american horror movies – Horror Ghouls

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/

Octaman (1971)

Posted on April 15, 2025April 15, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Octaman, or Octamaaaan, like Johnny Depp would have said it, is exactly what you think it is – a mutated, cheesy-looking octopus humanoid who shuffles around and kills people, played by a poor actor who can barely see shit through the costume. Yep, it’s one of those films. This is the type of vintage Z movie amateur campy schlockfest that could easily be mistaken for a lost Ed Wood film. And if you get some strong Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) vibes, you’re not wrong. Octaman is written and directed by Harry Essex, who also was a co-writer of said film.

The plot is something like this: we follow Dr. Torres as he goes on an expedition with a small crew to a primitive Latin fishing community in Mexico to uncover some atomic radiation. And they, of course, encounter Octaman, who’s actually credited in the opening sequence as Octaman, not the actor, just to add some extra flavor of mystique. It worked with Boris Karloff with Frankenstein way back in 1931, but here, though, with the cheesy costume and all that doesn’t even fool a blind person, it’s just comical. Anyway… Octaman starts to stalk and kill people one by one.

Octaman goes pretty fast into the monster action. And I’m using the words “monster action“ very loosely here, because there’s nothing much to get excited about, except for having some laughs at its overall incompetence, as the action has the impact like a pillow fight in your sister’s bedroom. The way Octoman attacks its victims is pure retarded slapstick comedy. He leaves his bodycounts with open wounds and an eye that almost pops out of some poor dude’s skull, yet he only slaps them like a drunk bitch with his overlong rubber suit tentacles as he also struggles to not lose balance. He’s as intimidating as, well, Octaman. Fun stuff. The monster costume was designed by the one and only Rick Baker, who later became one of the most prominent effect makers in Hollywood. This was his very first gig, and… we all have to start somewhere.

Writer and director: Harry Essex
Country & year: Mexico/USA, 1971
Actors: Pier Angeli, Kerwin Mathews, Jeff Morrow, David Essex, Jerome Guardino, Robert Warner, Norman Fields, Read Morgan
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067515/

Hide and Seek (2005)

Posted on April 11, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

David Callaway wakes up and finds the body of his wife Alison in the bathtub. Their 9-year old daughter, Emily, also comes in and witnesses her mother’s apparent suicide. As can be expected, this whacks a huge dent in the girl’s psyche. Who wouldn’t be a mess after witnessing a parent committing suicide? David is a psychologist so he should be well aware of some of the coping mechanisms, so when he decides to move to upstate New York and Emily starts interacting with an imaginary friend called Charlie, he doesn’t consider it much of a problem. Children always imagine things, and this imaginary friend could very well just be a way Emily deals with her grief. That is…until the actions of this “Charlie“ becomes quite sinister. One day David even discovers their dead cat in the bathtub, which Emily claims was killed by Charlie. Still, he refuses to get her help which should be quite apparent that she’s in need of right now. On top of that, something is up with David himself, where he keeps having nightmares about a New Year’s Eve party that took place before his wife’s death…

Hide and Seek is a psychological thriller from 2005, starring Robert De Niro as David and Dakota Fanning as Emily. It was directed by John Polson, and written by Ari Schlossberg. Originally, Albert Hughes was set to direct, but it’s said that he left “due to creative differences“. The movie grossed $127 million worldwide on a budget of $25 million.

As a psychological thriller, Hide and Seek works pretty fine. It’s mysterious, has a certain atmosphere, but never goes into actual scary territory. You keep wondering if Emily is just mentally broken, or if something else is going on. Whether it is something psychological, supernatural, or something else entirely, is kept a mystery for quite a long time without giving too much away early on, and the movie is also deliberately throwing a handful of red herrings at us. The movie is upheld by strong performances, and a young Dakota Fanning (who played the leading role in last year’s The Watchers by Ishana Night Shyamalan) plays her role as the disturbed child fairly well. There are some things about the character’s behaviour in the movie that, later on, feels quite illogical.. but that’s due to the script rather than the actual performances. It was also fun to see Famke Janssen in a minor role here.

