The Horror Feed

Chucky Is Coming Back: Don Mancini Signs With IAG to Develop the Next Movie. What’s Confirmed, What He’s Said and What’s at Stake

Thu, 12 Nov 2026 23:52:03 GMT

Twenty-two years ago today, on November 12, 2004, Seed of Chucky opened in theaters. It was the last time a Chucky movie made by the man who invented him played on the big screen. Every film since has gone straight to home video, streaming or cable, and the one Chucky picture that did get a wide release in that stretch, MGM's 2019 Child's Play remake, was made without him. This week, Don Mancini made it clear he wants to change that.

As Deadline first reported , Mancini has signed with Independent Artist Group for representation, and the first thing on the agenda is developing the next chapter of the Chucky franchise, alongside a slate of original film and TV projects. It isn't a greenlight, and there's no studio, title or date yet. But it's the clearest business signal so far that the movie Mancini has been talking about since April is moving from convention-stage tease to an actual project being shopped. Here's everything that's confirmed, what Mancini has already said about it, how the franchise got here, and what's really at stake for the killer doll.

Watch: The Last Time We Saw Chucky

There's no footage of the new film, because there's no new film yet. The most recent official look at Chucky is SYFY's trailer for the back half of the TV series' third and final season, the run that put the doll in the White House. It's a good reminder of where Mancini left his characters, which matters, because he says the movie picks up from there.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Actually Confirmed

Let's separate the hard news from the hopes. Here's what the reporting on the Independent Artist Group signing actually establishes:

The deal: Mancini, a writer, director and producer, has signed with IAG for representation. It's an agency signing, not a studio or financing deal, and no terms were disclosed ( JoBlo , Martin Cid Magazine ).
The focus: developing the next iteration of the Chucky franchise comes first, followed by original film and television projects ( Dread Central , Rue Morgue ).
Legal side: Mancini stays with his attorney, Joel VanderKloot of VanderKloot Law.
Not announced: a studio, a title, cast, a budget, a shooting date or a release date. The names of the original projects in his IAG slate weren't reported either.

What we do have is a good deal of on-record intent from earlier this year. In April, Mancini told the crowd at Steel City Comic Con in Pennsylvania, "I'm writing a new Chucky movie," per Deadline . In the weeks after, he laid out the shape of it: a theatrical release rather than another VOD drop, a return to genuinely scary territory in the spirit of 2013's Curse of Chucky , and a story that continues from both 2017's Cult of Chucky and the 2021-2024 TV series ( SYFY Wire , Total Film ). He's also said he plans to direct it himself. SYFY Wire described the project as reportedly a semi-reboot that still connects to everything that came before, minus the 2019 remake.

Who's Behind It: The Only Person Who's Never Left

Few horror franchises have a single author the way Chucky does. Mancini co-wrote the original Child's Play in 1988 with John Lafia and director Tom Holland, then wrote Child's Play 2 (1990), Child's Play 3 (1991) and Bride of Chucky (1998) on his own. He took over the director's chair with Seed of Chucky in 2004 and stayed there for Curse and Cult . Outside the doll, his résumé runs through NBC's Hannibal , where he was a writer and producer, Syfy's anthology Channel Zero , where he was a supervising producer, and an episode of HBO's Tales from the Crypt .

Then there's the voice. Brad Dourif has voiced Chucky in every Mancini-made entry since 1988, and his daughter Fiona Dourif became a franchise fixture starting with Curse . Jennifer Tilly, who joined as Tiffany Valentine in Bride , has been the franchise's loudest cheerleader for more. After the cancellation she told Entertainment Tonight, "I know for a fact there is more Chucky and Tiffany in the works" ( via Deadline ). Nobody has been officially cast, but if the movie really continues the series, it's hard to picture it without Dourif's cackle and Tilly's purr.

Photo: Brad Dourif via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: From Theaters to VOD to TV and Back

Chucky's history is a lesson in how a horror icon survives when Hollywood loses interest. The first three films came quickly, between 1988 and 1991. After a seven-year break, Bride of Chucky reinvented the series as a horror comedy in 1998 and became its biggest box office hit. Seed of Chucky pushed the camp even further in 2004 and earned the least of the theatrical Mancini films.

Universal's answer was to shrink the scale. Curse of Chucky (2013) and Cult of Chucky (2017) were made for about $5 million each, per The Numbers , and went to home video and VOD, with Cult also landing on Netflix. Both pulled the series back toward real dread, and fans largely loved them for it. Meanwhile, MGM held the rights to the original film and rebooted it in 2019 with Mark Hamill voicing a high-tech Chucky, a version Mancini had no part in.

Mancini's next move was television. Chucky premiered simultaneously on Syfy and USA Network on October 12, 2021, as a direct sequel to Cult . It ran three seasons of eight episodes each, 24 in all, with the third season split into two parts that ended on May 1, 2024 ( series history ). The show drew strong reviews in all three seasons, but on September 27, 2024, it was canceled. Mancini has said he had already pitched a fourth season to the network. The whole series now streams on Peacock.

Here's the timeline that led to this week:

Sept. 27, 2024: Syfy and USA cancel Chucky after three seasons.
April 12, 2026: At Steel City Comic Con, Mancini says he's writing a new Chucky movie.
April 2026: Follow-up reports outline a scary, theatrical film that continues Cult and the series, with Mancini directing.
Nov. 11, 2026: Mancini signs with Independent Artist Group, with the next Chucky project at the top of his slate.

By the Numbers

The franchise's box office history explains both why a theatrical return is plausible and why studios have been cautious. Worldwide grosses and budgets, per The Numbers :

Child's Play (1988): $44.2 million worldwide on a $13 million budget.
Child's Play 2 (1990): $35.8 million worldwide on $13 million, with the original trilogy's best opening at $10.7 million.
Child's Play 3 (1991): $19.9 million worldwide.
Bride of Chucky (1998): $50.7 million worldwide on $25 million, the high-water mark.
Seed of Chucky (2004): $25.3 million worldwide on $12 million.
Curse (2013) and Cult (2017): about $5 million each, no theatrical release.
Child's Play (2019 remake): $47 million worldwide on $10 million, with a $14.1 million opening.

Two things jump out. First, Chucky has never been a blockbuster. Even Bride , the peak, cleared barely $50 million worldwide. Second, the 2019 remake, without Mancini, Dourif or Tilly, still nearly matched it on a much smaller budget. That tells you the doll itself still sells tickets. A lean, Blumhouse-sized budget in the $10 million range would put a new Mancini film in the same zone where the remake turned a solid profit.

Analysis: What This Really Means

An agency signing is not a greenlight, and it's worth being clear-eyed about that. What it does mean is that Mancini now has a major representation team whose job is to pair his Chucky film with a buyer and money. The franchise has lived at two companies, Universal for the sequels and the series and MGM for the 2019 remake, and its TV home is gone, so landing the right partner is the real hurdle. The news suggests that process is starting in earnest.

The bigger question is whether the theatrical killer-doll market still has room. The comparison everyone will make is M3GAN . Blumhouse and Universal's original was a breakout in January 2023, but M3GAN 2.0 opened to around $10 million in June 2025 and was widely called a flop ( Bloody Disgusting ), with many critics pinning it on the sequel trading horror for action. That's the most useful lesson for Chucky: audiences show up for a killer doll when it's scary, and drift when it isn't. Mancini's pitch, back to the dread of Curse and the first two films, is pointed squarely at that lesson.

The second comparison is Annabelle , which proved a doll can carry a hugely profitable theatrical series on modest budgets when it's built for scares and plugged into a bigger universe. Chucky already has its universe, 35-plus years of continuity, the TV characters and a loyal fan base, but it also carries a risk that Annabelle never had: casual audiences haven't followed Chucky through three seasons of cable TV. A film that leans too hard on series lore could alienate them. That's probably why "semi-reboot" keeps coming up. The trick will be making a movie a first-timer can walk into while still paying off Andy, Kyle, Tiffany and the series kids.

There's also an author-ownership story here worth cheering. Horror is full of franchises that slipped away from their creators. Mancini has been the steady hand for nearly four decades, has kept the series' queer-themed storytelling at its center, and has survived a rival remake, a shift to VOD and a TV cancellation. If he gets the doll back into theaters on his own terms, it would be a rare win for the person who actually made the monster.

What We Still Don't Know

Who's paying for it: No studio or distributor has been named. Universal, which handled the sequels and the series, is the obvious first call, but nothing is confirmed.
Theaters vs. streaming: Mancini wants theatrical. Whether a buyer agrees is the open question.
Who's back: Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly haven't been officially announced, nor has anyone from the series' younger cast.
When: There's no title, start date or release window. With the script still in development, 2027 at the earliest looks realistic, and that's our estimate, not an announcement.
The original projects: IAG will also shop Mancini's non-Chucky film and TV ideas, which haven't been named.

Bottom Line

The headline isn't "new Chucky movie greenlit," and nobody should sell it that way. But a creator who has said publicly that he's writing the script, wants to direct it, wants it scary and wants it in theaters has now lined up the kind of representation that gets movies made. Twenty-two years after Seed of Chucky left theaters, the Good Guy is closer to the big screen than he's been in a long time.

So, over to you: should the next Chucky movie pick up the TV series' story, or hit reset and go back to the pure terror of the 1988 original?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Jennifer Tilly (Tiffany Valentine) in 1991 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline (Nov. 2026) , Dread Central , JoBlo , Rue Morgue , Martin Cid Magazine , Deadline (April 2026) , SYFY Wire , Total Film , The Numbers , Chucky (TV series) history , Bloody Disgusting .

Opinion: Jason Doesn’t Need a New Movie. Peacock Needs to Renew ‘Crystal Lake’ Now

Thu, 12 Nov 2026 17:51:04 GMT

Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, and for the first time in 17 years, Jason Voorhees actually has something new to celebrate. Peacock's Crystal Lake dropped all eight episodes on October 15, debuted at No. 1 in the U.S. and Canada, and became the first project in franchise history to earn a fresh score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Four weeks later, Peacock still hasn't renewed it. Meanwhile, co-creator Sean S. Cunningham keeps saying a new "old school" movie is in the works.

Here's our take, and we'll stand behind it: Friday the 13th doesn't need another movie right now. It needs Crystal Lake Season 2. The franchise spent four decades proving it can make money in theaters and almost nothing else. The show proved, in one season, that this story can be good. Below: the numbers, the track record, why TV fits Jason better than anyone expected, the fair case for the big screen, and what Peacock should do next.

Watch the Trailer

Peacock's official full trailer, released September 13:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

And the first teaser from July, which is still the best 51 seconds of Linda Cardellini whispering to a lake you'll see this year:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

1. The Movies Made Money. They Almost Never Made Fans Out of Critics.

Let's be fair to the films first, because the money is real. Twelve movies, from the 1980 original through the 2009 reboot, grossed about $468 million worldwide on a combined budget of roughly $81 million. Sean Cunningham's original cost about $550,000 and made nearly $60 million. Freddy vs. Jason is still the series' biggest hit at $116.6 million worldwide in 2003. Marcus Nispel's 2009 reboot opened on, yes, Friday, February 13 and pulled in $92.7 million on a $19 million budget.

Now look at what critics thought. CBR ran the Rotten Tomatoes table in October, and it's brutal: the 1980 original sits at 48 percent. Jason Lives , the fan favorite, has 39. Jason Takes Manhattan has 8. Not one film with Jason in it has ever landed a fresh score. Crystal Lake opened at 86 percent and has settled at 77 percent from 77 reviews, with a 61 on Metacritic and an audience score of 88. That's the franchise's best critical showing ever, and it isn't close.

You can argue Rotten Tomatoes doesn't matter for slashers, and plenty of us love Part VI no matter what the score says. But the point isn't that critics finally approved. The point is that the series finally found a format where the story gets room to breathe, and people noticed.

2. The Show Is Already a Hit, and the Numbers Say So

According to NBCUniversal figures reported by Collider and JoBlo, Crystal Lake racked up 1.3 billion minutes viewed in its first 11 days, making it Peacock's fourth-biggest scripted original debut ever. Nielsen had it at No. 3 among streaming original series for the week of October 19. The show also stayed at No. 1 for two straight weeks in Canada, where it streamed on Crave.

For a streamer that still lives in Netflix's shadow, that's a big deal. Peacock doesn't have dozens of original horror franchises sitting around. It has one with a hockey mask (well, eventually) and a name everybody knows. And as we covered earlier this month, Peacock already passed on Eli Roth's Hostel series with Paul Giamatti. If it's going to bet on horror, this is the bet already paying off.

3. Linda Cardellini Is the Argument

Betsy Palmer's Mrs. Voorhees is one of horror's great reveals, but in 1980 she got about 15 minutes of screen time to go from friendly camp cook to beheaded killer. The films never had time to ask what grief does to a person over years. A series does.

Nearly every review circled the same thing. THR's Daniel Fienberg called Cardellini the main reason to keep watching. IGN's Scott Collura said the show works largely because of her. Even Titus Welliver jumped on Instagram to call her "the gold standard." Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane told Collider that Cardellini was his first choice, and in interviews he keeps coming back to how much grief she carries on screen. The production even thought about copying Palmer's hairstyle before deciding it would feel like cosplay. That's a team that understood the assignment: honor the original, don't imitate it.

You can't get that performance in a 95-minute reboot. You get it in eight hours.

4. The Timeline Practically Demands More Seasons

This is the strongest point in favor of TV, and it comes from the show itself. Per JoBlo, Kane has said the events of the 1980 movie are still eight years away at the end of Season 1. That's a long runway, and it's the kind TV is built for. Kane has already told Bloody Disgusting (via CBR) that he wants "a whole hell of a lot more" of Sackhead Jason, more carnage, franchise characters who haven't shown up yet, and William Catlett's Chief Levon Brooks back as the lead. JoBlo reports Kane even floated a possible tie to the Jarvis family, which would make every Tommy Jarvis fan lose their mind.

Kane also told Collider the show recreates scenes from the movies in new contexts and uses Jason "liberally," and that's the trick. The films kept resetting Jason every few years, rebooting him, sending him to hell, sending him to space. The show can build him slowly from a kid who loves holding a machete (young star Callum Vinson's favorite killer is Art the Clown, per Kane) into the thing in the woods. Watching a monster get made is a better story than watching a monster get reset.

5. TV Is Where Horror's Old Franchises Have Been Thriving

There's a track record here. Bates Motel took a 1960 classic and ran five seasons on A&E by treating Norman's mother as a person, not a twist. Starz's Ash vs Evil Dead gave Bruce Campbell three seasons after the movies stalled. Don Mancini kept Chucky alive for three seasons when the theatrical lane dried up. And Kane himself came to this job from HBO's It: Welcome to Derry , another prequel that grew a movie mythology into a TV world.

Compare that to the theatrical side. Warner set an August 13, 2010 date for a sequel to the reboot, then pulled it that December. Writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift finished a script by 2011. A Paramount reboot died in 2017. Then the Victor Miller rights fight froze everything for years. In May 2024, Cunningham said studios were hesitant to fund a horror movie that might not be a financial success. In March 2026, he told TMZ a treatment for an "old school" movie was done and that he and Miller had worked things out. There's still no greenlight, director, cast or date. The show isn't a placeholder for the movie. Right now it's the only part of this franchise that actually works.

Photo: Sean S. Cunningham via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

6. The Other Side: Jason Belongs in a Packed Theater

The case against us is real, so let's make it properly. Slashers are a crowd experience. Part of the joy of a Friday movie is a theater full of people groaning at the same kill. The genre's theatrical lane is alive, too: Terrifier 3 made about $90 million worldwide on a tiny budget, and David Gordon Green's Halloween made over $250 million in 2018. Damien Leone is heading back for Terrifier 4 , and A24 should be watching that like a hawk.

The reviews weren't all raves, either. The Guardian's Benjamin Lee called the expansion unnecessary and the tone uneven. TIME's Judy Berman argued the premise was never rich enough to stretch this far. IndieWire's Ben Travers wasn't wowed by where it lands. And plenty of fans just want a grown Jason in a hockey mask, which Season 1 doesn't give them. Kane Hodder, who played him four times, is still the face a lot of fans picture, and no prequel about Pamela's grief can replace that.

Photo: Kane Hodder by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

We hear all of it. But "fans want the mask" is an argument for Season 2 and 3, not against them. The show is heading to the mask. A rushed movie that skips the journey would just be reboot number two, and history tells us how those end: one big opening and then another decade of nothing.

What Peacock Should Do

Renew it now. Every week of silence lets the cast scatter. Cardellini, Catlett and Hamish Linklater are not going to sit around.
Keep Kane. The project already burned through Bryan Fuller and Kevin Williamson before he steadied it. Don't start over again.
Plan the endgame. Eight years of story left means a clear finish line: end the series where the 1980 film begins. That's a better pitch for a movie than anything sitting in a drawer.
Let the movie wait. If Cunningham's "old school" film happens, it'll be stronger walking in behind a hit show than replacing one.

Bottom Line

For 17 years, Friday the 13th was a famous name with nowhere to go. Crystal Lake gave it somewhere: a slower, sadder, still bloody story about the woman who made the monster, with the best reviews the series has ever had and the viewership to back them up. A theatrical Jason can come later. Right now, the smartest move this franchise can make is to stay at camp.

So tell us, on the eve of Friday the 13th: would you rather get Crystal Lake Season 2 or a brand-new Jason movie first? Make your case in the comments. We know some of you are already sharpening machetes.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Linda Cardellini at South by Southwest 2019 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Videos: Peacock official YouTube channel.

Sources: Crystal Lake (TV series) overview , Friday the 13th franchise overview , CBR (Rotten Tomatoes) , CBR (Kane on the finale) , Collider (viewership) , Collider (Kane and Catlett interview) , JoBlo , Dark Horizons (review roundup) , Screen Rant , iHorror , TVLine , Pamela Voorhees overview .

‘Terrifier 4’ Won’t Make Art the Clown Sympathetic: David Howard Thornton on the Origin Story, and Everything We Know

Thu, 12 Nov 2026 12:52:01 GMT

For three movies, Art the Clown has been a monster with no explanation attached. He doesn't talk, he doesn't have a reason, and he doesn't care whether you understand him. Now Damien Leone has promised that Terrifier 4 will finally show us where he came from, and that has fans asking the obvious question: what happens to the scariest silent killer of the decade once he has a backstory?

The man under the greasepaint has an answer, and fans of the series' nastier side will be glad to hear it. At a Chattanooga Comic Con panel over the weekend, David Howard Thornton said he and Leone don't want Art's origin to make him a sad case. Below, we cover what Thornton said, everything confirmed about Terrifier 4 so far, the numbers that made this franchise a phenomenon, and why horror's track record with killer origin stories makes "no sympathy" the right call.

Watch: Where Art Left Off

There's no Terrifier 4 footage yet; the film has not shot. Here is the official Terrifier 3 teaser from Screambox, the Cineverse streaming service behind the last chapter, as a reminder of what Art's Christmas looked like.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What Thornton Said

The comments came from a panel hosted by ComicBook's Chris Killian, which ComicBook published on Nov. 10 and Dread Central, AV Club, Creepy Catalog and iHorror picked up over the next two days.

Thornton said Art's backstory was the very first thing he asked about the day he sat down in the makeup chair. He wanted to know who this clown was and why he does what he does. According to Thornton, Leone's honest answer back then was that he didn't know yet. Their ideas have shifted over the years, and Thornton was clear that he still doesn't know exactly where Leone will land.

