the bar pretty high. Sure, the movie’s got a bar and vampires, but Club Juke certainly ain’t no Titty Twister. And while I enjoyed the movie for the most part, I’m glad I toned down the expectations a lot prior to going into the big screen.

I’ll start with the positives: first and foremost, the movie looks great, the visuals are really gorgeous. I also enjoyed the somewhat slow build-up when introducing the characters, where our protagonists are set to put together their little joint. Almost felt like the set-up in a video game where you need to talk to all the npc’s who each can provide something for your “build the juke joint“ quest. I also enjoyed the musical parts quite a lot. There’s a scene where Sammie starts playing his guitar and sings, and everything transcends into a slightly surreal montage where musicians from both the past and the future are present: we see characters among the juke joint’s patrons who are obviously from modern day, as well as tribe people from a long gone past, all joining in the music and providing an excellent visualization of how music connects us throughout the ages. Despite this musical number’s greatness, however…just like in the old classic Disney movies and many other musicals, the villain gets the best song. The lead “vampire“, outside the joint stack, leads his vampire minions in a ring while starting to sing an Irish Jig, which increasingly builds up its crescendo and provides music that sounds both jolly, slightly evil and slightly primal at the same time, providing a perfect counterpoint to the previous musical number and once again showing the connection effect of music from both new and old times. To be honest, these were the parts I enjoyed the most since the musical numbers here were used in a way to enhance the story and character’s motivations (rather than just being a song played in the background).

The things I didn’t particularly care about, was the amount of excessive dialogue where some if it became simply too repetitive, which caused some pacing issues. Another major disappointment is the invasion scene where the vampires finally enter the building at last (isn’t really much of a spoiler, it’s a part that you knew would inevitably happen). It felt too disjointed and underwhelming, and I simply could not help having the From Dusk Till Dawn invasion in mind, and thinking how so much of that epicness was missing here. There were some mentions of the KKK earlier on in the film, and I was actually hoping for some crazy, epic fight where the Klan would come to the place and get killed off by the vampires (preferably in the most gruesome ways possible) while the survivors inside the joint would have to fight and conquer both threats. No such luck, though. There were also a tribe of Native Americans introduced in the middle of the film, which were vampire hunters (or something..?) and we never get to see them anymore.

Overall, I think Sinners is a pretty good period drama movie with some great musical elements and horror mixed in, and while I wasn’t as “blown away“ as the majority who watched the movie seems to have been, I could easily appreciate the movie’s higher notes and qualities.

Writer and director: Ryan Coogler
Country & year: USA/Australia/Canada, 2025
Actors: Miles Caton, Saul Williams, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Jack O’Connell, Tenaj L. Jackson, Michael B. Jordan, David Maldonado, Aadyn Encalarde, Helena Hu, Yao, Sam Malone
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31193180/

Abruptio (2023)

Posted on April 18, 2025April 18, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Les Hackel is a guy who has just been dumped by his girlfriend, and has to live with his parents which includes a nosy and nagging mother. And of course, the “whatever mom says“ kind of dad. On top of that, he works at a dead-end job. Les hates his life, but of course he does the one thing that will surely make his life even more miserable: drowning his sorrows in a bottle. Yup, Les has got a severe alcohol problem as well. When your life is like an open wound, the sweet temporary relief of alcohol is all too tempting, but in the end it’s just making everything much, much worse. Les is apparently smart enough to have realized that, as he’s trying to sober up…but that’s never an easy task, of course. Then one night, he discovers a fresh incision in his neck. He gets a call from his buddy Danny, who’s also got the same incision in his neck, and he says to Les that someone has implanted a bomb inside them. Danny gets a mission on his phone, but refuses to comply…and his head goes BOOM! That, at least, proves to Les that the bomb stuff is all too real. He also starts getting messages with demands to carry out several missions, always with deadly results. As the violence escalates around Les, he tries to find out what is really going on in a world that seems to have gone completely insane.

Abruptio is an adult puppet Sci-Fi horror film from 2023, which was written, edited and directed by Evan Marlowe and produced by Kerry Marlowe. It screened at several festivals, and won 21 awards. The movie stars several well-known actors here for the voices of the puppets, including Robert Englund, Jordan Peele, and Sid Haig in his final film before his death in 2019. And yes, the movie was released in 2023, but the voice recordings started on May 23, 2015, and wrapped on December 2, 2017. A passion-project, for sure, where Marlowe mentioned in an interview with Dread Central that the very first idea for using puppets in this film came from a dream he had about everyone having turned into puppets. Dreams can, for sure, be quite the inspiration!

