Poché Pictures

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” »

Don’t Click is the kind of movie that feels like a moral you’d get in a chain email from 2004—“If you watch bad things online, something worse will watch you”—except here the spam actually follows through and ruins your life. And somehow, it’s pretty fun to watch it happen. Hell is Other People’s Browser History … Read More “Don’t Click” »

Death of Me is the kind of movie that feels less like a horror film and more like a dare: “How long can you keep watching this before your soul quietly walks out of the room?” Spoiler: my soul left around the time Maggie Q vomited a snake. On paper, this had potential. Darren Lynn … Read More “Death of Me” »