What he does know is the line they won't cross. "We don't want him to have a sympathetic background," he told the crowd, per Dread Central . In Thornton's private version of the character, Art was simply evil from the moment he arrived in the world, and he offered the crowd a deliberately grim image of the clown's birth to prove the point. As iHorror notes, that's Thornton's head-canon, not anything shown in the films.

He also said he hopes the new film gets into why Art never speaks, something three movies have left untouched. And when asked whether Terrifier 4 would be his goodbye, he said he isn't done with the character, has a blast playing him and would come back.

One caution: some headlines ran with the idea that the movie "will depict" a specific evil origin. AV Club's own write-up quotes Thornton saying he doesn't know what Leone will settle on. The confirmed part is the intent: no sympathy, no sad clown.

What's Confirmed About Terrifier 4

It's happening. Leone confirmed a fourth film in September 2024, weeks before Terrifier 3 opened.
It's an origin story, at least in part. In January 2025 Leone said the fourth film would be the final installment and would dig into Art's beginnings. At Texas Frightmare Weekend in May 2025 he told fans the backstory would arrive in the movie's first 15 minutes.
It's set on New Year's Eve. Leone revealed the holiday on Instagram on May 8, 2026, after Halloween (the first two films) and Christmas (the third).
The target is 2027. Answering a fan, Leone said the plan is a theatrical release in 2027, Dread Central reported on May 11, 2026. No date has been set.
The script was nearly done in February. Leone posted that the screenplay was very close to completion and that he hoped to begin pre-production in the spring, Fangoria reported on Feb. 25, 2026. He added that official news would come through his own social accounts.
Thornton is back as Art. Lauren LaVera is widely expected to return as Sienna Shaw, but no cast list has been announced.

Not confirmed: a distributor (Cineverse released Terrifier 3 ), a budget, a start date for filming, or the rest of the cast.

Who's Behind It

Damien Leone is the whole engine. He created Art, and he writes, directs and edits the films, while also handling the practical effects that made the series infamous. Art first showed up in Leone's 2008 short The 9th Circle , then in the 2011 short Terrifier ; both were folded into the 2013 anthology All Hallows' Eve , the character's feature debut.

Photo: Damien Leone via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

David Howard Thornton took over from Mike Giannelli, who played Art in the early shorts and anthology before retiring from acting. Thornton, from Huntsville, Alabama, landed the part for the 2016 feature after sending in an audition that included an improvised kill. His background is the secret weapon: he understudied the Grinch on tour in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical , and that stage-trained physical comedy is why a mute clown can be both hilarious and horrifying in the same shot. He earned a Fangoria Chainsaw Award nomination for the first Terrifier , then played a murderous Grinch in The Mean One (2022) and a killer Steamboat Willie in Screamboat (2025).

Lauren LaVera became the franchise's hero in Terrifier 2 as Sienna Shaw, the sword-wielding final girl who beheaded Art and then had to face him again in Terrifier 3 .

Photo: Lauren LaVera via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory So Far

Here's the short version of Art's on-screen life, light on spoilers. In Terrifier (2016), he stalks a pair of friends on Halloween night and ends the film by his own hand when police close in. Terrifier 2 (2022) brought him back with help from the mysterious Little Pale Girl, introduced Sienna and her late father's mythology, and ended with Art's head on the floor. Terrifier 3 (2024) put him back together, moved the carnage to Christmas, and ended with Art slipping away, setting up the final chapter.

Notice what's missing from that summary: any reason. The films have dropped supernatural hints, from his resurrection to the strange entity riding along with him, but they've never told us who Art was before the makeup. That vacuum is a big part of why he works.

Leone has been teasing the reveal for a while. In an October 2025 Slasher Radio interview, Thornton said Leone told him he would love the origin story and described the finale in wildly enthusiastic terms. And the franchise's reach keeps growing: Art and Sienna are joining Dead by Daylight later this month, after appearances in Call of Duty and Fortnite .

By the Numbers

The stakes for Terrifier 4 come down to one of the wildest growth curves in modern horror:

Terrifier 2 (Oct. 6, 2022): made on about $250,000, it grossed about $15.8 million, helped along by widely shared reports of audience members fainting and throwing up, per Wikipedia's figures .
Terrifier 3 (Oct. 11, 2024): made for about $2 million, it opened to $18.9 million, beat everything at the box office that weekend, and finished around $90.3 million worldwide ($54 million domestic). It skipped the MPA ratings process to avoid an NC-17, making it the highest-grossing unrated film ever and Cineverse's biggest release.
Critics came around: Terrifier 3 scored 78% on Rotten Tomatoes from 127 reviews and 62 on Metacritic, with a B CinemaScore, per Wikipedia .

Put another way: Terrifier 3 earned roughly 45 times its budget. Very few horror films of any size can claim that, and almost none of them were unrated.

Analysis: Why "No Sympathy" Is the Right Call

Horror has run this experiment before, and the results are not kind. Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) spent its first act on young Michael Myers' miserable home life. It made money, about $80 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, but it sits at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, and John Carpenter later said the backstory took away the character's mystique. Some critics at the time felt the film made the young Michael almost sympathetic, which is exactly the trap Thornton is describing.

Hannibal Rising (2007) tried to explain Hannibal Lecter with wartime trauma and revenge. It cost $75 million, grossed $82.1 million worldwide and landed at 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Leatherface (2017) gave the Texas Chainsaw icon a teen origin and earned about $1.5 million worldwide with a 27% score. The pattern is hard to miss: when a franchise explains its monster with pain, the monster shrinks.

Thornton's version flips that. If Art was wrong from the start, the origin doesn't explain him away; it just shows that the evil goes all the way down. That keeps the core of the character intact. The fun of Art has always been that he's a cartoon and a nightmare at once, a mime who seems to enjoy his audience as much as his victims. Hand him a tragic childhood and you risk replacing that glee with pity.

The franchise has also already built a supernatural framework that gives Leone a third option between "sad human" and "no explanation." The Little Pale Girl, the resurrections and Sienna's destiny all point toward something cosmic rather than psychological. An origin that leans into that mythology could answer questions without making Art relatable. Leone's promise to put it in the first 15 minutes is smart, too: get it done, then let the clown work.

The commercial stakes are real. Terrifier 3 turned an indie gore series into a $90 million brand, and a fourth film billed as the finale will draw the curious as well as the faithful. The risk is the one every growing franchise faces, explaining too much to a bigger crowd. The upside is that Leone still controls almost every creative lever, and his lead actor is on record saying he wants to keep Art unknowable where it counts.

What We Still Don't Know

When filming starts, and whether pre-production has begun.
A release date. Leone has only said 2027, and a New Year's Eve setting makes a holiday-season release tempting.
Who distributes it, and whether it goes unrated again.
Who returns beyond Thornton, including LaVera, and whether the Little Pale Girl is part of the origin.
Whether Art finally gets a voice, or whether the film explains his silence instead.
Whether it's truly the end. Leone has called it the final installment, while Thornton keeps saying he'd return.

The Bottom Line

Origin stories have wounded better monsters than Art, but this one has a creator who has never softened anything and a star who just told a room full of fans that sympathy is off the table. If Leone can explain where Art came from without explaining why he's scary, Terrifier 4 could be the rare origin that makes its monster bigger.

So tell us: do you even want to know where Art came from, or should some clowns stay a mystery?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: David Howard Thornton by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: ComicBook , Dread Central , AV Club , iHorror , Creepy Catalog , Fangoria , Dread Central (2027 target) , Terrifier film series , Terrifier 3 , Terrifier 2 , Halloween (2007) , Hannibal Rising , Leatherface (2017) .

Stacy Keach Dies at 85: Remembering the ‘Roadgames,’ ‘Body Bags’ and ‘Ninth Configuration’ Star’s Underrated Horror Legacy

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 23:50:22 GMT

Stacy Keach, the gravel-voiced actor who spent six decades moving between Shakespeare, private-eye pulp and some of the strangest genre films of the late 20th century, has died at 85. His wife, Małgosia Tomassi Keach, said he died Tuesday, Nov. 10, at the family's home in Magdalenka, Poland, after a long fight with a serious heart condition and heart failure.

Most obituaries this week will lead with Mike Hammer, and fairly so. But horror fans knew a different Keach: the trucker playing cat-and-mouse with a killer in Roadgames , the vain businessman whose miracle hair transplant goes very wrong in John Carpenter's Body Bags , the haunted Marine psychiatrist at the center of William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration . This piece covers what we know about his death, the career that made him, and the genre work that deserves a second look right now.

What we know

Keach died Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026, at home in Magdalenka, a village just outside Warsaw. News of his death broke Tuesday evening via TMZ and was confirmed Wednesday by Fox News, Newsweek, Variety and others, all citing a statement from Tomassi Keach. In it she described his illness as a long and difficult battle with heart failure, and told The Hollywood Reporter, per Newsweek, that "He was a true warrior."

He is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1986, and their two children, Shannon and Karolina. His brother, actor and filmmaker James Keach, was his co-star in one of his best-loved westerns. Their father, Stacy Keach Sr., was a working actor and director in his own right.

Keach's health had been a public concern since June 2017, when he suffered a heart attack on stage at Chicago's Goodman Theatre during a one-man Hemingway show and later underwent a triple bypass, according to NTD. He kept working afterward, landing roles on The Blacklist and Man with a Plan , and his last screen role, per Cover Media, came in 2025's Jay Kelly .

There is no official studio trailer or tribute video to embed for this story, so we're letting the work speak below instead.

Photo: Stacy Keach via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who he was: Shakespeare first, everything else second

Walter Stacy Keach Jr. was born June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia. He was born with a cleft lip and a partial cleft palate, went through numerous surgeries as a child, and later served as honorary chairman of the Cleft Palate Foundation. The scar became part of his screen face, the kind of feature a lesser industry would have hidden and one that instead helped make him unforgettable.

He trained hard: an English and drama degree from UC Berkeley in 1963, an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1966, and a Fulbright to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. On stage he played the title role in the political satire MacBird! in 1967, earned a Tony nomination as Buffalo Bill in Broadway's Indians in 1969, and played Falstaff, Peer Gynt and Edmund in King Lear . His 1972 Hamlet in Central Park drew a New York Times rave from Clive Barnes, who called it "one of the great Hamlets of our time." He collected four Drama Desk Awards and three Helen Hayes Awards, the last for his own King Lear in 2009.

Film came fast. He played Doc Holliday in Doc (1971) opposite Faye Dunaway, then a washed-up boxer in John Huston's acclaimed Fat City (1972) and a rookie cop beside George C. Scott in The New Centurions the same year. He was Martin Luther in Luther (1974), the hapless Sgt. Stedenko in Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke (1978) and Nice Dreams (1981), and Frank James to his brother James's Jesse in Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980).

Television made him a household name. He played Mike Hammer on CBS's Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer from 1984 to 1987, earning a Golden Globe nomination, and returned to the trench coat for Mike Hammer, Private Eye in 1997-98. He won a Golden Globe and earned an Emmy nomination for playing Ernest Hemingway in the 1988 miniseries Hemingway . A younger audience met him as the boozy, gloriously awful dad Ken Titus on Fox's Titus (2000-2002), as Warden Henry Pope on Prison Break (2005-2007), and in Edward Norton's American History X (1998), The Bourne Legacy (2012) and Alexander Payne's Nebraska (2013). And millions heard him without seeing him: for roughly 16 years he was the voice of CNBC's American Greed .

The horror Keach: five performances worth revisiting

The Exorcist role that got away

Start with a near miss. According to Keach's own biography, he was the first choice to play Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist (1973), only for the part to go to playwright Jason Miller after screen tests. (Accounts differ on how close he came; one history calls him a contender rather than the front-runner.) Either way, William Peter Blatty didn't forget him.

The Ninth Configuration (1980)

Seven years later Blatty cast Keach as Col. Vincent "Killer" Kane in The Ninth Configuration , the author's directorial debut and the middle chapter of what he called his "Trilogy of Faith" alongside The Exorcist and Legion . Keach stepped in after Nicol Williamson was dropped from the role, and played a military psychiatrist sent to run a Gothic castle full of disturbed servicemen, a man whose calm hides something much darker. Jason Miller, of all people, co-starred, along with Scott Wilson, Ed Flanders, Robert Loggia and Tom Atkins.

The film flopped on its February 1980 release, but Blatty won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay and it has since built a devoted cult. It is part war-trauma drama, part absurdist comedy, part spiritual horror, and Keach's eerily still performance is the anchor holding it together. Trivia fans: it is believed to be the first appearance of the "Howie scream" sound effect.

Roadgames (1981)

If you only watch one Keach genre film this week, make it Richard Franklin's Roadgames . Writer Everett De Roche built it as Rear Window on the Nullarbor Plain: Keach is Pat Quid, an American trucker crossing Australia who becomes convinced the driver of a green van is a serial killer, with Jamie Lee Curtis, fresh off Halloween , as the hitchhiker he picks up. Franklin had wanted Sean Connery and couldn't afford him, and the actor's union fight that forced him to import Curtis turned into a gift.

The numbers were brutal at home. On a reported A$1.75 million budget it earned about A$100,000 in Australia, though Avco Embassy paid $500,000 for rights elsewhere. Franklin blamed marketing that sold it as a slasher. Critics have come around: it sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, Quentin Tarantino has named it a favorite, and it helped land Franklin the job directing Psycho II . Keach carries most of the film alone in a cab, talking to a dingo, and makes it riveting.

Photo: Jamie Lee Curtis, Keach's Roadgames co-star, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Class of 1999 (1990)

Mark L. Lester's follow-up to his own Class of 1984 casts Keach as Dr. Robert Forrest, the creepy architect of a program that puts combat androids in charge of a gang-ruled high school. Keach plays it with a slicked-back, faintly reptilian glee. It cost between $5.2 million and $7 million and made around $2.4 million, but its mix of killer-robot gore, Pam Grier and Malcolm McDowell has made it a VHS-era cult staple, complete with a Nine Inch Nails needle drop.

Body Bags (1993)

Showtime wanted its own Tales from the Crypt , hired John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, then dropped the series after filming started. The surviving segments became the anthology Body Bags , which premiered on Aug. 8, 1993. In Carpenter's "Hair," Keach plays Richard Coberts, a businessman so obsessed with his thinning hair that he signs up for a miracle treatment from a clinic run by David Warner, with Sheena Easton and Debbie Harry along for the ride. What grows back is not hair. It's the funniest, nastiest thing in the film, and Keach commits fully to a man who would rather be devoured than bald.

Carpenter liked him enough to call again: three years later Keach played Commander Mac Malloy, the man who sends Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken into the wasteland in Escape from L.A. (1996). That $50 million sequel grossed about $42.3 million worldwide and killed plans for a third film, but Keach's sneering bureaucrat is part of why it plays better now than it did in 1996.

The deep cuts

Keach never looked down on the genre. His credits include the Italian cannibal adventure Slave of the Cannibal God (1978) with Ursula Andress, later swept up in Britain's "video nasty" panic; Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (1999); Bruce Campbell's Man with the Screaming Brain (2005); and narration on the 1990s paranormal series Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories . Not all of it is good. All of it is better for having him in it.

By the numbers

Six decades on screen and stage, with more than 200 film and TV credits, per TMZ.
1 Tony nomination ( Indians , 1969), 4 Drama Desk Awards and 3 Helen Hayes Awards.
1 Golden Globe win ( Hemingway , 1988) and an Emmy nomination for the same role.
4 years as TV's Mike Hammer on CBS (1984-1987), plus a 1997-98 revival.
92% on Rotten Tomatoes for Roadgames , versus about A$100,000 at the Australian box office.
2 collaborations with John Carpenter: Body Bags (1993) and Escape from L.A. (1996).
A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, received in 2019.

What it really means: the character actor horror depends on

Horror history tends to remember its icons, the Englunds and Hodders and Curtises, and forget the actors who quietly made the genre's odder experiments work. Keach belongs in a lineage with Donald Pleasence, Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow: classically trained performers who brought total seriousness to material that could have collapsed into camp. Pleasence made Dr. Loomis believable. Von Sydow made Father Merrin feel ancient. Keach made a man arguing with a dingo in a truck cab, and a vain executive sprouting killer follicles, feel like real people with real fears.

That matters more than it sounds. Roadgames and The Ninth Configuration were both commercial failures on release, and both were rescued by home video, repertory screenings and critics who kept arguing for them. Each time, the performance at the center is a big reason the films survived long enough to be rediscovered. The same pattern is playing out right now with this decade's horror misfires that find their audience on streaming two or three years later: the films that last tend to be the ones with an actor who refused to wink.

It also says something about where genre sat in a serious actor's career. Keach went from Hamlet in Central Park to Blatty's madhouse to Carpenter's gross-out anthology without any sense that he was slumming. Today, prestige actors are pitched "elevated horror" as a safe space. Keach just did horror, at every budget level, because the parts were interesting.

What's next

No funeral or memorial details had been announced as of Wednesday evening. Tributes from former collaborators had not yet appeared in the reports we reviewed, though we expect more as the week goes on. If boutique labels or streamers move to spotlight his genre work, The Ninth Configuration and Roadgames are the two titles most overdue for a new audience.

Bottom line

Stacy Keach was a great Shakespearean, a great tough guy and, for horror fans, one of the most reliable faces in the genre's weirdest corners. Tonight is a good night to put on Roadgames , or to rewatch "Hair" and remember how much fun he was having. Our thoughts are with his wife, his children and his family.

Which Stacy Keach performance is your favorite: Roadgames , The Ninth Configuration , Body Bags or something outside horror entirely? Tell us below.

Header photo: Stacy Keach via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: TMZ , Fox News , Newsweek via Yahoo , Cover Media via Yahoo , NTD , Variety , Bloody Disgusting , Wikipedia: Stacy Keach , Wikipedia: Roadgames , Wikipedia: The Ninth Configuration , Wikipedia: Body Bags , Wikipedia: Class of 1999 , Wikipedia: Escape from L.A. .

James Gunn Is Out at DC Studios. Is DC’s Horror Experiment Next? What ‘Clayface’ Proved and What’s at Risk for ‘Swamp Thing’ and ‘Constantine’

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 17:55:43 GMT

The man who wrote the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and made Slither spent his last month running DC Studios watching a body-horror movie about a melting B-movie actor become one of the few unambiguous wins on his ledger. Then he lost the job anyway. On November 9, Skydance announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping away from the top of DC Studios, with Marvel Studios veteran Jeremy Latcham taking over as president and chief creative officer on December 1.

Most of the coverage has focused on Superman, Batman and the fate of the capes. We care about something else: the small, weird, R-rated horror lane that Gunn and Safran carved out of a superhero studio. Clayface just crossed $109 million worldwide on a roughly $40 million budget. Swamp Thing has James Mangold attached. Constantine got a new writer less than a week ago. Below, we lay out what's confirmed about the shake-up, how the horror titles performed, what's at risk, and why the next six months decide whether DC horror was a phase or a future.

Watch the 'Clayface' Final Trailer

Here's the film that may end up as the Gunn-Safran era's clearest proof of concept: James Watkins' body-horror riff on the Batman villain, starring Tom Rhys Harries.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What's Confirmed About the DC Studios Shake-Up

The facts that every outlet agrees on are fairly short. Per TheWrap , Skydance said Gunn and Safran will go back to their creative work full time, starting with post-production on Gunn's Superman: Man of Tomorrow . Latcham starts December 1 and will oversee DC film, TV and animation, reporting to Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, the co-chairs of Skydance Motion Picture Group. Gunn and Safran remain producers on a number of DC projects.