The main problem with Hide and Seek is the nonsensical twist (yes, it’s one of those movies), where little actually makes sense, and it drags out a bit too much before wrapping things up entirely. Overall, though, it’s a fine and suspenseful thriller, it just happens to fall a bit apart due to a pretty muddled twist.

The movie was also given five different endings, and the one we watched was the US theatrical ending.

Director: John Polson
Writer: Ari Schlossberg
Country & year: USA, 2005
Actors: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving, Dylan Baker, Melissa Leo, Robert John Burke, Molly Grant Kallins
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382077/

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/

Shakma (1990)

Posted on March 28, 2025March 29, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

You mad, bro? Shakma the baboon clearly is, that’s for sure. And who can really blame him, as he’s trapped inside a tiresome office building with a bunch of bland NPC characters that you rather want to flush down the toilet before you take the weekend off. Cuz this fluffy firecracker has zero tolerances for stupid people… and doors. Especially doors.

The story is even more simple than any of the Friday the 13th films: A group of young medical students are preparing themselves to be locked in a lab building during one night to role-play Dungeons and Dragons. And instead of a serial killer lurking around, we have a baboon named Shakma who starts to body-count them. And if baboons weren’t hostile enough animals already, this one has just been injected with an experimental serum that increases his aggression even more. If you play with fire, you’ll get burned, as we say, and Shakma will make sure of that.

Shakma is a very cheap-looking film, even for a budget of 1,500,000 bucks. The setting here, with the grey office environment, is as dull as it can get with the esthetics and vibes that ooze like a cancelled sitcom where the actors, who’s just graduated from the Disney Channel School of Acting, have to deliver lines such as You are soooooo male! Well, excuuuuuuse me, princess…

And speaking of: the one and only reason to give this silly B(aboon) movie a watch is thanks to Shakma himself. He’s “played“ by Typhoon – a real, unstoppable, demonic force of nature who’d bite off both of the ears of Mike Tyson in a heartbeat. Typhoon is not just the most badass name ever, but the most fitting, as he literally typhoons himself throughout the whole film, where you almost feel more sorry for the doors he tries to break, as his own life was depending on it. Fluffboy is so fucking pissed and full of rage that he makes Alec Baldwin look like Postman Pat, and no one can convince me that he was a joy to work with. I bet the feelings from Typhoon were mutual. At least he got snacks constantly between the takes to calm him down and was carefully instructed by his trainer, Gerry Therrien, so he didn’t murder the whole film crew. Baboons are, after all, nothing to joke with as they’re the most aggressive monkey species out there. The actors did what they could to not make eye contact with Typhoon as that was enough to trigger him. Actress Amanda Wyss, most known for being the first victim of Freddy Krueger back in 1984, was especially very afraid of the fluffy co-star. And I’m just assuming that most of the budget went to the doors. I’d love to see an hour of B-rolls of this, which I’d guess would be more amusing than the film itself.

That being said, Shakma works fine for what it is, and there’s enough of monkey rage, body-counts, some cheap gore and some even cheaper laughs, if you’re in the right mood, to keep you entertained. This was also David Lynch’s favorite film of 1990. And after learning that, I just can’t stop picturing a little, cute, fluffy baboon dancing in a certain red room.

Directors: Hugh Parks, Tom Logan
Writer: Roger Engle
Country & year: USA, 1990
Actors: Typhoon, Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss, Ari Meyers, Roddy McDowall, Robb Edward Morris, Tre Laughlin, Greg Flowers, Ann Kymberlie, Donna Jarrett
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100589/

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/

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/

Fallen (1998)

Posted on March 7, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

John Hobbes is a Philadelphia Police Detective, who is about to visit the serial killer Edgar Reese who is on death row. Despite this, Reese is in a pretty good mood, and during their conversation he grabs Hobbes’ hand and says something that at first is assumed to be pure gobbledygook, but is later identified as Syrian Aramaic. Later, when Reese is about to be executed, he mocks everyone who is watching. Not in Gacy-style by telling them to kiss his ass, but by singing “Time Is on My Side“ by The Rolling Stones. When the show is over, the world is one psychopath less. Or is it? Shortly afterwards, Hobbes and his partner Jonesy investigates a string of new murders which is reminiscent of Reese’s style, making them think there’s a copycat on the loose. As Hobbes digs further, he finds that something demonic is pulling the strings.