The puppets in this movie really belongs in the uncanny valley area, where some of them look like pure nightmare fuel. The puppetry is mixed with part live action, giving everything a really weird and surreal vibe. It’s a bit reminiscent of the British puppet show Spitting Image, but whereas the puppets in that show are pure comedy caricatures, the puppets in Abruptio leans more towards being outright grotesque. And it definitely works on establishing the otherworldly, sick tone. Aside from the visuals, the whole plot of the film feels like a fever-induced nightmare, and we start to expect that the film is also leading up to a certain reveal. We do get more than a few little snippets of information from the very start of the movie, which immediately makes you question what Les is actually experiencing and what significance everything has. I don’t want to spoil too much here, but even if you can more or less guess what the movie is leading up to from early on, the ride surely is an outlandish one.

Abruptio is, for sure, a one-of-a-kind horror movie. If you want something bizarre and different, give this one a watch!

Writer and director: Evan Marlowe
Country & year: USA, 2023
Voice actors: James Marsters, Christopher McDonald, Hana Mae Lee, Jordan Peele, Robert Englund, Sid Haig, Darren Darnborough, Rich Fulcher, Sohm Kapila, Patrick Cavanaugh, Carole Ruggier, John Wuchte
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3963226/

Run (2020)

Posted on April 8, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Dian Sherman has just given birth to a premature baby, and while she watches it lying inside an incubator, she asks the nurses if the baby will be ok. The only answer she gets is total silence. Uh-oh, that’s a really bad sign. Then we fast forward to several years later, and we see that Diane lives a seemingly fine life with her teenage daughter Chloe. Chloe’s life, on the other hand…she suffers from arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, asthma, and diabetes. To top it all, her legs are also paralysed. Fucking yay. She’s confined to a life in a wheelchair, and needs to take a batch of medications everyday. Oh, and she’s homeschooled by her mother, of course. What a surprise. Chloe’s one and only desire (aside from better health, of course) is going to college, and she eagerly awaits an answer to her applications. Whenever Diane gets the mail, the answer she gives Chloe is always the same: no response from any of the colleges. Oh well, no choice but to stay stuck with mommy dearest for the rest of your life, girl. Or…maybe mommy dearest is not such a dear after all. One morning, Chloe finds a prescription bottle including some green pills, but the name on the bottle is Diane. The thing is…Diane wants Chloe to swallow these green pills. What’s in those pills? Are mommy’s intentions perhaps not so motherly after all?

Run is a psychological horror thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty and co-written by Sev Ohanian. It stars Sarah Paulson as Diane (known for several roles in the American Horror Story series, and as Ratched in the netflix series) and Kiera Allen as Chloe. Kiera has been a wheelchair user since 2014, which makes this movie the first major thriller to use an actual wheelchair user since Rear Window (1998).

There’s no doubt that Run is a solidly made thriller, yet the biggest problem is that there really isn’t that much of a mystery here: we know very early on that Diane is off her fucking rocker, and is deliberately trying to keep Chloe confined in the home. Just to what extent she’s actually taking it, and what her reasonings might be, is what the plot is slowly unfolding. Is she just a worried mother that wants to keep her sick child close to her, or is something else wrong here? Well, of course it’s the latter, that’s not even a spoiler. Still, it’s fun to watch as Chloe continues trying to outsmart her mother and dig deeper into what is really going on.

There’s also some fun easter eggs in the movie, including a pharmacist named Kathy Bates, which considering the movie’s setting is an obvious nod to Kathy Bates’s role as Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990). Diane certainly ain’t no Annie Wilkes, though, and I have to admit that Chloe’s situation often didn’t feel quite as threatening as it could have been, but the movie still offers enough suspense and entertainment to keep you engaged. And as you probably start expecting already from very early on in the movie, there are a few twists and turns throughout the story.

Despite being a little predictable at times, Run is a pretty fine thriller with some solid performances and a decent suspension level. Recommended if you want a popcorn thriller on a lazy evening.