The context matters. Paramount's roughly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closed in October, according to Variety . Under the old regime, Gunn and Safran reported straight to David Zaslav. Under the new one, David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz planned to slot them under the Skydance film chiefs, which Variety characterized as effectively a demotion. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, as cited by Esquire , describe the exit as a push rather than a voluntary step back. The official statements are warmer: Ellison and Kreiz credited the pair with launching a new era, and Gunn wrote online that he was relieved to return to pure filmmaking and that the characters they set up will live on.

Latcham's résumé is pure Marvel. TheWrap notes he was part of Kevin Feige's founding team, with credits including Iron Man , The Avengers and the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, and that he worked with Gunn on all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Fiction Horizon, summarizing trade reporting, says he's reportedly expected to favor crowd-pleasing tentpoles. That single word, crowd-pleasing, is the part that should make horror fans nervous.

Who James Gunn Was Before the Capes

It's easy to forget that Gunn came up in the gutter of the genre, and we mean that as the highest compliment. He started at Troma, co-writing Tromeo and Juliet in 1996. He wrote the screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, which opened to $26.7 million in March 2004 and finished at $103.5 million worldwide on a $28 million budget, per The Numbers . It remains one of the best-regarded horror remakes of its decade.

His directing debut was less kind to him at the box office. Slither , the gooey alien-slug comedy he wrote and directed for Universal, opened to just $3.9 million on March 31, 2006 and topped out at $12.9 million worldwide against a $15.25 million budget, per The Numbers . It has since become a cult favorite, and you can see its DNA in every squishy practical effect Gunn has championed since. Later, as a producer, he backed Brightburn (2019), the evil-Superman horror film written by his brother Brian and cousin Mark, which turned a $7 million budget into $33.2 million worldwide, per The Numbers .

So when DC Studios greenlit a $40 million R-rated body-horror film about a disfigured actor instead of a fifth Batman villain origin story, it didn't look random. It looked like a horror guy using his keys.

Photo: James Watkins via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

By the Numbers: What 'Clayface' Actually Did

Clayface opened wide on October 23 in 3,458 theaters and took No. 1 with $24 million domestic and $43 million globally, per TheWrap , which also reported an A- CinemaScore, a genuinely rare grade for a horror movie. As of this week, The Numbers has it at about $57.3 million domestic and $52.4 million international, roughly $109.7 million worldwide, with a $40 million production budget (some outlets cite $44 million). It runs 108 minutes and is rated R.

The team behind it is a horror résumé in itself. Director James Watkins made Eden Lake , then The Woman in Black , which grossed $129 million worldwide on a $15 million budget in 2012, per The Numbers . His 2024 Speak No Evil remake made $77.5 million on $15 million. The screenplay is by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, from Flanagan's story. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, with Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, David Dencik and Eddie Marsan in support.

Now compare it with its own studio. Variety reports Supergirl took in about $126 million worldwide this summer on a $170 million budget. Clayface has essentially matched that gross for less than a quarter of the cost. It isn't perfect: Variety's sources say Clayface still won't fully break even until home entertainment and streaming revenue are counted, and it lost the No. 1 spot during its second weekend (we broke down that 57% drop here ). But in a year when the expensive DC bets wobbled, the cheap scary one is the one that over-delivered relative to its price.

The DC Horror Slate: What's at Risk

Here's where things stand for every DC project with real horror DNA, based on MakeUseOf 's tally of the slate (drawn from THR's reporting), plus iHorror and Dread Central :

Swamp Thing : James Mangold has been attached to write and direct since early 2023. Per iHorror, Safran said last month the script is being written. No date. Mangold has described it as a simple, clean Gothic horror movie.
Constantine : Francis Galluppi, the filmmaker behind The Last Stop in Yuma County and the upcoming Evil Dead Wrath , was hired to write a new script ( our full story ). Still early development.
Creature Commandos Season 2: Gunn's adult animated monster squad is still listed as coming, with no date.
Poison Ivy : a live-action HBO project reportedly in development, a natural fit for plant-based body horror.
Clayface follow-ups: nothing announced. Fiction Horizon, citing THR, says Gunn and Safran reportedly wanted more smaller, spookier DC films in this mold before their exit.

None of these has been canceled. That's the honest headline. But nearly all of them are early enough that a new boss can quietly shelve them without anyone noticing a press release, and that's how projects usually die in Hollywood: not with an announcement, but with silence.

Photo: James Mangold via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Analysis: Why DC Horror Might Survive the People Who Built It

There are two ways to read the Gunn-Safran exit for horror, and both are plausible. The pessimistic read: Variety's insiders say the studio spent big on lesser-known characters, specifically naming Supergirl and Clayface, and Latcham's Marvel pedigree points toward bigger, safer, four-quadrant movies. A boss tasked with getting DC back to basics doesn't usually start by asking for more R-rated films about swamp monsters and chain-smoking exorcists.

The optimistic read is the math. A $40 million horror film that grosses $109 million is exactly the kind of business a cost-conscious owner should love. Look at how horror spin-offs have worked elsewhere. Sony's Venom films printed money by leaning toward grime. Fox's Logan , directed by the same James Mangold now on Swamp Thing , proved an R-rated, downbeat comic movie could be a phenomenon. Warner itself has spent the past decade turning The Conjuring universe into one of the most reliable profit engines in the business. The lesson across all three is that a mid-budget scary movie with a known name is less a gamble than a hedge.

Our take: the films most likely to survive are the ones with filmmakers who bring their own audience. Mangold is an Oscar-nominated writer-director with a franchise track record, and a Gothic Swamp Thing could be made at a price that won't scare a spreadsheet. Constantine has a built-in fanbase that has been asking for an R-rated return since 2005. The most fragile ideas are the ones that existed mostly in Gunn's head, the reported slate of smaller horror experiments that never made it to a public announcement.

There's also a timing wrinkle. According to Esquire, citing Puck, there's chatter that the DCU could be rebooted after Man of Tomorrow opens July 9, 2027. A reboot would actually help standalone horror titles, which never relied on shared-universe continuity to begin with. Clayface worked because it was a creepy movie about one man falling apart, not because it set up a crossover.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether Latcham will keep Mangold's Swamp Thing on its current track, or reset it.
Whether Galluppi's Constantine script is still wanted, and whether Keanu Reeves is part of any plan.
Whether Clayface's home-entertainment run pushes it fully into profit, which could make the case for more films like it.
Which projects Gunn and Safran will keep producing beyond Man of Tomorrow, The Batman Part II and The People v. Gorilla Grodd.

The next real date is December 1 , when Latcham officially takes the job. Watch for the first slate announcement from the new regime. If Swamp Thing is on it, DC horror lives. If it isn't mentioned, start worrying.

Bottom Line

James Gunn didn't build DC Studios as a horror shop, but he left it with one of the clearest horror wins any superhero studio has had in years. Whether that turns into a lane or a footnote now belongs to a Marvel producer who helped make The Avengers . The smart business move is to keep making cheap, nasty, filmmaker-driven DC horror. We'll see if the smart move wins.

Your turn: which DC horror movie do you want to see survive the shake-up most, Swamp Thing , Constantine or a Clayface sequel? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: James Gunn via Wikimedia Commons ( Gage Skidmore, author and license ), cropped with text added. Trailer: DC / Warner Bros.

Sources: TheWrap (exit) , Variety , The Hollywood Reporter , iHorror , Dread Central , Esquire , Fiction Horizon , MakeUseOf , TheWrap (box office) , The Numbers: Clayface , The Numbers: Slither , The Numbers: Dawn of the Dead , The Numbers: Brightburn , The Numbers: The Woman in Black , The Numbers: Speak No Evil , The Numbers: Supergirl .

Robert Eggers’ ‘Werwulf’ Rated R for Gore, Sexual Assault and Graphic Nudity: What the Rating Means and Everything We Know

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 12:49:52 GMT

Robert Eggers has never made a cozy movie, but the ratings board just told us his next one may be the meanest of the bunch. Werwulf , his medieval werewolf film starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe, has officially been rated R by the MPA for "strong bloody/disturbing violent content, gore, sexual assault, graphic nudity and strong sexual content." That's a long list even by R standards, and World of Reel, which flagged the rating on Nov. 10, called it the most extreme MPA description any Eggers film has received. A rating also means the movie is locked, so post-production is done and the Christmas Day release is on track.

For a filmmaker whose debut put a goat named Black Phillip on horror's Mount Rushmore, that's saying something. And it lands at a strange, exciting moment: Focus Features is going back to the exact Christmas slot where Nosferatu turned into a $182 million surprise, this time with a film spoken entirely in Middle English. Below: what the rating really tells us, every confirmed detail, the team, the numbers that make this a smart gamble, and the question that hangs over every werewolf movie ever made.

Watch the Trailers

Focus has released two trailers. The theatrical trailer, below, lets you hear Taylor-Johnson's howl while keeping the full transformation out of sight.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The first trailer, released June 29, is muddier, quieter and arguably creepier:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: Everything Confirmed

Rating: R, for strong bloody and disturbing violent content, gore, sexual assault, graphic nudity and strong sexual content.
Release: exclusively in theaters Dec. 25, 2026 in the U.S. through Focus Features. Universal handles the international release, with the U.K. following on Jan. 1, 2027.
Tickets: on sale now for select 35mm screenings, per Dread Central.
Language: all of the dialogue is in Middle English.
Setting: medieval England. Studio-era coverage places it in the 1200s, while Eggers' interview with Den of Geek describes the 1300s, so expect somewhere around the turn of that century.
Story: a farmer is cursed to become a beast and looks for salvation through the love of his family, while a hunter closes in.
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the cursed farmer, Lily-Rose Depp as his wife, Willem Dafoe as the hunter, Bodhi Rae Breathnach as their daughter, plus Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Jan Bijvoet, Jack Morris, Ritchi Edwards and Hannah Harpin.
Runtime and budget: neither has been announced.

What That Rating Actually Tells Us

MPA descriptors are not reviews, but they are the closest thing we get to a peek inside a finished cut before critics see it. Three things jump out here. First, "bloody/disturbing" is doing a lot of work. The board doesn't hand out "disturbing" for jump scares; it tends to reserve it for violence that lingers. Second, "sexual assault" is a specific descriptor, not a catch-all, which suggests the film is going to deal with real cruelty rather than gothic suggestion. Third, "graphic nudity" plus "strong sexual content" tells us Eggers isn't sanding off the corners the way a studio werewolf movie aimed at a PG-13 crowd would.

None of it is a surprise if you've been listening to Eggers. When Focus brought footage to CinemaCon in April, he described the script as "the darkest thing I have ever written," according to Dread Central. He said much the same thing back when the project was first announced in early 2025. The rating is the first outside confirmation that the darkness made it from the page to the screen without getting trimmed.

It also matters for what it isn't: an NC-17. The film got its R and is done, which means Focus can market it on Christmas Day without the advertising headaches an adults-only rating brings. If you read our argument that horror should stop cutting its hardest scenes , this is the other path: a filmmaker who seems to have gotten exactly the movie he wanted inside the R box.

Who's Behind It

Photo: Robert Eggers via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Robert Eggers (director, co-writer, producer). Four features, four distinct flavors of period dread. The Witch cost about $4 million, opened to $8.8 million and grossed roughly $40 million worldwide with a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score. The Lighthouse was a black-and-white two-hander that earned an Oscar nomination for cinematography. The Northman was his big swing, a Viking epic budgeted around $70 million that critics loved (90%) but that grossed only about $70 million worldwide. Then came Nosferatu , the one that changed his career math: a $50 million budget, $182 million worldwide and four Oscar nominations.

Sjón (co-writer, producer). The Icelandic novelist and poet co-wrote The Northman with Eggers, so this pairing already knows how to build a brutal medieval world that feels lived in rather than costumed.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson (the cursed farmer). He played Thomas Hutter in Nosferatu , and Variety reported his casting in the title role in July 2025. Before that, his genre résumé ran from Kick-Ass to Nocturnal Animals and the zombie sequel 28 Years Later . Playing a werewolf for Eggers is a very different job from playing a hero; the role reportedly involved serious physical preparation.

Lily-Rose Depp (his wife). Her Ellen Hutter was the beating, convulsing heart of Nosferatu , and this is her second straight Eggers lead.

Photo: Willem Dafoe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Willem Dafoe (the hunter). This is Dafoe's fourth Eggers movie after The Lighthouse , The Northman and Nosferatu . At this point he's less a guest star than a house instrument. Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie, the parents from The Witch , are back in the Eggers family too.

Behind the camera. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (Oscar-nominated for both The Lighthouse and Nosferatu ), editor Louise Ford and composer Robin Carolan all return. Working Title's Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner produce with Eggers and Sjón, alongside Maiden Voyage Pictures.

The Backstory: From Announcement to Rating

January 2025: The Hollywood Reporter reveals Eggers' next film is a medieval werewolf story at Focus.
July 2025: Taylor-Johnson is cast in the title role, with Depp, Dafoe and Ineson in talks.
September 2025 to January 2026: principal photography at Sky Studios Elstree, with location work at Bourne Wood in Surrey, Dartmoor and the Forest of Dean. Bodhi Rae Breathnach joins in January 2026, and Blaschke and Ineson post that filming has wrapped that same month.
April 2026: first footage screens at Universal and Focus' CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas.
June 2026: first official image, then the first trailer on June 29.
September 26, 2026: the theatrical trailer arrives.
October 22, 2026: Den of Geek publishes an in-depth first look and interview.
November 10, 2026: the R rating posts; post-production is complete.

The craft details are pure Eggers. The film was shot on 35mm film in the boxy 1.37:1 Academy ratio, and Den of Geek reports it was originally imagined in black and white before Eggers and Blaschke landed on an orthochromatic color look, the kind of light response old film stocks had, where reds go dark and skin looks almost carved. The Middle English came out of work with two Oxford scholars, Eleanor Baker and Daniel Wakelin, plus dialect coach William Conacher, who also worked on Nosferatu . Eggers told Den of Geek the goal was a Middle English modern audiences could follow, and that the images are strong enough to tell the story even with the sound off.

The most fan-relevant detail may be about the monster itself. Eggers told Den of Geek he's keeping the creature hidden for as long as he can, following what he called "Ridley Scott Alien, Jaws rules." He has also said he wanted to strip away the usual lore of bites and silver bullets by setting the story before those legends existed.

By the Numbers

Nosferatu (Dec. 25, 2024): $11.55 million on Christmas Day, $21.7 million over its first three-day weekend, $40.8 million over five days (against pre-release tracking of about $25 million), $95.6 million domestic and $182 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.
The Northman (2022): roughly $70 million budget, $12.3 million opening, about $70 million worldwide.
The Witch (2016): about $4 million budget, $8.8 million opening, around $40 million worldwide.
The Lighthouse (2019): $11 million budget, about $18 million worldwide.

And the werewolf comparisons are not kind to the genre. Universal's The Wolfman (2010) cost a reported $150 million, opened to $31.5 million and grossed $142.6 million worldwide with a 32% Rotten Tomatoes score. Blumhouse's Wolf Man (January 2025) went the other way, a $25 million budget, a $10.9 million opening, $36.8 million worldwide and 47% from critics. Two very different budgets, the same result: nobody walked out thinking the werewolf was solved.

Analysis: What This Really Means

For Eggers, Werwulf is a test of whether Nosferatu was a breakthrough or a one-off. Nosferatu had a famous brand, a famous monster and a gorgeous romance hook. Werwulf has the monster but not the brand, and it asks audiences to sit through Middle English, which is a bigger ask than the stylized 19th-century German-English of his vampire film. If it still plays, Eggers stops being an arthouse director who had a hit and becomes a genre brand on his own.

For Focus, this is a repeat play with one big change. The Christmas counter-programming idea worked beautifully in 2024: while families went to Sonic 3 and Mufasa , adults who wanted something nasty went to Nosferatu and beat tracking by more than 60%. But the 2026 holiday calendar is far more crowded, with Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three opening the week before, per /Film. Werwulf doesn't need to beat those movies, it needs to be the obvious alternative to them, and a rating this harsh is a marketing asset for exactly that audience.

For the werewolf, this may be the subgenre's best shot in years. The problem with werewolf movies has rarely been ambition; it's been the transformation and the creature. The Wolfman drowned in effects and reshoots, and Wolf Man went so small and so restrained that many fans felt they never got a monster at all. Eggers' plan, as he's described it, sits between those: hide the beast, make the world unbearably real and let the violence (which the MPA now confirms is there) do the talking. Think of how The Witch withheld almost everything until the last reel. If he pulls that off with a creature feature, Werwulf could do for werewolves what Nosferatu did for the arthouse vampire.

The risk is the same one that dogged The Northman : critics loved it, and audiences treated it as homework. A Christmas date, a cruel R rating and a language nobody has spoken in 600 years is either the boldest counter-programming of the year or a hard sell. Our guess is that the Nosferatu crowd shows up opening weekend, and word of mouth on that transformation decides the rest.

What We Still Don't Know

Runtime: not announced. Nosferatu ran a little over two hours, so expect something in that range.
Budget: not reported.
The creature design: Focus has kept it out of every trailer, and it sounds like that's the plan until opening day.
Subtitles: how much of the Middle English will be subtitled hasn't been spelled out.
Reviews: we have not seen a festival premiere or review embargo date announced, so first reactions likely land in December.

Bottom Line

The R rating doesn't tell us whether Werwulf is good. It tells us Eggers made the movie he promised, with nothing softened for the holiday crowd, and that Focus is betting the same audience that crowned Nosferatu wants something even meaner under the tree. Dec. 25 can't come fast enough.

So tell us: are you seeing Werwulf on Christmas Day, and can Eggers finally make a werewolf movie that lives up to the legend?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Aaron Taylor-Johnson by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central (rating) , World of Reel , Den of Geek , /Film , Dread Central (first trailer) , Netflix Junkie (via Esquire) , Wikipedia: Werwulf (production timeline) , Wikipedia: Nosferatu box office , Wikipedia: Wolf Man (2025) , Wikipedia: The Wolfman (2010) .

Freddy vs. Freddy Is Over: Warner’s ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ Is Dead, Paramount’s Craven-Estate Reboot Lives. Everything We Know

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 23:55:17 GMT

For four months, Freddy Krueger had two studios fighting over who got to bring him back. As of Tuesday, he has one. Dread Central reported on November 10 that Warner Bros.' rival A Nightmare on Elm Street project, the one with Evil Dead Rise filmmaker Lee Cronin in talks to write and direct, is no longer moving forward. That leaves Paramount's Craven-estate-backed film, developed under its Paramount Primal genre label, as the only new Elm Street movie in the works.

It sounds like a boring corporate tidy-up, and in a way it is: Paramount now owns Warner Bros., so it was never going to keep paying to make a second Freddy movie to compete with itself. But the end of the "Freddy vs. Freddy" race actually settles a lot. It tells us who controls the franchise, what the new film is allowed to draw from, who is producing it and which filmmakers are lining up for the director's chair. Here is everything confirmed, how we got here, what the numbers say and what it all means for horror's most famous dream demon.

