The Cellar is far too bogged down in the why of its haunted house conceit, deferring thrills in its dull march to an inevitable conclusion. Brendan Muldowney’s The…
Night’s End is a Frankensteined mess of horror movie modes that never achieves any formal or thematic cogency. Jennifer Reeder has always gravitated toward highly particular…
The Seed offers plenty of gooey, gloopy genre fun, but is ultimately too scattershot and arrhythmically paced to fully recommend. There’s always room out there for…
Hellbender is the best kind of DIY effort, technically accomplished and on the verge of transcendent horror. 2019 introduced genre audiences to The Deeper You…
All the Moons is a gorgeous, sorrowful, and achingly sensitive fairy tale. Though it at first looks like a typical, if particularly handsome, period vampire film,…
Like so much recent horror, Slapface relies too heavily on soft metaphor, but there’s sufficient talent here to still keep things interesting. Jeremiah Kipp’s Slapface…
The Last Thing Mary Saw is sedate bit of moody horror that takes an array of cinematic reference points and flattens them until there’s little…
Boy Harsher’s foray into filmmaking is a bit clunky, but The Runner certainly doesn’t lack for ambition or vibes. Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have…
Death Valley is an underwhelming but mostly inoffensive bit of lightweight genre work, delivering a few moments and overcoming obvious budget limitations. As has been periodically mentioned…
As far as holiday traditions go, advent calendar are pretty lame; The Advent Calendar is lamer. Break out your horror premise Bingo cards, because if you marked…
The Strings is pure vibe-y lite-horror, director Ryan Glover skilled at eerie mood-setting and constructing effective compositions and ambiance. Ryan Glover’s new film The Strings is almost…
Like so many pastiches before it, the thematically unfocused Dead & Beautiful succumbs to its own vacuous sheen. In the metropolitan center of Taipei, five young…
V/H/S/94 isn’t entirely successful, but it marks an upswing for the anthology franchise from its last entry. The first V/H/S film was a novelty, a throwback to…
Martyrs Lane is the latest horror film built around a metaphor for trauma in which boredom and cliche trump any catharsis. There’s a palpable sense…
Superhost isn’t heavy on style and runs out of steam too early, but Gracie Gillam’s outlandishly unhinged performance keep things from becoming bland rehash. A companion…
There’s a perverse gothic sex comedy located somewhere in Jakob’s Wife, but it’s buried under reams of flat, deadening horror comedy. The work that made Barbara Crampton…
Bleed With Me is too generic as a familiar, slow-burn mood exercise, but Moses has plenty of technical acumen to recommend keeping an eye on…
Teddy feels awfully familiar and its bid at upsetting that template doesn’t quite work, but the Boukherma brothers at least present a clear sensibility that could…
The Boy Behind the Door doesn’t do much that hasn’t been seen before, but mostly works on the strength of its careful, expert craft. A tough,…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many…
The Call’s throwback vibes don’t do much to add to its predictable style and lack of notable scares. Arriving on the heels of the Fear…