Fallen is a supernatural horror thriller from 1998, directed by Gregory Hoblit and stars Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, Embeht Davidtz, James Gandolfini and Elias Koteas. It received mixed reviews, and earned only $25.2 million on a $46 million budget. It has later started gaining a bit of a cult following where the common audience appears to be a lot more appreciative than the critics.

Supernatural horror movies about demon hunting and possessions are a dime a dozen, and if you’ve also seen the Supernatural TV series, this movie will feel like very familiar and well-trodden territory. Now, with this being a movie from 1998, it’s kind of fun to check out something that precedes the others and it definitely holds up well on its own. The supernatural elements are for the most part portrayed as a more mysterious part of the movie, mixing well with the detective elements. There’s no graphic violence or any actual scares here, but the mystery entwined with the supernatural elements makes it exciting enough for a popcorn evening. There’s also a fair amount of familiar faces here: Donald Sutherland plays a grumpy no-bullshit kind of guy as usual, and John Goodman fits well as the upbeat and jolly policeman. James Gandolfini, most known for his role as the mafia boss Tony in the TV series The Sopranos, hasn’t become the well-known mafia character yet and here he is walking around with a 70s mustache. Denzel Washington who is playing the protagonist is also doing a good job at playing a rational character who is very much forced to believe all the strange stuff that keeps happening around him.

Those who watched Nefarious (2023) saw the similarities to Fallen, and I also think that the Supernatural series might’ve been inspired as well. Still, the plot of Fallen is also similar to a movie from 1990 called The First Power, where a policeman hunts a serial killer called the Pentagram Killer, who’s been brought back to life by Satan. That movie received mostly negative reception, but ended up being a financial success anyway (then again, it had a much lower budget).

Overall, Fallen is a pretty nice supernatural thriller, which will probably feel a bit familiar if you’ve ever seen Supernatural or any of the demon-hunting movies or series that’s been released over the years. The movie is, however, pretty easy to feel comfortable with as it doesn’t overplay the supernatural events to the point of it becoming too cheesy, and it’s fast paced enough to have a lasting popcorn-entertainment effect. It also has a pretty nice twist at the end, and while I’ve gotten a bit tired of movies focusing too much on leading up to a twist, this one came more like a sly little surprise, and that’s something I can appreciate.

Director: Gregory Hoblit
Writer: Nicolas Kazan
Country & year: USA, 1998
Actors: Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, Embeth Davidtz, James Gandolfini, Elias Koteas, Gabriel Casseus, Michael J. Pagan, Robert Joy, Frank Medrano
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119099/

The McPherson Tape (1989)

Posted on March 4, 2025March 4, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Uh-oh…Here comes the little grey men! With their sticky faces and lasers. So let’s demonstrate our Second Amendment by shooting them straight in the mug to show them who’s the good guys here. Can’t get more Americana than that, besides having a collective, chronic and crippling fear of aliens/lizard people (and Bigfoot). God bless America.

The McPherson Tape is a penny-budget amateur found footage film that starts during a birthday party with the Van Heese family at an isolated farmhouse in Connecticut. The year is 1983 and Michael has just bought a shiny new VHS camera to document the five-year-old Michelle blowing out the candles. Then suddenly the electricity goes out…

Michael and his brothers head out in the pitch black darkness to get a clue on what happened, and what they see not so far from the house is a UFO and three tiny aliens from a certain Steven Spielberg film. It’s, of course, all blurry, grainy and unfocused since there was no budget to build a decent-looking spaceship. As the pussy pants they are, they run back to the house in full panic mode, grab the shotgun and shoot one of the poor aliens. Thoughts and prayers.