Watch: The Original, Restored

There is no footage of the new film yet (it doesn't have a writer or director). So here is the official Warner Bros. trailer for the 4K restoration of Wes Craven's 1984 original, the screenplay Paramount's new movie is built on.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed

Here is what we actually know, as of November 10, 2026:

Warner's version is dead. Dread Central's Brad Miska broke the news on November 10, and Fangoria, JoBlo, Nerdist, ComingSoon, MovieWeb and ComicBook.com all followed his report. Neither studio has announced it publicly.
Paramount's version is the only one. It is being developed through Paramount Primal, the studio's new genre label.
The rights: Paramount closed a deal in July licensing the U.S. rights from the Wes Craven estate. Warner Bros., through New Line, kept international rights to the franchise.
The source: the film draws from Craven's original 1984 screenplay and is set in the world of the first film.
Producers: Iya Labunka (Craven's widow and longtime producing partner), Jonathan Craven (his son) and attorney Marc Toberoff. J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, who run Paramount Primal, are executive producers.
Not a shot-for-shot remake. Paramount told JoBlo directly that claims of a shot-by-shot redo aren't true.
Still unannounced: title, writer, director, cast and release date. Whether Freddy himself appears has never been officially confirmed either.

One wrinkle: outlets don't agree on how far along Cronin was. Dread Central, JoBlo and Nerdist describe him as in talks, while ComingSoon says Warner had secured him. We're going with the original reporting: talks, not a done deal.

Who's Behind It

Paramount Primal. Lifshitz and Margules are the producing duo behind Barbarian , Weapons , Companion and Friendship , according to Dread Central's July report. That is about as good a recent résumé as anyone in genre film has. Their taste runs toward original, twisty, filmmaker-driven projects, which is not usually what you'd expect from the people handed a 42-year-old slasher brand.

The Craven family. Having Labunka and Jonathan Craven as producers is the headline detail. When Paramount announced the deal in July, Labunka said she couldn't wait for audiences to "sit together in a dark theatre," a line that reads like a promise this is a theatrical movie, not streaming filler. Jonathan Craven is no stranger to his father's work, either; the two co-wrote 2007's The Hills Have Eyes 2 .

Photo: Wes Craven via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The director who isn't. Lee Cronin is out of the picture, at least for now. The Irish filmmaker broke through with A24's The Hole in the Ground (2019), then made New Line's Evil Dead Rise (2023), and this year delivered Lee Cronin's The Mummy for New Line, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster. ComicBook.com describes that film's reviews as divisive and reports a roughly $90 million worldwide gross on a $22 million budget. He's also an executive producer on Evil Dead Burn . He was a smart Warner choice for exactly the reason he's now out: he was a New Line guy, and New Line was Warner's horror house.

The Backstory: How Two Freddys Became One

The rights to Elm Street have been a famously tangled mess. Craven wrote the 1984 original, New Line made its name on it (the studio was long nicknamed "the House That Freddy Built"), and Warner Bros. inherited New Line when it absorbed the company. Over the years the rights split: the Craven estate came to control what Paramount licensed for the U.S., while Warner and New Line held the international side. Meanwhile, Freddy hasn't been on the big screen since the 2010 remake.

The timeline from there:

July 13, 2026: Dread Central reports Paramount has closed a deal for U.S. rights to a new Elm Street film through the Craven estate, under Paramount Primal, drawing from the original screenplay.
July 30, 2026: Puck's Kim Masters reports that Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy were in talks with Cronin for a rival version that Warner could release only overseas, where it held the rights. Puck also reported Warner's earlier talks with the estate fell apart over an aggressive back-end split. One insider described it as a race.
October 6, 2026: Paramount completes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The combined company is now called Skydance. De Luca and Abdy are pushed out.
November 10, 2026: Dread Central reports the Warner project is dead.

Once you see the dates, Tuesday's news is almost a formality. The executives who championed a competing Freddy are gone, and the company that owns the domestic film now also owns the company that held the international rights. Two dueling movies made sense when they were two rival studios. Under one roof, it would just be burning money twice.

Photo: Heather Langenkamp, the original Nancy Thompson, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

By the Numbers

Why would two studios fight over this? The Numbers lays out how well Freddy has paid off:

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): about $1.8 million budget, $25.8 million domestic, $59.2 million worldwide.
Dream Warriors (1987): about $5 million budget, $8.9 million opening, $44.8 million domestic.
Freddy vs. Jason (2003): $25 million budget, $36.4 million opening, $82.6 million domestic, $115.5 million worldwide.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): $35 million budget, $32.9 million opening, $63.1 million domestic, $117.7 million worldwide.

Look at the 2010 line. Fans largely hated that remake (Fangoria calls it "highly contentious," which is generous), and it still opened to nearly $33 million and more than tripled its budget worldwide. That is the floor for this brand: a movie people didn't love still made money. A movie people do love has a much higher ceiling.

Analysis: What This Really Means

The good news: one vision, not two. The worst outcome of the race was always two rushed Freddy movies, each built to beat the other to theaters instead of being good. Splitting audiences between a domestic Freddy and an overseas Freddy would have been confusing for fans and bad for both films. A single project with the estate involved and no deadline pressure from a rival is a much better starting point.

The interesting news: the rights problem may be gone too. The whole reason Warner wanted its own film was that it held international rights while Paramount held U.S. rights. Now Paramount owns both sides of that split. Nobody has officially said how the new film will be distributed worldwide, but on paper, the corporate merger that killed Warner's movie could also be what lets Paramount's movie play everywhere.

The tricky news: the original screenplay is a fence. Nerdist points out that the estate deal means the new movie draws only on Craven's first film, not the sequels. So no Dream Warriors, no Dream Master power-ups, no Jason crossover. That can cut both ways. It forces a back-to-basics take on Freddy, which is what the series needs after decades of wisecracks. But it also means the 2010 remake's approach (redo the original, but darker) is the obvious trap, and Paramount's "not shot-for-shot" comment suggests they know it.

The comparisons. We've seen three ways to revive a slasher icon. Blumhouse's Halloween (2018) ignored the sequels and made a direct follow-up with the original star, and it was a massive hit. The Scream revival leaned into legacy characters and new blood and turned into a steady earner. The 2010 Elm Street, and the 2009 Friday the 13th before it, simply remade the original with a new cast, and both are remembered as soulless even though they made money. Paramount Primal's track record suggests a fourth option: hand it to a filmmaker with a real idea and let them make something that feels new.

The director race is the real story now. No one is attached, but there's no shortage of names. I Saw the TV Glow filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun said at a premiere of their film Camp Miasma that they were trying to get a meeting on it. Parker Finn of Smile was reportedly circling at one point, though he's now on a Possession remake while David Bruckner takes Smile 3 . Obsession director Curry Barker, already set for a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre , has said in interviews that everybody wants to do Elm Street and he'd love a crack at it. And Mike Flanagan famously pitched himself on social media back in 2019. Any of those would be a statement. Schoenbrun, whose work is all about dreams, identity and the uncanny glow of a screen at 3 a.m., might be the most exciting fit of the bunch.

Photo: Jane Schoenbrun via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

What We Still Don't Know

Who directs and writes. ComingSoon says a Craven will reportedly work on the script but doesn't say which one, and no one else has reported it, so treat that as unconfirmed.
Who plays Freddy. Robert Englund isn't expected back in the makeup and has floated Kevin Bacon and Doug Jones as successors, per MovieWeb. Jackie Earle Haley's 2010 take didn't stick.
Remake, reboot or something stranger. "Set in the world of the original" leaves room for a lot, including a legacy sequel, as Nerdist notes.
Worldwide release. Whether the merger lets Paramount release it globally has not been addressed.
Cronin's next move. He's an obvious candidate for other horror projects now under the Skydance umbrella, but nothing has been reported.

Bottom Line

Freddy didn't need two movies. He needs one good one. The end of the studio fight means the franchise is back under one owner, with Craven's family producing and the team behind Barbarian and Weapons running the show. That's the best setup Elm Street has had in a generation. Now it all comes down to the hire.

So who should direct the new Nightmare: Jane Schoenbrun, Curry Barker, Mike Flanagan or someone nobody's mentioned yet? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Robert Englund at Comic Con Brussels 2023 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central (Nov. 10) , Dread Central (July 13) , Dread Central (July 30) , JoBlo , Fangoria , Nerdist , ComingSoon , MovieWeb , ComicBook.com , Skydance press release , The Numbers .

Vera Farmiga Returns to Occult Horror in Bryan Hill’s ‘Inferno’: The Black Branch, the Team and Everything We Know

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 17:59:52 GMT

Vera Farmiga spent the better part of 12 years walking into haunted houses so the rest of us didn't have to. Now that Lorraine Warren has officially hung up the crucifix, the actress is heading straight back into the dark, this time without Ed Warren at her side and without a church-approved case file. Variety broke the news on Monday, November 9, that Farmiga will star in and executive produce Inferno , a supernatural serial-killer thriller written and directed by Bryan Hill, the comics and TV writer behind runs on Batman and the Outsiders and American Carnage .

It's a pitch built to make horror fans sit up: a former detective, a killer who may not be entirely human, and a rumored occult unit buried inside Scotland Yard. It's also a business story, because Inferno surfaced as a package being shopped to buyers at the American Film Market. Below, we break down everything confirmed so far, who's making it, how it fits into Farmiga's genre career, why the sales pitch name-drops Manhunter and Longlegs , and what still has to happen before anyone sees a frame.

Is there a trailer?

Not yet, and there won't be for a while. Inferno is in pre-production, with cameras not scheduled to roll until late spring, so no footage, teaser or official still exists. We'll embed the first official look the moment one drops. For now, the best preview is Farmiga's own track record, which we dig into below.

The details: what's confirmed

Here's what the announcement and the trade coverage that followed actually lock in:

Title: Inferno .
Star: Vera Farmiga, who is also attached as executive producer.
Writer-director: Bryan Hill.
Producers: Ara Keshishian and Petr Jákl for ZQ Entertainment, alongside Adrian Askarieh of Prime Universe Films.
Sales: Manifest Pictures is handling international sales and introducing the film to buyers at AFM. iHorror reports that CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group are co-representing domestic rights.
Production: scheduled to start in late spring. No shooting location has been announced.
Release: no distributor, date or rating yet.

The story, as described in the materials: Farmiga plays a former detective whose pursuit of a killer drags her back into the Black Branch, a whispered-about special unit at Scotland Yard that investigates the occult. That puts her face to face with the kind of paranormal terror she believed she had left behind. It's worth stressing that the Black Branch is fiction dressed as rumor, not a piece of documented police history, which is exactly the kind of "is this real?" hook that sells well in this genre.

Hill framed the project as horror with ideas on its mind. Per Dread Central, he said, "Great horror films challenge what we believe about the world," and praised Farmiga's intelligence and presence as the right fit to lead viewers through the darkness. Manifest's co-CEOs leaned hard on the comparisons: Zach Glueck said the company was "immediately sucked into Hill's script" and pointed to Manhunter for its investigative tension and to The Exorcist and Longlegs for performance-driven horror, while co-CEO Yvette Zhuang pitched it to Creepy Catalog as a cross between a serial-killer procedural and possession horror.

Who's behind it

Vera Farmiga

Photo: Vera Farmiga at the Paley Center for Media, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Few actors have a genre résumé this deep without being typecast by it. Farmiga's horror run started before the Warrens, with the creepy-kid double feature of Joshua (2007) and Orphan (2009). Orphan cost about $20 million and grossed roughly $78.8 million worldwide, and it was good enough to spawn a 2022 prequel, Orphan: First Kill . The same year as Orphan , she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Up in the Air , and in 2011 she directed and starred in her debut feature, Higher Ground , which premiered at Sundance.

Then came the long haul. She played Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016), Annabelle Comes Home (2019), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) and The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025). In parallel, she spent five seasons and 50 episodes as Norma Bates on A&E's Bates Motel , from March 2013 to April 2017, a role that won her a Saturn Award and an Emmy nomination. Throw in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and you have someone who has carried horror on the big screen, on cable and in a kaiju blockbuster.

Bryan Hill

Hill is the less familiar name to movie audiences, but not to comics readers. His credits, as summarized by iHorror, include Batman and the Outsiders for DC, the crime series American Carnage , episodes of the live-action Titans , and a feature called Archangel that's currently in post-production. Inferno is the kind of contained, character-first genre film that writers with his background often use to step into directing, and the script is clearly the thing that got the package moving.

The producers

Photo: Petr Jákl via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Petr Jákl is a Czech filmmaker with one of the more unusual paths into producing: a former judoka who competed in the heavyweight division at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, then worked as a stuntman on Hollywood productions including XXX and Alien vs. Predator before directing features such as Kajínek (2010). His ZQ Entertainment partner Ara Keshishian's credits include the Ted Bundy film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile , so serial-killer material isn't new territory for this team. Adrian Askarieh, through Prime Universe Films, is best known for the Hitman movies.

The backstory: life after Lorraine

To understand why this announcement landed with a thud of excitement, you have to look at where Farmiga's signature franchise just ended up. The Conjuring: Last Rites , directed by Michael Chaves, opened September 5, 2025, and was billed as the Warrens' final case. It opened to $84 million domestically, the best start in franchise history, and finished around $499 million worldwide on a reported $55 million budget, making it the highest-grossing entry in the series, despite a middling 57% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Warner Bros. hasn't let the universe rest. A prequel, The Conjuring: First Communion , is dated for September 10, 2027, with Rodrigue Huart directing from a script by Richard Naing and Ian Goldberg, and iHorror reports Garrett Wareing and Amanda Fix are playing the younger Warrens. There's also an HBO Max series in development with Nancy Won as showrunner. In other words, Lorraine lives on, just not with Farmiga's face. That's why Inferno matters: it's a chance to see what Farmiga does with the supernatural when she isn't playing the franchise's moral compass, and it's why so many outlets led with "Farmiga returns."

By the numbers: the comps in the pitch

Sales pitches are aspirational by design, so it's worth checking the films Manifest name-checked against reality:

Manhunter (1986): Michael Mann's film, the first screen appearance of Hannibal Lecter, cost an estimated $14-15 million and made only about $8.6 million in the U.S., a flop on release that became a cult touchstone. A 4K "Final Cut" restoration hit U.S. theaters on July 24, 2026.
Longlegs (2024): Osgood Perkins' occult serial-killer film cost under $10 million, opened to $22.4 million and grossed about $128 million worldwide for Neon. A new Longlegs film was announced in April 2026, with Paramount taking over distribution.
The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025): $55 million budget, $84 million opening, about $499 million worldwide.
Orphan (2009): about $20 million budget, about $78.8 million worldwide.

Notice the pattern. The ceiling for a cop-meets-occult horror film is enormous when it hits, and the floor is Manhunter : beloved decades later, ignored at the box office. The difference is rarely the premise. It's marketing, mood and a performance people can't stop talking about.

Analysis: what this really means

The Longlegs effect is now a sales category. Two years ago, "FBI agent chases a killer with satanic fingerprints" was a niche pitch. After Longlegs turned a sub-$10 million indie into a $128 million hit, it became a lane. Inferno is explicitly positioned in that lane, swapping the American heartland for London and adding the detective-unit angle that gives it obvious sequel or series potential. Buyers at AFM love a film that can be sold as "the next X" with a recognizable star attached, and Farmiga is about as recognizable as horror leads get.

Farmiga's choice says something. She could have gone prestige-drama after Last Rites , and her recent slate has included non-genre work. Instead, she's attaching herself as an executive producer to an independent, director-driven occult thriller that's being sold market by market. That's a bet on material over machinery: a bankable genre face lending credibility to a filmmaker with something specific to say. It also means she isn't simply walking away from the "paranormal investigator" persona; she's re-forming it in darker, less sanctified territory. Lorraine had faith on her side. A burned-out detective in a secret occult unit presumably does not.

The risk is the procedural. Serial-killer-meets-supernatural is a crowded genre on TV, and films that lean too far into case-of-the-week mechanics can feel like a pilot. The comparison to The Exorcist suggests the team knows the scares have to come from character, not just clue-hunting. Hill's comics background is promising here: crime and superhero writing both reward world-building, but a feature has to deliver a complete, terrifying story in about two hours, not set up a universe.

And the independent route cuts both ways. Without a studio already attached, Inferno depends on presales and a distributor deal. That's how plenty of great horror gets made, and it gives Hill more creative room than a franchise chapter would. But it also means dates can slip, and the eventual release could land anywhere from a wide theatrical rollout to a streamer.

What we still don't know

Who else is in the cast, including whoever plays the killer.
Where it shoots, and whether London locations are real or recreated elsewhere.
Which year "late spring" refers to. The announcement didn't specify, though the natural reading is spring 2027.
Who distributes it in the U.S., and whether it goes theatrical or streaming.
How much the Black Branch is a one-film device versus a franchise setup.

Expect more news once AFM deals start getting announced, and casting reports as the start of production gets closer.

Bottom line

Inferno is still just a script, a star and a very good logline. But it's the right star, with a strong pedigree of turning paranormal material into real performances, and it's arriving at the exact moment occult crime horror has proven it can sell. If Hill delivers something closer to Longlegs than to a TV pilot, Farmiga may have found her post-Warren calling card.

So, horror fans: are you more excited for Vera Farmiga hunting an occult killer in Inferno , or do you wish she'd come back as Lorraine Warren one more time? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Vera Farmiga via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Variety , Dread Central , iHorror , Creepy Catalog , ComingSoon , Horror Fuel , The Conjuring: Last Rites box office data , Longlegs box office data , Manhunter box office data , Bates Motel episode data .

‘Other Mommy’ Hits Digital Today: The D+ Horror Hit That Made $110M+ on a $19M Budget, and Everything You Need to Know

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 12:59:30 GMT

Critics shredded it. Opening-night audiences handed it a D+ CinemaScore. And Other Mommy still walked out of theaters with more than $110 million worldwide on a reported budget of under $20 million. Starting today, Tuesday, Nov. 10, Rob Savage's Jessica Chastain nightmare is available to buy or rent at home, which means the biggest argument in horror this fall is about to move from the multiplex to your living room couch.

That makes this a good moment to take stock. Below you'll find everything confirmed about the digital release (prices, platforms, bonus features and the disc date), the people who made it, the long road from Josh Malerman's novel to the screen, the numbers that made it a hit, and our take on what a critic-proof, audience-split, wildly profitable movie actually tells us about where studio horror is heading.

Watch the Trailers

Universal first played the teaser only in theaters, in front of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey , before putting it online on July 21. Here it is, followed by the second trailer and the studio's behind-the-scenes featurette on Chastain's transformation.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: How to Watch Other Mommy at Home

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment put the film up on premium video on demand at midnight Eastern on Nov. 10 (9 p.m. Pacific on Nov. 9). According to Forbes and Decider , here's what that looks like:

Buy: $24.99 on Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Prime Video and YouTube.
Rent: $19.99 for a 48-hour window (the Prime Video price, per Decider).
Physical: 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD arrive Dec. 29.
Rating and runtime: R for some bloody violence and language; 1 hour 33 minutes, per Rotten Tomatoes .
Streaming: no Peacock date has been announced. Universal's recent pattern points to early 2027, but treat any specific date you see online as a guess.

Digital buyers at participating retailers also get extras, which Dread Central and /Film both list: four deleted or alternate scenes ("Alternate Car Confrontation," "Dancing at Grandma's," "Checking Bela's Room" and "Taking a Bath") and three featurettes. "Effecting Fear" covers the visual effects, "A Family in Pieces" focuses on the family at the center of the story and the performances, and "Breaking Rules with Other Mommy" digs into the film's point of view and the horror conventions it tries to sidestep. The same package is expected on the discs.