Side note: this film was the last film Aneesh Chaganty directed, before meddling with generative AI by creating the infamous I H8 AI short. And no, it’s not a short about actually hating generative AI, but rather a short that kind of tries to show how “creative“ a director could be if he had generative AI tools so he could, well…not be creative at fucking all. Unless you consider typing “plz make background look like Manhattan“ and hit a button as “creative“. The short was made as a collaboration between Meta and Blumhouse, and the reception was, as expected, not good. The backlash even caused it to be removed from Letterboxd. After this, Chaganty has been pretty silent and there’s currently no upcoming projects on IMDb under his name. If he does make more movies, I certainly hope he can take a Heretic in the credits and state that the movie was made without generative AI.

Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen, Sara Sohn, Pat Healy, Erik Athavale, BJ Harrison, Sharon Bajer, Onalee Ames, Joanne Rodriguez, Ernie Foort
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8633478/

Strange Darling (2023)

Posted on March 25, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

A woman is hunted by what appears to be a deranged killer, who is hellbent on taking her down. Who are these people, and what connection do they have? Well, we are soon to find out more but not in a chronological order. What we see in the opening is very much the middle of the film, and after an action-filled chase scene we backtrack to an earlier chapter where we find out that the woman meets the guy in order to hook up for sex in a local motel. Something is off right from the start, of course, and everything keeps spiraling into what ends up as a crazy cat ‘n mouse chase where you’re going to keep guessing.

Strange Darling is a thriller from 2023, written and directed by JT Mollner. The movie is told in a non-linear fashion, with 6 chapters, and very much centers around keeping you wondering what is going on, except the early understanding of this being a story about a serial killer. The movie was shot on location in Oregon on 35 mm film by Giovanni Ribisi.

When Mollner had completed the script for the film, he got three different offers and decided to meet up with Miramax first, where he wasn’t even three minutes into his pitch before Bill Block told him they had a deal. Things didn’t exactly go as smooth from thereon, however. It was shut down two days into filming due to some executives suddenly deciding to throw a fit, and stated “we hate everything about what you’re sending us. We’re not enjoying this at all. And we’re not sure if this is going to work“. They also wanted Willa Fitzgerald to be recast (who was excellent in the role) and hated that the movie was told in a non-linear way. Why they suddenly started to act like someone shoved a cactus up their ass is anyone’s guess, but it actually went as far as Miramax hiring another editor to recut the film as a linear story, to which Mollner clearly stated that he then would have his name removed from the film. He utilized a clause in his contract that stipulated that he could demand there to be a test screening of his director’s cut, and during this test screening the crowd started being very enthusiastic about the way the story was told, and Miramax finally let Mollner keep his final cut. Bill Block also later apologized to Mollner for the shitstorm during the film’s production.

While I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about stories not being told in a non-linear way (sometimes it works perfectly, other times it might just befuddle everything), this movie is a perfect example of how the non-linear storytelling heightens the experience. Yeah…I gotta admit that certain things were a little obvious already from the early part of the movie, but not being entirely sure what is going to happen and what has already happened, that is part of the viewing experience here. It’s entertaining and suspenseful, and the performances from both Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner are really well done and the cinematography is vibrant and beautiful.

Strange Darling is one of those movies that is hard to write very much about since it really is a movie where you need to go in as blind as possible, and while the “twist“ or whatever could be seen from a mile away (or at least from very early in the movie), it was still a very fun experience.

Writer and director: JT Mollner
Country & year: USA, 2023
Actors: Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Ed Begley Jr., Barbara Hershey, Madisen Beaty, Bianca A. Santos, Steven Michael Quezada
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/

The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

Posted on March 18, 2025March 19, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

The Ugly Stepsister is a dark and twisted reimagining of the classic fairytale Cinderella, mostly inspired by the Brothers Grimm version and this time told from the perspective of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. Her name is Elvira, and she’s dreaming of Prince Julian all the time. She’s savoring his published book of poems, dreaming of being the girl he will end up marrying. And she’s willing to do everything it takes!

The original title of this movie is Den Stygge Stesøsteren, and it’s a dark comedy horror film co-written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt in her directorial debut. It is an international co-production between Norway, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, and it was filmed on location in Poland. The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2025, where it opened the Midnight Section. It received a little bit of buzz on the festival screenings, where some people even compared it to the body-horror hit The Substance from last year. And while I can see where people draw those similarities from, I’d also like to make it clear that The Substance and The Ugly Stepsister are two very different beauties. They both involve a commentary on society’s harsh demands on looks, where The Substance focused mostly on aging where The Ugly Stepsister is a commentary on the fucked up beauty standards as a whole. The Substance is a lot more sci-fi-ish and wild, while The Ugly Stepsister is more toned in realism, but both are definitely worth a watch! Just don’t expect them to be very similar.