Now we just wait for the remaining aliens to take revenge on these morons. Because it’s hard to give a single frick about the family. The grandmother seems more irritated by being in the film, while the youngest of the cast, Michelle, looks more bored and wants to play cards rather than pretend to be scared. There’s a lot of yelling, arguing and such to amp up the tension as they’re isolated in the house while Michael, the cameraman, moans constantly like as if he hasn’t jerked-off since last week: Ahhh – Ahh – Ahhh – Ahh – Ahhhh – Ahhh – Ahhh – Ahhh …

The McPherson Tape is written and directed by the young and upcoming filmmaker Dean Alioto, who made the film during one night after a week of rehearsals. A friend of his funded the budget of $6,500 and the film got a distribution deal. And here’s the starting point with the wild circumstances around it, all from the funny conspiracy theories and how people actually believed that this was legit proof that aliens walk among us. Because listen to this; after the distribution deal, the warehouse burned down with all the copies of the film and Dean Alioto bitterly wrote the film off as a big loss. Life went on as he continued to work in the television industry without realizing that the distributor had managed to send out dozens of copies before the fire. One of these VHS cassettes ended up in the hands of a prankster who re-edited the opening and closing text. He/she then spread pirated copies to the UFO community where the audience around the US burst into full hysteria mode as they believed that this mysterious home-made film was real. Rumors also spread that the authorities were trying to seize video copies, which, yeah, of course. The most profiled people who ate this up were the UFO expert Tom Dongo and the retired Lt. Colonel for the U.S. Army stated that I am not convinced that this thing is a hoax. Dean Aliato eventually got his lost film under the radar, as it lived a life of its own, which he apparently had forgotten about, and made a public statement that the film was just a fake amateur reel. But too late as the floodgates are fully open.

The original title for the film was actually U.F.O. Abduction, but got called The McPherson Tape during its resurrection at the UFO conventions in the 1990s, despite there’s no one in the film with that name. Huh…

Dean Aliato didn’t seem to have higher ambitions than making a silly film packed in a new unique format that we haven’t seen before, and all credits goes to him for being as ahead of his time with the found footage genre as he was. By all means. This would maybe be seen as the first Blair Witch if it got the theatrical release. And somehow it did, but only very limited at UFO conventions where the popcorn was replaced with mushrooms. But the product itself is way too sloppy and naive to be taken seriously, even back in 1989. I’d probably be more impressed if this was made in the 1950s or in the wake of Orson Welle’s radio drama The War of the Worlds. I couldn’t avoid laughing when we saw the glimpses of the aliens more closely, here played by three eight-year-olds in the most stereotypical and generic looking costumes possible. So it has its amusing entertainment value during its short runtime of 70 minutes, but mostly for the wrong reasons. The controversies behind it make it even funnier with the fact that there are UFO “experts“ even to this day in the year of 2025 who is convinced that this is 100% authentic. Because believing in aliens in the USA isn’t just a matter of believing, it’s a full-blown religion.

Dean Alioto remade the film in 1998 for the TV channel UPN, titled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. It never got a physical release but can be watched on YouTube. Despite a higher budget and more professional actors, the film is even worse than the original and gives an impression that it was made just to mock the gullible minds who still refused to believe that The McPherson Tape was not real. And guess what: several UFO “experts“ actually did. Yes – again. Fool me once, fool me twice. I’d bet that the same audience got some sleepless nights after Oren Peli’s hidden space turkey Area 51 (2015) and would have no problem believing that ALF (the ’80s sitcom) was abruptly canceled with the most brutal cliffhanger because the US Government found out that he was played by an actual real alien.

Writer and director: Dean Alioto
Original title: U.F.O. Abduction
Country & year: USA, 1989
Actors: Tommy Giavocchini, Patrick Kelley, Shirly McCalla, Stacey Shulman, Christine Staples, Laura Tomas, Dean Alioto, Kay Parten, Ginny Klekker, Rose Schneider
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169005/