If you skipped it in theaters, the setup is simple. Eight-year-old Bela (newcomer Arabella Olivia Clark) lives in a house strained by her parents' failing marriage. Each night, something she calls Other Mommy comes out of her closet and asks to be let inside. Chastain plays both Bela's real mother, Ursula, and the thing wearing her face; Jay Duplass plays her dad, with Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen rounding out the cast, per Universal's release announcement .

Who's Behind It

Rob Savage, director

Savage is one of the more interesting career arcs in modern horror. He broke out with Host , the Zoom-call séance movie shot during lockdown on a budget of roughly $100,000, which premiered on Shudder in July 2020 and still sits at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. His follow-up, Dashcam , was much more divisive (46% on RT) and barely registered at the box office. Then came the Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman in 2023, which was originally planned for Hulu, got bumped to theaters after strong test screenings, and grossed about $82.3 million worldwide against a reported $35 million budget, per The Numbers . Other Mommy has now beaten that total on roughly half the money.

Savage did not pretend this was going to be a slow burn. In a pre-release Entertainment Weekly interview, relayed by Dread Central , he guessed the film has around 50 jump scares and then hedged: "It depends on what you refer to as a jump scare." He also argued that a good scare doesn't need the familiar quiet-quiet-BANG setup. Speaking to EW via Gizmodo , he described Chastain's performance as the film's real special effect.

Jessica Chastain, star

Chastain's horror résumé is short but loaded. Guillermo del Toro produced Mama (2013), which opened at No. 1 with $28.4 million and grossed $148.1 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. She later played adult Beverly Marsh in It Chapter Two (2019), which made $473.1 million worldwide. With Other Mommy , she's back to the "mother figure as monster" territory that Mama mined, except this time she plays the monster too. By mid-October it had already passed Lawless to become her ninth-highest domestic grosser, per Koimoi .

In a Rotten Tomatoes interview , she explained that the production kept its young lead out of the room for the scariest material, because "children need to be protected." She also described the Other Mommy smile: as warm as possible, no teeth, and no blinking. Talking to SYFY Wire , she said the real horror is a child's safest place, their parent, turning into the threat.

Photo: Jay Duplass by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The rest of the team

James Wan produced through Blumhouse Atomic Monster, the company formed when Jason Blum's and Wan's banners merged in January 2024. Nathan Elston, a Succession writer, adapted the screenplay, and Savage and Malerman are among the executive producers alongside Michael Clear, Judson Scott and Ryan Lewis. Malerman is best known for Bird Box , whose 2018 Netflix adaptation became one of the streamer's biggest films; Netflix later said it was watched by 89 million households.

Photo: James Wan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: From Incidents Around the House to Other Mommy

Malerman's novel Incidents Around the House was published by Del Rey on June 25, 2024. He has said the idea came from a story his brother told him about a child saying goodnight to an "Other Mommy." Things moved fast from there:

April 16, 2025: the adaptation is announced with Savage directing, Chastain starring and Elston writing for Universal, per JoBlo , which relayed Deadline's report.
July 2025: the project is retitled Other Mommy , and Clark, Duplass and Lachman join the cast.
September 2025: Universal moves the release from May 8, 2026 to Oct. 9, 2026, putting it right in spooky season ( JoBlo ).
July 2026: the theater-only teaser plays before The Odyssey , then goes online July 21.
Sept. 15, 2026: the second trailer drops.
Oct. 9, 2026: theatrical release, with critics' screenings held until the last minute, according to CinemaBlend .
Nov. 10, 2026: digital release, 32 days after opening.

That's about 18 months from announcement to theaters. By studio standards, that's a sprint, and it's the Blumhouse playbook in a nutshell: a known book, a proven genre director, a star with range, and no time for the project to go stale in development.

By the Numbers

Opening weekend: about $27.5 million estimated (actuals came in near $27.8 million) from 3,365 theaters, landing at No. 1 when tracking had pointed to around $20 million ( AP ).
Second weekend: about $8.25 million, a drop of roughly 70%.
Running total: about $108 million worldwide by Nov. 3 ( Koimoi ), around $111 million by Nov. 7 per Forbes, and more than $115 million per Decider. Domestic and international are splitting close to 50/50.
Budget: reported at $18 to $19 million.
Rank: the fourth-biggest horror opening of 2026, behind Backrooms ($81.4M), Scream 7 ($63.6M) and Resident Evil ($60.1M), per Rotten Tomatoes .
Reviews: 19% Tomatometer from 100 reviews, a 48% Popcornmeter, and a Metacritic score of 39.
CinemaScore: D+. RT's box office column notes it's the biggest opening ever for a film with that grade, ahead of Alexander and Hereditary .

The critics weren't gentle. CinemaBlend's roundup gathered pans from Variety, RogerEbert.com, the New York Post, JoBlo and Dread Central, with most of them landing on the same complaint: lots of jump scares, not much movie around them. The defenders, including a few mid-range reviews and a Dread Central "devil's advocate" column, mostly agree on one thing: Chastain is doing something far stranger and braver than the material around her.

Analysis: What Other Mommy Really Means

Strip away the reviews and you're left with a clean business story. A movie that cost less than $20 million made more than five times that in theaters, and it did so in a month crowded with Clayface , Wicker and a Halloween corridor full of genre options. Koimoi pegs its theatrical break-even point at under $50 million worldwide. Whatever you think of the jump-scare count, Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster will make this kind of movie again, probably with the same team.

The more interesting question is why it worked when the word of mouth was this bad. Three things stand out. First, the marketing sold one image better than any horror campaign this year: Chastain's frozen, toothless smile. The theater-only teaser created a "did you see that?" moment before anyone could watch it online. Second, the audience skewed very young. PostTrak data reported by Deadline had 38% of opening-weekend moviegoers aged 18 to 24, the crowd most likely to go opening weekend and least likely to care about a Tomatometer score. Third, the date move to October put it squarely in the season when people buy a ticket to something scary on a Friday night.

The cost of that strategy shows up in the second weekend. A 70% drop is brutal even for horror, which is famously front-loaded. Compare Mama , which opened almost identically at $28.4 million in 2013 and then kept legs long enough to earn $148 million worldwide. Or look at The Boogeyman , which opened much smaller and finished smaller. Other Mommy sits in the middle: a monster opening, then a fast fade. It's the profile of a movie people were curious about rather than one they told friends to see.

That's why today's release matters more than usual. PVOD is where a movie like this can find a second life. At home, a "fun bad" or "better than they said" reputation can travel, and a Chastain performance that critics singled out as the best thing in the film gets watched by people who skipped it in theaters. The 32-day window also says something about Universal's approach: it pulled this out of theaters as soon as the box office cooled and is charging premium prices while the title is still in the conversation. Expect the same playbook for every mid-budget Blumhouse Atomic Monster release in 2027.

For Savage, this is a career inflection point. He now has two studio hits in a row, and his worst-reviewed film is his biggest earner. The worry is that the industry learns the wrong lesson, rewarding volume of scares over the kind of inventive, lean filmmaking that made Host special. The hope is that the next studio gig gives him the time and trust to make something that hits with critics and audiences.

What We Still Don't Know

The Peacock date. Nothing official yet.
A sequel. Nobody at Universal has publicly floated one, but the numbers make the conversation inevitable.
Whether the deleted scenes change anything. "Alternate Car Confrontation" is the one to watch if you're curious how the film might have played differently.
Savage's next move. No new directing project has been confirmed.

Bottom Line

Other Mommy is the year's clearest example of a movie critics and theater crowds rejected while the box office happily paid for it. Now it's cheap enough to rent on a weeknight, which makes this the fairest test it'll ever get: no hype, no opening-night crowd, just you, the couch and Chastain's unblinking stare. So we want to know: if you saw it in theaters, was the D+ fair? And if you're watching it at home this week, tell us whether it's a hidden gem or a jump-scare machine.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Jessica Chastain via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Trailers and featurette: Universal Pictures official YouTube channel.

Sources: NBCUniversal , Forbes , Decider , Dread Central , /Film , Rotten Tomatoes , Rotten Tomatoes box office , AP , Koimoi , CinemaBlend , Rotten Tomatoes interview , SYFY Wire , Gizmodo , JoBlo , The Numbers .

‘Whalefall’ Sinks to 375 Theaters in Three Weeks: The $60M Gamble, the Numbers and Why the Whale Went Under

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 23:50:44 GMT

Three weeks ago, Whalefall rolled into more than 3,000 American theaters as 20th Century Studios' big October swing: a $60 million survival nightmare about a teenager swallowed by a sperm whale, adapted from a horror novelist's acclaimed book and directed by the man behind No One Will Save You . This past weekend it was playing on just 375 screens. According to The Numbers, the film made about $270,000 domestically from Nov. 6 to 8, a 77% drop, and ComicBook.com reported on Monday that the studio has slashed its footprint to a few hundred locations as it heads toward digital.

That makes Whalefall one of the most expensive horror-adjacent misfires of 2026, and it happened to a movie that critics mostly liked. Below: the trailer, the full team, the week-by-week collapse, how it stacks up against a near-identical flop from 2020, why we think it sank, and when you will likely be able to watch it at home.

Watch the Trailer

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

20th Century also released a featurette built around the father-and-son relationship at the center of the story. Watch it, because it is a very different pitch from the trailer, and that gap matters later in this piece.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details

Release: Oct. 16, 2026 in the U.S. (Oct. 14 in France, Italy, Belgium and several other markets), from 20th Century Studios.
Rating and runtime: PG-13 for peril, violent content, bloody images, strong language and thematic content; 106 minutes per the studio.
Director: Brian Duffield, who co-wrote the screenplay with novelist Daniel Kraus.
Cast: Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner, Josh Brolin as his father Mitt, Elisabeth Shue as his mother Zara, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd as his sisters Eva and Nan, and John Ortiz as Hewey.
Producers: Brian Grazer for Imagine Entertainment, plus Duffield, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum.
Crew: cinematographer Aaron Morton, editor Pietro Scalia and composer Joseph Trapanese.
Reported budget: $60 million.

The premise, without spoilers: a grieving teen dives off the Central California coast to recover his late father's remains and ends up inside a sperm whale, with about an hour of air and his dad's voice in his head. The studio even cut a spot titled "1 Hour to Escape," which tells you exactly how it wanted the film sold.

Who's Behind It

Brian Duffield has quietly become one of genre's most interesting writers. He scripted The Babysitter (2017), the deep-sea creature feature Underwater (2020) and Love and Monsters (2020), which landed an Oscar nomination for visual effects. As a writer-director he made the dark comedy Spontaneous and then No One Will Save You , the nearly wordless alien home-invasion film that Hulu released on Sept. 22, 2023. That one cost an estimated $22.8 million and earned an 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it built a real cult following. He has more on deck, including Siren Head with Zach Cregger at Warner Bros.

Daniel Kraus wrote the source novel and co-wrote the script. Horror fans know him as the author who co-wrote The Shape of Water and Trollhunters with Guillermo del Toro and who completed George A. Romero's unfinished zombie epic The Living Dead in 2020. His 2025 novel Angel Down won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Whalefall book, published Aug. 8, 2023, made The New York Times' best thrillers list for that year and won a 2024 Alex Award.

Photo: Daniel Kraus via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Austin Abrams carries the movie almost alone, and his 2026 has been wild. He played Bryan in Zach Cregger's Resident Evil , which opened in September and became one of the year's biggest genre hits, and before that he was in Cregger's Weapons . Genre fans also remember him as Ron Anderson on The Walking Dead and from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Tragedy Girls , with Euphoria and Do Revenge on the mainstream side.

Photo: Austin Abrams via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Josh Brolin , the father whose voice guides Jay through the dark, brings the marquee value. Elisabeth Shue , Jane Levy (a horror veteran of Evil Dead and Don't Breathe ) and Emily Rudd round out the family.

The Backstory

This project moved fast and attracted serious money. Imagine Entertainment pre-emptively grabbed the film rights in August 2023, just before the novel even hit shelves. In March 2024, 20th Century won a bidding war for distribution, with Duffield attached to write and direct. Abrams was cast as the lead in March 2025, Brolin came aboard later that month, and Shue, Ortiz, Levy and Rudd joined in June 2025. Cameras rolled in Los Angeles on June 9, 2025, with the help of a California tax credit, and the production shot on the Monterey Peninsula that same month. Release to theaters came about 16 months later. For a studio, that is the timeline of a movie it believes in.

By the Numbers

Here is the week-by-week slide domestically, per The Numbers:

Opening weekend (Oct. 16-18): $7.84 million from 3,065 theaters, fourth place, about $2,557 per screen.
Weekend 2 (Oct. 23-25): $3.08 million, down 61%.
Weekend 3 (Halloween, Oct. 30-Nov. 1): $1.17 million, down 62%, with theaters cut to 2,000.
Weekend 4 (Nov. 6-8): about $270,000, down 77%, from 375 theaters.

That puts the domestic total at roughly $17.4 million, plus about $20.4 million overseas (Mexico, the U.K. and France led), for a worldwide gross near $37.8 million. Box Office Watch projects a domestic finish around $18 million to $19 million and pegs theatrical breakeven at roughly 2.5 times the budget, which here means something like $150 million. The film will not get within a hundred million dollars of that.

The reviews tell a different story. Whalefall sits at 74% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes across 191 reviews, with an 81% audience score, plus a 59 on Metacritic and a 6.8 on IMDb. Collider's critic gave it a 9 out of 10. As ComicBook.com put it, the film "did modestly well with both critics and fans." People who saw it mostly liked it. Not enough people saw it.

Analysis: Why the Whale Sank

The ghost of Underwater. The most striking comparison is one Duffield already lived through. Underwater , which he wrote, opened in January 2020 for 20th Century Fox with $7.0 million, finished with $17.3 million domestic and $39.2 million worldwide, all on a $65 million budget. Put those numbers next to Whalefall 's $7.8 million opening, $17.4 million domestic and $37.8 million worldwide on $60 million, and they are nearly a carbon copy. Six years apart, the same studio paid premium money for a claustrophobic deep-sea horror movie and got the exact same answer from audiences. That is not bad luck. That is a pattern: ocean-floor dread plays great at home and struggles to justify a ticket.

It was sold as one thing and is another. The trailers leaned on the ticking clock and the gore-adjacent survival hook, positioned for Halloween season. The featurette above and most of the reviews point to something closer to a grief drama about a son and his difficult father, wrapped inside a monster movie. ComicBook.com's take is that the Halloween-thriller marketing misrepresented the movie, and we think that's right. Horror crowds who wanted a scary movie heard it was emotional; adult drama crowds never knew it was for them. A PG-13 rating didn't help it win over gorehounds either.

The calendar was brutal. October 2026 was crowded with genre, including DC's Clayface , which has passed $100 million per ComicBook.com, and the film's fourth weekend collided with Godzilla Minus Zero 's record-setting debut and its grip on premium screens. When a movie is down 61% in weekend two, exhibitors need little excuse to hand its screens to the next big thing.

Duffield's best work found its audience at home. No One Will Save You was a Hulu original and became a word-of-mouth favorite. Love and Monsters made only about $1.1 million in its limited 2020 theatrical run but was the top rental on Apple TV and FandangoNow in its opening weekend and later traveled the world on Netflix. There's a reasonable argument that Disney should have put Whalefall on Hulu from day one, like No One Will Save You . At $60 million, though, a theatrical shot was always going to be tempting.

Austin Abrams isn't the problem. It's tempting to call this a test of whether Abrams can open a movie, but he spent September co-starring in a smash. The lesson is that a breakout supporting role in an IP film does not transfer into ticket sales for an original survival story a month later. Star power in 2026 horror lives in brands and directors more than faces.

What's at stake: not a franchise, because there never was one, but the appetite for mid-budget studio horror that isn't a sequel or a remake. Every Whalefall gives executives an excuse to greenlight one more legacy reboot instead.

What We Still Don't Know / What's Next

Digital date: Disney hasn't announced one. ComicBook.com says the film is heading to digital, and Popped News previously estimated a rent-or-buy window in late November or December.
Streaming: Also unannounced. As a 20th Century release, Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally are the likely homes; one early estimate pointed to around January 2027, but treat that as a guess, not a date.
Final gross: Expect it to finish near $18 million to $19 million domestic.
The second life: Given how No One Will Save You and Underwater both gained cult followings at home, there's a good chance this one does too.

Bottom Line

Whalefall is the rare 2026 box office flop that seems to have deserved better. It has a Pulitzer-winning author, a director with a cult following, a well-liked lead coming off a hit and decent reviews. It was also a $60 million original survival movie sold as a Halloween scare and released into one of the busiest genre months in years. It sank exactly like Underwater did, and it will probably surface on streaming exactly like Underwater did, too.

Did you see Whalefall in theaters, or are you waiting for it to hit streaming? And should Disney have sent it straight to Hulu? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Josh Brolin at TIFF 2025 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: 20th Century Studios , The Numbers , Box Office Watch , ComicBook.com , Collider , Rotten Tomatoes , Wikipedia (film) , Wikipedia (novel) , Wikipedia (Daniel Kraus) , Wikipedia (Brian Duffield) , The Numbers (Underwater) , Wikipedia (No One Will Save You) , Wikipedia (Love and Monsters) , Popped News .

Opinion: The AI ‘Return of the Living Dead’ Sequel Is the Real Zombie. Horror Needs a Hard Line on Likeness

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 17:51:34 GMT

The 1985 The Return of the Living Dead is a movie about something buried coming back wrong. Forty-one years later, the franchise has a sequel that does exactly that. The Return of the Living Dead: Aftermath , released over Halloween weekend by writer-director Richard Driscoll through his DragonFlix streaming site, was sold as a reunion of the original cast. According to Kotaku, which actually watched it, it plays as almost entirely AI generated. And the stars whose faces are on it are now asking, loudly and publicly, to be taken off.

This is an opinion piece, and here's the take: horror has to draw a hard, public line on AI likeness, and it has to draw it now. Not because every tool is evil, and not because one micro-budget release will topple Hollywood. It's because horror, more than any other genre, runs on the bodies and faces of its performers. Our icons are people. If the genre shrugs at Aftermath , it is telling every future rights-holder that a scream queen's face is just another asset in the vault.

What Actually Happened

The project didn't start out as an AI film. In 2024 Driscoll launched a crowdfunding campaign for Trash's Revenge , a follow-up built around Linnea Quigley, whose punk graveyard dancer Trash is one of the most famous characters in '80s horror. By January 2025, JoBlo was reporting a cast list that read like a convention autograph row: Quigley and Beverly Randolph, who played Tina, plus Thom Mathews (Freddy), Miguel A. Núñez Jr. (Spider), John Philbin (Chuck), Eric Roberts and Michelle Bauer. Quigley was producing, Randolph was an associate producer, and original story writer John A. Russo was listed as a co-producer. Even then there was a warning sign: the late James Karen and Don Calfa were to be brought back with CGI.

What came out instead was Aftermath , marketed as a direct sequel to the 1985 film and sold as a $19 digital package with 2D, VR and anaglyph 3D versions. Creepy Catalog reported it landed on DragonFlix on November 1 after "technical issues" bumped it from Halloween night. Dread Central noted the announcement promoted a cast reunion and a featurette and said nothing at all about AI.

