2025 – 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/

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/

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/