Most of us are familiar with the classic fairytale Cinderella, especially due to the animated Disney feature from 1950. Here we start with the “bad guys“, the stepmother and her two daughters, coming to live with her new husband and his daughter Agnes (Cinderella). It doesn’t take long before things go south. Agnes’s father suddenly dies during dinner, making the stepmother a widow once more. Agnes, of course, is completely lost in grief. Then, in a scene where the “ugly“ stepsister, Elvira, enters Agnes’s room with some chocolate because she believes it might cheer her up and starts talking about how it felt when their father died, Agnes suddenly bursts out in anger and says “how dare you compare your grief to mine“. Yup…this made it very early that Agnes/Cinderella is a bit of a stuck-up bitch. At this point I started to wonder if the movie would be going in that opposite direction where the bad guys are the good ones and vice versa. However, when Agnes keeps up her bitch-parade by telling Elvira that her father would never have let people “like them” inside the house if it wasn’t for their money, Elvira runs out of the room in a shocked state towards her mother, shouting “they don’t have any money!“, where her mother is in a meeting with some creditors. So, both tried to marry because they believed the other one had wealth…so no one is really a good guy here, but there’s still no doubt who the real villains are. While Agnes (Cinderella) isn’t as meek and lovely as the original fairytale makes her out to be, the stepmother and Elvira treat her horribly without any just cause. The only sympathetic character is perhaps the other stepsister, Alma, who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about neither ball nor prince and is the most reasonable among them.

While we follow Elvira’s quest for unsurpassable beauty, it’s also easy to take note that despite this being set in such a fanciful fairytale setting, the procedures that Elvira are going through are based on things women actually did to themselves in order to achieve “beauty“ (well, aside from the final Grimm-part of course, the most similar you get to that is probably the Chinese foot binding). I have to admit I expected the movie to take things a lot further than it did (after all, there are enough brutal beauty practices to take from) but based on the sounds emanating from the other people in the theater I suppose there were enough gut-churning moments for the less hardened viewers.

Visually, the movie looks great and the costumes and scenery are all top notch. While the horror elements are more subtle, I’d say that they were interwoven in the movie to enhance the enchanting atmosphere. For example, Cinderella’s father was put inside a room in the house in order to wait for “enough money“ to bury him, which makes for some grotesque scenes. At the same time, this is also where the singing mice and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo have been swapped with silk-spinning maggots crawling from the corpse’s body and the ghost of her mother. This makes for quite a creepycute scene, like something that could have come from a Tim Burton movie. The perfect atmosphere for a dark fairytale.

The Ugly Stepsister is a fun and beautiful movie, with a dark fairytale spin on a classic story mixed with the insane beauty standards that both have existed, and still exists today. The director, Emilie Blichfeldt, said in an interview that the movie’s theme is very personal for her: “When I got the idea for the movie, I thought: here I’ve been walking around trying to be Cinderella, while I’m actually the stepsister. Those of us who struggle with making that fucking shoe fit, we’re the stepsisters!“ and with that she’s certainly got a point. The beauty industry’s standard’s are unachievable for most people (duh, it needs to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be such a huge industry) where very few of us fits into the “perfect“ ideal. There are very few true “Cinderellas“ out there, most of us are “stepsisters“. And that isn’t really a problem as there isn’t a lot of true “princes“ either (there are very few monarchies left, after all). The majority of us are a bunch of normal people with normal looks, and while it’s far too naive to say that it’s only up to us how we want the beauty industry to affect our lives, we can at least use some common sense and appreciate the beauty in the “less perfect“.

The rights for North America, UK, Australia and New Zealand has been acquired by Shudder, and it has also been sold several other rights holders for further distribution. The Ugly Stepsister will hit the big screen in the US on April 18, and in the UK on April 25.