Then the cast started talking. In a November 5 interview with The Caffeinated Horror Dude, Randolph said she shot for three days, including a scene with Mathews, and expected some CGI for a cemetery sequence. What she didn't expect was to hear her own performance coming back sounding synthetic. She told the interviewer, per Dread Central, that "we all sound like robots through the entire thing." She says Driscoll sent her the finished film the morning it came out, that she has written him angry letters, and that she wants her face and likeness removed. Kotaku reported she urged backers to seek refunds through their card companies and called on Amazon, which bought MGM in 2022, to take legal action.

Quigley's account is just as pointed. She says she helped recruit the cast and promote the project, warned Driscoll that fans would reject AI, and walked away before filming a scene once she learned how far the AI use went. Her word for the result, per Kotaku: a fiasco. In the coverage we reviewed, Driscoll had not publicly responded to the cast's complaints.

Miguel A. Núñez Jr. (left), Spider in the 1985 original, was on the 2025 cast list for Trash's Revenge . Photo: Miguel A. Núñez Jr. via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

A note on video: normally we'd embed an official trailer here. We're not linking or embedding Aftermath material, because the people whose likenesses are in it have asked for exactly the opposite, and we couldn't verify an official, studio-run upload of the 1985 trailer to embed in its place.

Why This Franchise, of All Franchises, Hurts

Dan O'Bannon's original was a scrappy miracle. It opened wide through Orion on August 16, 1985, cost an estimated $3 to $4 million and grossed roughly $14.2 million domestically. It holds a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 66 on Metacritic, earned four Saturn Award nominations and got three stars from Roger Ebert. It was O'Bannon's directing debut, and it was William Stout's first job as a production designer. Tobe Hooper was originally attached before leaving to make Lifeforce , and Hemdale's money troubles pushed the shoot back. In other words, the thing barely got made, and it survived on the energy of a young cast and a crew of craftspeople who were figuring it out in real time.

That's the whole appeal. Return is beloved because it feels handmade and alive: the Tarman suit, the punk soundtrack, James Karen and Thom Mathews selling pure panic, Quigley's fearless graveyard scene. The film's actors have spent four decades on the convention circuit keeping that spirit going, and fans love them for it. An AI rendering of those people is the opposite of everything the movie stands for. It swaps the sweat for a simulation.

Thom Mathews, Freddy in the 1985 original, was part of the announced Trash's Revenge cast; Randolph says she shot a scene with him. Photo: Thom Mathews via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

It also lands on a franchise that's already a legal haunted house. The sequels slid from the $9.2 million domestic gross of Part II in 1988 to $54,207 for Brian Yuzna's Return of the Living Dead 3 in 1993, then to two Sci Fi Channel movies that both aired on October 15, 2005. Since then, rival camps have fought over the name. Steve Wolsh's Living Dead Media has its own "sixth installment" with Devon Sawa, pitched with a no-CGI, no-green-screen pledge. Original cast members tangled with Living Dead Media in court until a July 2026 settlement, and according to JoBlo and Creepy Catalog a tentative Los Angeles ruling in August said the chain of title for the 1985 film sits with MGM. Into that mess, Aftermath drops a third version of "the official sequel," and this one comes with synthetic faces.

Horror Has Been Here Before, and Learned Nothing Loudly Enough

Remember March 2024? Late Night with the Devil was one of the best-reviewed indie horror films of the year, and it still caught a wave of boycott calls when viewers spotted AI-generated interstitial cards. Directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes said, per Film Stories, that they had experimented with AI for three still images, which were then edited by their graphics team. Three title cards. That was enough to light up Letterboxd for a week.

You can argue that reaction was out of proportion, and plenty of people did. But look at the gap between that case and this one. The Cairnes brothers used AI for set dressing and owned up to it right away. Aftermath , by its own cast's account, put AI where the performances should be, and the people being simulated say they found out on release day. If three AI title cards are a scandal, a film that reportedly turns real actors into robotic approximations without their sign-off should be a five-alarm fire. The fact that it's a tiny release on a niche platform shouldn't lower the alarm. It should raise it, because small, unregulated corners are where the norms get tested first.

The Rules Exist. They Just Don't Reach Everyone

Hollywood's unions saw this coming. The deal that ended SAG-AFTRA's 2023 strike, which the union's board backed with an 86% vote, required consent every time a digital replica is used, demanded a reasonably specific description of each use instead of blanket perpetual rights, and tied replica pay to the work the actor would have done on set. The union's 2026 TV/Theatrical Agreement goes further into digital replicas and synthetic performers, with consent, compensation and notice requirements.

Those protections are real, and they matter. But they're contracts, and contracts only cover the productions that sign them. A self-distributed, crowdfunded indie released through a filmmaker's own streaming site can live a long way from any union agreement. That's the loophole Aftermath exposes. The guardrails were built for studios. The people most likely to cut corners on a cult icon's face are often working far below the studio level, selling directly to fans who trust a familiar name and a familiar cast photo.

Which is why the fix can't just come from contracts. It has to come from the culture around horror: festivals, distributors, conventions, crowdfunding platforms, press and fans.

What a Hard Line Looks Like

Disclosure up front. If a horror film uses AI to generate or alter a performer's face or voice, say so on the sales page and in the crowdfunding pitch. Backers of Trash's Revenge paid for a reunion, not a simulation.
Written, specific consent from every performer, living or dead. For actors who've passed, like James Karen and Don Calfa, that means their estates, in writing, for that exact use.
A takedown path. When an actor says "take my face off this," platforms and storefronts need a fast way to act on it, not a months-long fight.
Fans voting with their wallets. Horror fandom is passionate and organized. Make undisclosed AI likeness the thing that gets a project shunned, not the thing that gets it clicks.

None of that bans technology. It just puts the performer back at the center of the decision, which is where the genre's whole history says they belong.

The Other Side

The strongest case on the other side goes like this: independent horror has always been about doing a lot with nothing, and AI tools could let a tiny team make things it never could before. Practical effects legends were once the "new technology" too, and every leap, from rubber suits to CGI, got called a betrayal by somebody. There's also a fair point that legacy casts are getting older, that fans want to see these characters again, and that a low-budget filmmaker might see AI as the only way to finish a project when money and schedules fall apart. And the full story here isn't public yet: we haven't heard Driscoll's side, and complaints about a project's quality are not the same thing as proof of what anyone agreed to on paper.

All true, and worth saying. But none of it touches the core issue. Nobody is arguing that a filmmaker can't use new tools on his own work. The argument is about using other people's faces and voices in ways they say they never agreed to and don't want. Rubber suits never needed an actor's permission to exist. A synthetic Tina does. "It was the only way to finish" is a reason to tell the cast and the backers early, not a reason to surprise them on release day. And the pro-AI case gets much stronger the moment it starts with consent, which is exactly the line we're asking for.

Bottom Line

The Return of the Living Dead gave us zombies that ran, talked and begged for brains, and that made it funnier and scarier than the slow shamblers that came before. The joke worked because the dead weren't just bodies, they had personalities. Aftermath , at least as its own stars describe it, flips that: it takes living, working actors and turns them into something closer to puppets. Horror should treat that the way the movie treats Trioxin. Seal it up, label it clearly, and don't let it leak into the next town.

Beverly Randolph and Linnea Quigley spent 41 years making these characters part of horror history. The least the genre can do is back them up when they say "not like this."

Your turn: Is there ANY version of AI likeness in horror you'd accept, say, with full consent and disclosure, or should the genre ban it outright? Tell us we're wrong in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Dan O'Bannon, writer-director of the 1985 original, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Kotaku , Dread Central , iHorror , Creepy Catalog , JoBlo (Trash's Revenge cast) , JoBlo (rights ruling) , Wikipedia: The Return of the Living Dead , Wikipedia: film series , Wikipedia: Return of the Living Dead (2026 film) , Film Stories , AFP via eNCA , Weintraub Tobin .

Rosamund Pike Goes Momfluencer Body Horror in Leslye Headland’s ‘Feed’: The Team, the ‘Hatching’ Connection and Everything We Know

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:49:36 GMT

Rosamund Pike has spent a decade playing women you should never turn your back on. Amy Dunne faked her own murder in Gone Girl . Marla Grayson ran a legal guardianship racket in I Care a Lot . Elspeth Catton smiled her way through the rot of Saltburn . Now she is taking that energy somewhere much wetter and much stranger: a body horror movie about a stage mother, a miracle supplement and a daughter who goes viral in the worst possible way.

The film is called Feed . Pike stars and produces, Leslye Headland ( Russian Doll , The Acolyte ) directs, and the script by Daniella Isaacs is inspired by the 2022 Finnish creature feature Hatching . Deadline broke the news late last week, and the project is heading to the American Film Market to find buyers. Below: everything confirmed, the people behind it, the cult film that inspired it, and why this might be the most interesting pairing of star and subgenre to come out of this year’s market.

Watch: The ‘Hatching’ Trailer That Started It

Feed has no footage yet; it is a package being sold at market, not a film in the can. So the best preview of its DNA is the official trailer for Hatching , released by IFC Midnight in 2022. If you have not seen it, this is the egg everything else came out of.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What’s Confirmed

Here is what the announcement, as reported by Deadline, TheWrap, Dread Central, GamesRadar and JoBlo, actually locks in:

Star and producer: Rosamund Pike, through her company Primitive Streak.
Director: Leslye Headland. It is her first directing job since The Acolyte .
Writer: Daniella Isaacs, whose previous credit is the drama People Who Knew Me .
The story: Pike plays Erin, a mother whose tween daughter is a gymnast. Erin finds an obscure collagen supplement that seems to turn the girl into an online star. The followers pour in, and so does a monstrous physical change.
Inspiration: the Finnish film Hatching (2022). The trades describe Feed as inspired by it, not as a straight remake.
Producers: Pike; Shelley Browning (Magnolia Entertainment); Steven Schneider (Spooky Pictures); Ara Keshishian and Petr Jakl (ZQ Entertainment); and Sam Ritzenberg (Agile Films).
Money: ZQ Entertainment financed the script’s development.
Sales: The Veterans handles international rights and CAA Media Finance handles the U.S. Sales start at AFM this week.

The official logline calls it a mother-daughter story about parental ambition and the illusion of protection, and about “the fine line between predator and prey.” What is not confirmed: any other cast (no one has been named as the daughter), a studio or distributor, a budget, a shoot date or a release window. GamesRadar notes plainly that there is no release date.

Pike’s statement on the project framed it as something she has wanted to make for a long time: a film that plays wildly with our fixation on social media and self-improvement. She added a nicely sinister read of her character, who believes success online will shield her daughter from a cruel world, and then lets that belief hang with a question mark. Headland, for her part, called Isaacs’ script disturbing and humane, and called Pike “among the boldest actors working today.”

Who’s Behind It

Rosamund Pike

Pike earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for Gone Girl (2014), David Fincher’s thriller that grossed more than $356 million worldwide. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for I Care a Lot (2020) and drew award attention again for Saltburn (2023). She also led and produced Prime Video’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time as Moiraine.

Her straight-up horror résumé is short but getting more serious. Long before prestige, she was Dr. Samantha Grimm in the video game adaptation Doom (2005). Far more relevant is Hallow Road (2025), Babak Anvari’s nearly real-time nightmare in which Pike and Matthew Rhys play parents racing through a forest after their daughter’s hit-and-run. It premiered at SXSW in March 2025, scored 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and 69 on Metacritic, and barely registered at the box office (about $220,000). Look at the through-line: two films in a row in which Pike plays a mother whose instinct to protect her daughter curdles into something dangerous. That is not an accident. That is a lane.

She is also extremely busy. Her Olivier-winning one-woman play Inter Alia opens on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on November 10 and runs into February 2027, and she has 2026 films with Guy Ritchie ( In the Grey ) and Netflix ( Ladies First , opposite Sacha Baron Cohen). Translation: Feed is unlikely to shoot before spring.

Photo: Leslye Headland via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Leslye Headland

Headland started as a playwright and moved into film with two Sundance comedies she wrote and directed, Bachelorette (2012) and Sleeping with Other People (2015). Her breakout was Russian Doll , the Netflix time-loop series she co-created with Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler in 2019. It earned Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series and for its writing, and it was, quietly, a horror-adjacent show: a woman dying over and over, haunted by her mother’s illness and her own body.

Then came The Acolyte , the Star Wars series she created and ran for Disney+. It premiered in June 2024 and was cancelled that August after one eight-episode season, with a reported price tag in the high hundreds of millions that became part of the online fight around the show. Critics were warmer (78% on Rotten Tomatoes) than the loudest part of the audience (19%). Since then she has been an executive producer on FX’s Dying for Sex , which earned a 2025 Emmy nomination, and she made her Broadway debut with her play Cult of Love in 2024.

Feed is a smart reset: a contained, idea-driven genre film where the director’s voice matters more than the IP.

The producers

The name horror fans should circle is Steven Schneider of Spooky Pictures, a producer whose credits include Paranormal Activity and Insidious , two of the most profitable horror launches of the century. Shelley Browning of Magnolia Entertainment is a longtime producing partner of Pike’s, and ZQ Entertainment put up the development money that got the script written.

The Backstory: What ‘Hatching’ Was

If Feed sounds familiar, it is because Hatching (original title Pahanhautoja ) already told a version of this nightmare. Directed by Hanna Bergholm from a script by Ilja Rautsi, the Finnish film follows a 12-year-old gymnast, played by Siiri Solalinna, whose mother runs a relentlessly cheerful family lifestyle blog. The girl finds a strange egg, keeps it warm in her bed, and what hatches becomes a grotesque mirror of everything she is forced to hide.

The creature was a practical animatronic built by Gustav Hoegen’s team, with makeup effects from Oscar nominee Conor O’Sullivan, and that handmade quality is a big reason the film stuck. It premiered at Sundance on January 23, 2022, won the Grand Prix at France’s Gérardmer festival, and was released in the U.S. by IFC Midnight on April 29, 2022. It sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and landed on plenty of best-of-2022 horror lists.

It was also tiny. The budget was roughly €3.95 million, and Rotten Tomatoes lists its U.S. gross at about $183,000. That gap between cult reputation and commercial reach is exactly why an English-language take with a star makes business sense.

The key change in Feed is where the horror lives. Hatching made the mother the pressure and the egg the monster. From the logline, Feed swaps the fairy-tale egg for a product, a collagen supplement, and swaps the family blog for influencer fame. That moves the story from fable to satire of a very real 2020s economy: wellness marketing, kid creators and parents who manage their children’s accounts.

By the Numbers

$356M+: worldwide gross of Gone Girl , still Pike’s defining hit.
92%: Hatching ’s Rotten Tomatoes score.
About $183K: Hatching ’s U.S. gross.
$77M to $82M: worldwide gross of The Substance on an $18M budget, the benchmark every star-led body horror pitch is now chasing.
88%: Hallow Road ’s Rotten Tomatoes score, Pike’s most recent horror outing.
Six: producers and companies already attached before a single frame is shot.

Analysis: Why This Package Makes Sense

Start with The Substance . Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film took a famous actress, a beauty product that promises a better self and a body that rebels in gruesome ways, and turned it into $77 million to $82 million worldwide off an $18 million budget, plus awards-season glory for Demi Moore. Every agent and financier in town noticed. Feed is not a copy, but it is clearly built on the same discovery: audiences will show up for disgusting practical effects if a respected star is at the center and the film is about something everyone recognizes.

Next, the Pike factor. Her best roles are women performing perfection for an audience while something cold runs underneath. A momfluencer, someone who literally sells a curated version of her family, is the most Rosamund Pike character imaginable. The risk with stars in body horror is that they treat it as slumming. Pike producing it herself, and coming straight off Hallow Road , suggests she is all in.

Third, the remake question. English-language versions of acclaimed foreign horror have a messy record. Speak No Evil (2024) worked commercially by softening the Danish original’s ending, to the irritation of purists. Others vanish. Feed is smart to call itself “inspired by” rather than a remake: shifting the monster from an egg to a supplement and the platform from a blog to influencer culture gives it its own reason to exist. Whether that respects Bergholm’s film or flattens it will come down to one thing: does Feed keep the practical creature work that made Hatching unforgettable?

Finally, Headland. After the very public bruising of The Acolyte , a mid-budget genre film with a sharp hook is the classic way for a director to remind the industry what she can do. Her work has always circled women under pressure to perform, from Bachelorette to Russian Doll . Put that through a body horror filter and you have a real point of view, not just a gross-out.

What is at stake: if Feed sells big at AFM, expect a wave of star-plus-satire body horror pitches to follow. If it stalls, it will be a reminder that the Substance lightning is hard to bottle.

What We Still Don’t Know

Who plays the daughter. This is the most important casting left, and the role will carry the film’s grossest moments.
Who buys it. U.S. rights are with CAA Media Finance; watch AFM this week for a distributor deal.
When it shoots. Pike is on Broadway until late February 2027, so a 2027 production and a 2028 release is the realistic guess, not a confirmed plan.
Whether Hanna Bergholm or Ilja Rautsi are involved in any way. No source mentions them as credited producers.
How practical the effects will be.

Bottom Line

Feed is a great pitch with the right star: an Oscar-nominated actress who specializes in terrifying perfection, a director with something to prove, and a premise lifted from one of the best body horror films of the decade and pointed at the wellness-and-influencer economy. The hard part is all still ahead. But on paper, this is the AFM title horror fans should be watching.

So tell us: is an English-language take on Hatching a smart update, or should Hollywood have left that egg alone?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Rosamund Pike at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline , TheWrap , Dread Central , GamesRadar+ , JoBlo , Rotten Tomatoes (Hatching) , Hatching (Wikipedia) , Leslye Headland (Wikipedia) , Rosamund Pike (Wikipedia) , Hallow Road (Wikipedia) , The Substance (Wikipedia) .

Netflix’s ‘The Body’ Brings Catholic School Mass Hysteria on Nov. 11: The Trailer, the Cast and Everything We Know

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 23:51:09 GMT

Netflix is about to send a Catholic school dance team straight into the arms of the devil, or at least into the arms of a town that is very sure the devil is involved. The Body , the eight-episode horror-tinged teen series from Under the Bridge filmmaker Quinn Shephard, drops all at once on Wednesday, November 11 . The pitch is simple and nasty: a dance-team initiation goes wrong, the girls who survive it start having prophetic visions, and the community around them tips into full-blown mass hysteria.

That puts the show in a lane horror fans know well, somewhere between Carrie , Jennifer's Body and The Crucible , and it lands at a moment when streaming horror about teenage girls is having a serious run. With three days to go, here is everything confirmed about The Body : the trailer, the cast, the team behind it, how long it has been in the works, and what its arrival says about where Netflix's horror slate is headed.

Watch the Trailer

Netflix released the first full trailer on October 12. It plays like a confession tape: pleated skirts, candlelit rituals, a party that goes somewhere it shouldn't, and adults who look increasingly terrified of the girls they are supposed to be protecting.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed

Premiere: Wednesday, November 11, 2026, on Netflix.
Episodes: eight, all released the same day.
Format: billed as a limited series and a coming-of-age psychological drama, with a heavy dose of religious horror.
Creator and showrunner: Quinn Shephard, who also wrote and directed the pilot.
Production companies: The North Road Company, Chernin Entertainment and Felix Culpa.
Filming: shot in Canada in late 2025, with locations including Dundas, Ontario.
Not announced yet: episode runtimes and an official maturity rating.

