Urban Legends, High-Rises, and Terrible Boyfriends Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Kandisha takes the classic “say-her-name-and-summon-the-vengeful-spirit” setup and drags it into a rough French housing estate, then lets it loose on every man in a 5-kilometer radius. It’s part urban legend, part grief drama, part supernatural slasher, and somehow the mix actually works. This is … Read More “Kandisha (2020) Bloody folklore meets French tower blocks” »
Fear, Fire, and… Not Much Else I Am Fear really wants you to know it’s about something. Terrorism. Media spectacle. Islamophobia. American paranoia. Wildfires. Supernatural forces. July 4th. At some point you start to suspect someone had a checklist and decided to just throw every Hot Topic into a blender and call it a screenplay. … Read More “I Am Fear (2020) Edgy terror tale without edge” »
Witchcraft, Ratings, and Regime Change Cristian Ponce’s History of the Occult is what happens when a political thriller, a late-night talk show, and a satanic panic documentary all get tossed into the same cursed broadcast signal. Shot in moody black-and-white and framed as the final episode of a popular 1980s Argentine news program, it plays … Read More “History of the Occult (2020) Conspiracy, coven, and cursed TV” »
Pandemic Horror Before It Was Cool (and Horribly Real) There’s something almost quaint now about a pre-COVID virus movie. Hall arrived at that awkward moment when “airborne pathogen ravages the world” was still a genre hook and not the evening news. Watching it now feels like opening a time capsule labeled: “What we thought a … Read More “Hall (2020) Virus, hallway, and bad marriages” »
A Grimm Story, Finally Grim Enough Osgood Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel is what happens when someone takes the old Brothers Grimm safety warning—“don’t go into the forest, kids”—and shoots it like arthouse horror instead of a sugary studio remake. This is not the candy-coated cottage of your childhood; it’s a slow, beautifully rotting nightmare where … Read More “Gretel & Hansel (2020) Moody fairy tale with teeth” »
Expectations: Four Giants, One Tiny Film On paper, Ghost Stories sounds like a horror fan’s dream and a film student’s wet thesis: four of India’s most prominent directors—Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar—each delivering a short horror film, bundled into one Netflix anthology. In practice, it plays like four separate people were … Read More “Ghost Stories (2020) Four auteurs, zero real scares” »
The Funeral Home answers a question most horror movies are too cowardly to confront: What if you not only live above a funeral parlor… but the house is also full of ghosts, a demon, unresolved family trauma, and Argentine passive-aggressiveness? Somehow, writer/director Mauro Iván Ojeda turns that cursed cocktail into something oddly moving, quietly bleak, … Read More “The Funeral Home” »
Fantasy Island is what happens when you take a cheesy 70s TV show about wish fulfillment, ask, “But what if it was DARK?” and then hand the script to a committee of studio notes and a random plot generator. It’s marketed as Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island, but it feels more like Spirit Halloween’s Lost Screenplay: shiny, … Read More “Fantasy Island” »
The Evil Next Door is the story of a blended family, a creepy duplex, and a demon that—much like this script—really needs to find a hobby. On paper, this Swedish horror film sounds promising: grief, domestic tension, haunted semi-detached housing. In practice, it’s like someone watched The Conjuring, The Babadook, and a real estate commercial, … Read More “The Evil Next Door” »
Evil Eye is a movie about generational trauma, reincarnation, and red flags the size of a Bollywood dance number… and yet somehow it still manages to be mostly about people having long, tense phone calls in well-lit apartments. If you’ve ever thought, “What if Get Out but with less tension, more Skype, and a villain … Read More “Evil Eye” »