Writer and director: Emilie Blichfeldt
Original title: Den stygge stesøsteren
Country & year: Norway/Poland, 2025
Actors: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth, Malte Gårdinger, Ralph Carlsson, Isac Aspberg, Albin Weidenbladh, Oksana Czerkasyna, Katarzyna Herman
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29344903/

Wrong Turn (2021)

Posted on March 14, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Jen and her boyfriend Darius are going on a hike to the Appalachian Trail, together with two other couples: Adam and Mia, and Gary and Luis. When they arrive at the small town in rural Virginia, they immediately get on the wrong foot with some of the locals. And when they begin their hike, they do of course commit the worst mistake of all which have been warned about so clearly: going off the trail. Every year, people die when hiking the Appalachian Trail, but sure…let’s tempt fate a little. It doesn’t go long until something happens: a huge tree trunk suddenly rolls down the hill and Gary gets crushed by it. Luis is totally distraught over the loss of his boyfriend, and on top of it all they cannot find their way back. They have no choice but to set up camp for the night, and the next day they wake up to find their cellphones are gone…and they also can’t see Mia anywhere. Close by, they find an old plaque dated “1859“, commemorating the creation of the “Foundation“, which were a group of settlers who fled to the mountains because they believed the end of the US was near. Obviously, they still live there, and the people who enter their realm do not get out alive.

Wrong Turn (aka Wrong Turn: The Foundation) is a horror film from 2021, which is some kind of reboot of the Wrong Turn franchise. It is directed by Mike P. Nelson and written by Alan McElroy, who is the franchise’s creator. It was theatrically released for only one day, on January 26, 2021, by Saban Films. It received fairly positive reviews, and grossed $4.8 million at the box office and $2.1 million in home sales. It is also the first film in the Wrong Turn franchise to actually have been filmed in the United States, as the previous ones were filmed in Canada and Bulgaria.

Wrong Turn is taking a different approach in this reboot, and instead of a bunch of inbred cannibal hillbillies killing off innocent travelers, it’s now a cult that’s behind it all. The cult, who is calling themselves the Foundation, believed in making an ideal place for themselves. Doesn’t sound that bad, right? Well, we all know that the creation of some people’s Utopia inevitably ends with the birth of some kind of Hell on earth, and this is no exception. While the previous installments in the franchise had the lunacy of the hillbillies as the threat, the cult’s vision of a perfect world and how to treat everyone who doesn’t fit in it, serves as a possibly even bigger threat. That being said, the build-up involves a bit of justified reaction from the cult due to the previous behaviour of the hikers, so there’s an attempt at trying to justify the view from both sides here. At least until a certain point.

There are some kills here that are grisly enough, and while there’s isn’t very much of this kind the ones displayed are effective enough. There’s a definite feeling of being lost and trapped between the characters, and while there are some things that fails to make everything entirely convincing all the time, it was a fun enough watch. Also, the ending was a nice touch.

Wrong Turn is a decent enough horror film and a reboot that does things a bit differently from the previous films in the franchise. I can see how this would easily put off many of the fans of the earlier films (very much like Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin did to that franchise’s fans), but as an easy-going horror flick for a lazy day this is a perfectly fine pick.

Director: Mike P. Nelson
Writer: Alan B. McElroy
Country & year: USA, 2021
Actors: Charlotte Vega, Adain Bradley, Bill Sage, Emma Dumont, Dylan McTee, Daisy Head, Matthew Modine, Vardaan Arora, Adrian Favela, Tim DeZarn, Rhyan Elizabeth Hanavan
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9110170/

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

Posted on March 11, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Margot was abandoned as a baby outside a hospital, and the only thing she knows is that her mother came from an Amish family living at the Beiler Farm. She decides to make a documentary about her past, and brings with her some friends: Chris, the cameraman, and Dale, the soundman. They meet up with her blood relative Samuel, who leads them to the place where Margot’s mother came from. There they meet Jacob, the patriarch of the commune and also Margot’s grandfather. They’re welcomed, and soon strange events start happening. Margot gets some cryptic signs indicating that her mother, Sarah, is still alive and at the location somewhere. They also find a small church that is locked up, and they’re told they’re not allowed to enter. As more and more red warning signs start blinking, things have already gone too far before they realize that they’re all in danger at the isolated Amish farm.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is a supernatural horror film from 2021, and despite the title, it doesn’t have jack-shit to do with the franchise aside from the name. It’s written by William Eubank, and produced by Jason Blum and Oren Peli. It’s the 7th film in the series, despite that Ghost Dimension from 2015 was promoted as the final installment. Next of Kin is very much a stand-alone film, and was originally planned for a theatrical release but then COVID-19 happened, and it became the first Paranormal Activity film to not get shown on the big screen.