The core cast is a mix of rising young actors and a few familiar faces. Sofia Wylie plays Grace Franklin, whose fate appears to be the central mystery; Netflix's own synopsis teases the question of what happened to her. Kristina Bogic is Anya Butler, Sara Boustany is Elise Zakaria, Geena Meszaros is Lisbeth Anderson and Shirley Chen is Maddie Delaney. On the adult side, Nnamdi Asomugha plays Father Franklin, Louisa Krause plays Catherine Anderson, and Jackson Kelly plays Leo Anderson.

The recurring cast is deep, too: Kyra and Phallon Pierce as twins Bailey and Brit Bradley, Marcel Ruiz as Tyler Santos, Orlando Norman as Steven Maxwell, Ashley Madekwe as Theresa Franklin and Motell Foster as Michael Franklin. In the most unexpected bit of casting, Gabby Windey, the reality TV personality who won The Traitors , plays the dance team's Coach Miller.

Sofia Wylie plays Grace Franklin. Photo: Sofia Wylie via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Who's Behind It

Quinn Shephard

Shephard has been working in front of the camera since she was five, when she appeared in the 2001 drama Harrison's Flowers . TV fans may remember her as Morgan Sanders on CBS's Hostages or as Claire Mahoney on Person of Interest , and she played Coley Taylor in The Miseducation of Cameron Post .

Her filmmaking is where it gets interesting. Her 2017 debut Blame , which she wrote, produced, edited and starred in, premiered at Tribeca, where she became the youngest female director to debut a film at the festival. It sits at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. She followed it with the social media satire Not Okay for Hulu in 2022, then took on her biggest project yet: Hulu's 2024 true-crime limited series Under the Bridge , which she developed, executive produced, co-wrote and partly directed. That series, starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone, holds an 87% Tomatometer score and earned Gladstone a Primetime Emmy nomination for supporting actress in a limited series.

In other words, Shephard has spent nearly a decade circling the same subject: teenage girls, group cruelty and what happens when a community decides who is guilty. The Body looks like the version of that obsession with the supernatural dial turned all the way up.

The producers

The executive producer list is strong. Peter Chernin, Amy Israel and Josh Stern come from The North Road Company, and Chernin Entertainment is already proven in Netflix horror: it produced Leigh Janiak's Fear Street trilogy, which rolled out weekly in July 2021 and scored 84%, 88% and 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Riley Keough, Gina Gammell and Sacha Ben Harroche come in through Felix Culpa, the company behind Keough and Gammell's War Pony , which won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at Cannes in 2022. Blair Breard and Shephard also executive produce, and Gammell directs as well.

The writers' room includes Stuti Malhotra, Julian Breece, Catherine Schetina, Lily Houghton, Naledi Jackson and Greta Heinemann, with Shephard writing or co-writing three of the eight episodes.

The cast

Sofia Wylie is the most recognizable of the young leads. She broke out as Buffy Driscoll on Disney Channel's Andi Mack , spent four years as Gina Porter on Disney+'s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series , and played Aggie in Netflix's dark fairy tale The School for Good and Evil . A Catholic horror story is a sharp left turn from the Disney machine, which is exactly why it is worth watching.

Nnamdi Asomugha spent 11 seasons as an NFL cornerback, mostly with the Oakland Raiders, before rebuilding himself as an actor and producer. He starred in and produced Crown Heights and Sylvie's Love , appeared in The Good Nurse , and directed and starred in 2024's The Knife . Louisa Krause brings serious indie credentials: Martha Marcy May Marlene , the lead in season 2 of The Girlfriend Experience , recurring roles on Billions and Ray Donovan , and a part as Sapphire Stagg in 2025's Superman .

Louisa Krause plays Catherine Anderson. Photo: Louisa Krause via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The Backstory: From Order to Premiere

This has been a fast-moving project by streaming standards. Netflix ordered the series in May 2025, announced in reports from Variety and the streamer's Tudum site. The main cast was revealed in early October 2025, with the recurring players added later that month, and cameras rolled in Ontario before the end of the year. Netflix set the November 11 date and released first-look images on August 11, 2026, then dropped the trailer on October 12. That is roughly 18 months from order to premiere, quick for an eight-episode drama.

There is no book or comic behind it. Shephard has said the show grows out of her own adolescence, and she has been open about her influences: Carrie , Jennifer's Body , Heavenly Creatures , Mean Girls and Arthur Miller's witch-trial play. In Netflix's materials she described the tone as a kind of gritty camp and framed the show around a big idea: "I've always been interested in the idea of girlhood as a religious experience." She has also called it "a raunchy teen psychodrama with a dash of Catholic horror," which might be the most honest logline Netflix has put out all year.

By the Numbers

8 episodes, all dropping November 11.
8 series regulars and 16 recurring players announced.
3 of 8 episodes written or co-written by Shephard.
87% : Under the Bridge 's Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes.
84-89% : the Rotten Tomatoes range of Chernin's Fear Street trilogy.
About 18 months from series order (May 2025) to premiere.

No reviews or scores were out as of this writing, so the critical verdict will likely arrive right around launch.

Analysis: What This Really Means

Start with the obvious comparison. Yellowjackets proved that a story about teenage girls, group belief and ritual violence could become one of TV's most-discussed horror shows, and its final season begins November 20 on Paramount+. The Body arrives nine days earlier with a similar engine (a tight-knit team, a shared secret, a slide into something that might be supernatural) and a very different setting. Netflix does not need it to be Yellowjackets . It needs it to catch the audience waiting for Yellowjackets to come back.

The second comparison is Netflix's own. Wednesday showed the streamer that dark, stylish, girl-centered genre TV can be a global monster: within three weeks of release its first season ranked as Netflix's second most-watched English-language series ever. The Body is clearly far less of a mainstream play, with more blood and more sex, but it chases a similar audience, and casting a Disney-bred star like Wylie is a smart bridge to younger viewers. Meanwhile, Chernin's Fear Street is the proof that this production team can deliver teen horror Netflix subscribers actually finish.

The bigger question is tone. Gritty camp is a hard target. Lean too campy and the mass-hysteria story loses its sting; lean too gritty and it becomes another grim prestige drama with a few creepy visions sprinkled on top. Jennifer's Body , one of Shephard's stated influences, is the cautionary and hopeful example at once: misread on release in 2009, now beloved, and reportedly heading for a sequel. Shephard's track record suggests she knows how to handle the social horror of a group turning on one girl. Whether she can make the supernatural side genuinely scary is the open bet.

There's also the format. Netflix is calling this a limited series, which signals a complete story rather than a mystery box built to stretch over five seasons. If it hits, expect the streamer to find a way to come back to this town anyway. Plenty of "limited" shows have found a second season once the numbers came in.

What We Still Don't Know

Episode runtimes and the official maturity rating.
Which episodes Gina Gammell and other directors helmed, beyond Shephard's pilot.
How literally supernatural the visions turn out to be, and what happened to Grace.
Reviews, which should land around the November 11 premiere.
Viewership: Netflix's weekly Top 10 data for the show's first days should arrive the following Tuesday.

The Bottom Line

The Body has the pieces: a filmmaker who has been building toward this story her whole career, producers with a Netflix horror hit already on the shelf, a lead making a bold jump away from Disney, and a premise that taps one of horror's richest veins. It is also walking a tonal tightrope that has tripped up plenty of teen horror shows before it. We'll know Wednesday whether it is the next cult favorite or a sleepover watch that's forgotten by Thanksgiving.

Are you binging The Body on day one, or waiting for word of mouth? And which is scarier: possession, or a whole town convinced you're possessed?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Quinn Shephard via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: What's on Netflix , Dread Central , JoBlo , ShowbizJunkies , Horror News Network , Wikipedia: The Body , Wikipedia: Quinn Shephard , Rotten Tomatoes , Marie Claire , Wikipedia: Fear Street , Wikipedia: War Pony .

Horror’s YouTube Gold Rush: Lionsgate Launches Render Road Days After Blumhouse Becomes Blumhouse Atomic

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 17:51:12 GMT

Two years ago, a studio executive who wanted the next big horror filmmaker went to film festivals. Now they open YouTube. In the span of three days this week, two of the most powerful companies in the genre made that shift official. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, Jason Blum and James Wan retired the clunky "Blumhouse and Atomic Monster" handle and renamed their merged company Blumhouse Atomic , with Wan's statement leaning hard on finding "new voices." Two days later, Lionsgate and its management-company subsidiary 3 Arts Entertainment launched Render Road , a horror banner built to make films, series and digital work for audiences wherever they are already watching scary stuff, which in 2026 mostly means a phone.

Neither move happened in a vacuum. This was the year a 20-year-old YouTuber opened an A24 movie to $81.5 million, and a sketch comedian turned a sub-$1 million thriller into one of the biggest originals of the decade. Below: everything confirmed about Render Road and Blumhouse Atomic, the people running them, the numbers that started the land grab, and our honest read on whether the creator gold rush is a revolution or the start of a bubble.

Watch: Where This All Started

Render Road and Blumhouse Atomic don't have trailers of their own, so here are the two videos that explain why they exist. First, A24's trailer for Backrooms , released March 31:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

And the one that started it: Kane Parsons' original "The Backrooms (Found Footage)," posted to his Kane Pixels channel on Jan. 7, 2022, and built in the free 3D program Blender.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What Render Road Actually Is

Render Road was first reported by Deadline as an exclusive and confirmed in a TheWrap report by Drew Taylor on the evening of Nov. 5. Here is what is on the record:

Who runs it: 3 Arts partners Luke Maxwell and Will Rowbotham are leading the banner.
What it makes: feature films, TV series and digital storytelling, developed, produced and financed in-house, for a wide range of platforms.
Who it works with: emerging filmmakers alongside established ones, on its own projects and in partnership with other studios and production companies.
The pitch: reaching horror fans where they are discovering and engaging with the genre. Translation: online first, theaters when it earns them.

No titles have been announced for the banner yet, and no budget ranges or distribution terms have been made public. What makes Render Road worth paying attention to is the roster 3 Arts already manages. The company represents Kane Parsons ( Backrooms ), Ian Tuason ( Undertone , and now the director of the next Paranormal Activity ) and Dylan Clark , who is directing the new Blair Witch for Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic as well as Portrait of God for Lionsgate, with Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele producing. In other words, the management company already has the talent. Render Road gives it a way to own the projects too.

The Details: What Changed at Blumhouse Atomic

The rename is less dramatic than it sounds, but the numbers attached to it are not. Blumhouse and Wan's Atomic Monster first went public with merger talks in November 2022 and closed the deal on Jan. 2, 2024. As of this week, Blumhouse Atomic is the corporate name for the combined company, while Blumhouse and Atomic Monster carry on as separate production labels with their own creative teams, according to TheWrap's Umberto Gonzalez.

Blum called the new name a "natural evolution" of what the two built together. Wan's line is the one the industry heard: "The future of horror comes from new voices." He name-checked Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, Josh Giuliano and Dylan Clark as filmmakers he is working with. The company also pointed to Sam Zimmerman, hired earlier this year as senior vice president of development and acquisitions to oversee genre features, including movies that cost under $5 million, plus a first-look deal with Divide/Conquer signed in late 2025.

The 2027 film slate is stacked: River , The Revenge of La Llorona , The Exorcist: Martyrs , Curry Barker's Anything But Ghosts , Paranormal Activity , Molepeople , Blair Witch , Sleepover and Seasons . Beyond movies, there is USA Network's The Rainmaker , Prime Video's Scarpetta , the game Grave Seasons , a Broadway version of Paranormal Activity and Halloween Horror Nights tie-ins.

Who's Behind It

James Wan is the reason the word "franchise" sits so comfortably next to "horror." He co-created Saw with Leigh Whannell, then built Insidious and The Conjuring into two of the genre's sturdiest brands through Atomic Monster. In 2025, Blumhouse picked up the rights to future Saw projects, which put Wan back with the series he started. Lionsgate keeps its existing ownership and distribution rights.

Jason Blum perfected the micro-budget, wide-release model with Paranormal Activity , then scaled it with Get Out , Five Nights at Freddy's and M3GAN . Since the merger, the company has released Night Swim , M3GAN 2.0 , Five Nights at Freddy's 2 , Lee Cronin's The Mummy and Other Mommy , among others.

Lionsgate has its own horror pedigree. It inherited The Blair Witch Project through its purchase of Artisan, distributed Eli Roth's Hostel and rode Saw for two decades. Its upcoming slate includes a new Saw from director Mike P. Nelson and a remake of Magic , the 1978 ventriloquist chiller written by William Goldman, which Sam Raimi is directing from a script by his Send Help writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon.

Photo: Sam Raimi via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ). Raimi is directing Lionsgate's Magic remake and producing Dylan Clark's Portrait of God .

Raimi is the perfect patron saint for all of this. He made The Evil Dead with friends and borrowed money decades before "creator economy" was a phrase. There is even a Sam Raimi Horror Award running right now, offering $25,000 and distribution to an emerging filmmaker's short, with submissions closing Dec. 31, according to the Fearsome Fiction weekly roundup.

The Backstory: How YouTube Became Horror's Farm Team

The pipeline didn't appear overnight. Parsons posted his first Backrooms video at 16 and spent three years turning it into a web series that pulled in millions of subscribers on Kane Pixels. A24 put him in the director's chair, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve starring, and the movie shot in Vancouver in the summer of 2025 under the working title Effigy .

Curry Barker came up through the sketch channel "that's a bad idea" with collaborator Cooper Tomlinson. His short "The Chair" caught a producer's eye in 2023, and his first feature, Milk & Serial , went up free on YouTube in August 2024. Obsession premiered at TIFF's Midnight Madness on Sept. 5, 2025, where Focus Features paid a reported $14 million to $15 million, said to be a festival record for a genre film. Blumhouse came aboard as an executive producer after the premiere, which is how Blum and Wan ended up with a piece of the year's biggest surprise.

Ian Tuason took a different road. Undertone started life as a radio play, was shot in his own childhood home in Toronto, and won an audience award at Fantasia in July 2025 before A24 bought it. Its success helped land him the job of steering Paranormal Activity back to its original house.

And the list keeps growing. Per a TheWrap survey from Oct. 30, Warner Bros. has a Siren Head movie from Trevor Henderson with Zach Cregger producing, Amazon MGM has Alex Kister's Mandela Catalogue , Blumhouse has MatPat's Amanda the Adventurer , and Mark Fischbach's self-financed Iron Lung reportedly made about $50 million in theaters.

By the Numbers

Obsession : made for $750,000 or less, per Barker. Opened in third place with $17.2 million on May 15, then grew in weekends two and three ($24 million, then $27.4 million). Worldwide gross topped $505 million by early September per Box Office Mojo, making it Focus Features' biggest film ever. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, A- CinemaScore.
Backrooms : budget under $10 million. Opened May 29 to $81.5 million domestic and $118 million worldwide, A24's biggest debut ever, and reached roughly $402 million worldwide. 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. Parsons became the youngest director to open a film at No. 1 in North America.
Undertone : a $500,000 budget, a $9.34 million opening against a roughly $7 million projection, and about $21.6 million worldwide.
Blumhouse Atomic overall: more than $2.5 billion worldwide since the merger against combined budgets under $330 million, over $1 billion in each of 2025 and 2026, and nearly $1.3 billion from 2026 releases that cost less than $70 million combined.

Sit with that last stat. Blumhouse Atomic's 2026 movies grossed roughly 18 times what they cost to make. No other corner of Hollywood can say that right now, and a big share of it came from two filmmakers who were posting videos for free a few years ago.

Analysis: What This Really Means

The scouting system has changed for good. For decades, the path for horror filmmakers ran through festivals, short-film circuits and the occasional viral trailer. YouTube flips that. A creator shows up with a tested premise, a built-in audience and years of proof that they can hold attention, which is exactly what a marketing department wants. Render Road exists because Lionsgate looked at 3 Arts' client list and realized it was renting talent it could be developing from day one.

The rename is a flag in the ground. Dropping "Monster" from the corporate name is tidy branding, but pairing it with a box office scorecard and a speech about new voices is a message to every creator with a horror channel: we've done this twice in a year, come to us first. Hiring an executive specifically to chase sub-$5 million features says the same thing.

History says booms overheat. We've seen this movie. The Blair Witch Project in 1999 kicked off a wave of cheap found-footage imitators, most forgotten. Paranormal Activity did it again a decade later and ran its own franchise into diminishing returns. The same risk is here. Undertone is the warning label: a strong opening, then a C CinemaScore and steep drops, ending near $21.6 million. That's still a big profit on $500,000, but it's a reminder that a viral concept isn't the same as a crowd-pleaser. Not every viral channel is going to produce a Backrooms .

The other risk is sanding off the weird. What made Backrooms and Obsession work was that nobody told their creators "no" for years. The more money and notes flow in, the more pressure there is to turn online oddities into safe four-quadrant products. The banners that win will be the ones that protect a creator's voice instead of absorbing it into another IP machine. Lionsgate's own track record with Saw (a new installment every Halloween from 2004 to 2010) is something to watch on that front.

The good news for fans: more doors are open for strange, cheap, original horror than at any point since the late '70s. If even a third of these creator projects keep their teeth, 2027 and 2028 are going to be very fun.

What We Still Don't Know

Render Road's first projects, and whether Parsons, Tuason or Clark will make anything under the banner itself.
Whether Render Road's "digital storytelling" means original YouTube series, games or something else entirely.
How Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic split the spoils on shared titles like Blair Witch , now that both are courting the same creators.
Release dates for most of Blumhouse Atomic's 2027 slate. The confirmed one: Paranormal Activity on Oct. 22, 2027.

Bottom Line

Horror's biggest companies have stopped treating YouTube as a gimmick and started treating it as their talent pipeline. Render Road and Blumhouse Atomic are the same bet from two angles: whoever signs the next Parsons or Barker first wins the next five years of the genre. The question is whether the money helps these creators get weirder or makes them play it safe.

Your turn: which horror YouTuber should get a studio deal next? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: James Wan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: TheWrap (Render Road) , Deadline , TheWrap (Blumhouse Atomic) , GamesRadar+ , TheWrap (creator pipeline) , Fangoria , Backrooms box office and reception , Obsession box office and reception , Undertone box office and reception , Box Office Mojo , Fearsome Fiction .

‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ Breaks a 22-Year Box Office Record: The $32M Opening, the IMAX Surge and What Comes Next

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:55:27 GMT

For 22 years, the record for the biggest North American opening by a live-action film not in English belonged to Jet Li. Zhang Yimou's Hero opened to roughly $18 million in late August 2004, and nothing subtitled with real actors in it has touched that number since. This weekend, a 135-minute, R-rated, Japanese-language monster movie about a country still clawing its way out of World War II walked right over it. Godzilla Minus Zero pulled in $14.5 million on Friday alone, and Saturday estimates from the trades have it tracking for about $32 million over three days, nearly triple what Godzilla Minus One opened to in 2023.

That is not a niche win. It puts a $15 million-ish Toho production in the same opening-weekend neighborhood as Legendary's Godzilla vs. Kong , it crushed Warner Bros.' animated The Cat in the Hat , and it handed IMAX and premium screens one of their biggest weekends of the year. Below: every number we can confirm so far, how the record is actually defined (there's an asterisk, and it's an anime-shaped one), who made this thing, how it got here, and what this weekend tells Hollywood about horror-adjacent monster movies, subtitles and the big screen.