It was released mostly to negative reviews, and to be honest, it very much escaped our interest back in 2021 mostly because of it seemingly being yet another film in the PA franchise. Sure, we really did love the first movie when it came out back in the day, its simplicity felt very fresh and effective, but there’s a limit to how interesting it was able to keep that premise going. The people who love the movies in this franchise, however, would definitely be put off due to the fact that this movie has nothing to do with neither the characters from the franchise, or anything else. It’s like this movie was written as something completely independent, but then they decided to slap “Paranormal Activity“ in the title in hopes of more attention. While this might have gained the movie more viewers, I also think the problem was that the ones who wanted a new PA movie would be left dissatisfied, while those of us who had grown tired of these movies were more likely to turn a blind eye. Oh well.

As we decided to check it out this year, we were left with a feeling that this movie is by no means any masterpiece, but it’s far from a bad one either. One of the major elements that keeps you engaged is the mystery behind Margot’s Amish family, her mother, the isolated farm and the creepy little church. The surroundings makes for some decent atmosphere, and the isolation of the Amish farm and the people living there are creepy enough even without any supernatural intervention. And speaking of, the supernatural elements are put a little in the backseat for the majority of the film, as it mostly plays out as a mystery where Margot is trying to find out what happened to her mother. To be honest, the entire movie could even have done well without anything supernatural in it.

Overall, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is a generic but pretty fine found-footage horror film, that doesn’t really feel like it belongs in the PA universe. The movie is playing more on the mystery elements than the supernatural ones, so just watch it while having in mind that the title could simply have been cut to “Next of Kin“.

Director: William Eubank
Writer: Christopher Landon
Country & year: USA, 2021
Actors: Emily Bader, Roland Buck III, Dan Lippert, Jaye Ayres-Brown, Tom Nowicki, Jill Andre, Alexa Niziak, Colin Keane, Ari Notartomaso, Michael Short, Al Garrison
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10515988/

The Monkey (2025)

Posted on February 25, 2025March 6, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

The pilot Petey Shelburn enters an antique shop in the hopes of getting rid of a drum-playing toy monkey, saying he wants it to be someone else’s problem. Suddenly, the toy monkey starts playing its drums, which causes a chain reaction where the shop owner gets killed. Petey on the other hand disappears, never to be heard from again. This leaves his wife, Lois, to raise their two children Hal and Bill alone. Several years later, in 1999, the two boys discover the toy monkey while going through their father’s belongings. Curious, they wind its key, and the first victim is their babysitter Annie. They realize that the toy monkey caused it for some reason, and when Hal gets tired of Bill’s constant bullying he decides to wind up the toy once again in the hopes it will kill his brother. Instead, their mother suffers a sudden aneurysm and dies as soon as Bill comes home. Obviously, the monkey doesn’t take orders. Hal chops the toy in pieces, and disposes of it before they move to their aunt Ida and uncle Chip. There, the monkey reappears and another death ensues. The brothers then decide to try a final attempt of getting rid of it by sealing it inside a box and throwing it into a well. And, well…according to the law of horror stories, nothing that is cast into a well will remain hidden forever. Twenty-five years later, Hal is estranged from his brother and barely has any contact with his son Petey. Then, Bill suddenly calls because he thinks the monkey is back.

The Monkey is a comedy horror movie written and directed by Osgood Perkins, and is loosely based on a short story from 1980 by Stephen King. Originally, Frank Darabont (director of The Mist from 2007) held the film rights to this story, but the project never materialized.

We’ve come to know Osgood Perkins as the master of atmospheric slow-burn horror movies (with his debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter and last year’s hit Longlegs), and this time he wanted to try something completely different. Perkins wanted to give the film comedic elements because he thought it was more fitting for a film about a killer toy:

“I took liberties like a motherfucker. They [Atomic Monster] had a very serious script. Very serious. I felt it was too serious, and I told them: ‘This doesn’t work for me. The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I’m an expert on that.’ Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways. I spent a lot of my life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad. It all seemed inherently unfair. You personalize the grief: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But I’m older now and you realize this shit happens to everyone. Everyone dies. Sometimes in their sleep, sometimes in truly insane ways, like I experienced. But everyone dies. And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile.”

While the film does have a lot of the moody visuals which is identifiable in Perkins’s earlier works, the suspense is unfortunately lacking so it all feels a little misplaced. There isn’t really any actual tension here, and the kills are mostly setup as pure jokes. Nothing wrong with that, but it gets a bit repetitive, and the comedy parts fall a little flat for me and gives a feeling of trying a little too hard which just makes it stumble. I’ll admit I did like the design of the monkey toy itself, it’s similar enough to the original toy with cymbals (the Jolly Chimp from the 1930s) while giving it a slightly ominous flair without going over the top (like with the Annabelle doll). I can easily imagine that it would have worked pretty well in a more serious movie, too. In many ways, I think this movie is a little reminiscent of movies like Wish Upon, with a dose of Final Destination. It’s kind of silly, kind of gory, and never tries to fool you into taking any of it seriously. The premise itself is of course totally bananas: a toy monkey causing someone to die every time it’s playing the drums. It was also fun to see some well-known faces throughout the movie. Also fun to see Perkins himself playing a minor role here, as the eccentric uncle Chip.

Granted, The Monkey isn’t any masterpiece, but there’s no doubt that it’s still granted a success. The film has already grossed $20 million against a budget of $10-11 million. Not much of a surprise when keeping the success of Longlegs from last year in mind (although these two films can barely be compared), and the trailer for The Monkey got millions of views.

My verdict? The Monkey is a movie where the kills are the most entertaining and fun part, and the movie is best enjoyed when turning off your brain completely and not expecting anything similar to what Perkins has made earlier. I’m fine with him wanting to do some monkeying around for a change, but I also personally hope that we’ll see more of his slow-burn atmospheric horror movies in the future.

Writer and director: Oz Perkins
Country & year: USA/UK/Canada, 2025
Actors: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Elijah Wood, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Osgood Perkins, Tess Degenstein, Danica Dreyer, Beatrix Perkins, Kingston Chan
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27714946/

Cuckoo (2024)

Posted on February 7, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Gretchen and her father Luis, Stepmother Beth, and the mute half-sister Alma moves to a resort town in the Bavarian Alps. Gretchen doesn’t really want to, but she can’t live with her mother anymore and needs to come with them. Yay. Her family are going to help building a new hotel there, and upon arriving the buoyant Herr König offers Gretchen a job at the front desk where she even manages to meet a love interest. So…maybe things won’t be so bad after all? Then, strange and bad shit starts happening of course. Several women are entering the reception desk while vomiting, and she also has an encounter with a terrifying hooded woman. Things start getting even more serious when Gretchen meets a detective named Henry, who is investigating a murder that happened on the premises. On top of it all, Alma starts having seizures. Gretchen feels compelled to both get the fuck away from there and also to find out what’s up with this resort, which soon proves to put both herself and her entire family in danger.

Cuckoo is a horror film from 2024, written and directed by Tilman Singer. It premiered at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2024, and was then released theatrically in the US on August 9, and later in Germany on August 29.

This is one of those movies where you (unless you’ve gone and gotten the entire plot spoiler from somewhere beforehand) have no idea what it will be going for. All you know is that it’s going to be one of those unraveling mystery packages where you’ll be sitting like a bit of a question mark for some time during the viewing. And indeed, already from the start you are immediately teased with several little nuggets about the protagonist and her struggles, not knowing much more than that she misses her mother and keeps calling her. Her relationship to her stepmother and half-sister are barely existent, and her relationship to her father is strained and filled with underlying hurt. Atmosphere-wise, the Bavarian Alps and the beautiful landscape fits rather well to give off an isolated feeling, which ironically couldn’t make too much of a difference to Gretchen as she’s already alone and isolated with her own struggles. Everything Gretchen experiences almost feels like the result of a shroom-induced fever dream, where everything is just…well…off. Everything just feels weird, odd, and totally cuckoo, and this surreal vibe throughout is not even the movie’s raison d’etre. Let’s just say that the movie’s title is actually more literal than you’d imagine.

We do get a fair amount of time with Gretchen wandering around, taking her bicycle out for some exploring, finding out one piece of the mystery puzzle after the other until things start falling into place. Eventually, once the mysteries are revealed, we do venture into a total sci-fi-fiddle-faddle territory where it doesn’t really…make too much sense, I guess? It’s very much making up its own logic, and in some ways this makes for an even more surreal and trippy experience where nothing seems to be grounded in reality. Like one of those dreams you have that starts off with a certain familiarity to real life, and then everything ventures into total cuckoo-land where you later realize that dreaming is often like being temporarily mentally insane. I personally think the odd and surreal choices for the story in Cuckoo works pretty well, but I can see how some people might be put off by it.

Overall, Cuckoo is a weird film with a slightly dreamlike vibe to it, focusing a lot on a surreal mood and atmosphere and ends up going places you probably didn’t expect beforehand.

Writer and director: Tilman Singer
Country & year: Germany/USA, 2024
Actors: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Greta Fernández, Proschat Madani, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Konrad Singer, Kalin Morrow
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12349832/

The Cursed (2021)

Posted on February 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

It’s 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. A French captain has been wounded, and brought to the medical tent. He’s got hit by three bullets, but when the army surgeon removes them he discovers an additional fourth bullet which is made of silver. How did that get there? Well, obviously the captain knows as he smiles and says “eight for silver“. Then we need to head back 35 years before the battle, to 1881 in rural France, in order to find out the origins of that silver bullet. The brutish land baron Seamus slaughters a Romani clan who have settled upon “his“ land, except it’s not really his, they have a claim to it. Seamus won’t have any of that, of course, and he gathers a bunch of men to have them brutally killed and one of them is even dismembered and put on a stake as a horrifying scarecrow. Yikes! But, as everyone should know, you do not wrong anyone from a Romani clan without suffering the consequences. The elderly woman of the clan is buried holding a set of silver dentures, which will now serve as a means for their revenge. Soon, the townspeople and Seamus’ children are having terrifying nightmares of the dismembered scarecrow and the silver fangs. One day, the children go to the place where the scarecrow is located and the silver fangs were buried, and a farm boy named Timmy digs it up in what appears to be a trance-like urge. He then puts them inside his mouth, and bites one of the other children’s throat. This is the start of a nightmare for the townspeople and Seamus and his family most of all.

The Cursed (aka Eight for Silver) is a gothic horror werewolf film from 2021, directed by Sean Ellis. It was shot in the Charente region of western France, filmed on 35mm with anamorphic lenses. The movie serves as a gothic spin on the werewolf mythos, of which there have been numerous interpretations over the years. All from the classical old-fashioned werewolf movies to coming-of-age movies like Ginger Snaps, or movies set in a more modern setting like Wer. This one belongs in the old-fashioned category but with twists and turns of its own. The director said he was inspired by the story of the Beast of Gévaudan from the 1700s, where a man-eating beast was terrorizing the people of the former province of Gévaudan in the Margeride Mountains of south-central France, where there had been 210 attacks and 113 deaths between 1763 and 1767. Historians are still unsure what kind of animal the “beast“ was, but most likely an unusually large wolf, perhaps the last of the extinct species the dire wolf. Needless to say, stories like this are the perfect fuel for myths and legends, and it’s easy to see how it could inspire one to make a werewolf story.

Visually, the movie is very good with some decent set-pieces. The misty landscape during the bleakest autumn is a perfect setup for a movie like this. I also like how the early scene with the slaughtered Romani people sets a certain presumption of what to come, this scene was more brutal than anticipated. And indeed, there are some gory and bloody scenes here, and the effects are overall pretty fine, especially the practical ones. There’s a perceptible feeling of dread from the very start, aided with the fear and anticipation amongst the characters. When the first victim turns into a werewolf and the killing starts, the movie still manages to hold on to the feeling of mystery and trepidation. The only downside is that the movie outstays its welcome a little bit too much, where the final parts of the movie feels much longer than they should have. The pacing was overall pretty good throughout most of the movie, but it could have fared much better if the runtime was cut a little shorter.

Overall, The Cursed (or Eight for Silver, which I personally think is a better and less generic title) is a pretty good werewolf movie with a gothic flair.

Writer and director: Sean Ellis
Country & year: UK/France/USA, 2021
Also known as: Eight for Silver
Actors: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran, Nigel Betts, Stuart Bowman, Simon Kunz, Amelia Crouch, Max Mackintosh, Tommy Rodger, Áine Rose Daly, Millie Kiss, Tom Sweet
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9907782/