Watch the Trailer

Toho's official trailer, cut in the film's full 1.43:1 IMAX frame, is the best argument for why people paid up for the biggest screen in town:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

And here's the official teaser that GKIDS and Toho released over the summer:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Numbers So Far

A note before the figures: as of Sunday morning, studios haven't filed their official weekend estimates yet, so the three-day total below is the trades' Saturday projection. Friday's number is in the books.

Thursday previews: $6.7 million, already more than half of Minus One 's entire opening weekend.
Friday: $14.5 million, per Variety, against about $6 million for The Cat in the Hat .
Weekend projection: roughly $32 million from 3,254 theaters, with Deadline's range at $30 million to $33 million.
Premium formats: Forbes reports IMAX, Dolby and other large-format screens account for about three-quarters of the domestic gross, a share it calls a premium-format record.
Audience grades: an A CinemaScore (the same grade Minus One earned), a 90% Certified Fresh Tomatometer and a 96% Popcornmeter.
Japan: the film opened there on Nov. 3, Godzilla's birthday, with ¥910 million (about $5.75 million) and roughly 590,000 admissions on day one, which trade publication Kogyo Tsushin calls the best opening day ever for a live-action film in Japan. That's about double Minus One 's first day.
Global: Dark Horizons pegs the worldwide opening in the $60 million range, and Forbes projects $65 million to $70 million.

About That Record (Read the Fine Print)

You'll see this described as "the biggest foreign-language opening ever." Strictly speaking, that's wrong, and it matters. The all-time foreign-language opening in North America belongs to Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle , the anime blockbuster that opened to about $70 million in September 2025 and went on to pass Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 's long-standing domestic total for a non-English film.

What Minus Zero broke is the live-action record. The previous holder, Hero , opened to about $17.8 million to $18 million (sources differ slightly) in August 2004 on just over 2,000 screens. Screen Rant ran the math and found that even adjusted for inflation, Hero 's debut would land around $31.6 million today, so a $32 million weekend tops it in real dollars too, if only just. Either way, it's comfortably the biggest opening for a Japanese-made Godzilla film in North America, and the biggest in the history of its distributor, GKIDS.

What the Film Is (No Spoilers)

Godzilla Minus Zero picks up in 1949, two years after Minus One , with Japan rebuilding and the Shikishima household trying to live something like a normal life. Then, as Toho's synopsis puts it in so many words, a new threat shows up just as peace settles in. We're keeping it there; some reviews give away more than you'll want to know going in.

The details that are locked: it runs 135 minutes, it plays in Japanese with English subtitles, and the MPA rated it R for "some violent content/bloody images," making it the first R-rated film in the franchise's 72-year history. It's also the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX, shot in Japan on IMAX-certified digital cameras, with extra shooting in New Zealand and Norway. Toho Studios and ROBOT produced, Yamazaki's longtime home Shirogumi handled the effects, and GKIDS, which Toho bought in 2024, is releasing it in North America.

Photo: Ryunosuke Kamiki and Takashi Yamazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who's Behind It

Takashi Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the visual effects again, which is the whole secret of this series. He started at Shirogumi in the mid-1980s building miniatures, and his directing résumé runs from the nostalgic hit Always: Sunset on Third Street (which swept the Japan Academy Prizes) to The Eternal Zero , the two-part Parasyte body-horror adaptation, Space Battleship Yamato and the Stand by Me Doraemon films. Minus One won him and his team, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima, the Oscar for Best Visual Effects in March 2024, the first Academy Award the franchise had ever won.

On the R rating, Yamazaki told Variety at the New York Film Festival that he refused to trim his way to a softer certificate. "Censoring it or cutting it was just not an option for me," he said. At CinemaCon in April, he told AFP the sequel would put audiences closer to Godzilla than ever, and admitted that Minus One 's reception had turned into its own hurdle to clear. Forbes also points to a Hollywood Reporter interview in which he called a third film a coin flip for him.

The cast brings back the core of the first film: Ryunosuke Kamiki as former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima, Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi, Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kenji Noda, Yuki Yamada as Shiro Mizushima, Sakura Ando as Sumiko Ota and Kuranosuke Sasaki. New faces include Min Tanaka, the dancer-actor from Wim Wenders' Perfect Days and the Japanese hit Kokuho , as a war-scarred biologist; Masami Nagasawa ( Our Little Sister ) as a weather forecaster attached to the Disaster Response Bureau; and veteran character actor Jun Kunimura, whose genre credits include Audition and The Wailing , as Dr. Ogata.

Photo: Min Tanaka via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

How We Got Here

Dec. 1, 2023: Godzilla Minus One opens in North America through Toho International to $11.4 million from 2,308 theaters, on a reported budget of $15 million or less. It finishes around $57 million domestic and more than $100 million worldwide.
Jan. 2024: the black-and-white Minus One/Minus Color cut hits theaters.
March 10, 2024: the VFX Oscar. June 1, 2024: the film drops on Netflix and finds a second, enormous audience.
Nov. 1, 2024: Yamazaki confirms he'll make another Godzilla film. By February 2025 he says the script is underway and the budget will top the last one.
Nov. 3, 2025: the title Godzilla Minus Zero is revealed at Godzilla Fest.
Jan. 2026: GKIDS is named North American distributor. April 14: first teaser at CinemaCon. July 9: second teaser. Sept. 8: the IMAX trailer and new cast.
Sept. 23–26, 2026: the R rating lands, then a Spotlight Gala world premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, 2026: record openings in Japan, then North America.

By the Numbers: How It Stacks Up

Put the projected $32 million next to its relatives and the scale gets clearer. Godzilla vs. Kong opened to $32.2 million in 2021, but that was a pandemic release streaming on HBO Max the same day, so it's an imperfect yardstick. Godzilla: King of the Monsters opened to $47.7 million in 2019 on a budget reported at well over ten times this film's. Minus Zero 's reported budget is a bit north of $15 million, and Forbes estimates marketing at around $10 million so far. Even after theaters take their cut, that math is close to absurd.

The long-tail question is where it gets fun. Minus One turned an $11.4 million opening into roughly $57 million, about a five-times multiplier, on the back of word of mouth. Forbes' Mark Hughes floats a worst case of about $125 million domestic, which would make Minus Zero the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film ever in North America. That's an analyst projection, not a reported figure, but the A CinemaScore and a Thanksgiving holiday on the horizon make it look less like a fever dream than it would have a week ago.

Photo: Minami Hamabe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

What This Really Means

1. Subtitles are not the wall Hollywood thinks they are

For decades the conventional wisdom was that American audiences won't read at the movies unless the movie is animated. Parasite cracked that, Minus One dented it, and Infinity Castle proved fandom can fill a multiplex in any language. This weekend is the cleanest test yet for live action: no English-language version, no American star, and an R rating, and it still opened like a studio tentpole. The lesson isn't "subtitles are fine now." It's that a clear hook, a known monster and a film that's actually good will carry people past them.

2. The big screen is the product

Three-quarters of the gross from premium screens is the headline for exhibitors. Yamazaki shot specifically for IMAX's tall frame and sold the film on scale, and audiences responded by paying premium prices. It's the same pattern behind this summer's The Odyssey : when a film is built for the biggest screen and marketed that way, people treat the ticket like an event. For horror and monster movies, which usually live on cheap tickets and fast turnover, that's a model worth stealing.

3. Grief, guilt and a giant lizard

The reason the Minus films land with horror fans in particular is that they treat Godzilla the way the 1954 original did: as a nightmare born from national trauma, not a superhero. These films are about survivors' guilt, and the monster is the bill coming due. The R rating sharpens that. Compare it to Shin Godzilla (2016), which went satirical, or the MonsterVerse, which went full wrestling match. Yamazaki keeps winning by making the human stakes hurt, even if critics this time are split on whether the people quite measure up to the spectacle.

4. Two Godzillas, one marketplace

Legendary and Warner Bros. have Godzilla x Kong: Supernova dated for March 26, 2027, with Grant Sputore taking over from Adam Wingard, and Apple and Legendary are reportedly in talks on a retooled third season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters . A $15 million Japanese film opening on par with a Hollywood-budget Godzilla raises an awkward question for the MonsterVerse: is bigger actually what fans want, or do they want this?

What We Still Don't Know

The final weekend number. Studio estimates arrive Sunday and actuals Monday. Anything from $30 million up keeps the live-action record safe; the exact margin over Hero adjusted for inflation depends on it.
The second-weekend hold. Fan-driven openings can drop hard. Minus One didn't, and Forbes expects this one to play through Thanksgiving before December's heavy hitters arrive.
A third film. Yamazaki hasn't committed, and has a Hollywood project, Grandgear , in development. This weekend makes Toho's case for another one a lot louder.
Streaming. No home release date yet. Minus One reached Netflix about six months after its U.S. debut; don't assume the same deal or timing for a GKIDS release.

Bottom Line

Toho made a subtitled, R-rated, two-hour-15 sequel set in 1949 for about the price of a mid-budget American horror film, and it beat a 22-year-old record and a Dr. Seuss movie in the same weekend. It's not just a Godzilla win; it's proof that audiences will show up for monster movies that take fear and grief seriously, in any language, if you give them a reason to see it big. So which one's sitting higher on your list: Minus One or Minus Zero ? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Minami Hamabe at the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Weekend figures are Saturday projections and may change when studios report.

Sources: Variety , Forbes (Mark Hughes) , Forbes (Tim Lammers) , Collider , Dark Horizons , Screen Rant , The Main Street Mouse , The Numbers , GKIDS , Rotten Tomatoes , Dread Central , Final Weapon , Gulf News/AFP , TheWrap , The Numbers (Minus One) .

‘Paranormal Activity’ Moves to October 2027 and Goes Back to the Original House: Everything We Know About Ian Tuason’s Relaunch

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 23:51:15 GMT

The house is waiting a little longer, and honestly, it picked a better night to knock. Paramount has moved the new Paranormal Activity from Friday, May 21, 2027 to Friday, October 22, 2027 , nine days before Halloween. The film, directed by undertone breakout Ian Tuason and produced by Jason Blum, James Wan and franchise creator Oren Peli, now lands in the exact pre-Halloween corridor the series owned for most of its run.

On paper it's a calendar shuffle. In practice it's the studio admitting what fans already knew: Paranormal Activity isn't a summer movie. It's a sleepover-in-October movie, a grab-your-friend's-arm-in-the-dark movie. Below, we break down everything confirmed about the eighth film, the team behind it, how the franchise's numbers have risen and fallen, and what the move tells us about Paramount's plans for one of the most profitable horror series ever made.

Watch: The Trailer That Got Ian Tuason the Job

There's no teaser for the new film yet, and Paramount hasn't released footage. The best preview of what Tuason does is the official trailer for undertone , the micro-budget A24 chiller that put him on the map. Turn the volume up. That's the point.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

A24 also released a second official trailer in February, which leans harder into the film's audio-driven scares:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed

New release date: Friday, October 22, 2027, in theaters, via Paramount. The move was reported Friday, November 6, 2026.
Previous date: May 21, 2027, set by Paramount in January 2026.
Director: Ian Tuason, hired in December 2025.
Producers: Jason Blum and James Wan through Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, and Oren Peli through his Solana Films. Paramount co-finances and co-produces.
Cast: Chase Yi ( Mythic Quest ) and Sonia Mena ( Tell Me Lies ), both cast in late June 2026, and Maya da Costa ( Girls Like Girls ), who joined on July 1. Character names haven't been announced.
Production: Filming started in Toronto on July 13, 2026, with a wrap expected around August 26.
The big hook: The film is set in the same house Peli shot the 2007 original in. Blumhouse revealed it at its New York Comic Con panel on October 9, 2026.
Still unknown: plot, rating, runtime, official title, and whether Katie or Micah have anything to do with it.

Who's Behind It

Ian Tuason, the YouTube kid who "stole" from Paranormal Activity

Tuason is the most interesting hire this franchise has made since Peli himself. Before features, he made live-action VR horror shorts that racked up millions of views on YouTube and earned a SXSW showcase. His first feature, undertone , stars Nina Kiri as the host of a paranormal podcast who starts hearing things in recordings she shouldn't. It was shot for about $500,000 , broke out at the Fantasia festival in 2025, and sparked a bidding war that A24 won. Fangoria pegged the deal at $3 to 4 million.

Then it worked in theaters, too. undertone opened March 13, 2026 on 2,570 screens and made $9.3 million its first weekend, beating projections of around $7 million and finishing third. It ended with about $20 million domestic and $21.5 million worldwide , roughly 40 times its budget.

Tuason has been open that Paranormal Activity shaped him. Talking to Dread Central in March, he said the original taught him a lesson he used directly in his own film: Peli "scared people without showing them anything," and he admitted to borrowing from it and now wanting to give something back. Asked about tone, he said the new film will be pretty serious. He also told Screen Rant "I have a trilogy in mind" for undertone , though that waits until this one is done.

Blum, Wan and Peli

Jason Blum is the reason the original reached theaters at all. As a Miramax executive he re-edited Peli's movie and shopped it around before DreamWorks and Paramount picked it up. The film became the template for the Blumhouse model of tiny budgets and huge returns. James Wan came aboard in December 2025, and in announcing it he said he'd admired the series since the first film and wanted to expand on its legacy. Wan's own track record on low-budget, high-yield horror ( Saw , Insidious , The Conjuring ) makes him a natural fit. Peli, who wrote, directed, shot and edited the 2007 film, stays on as producer.

Photo: James Wan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Blum has also joked that this one costs a little more than the original's $15,000. We'll take his word that the gap is bigger than he's letting on.

The Backstory: From $15,000 to a Franchise

Peli shot the original in his own San Diego house for about $15,000, with Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat playing versions of themselves. It premiered at Screamfest on October 14, 2007, was turned down by Sundance, and nearly became a DreamWorks remake until a test screening convinced executives to release Peli's version instead. Paramount bought domestic and sequel rights for $350,000. A reshot ending later followed, and Paramount rolled the film out in 12 college towns on September 25, 2009 before going wide October 16. It made $107.9 million domestic and $194.2 million worldwide .

Paramount then turned October into Paranormal Activity month. Tod Williams' PA2 (October 22, 2010) and Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's PA3 (October 21, 2011) and PA4 (October 19, 2012) all opened the weekend before Halloween. Christopher Landon's spinoff The Marked Ones broke the pattern in January 2014, and Gregory Plotkin's The Ghost Dimension returned to October in 2015 and was billed as the end. It wasn't. William Eubank's Next of Kin , written by Landon, went straight to Paramount+ on October 29, 2021 after a pandemic delay.

The new film's timeline moved fast: Wan's involvement was reported December 3, 2025, Variety confirmed the Blumhouse-Atomic Monster film at Paramount the next day, Tuason was named director December 12, and the May 2027 date arrived January 16, 2026. Casting followed that summer, the cameras rolled in July, and the house reveal came in October.

By the Numbers

Paranormal Activity (2009): $15,000 budget, $194.2M worldwide
PA2 (2010): $3M budget, $177.5M
PA3 (2011): $5M budget, $207.0M, the franchise high
PA4 (2012): $5M budget, $142.8M
The Marked Ones (January 2014): $5M budget, $90.9M
The Ghost Dimension (2015): $10M budget, $78.9M
Next of Kin (2021): streaming only

Add up the six theatrical films and you get about $891 million worldwide on roughly $28 million in combined budgets . Few horror franchises have ever been that profitable. The decline is just as clear, though: each film after PA3 made less than the one before, and The Ghost Dimension made well under half of PA3 's total.

Analysis: Why October Is the Right Call

Summer horror can work. The Conjuring proved that in July 2013. But this franchise's identity is tied to the season. Five of its six theatrical films opened in late September or October, and its four biggest earners all came out in that window. The one January release, The Marked Ones , finished below every one of the first four films. Opening the reboot nine days before Halloween puts it back in the slot where audiences already expect it, and where the "see it with a crowd that screams" experience matters most.

Paramount also knows the move works. Smile opened in the fall corridor in 2022 and became a $200 million-plus worldwide hit on a modest budget, and Blumhouse's own Halloween (2018) set the bar for what a legacy horror relaunch can do in mid-October. A Paranormal Activity that goes back to its own original house in its own month is pitched for that same nostalgia-plus-new-blood crowd.

There's a risk, though. October is crowded, and the franchise's last theatrical entry sank in that month in 2015. Being "the October movie" didn't save The Ghost Dimension , because by then the gimmick had been run into the ground with sequels, a spinoff and a 3D upgrade. What will matter is whether Tuason can make found footage feel scary again, not just familiar. His undertone did that with audio, which is a smart sign. The house reveal is a strong nostalgia play, but nostalgia doesn't keep people up at night. Dread does.

It's also worth noting the irony for us. Ten days ago we argued that studios should stop handing their YouTube-born horror directors reboots. Tuason is a test case. If anyone can make an old franchise feel new, it's a filmmaker who built his career on the very trick this series made famous: making you stare at nothing until you swear something moved.

What We Still Don't Know

The plot, and who's living in that house this time. The setting alone doesn't tell us whether it connects to Katie's story.
The official title. Trades have used "the eighth Paranormal Activity ," but Paramount hasn't named it.
Whether Katie Featherston or Micah Sloat appear in any form.
When the first teaser drops. With an October 2027 date, a first look within the next several months seems possible, but nothing is announced.
The rating, runtime and budget.

Bottom Line

Paramount didn't just delay Paranormal Activity . It put it back where it belongs. A director who learned to scare people from this franchise, the original house, the Blum-Wan-Peli brain trust and a Halloween-season slot add up to the most promising setup the series has had since 2011. Now Tuason has to make us afraid of a quiet bedroom again.

Your turn: Is October 2027 the right move, and can a return to the original house actually revive this franchise? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Jason Blum by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central (date move) , iHorror , Dread Central (original house) , Dread Central (Tuason interview) , The Hollywood Reporter (Wan) , Variety , The Hollywood Reporter (Tuason) , Deadline (casting) , JoBlo , Fangoria , The Numbers , World of Reel , franchise box office history .

‘Stranger Things’ Prequel ‘Other Worlds’ Heads to 1955 Nevada: The Teaser, the Team and Everything We Know

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 17:50:48 GMT

Hawkins is closed for business, but the Upside Down apparently never was. On Stranger Things Day, November 6, Netflix announced Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure , a live-action prequel series set in the 1950s and due in 2028. It skips past the Indiana suburbs, the arcades and the synth score entirely, and opens in the Nevada desert on April 19, 1955, a full four years before Henry Creel's story in the stage play The First Shadow .

It is the franchise's first live-action spinoff, and it arrives with a surprisingly prestigious team: The First Shadow writer Kate Trefry as showrunner, Atonement and Darkest Hour director Joe Wright behind the camera for the first three episodes, and the Duffer Brothers co-creating even though they now work for Paramount. Below: the teaser, every confirmed detail, the people behind it, the franchise math that made this inevitable, and the big question of whether Stranger Things can survive without the kids, the bikes and the '80s.

Watch the Teaser

Netflix dropped a 58-second announcement teaser on its official channel. It's light on plot and heavy on mood: an abandoned bicycle with a radio crackling out the doo-wop standard "Sh-Boom," a "restricted area" sign, a military installation glowing in the dark, and then the night sky tearing open.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Yes, there's a bike in it. Make of that what you will (more on that below).

The Details: Everything Confirmed So Far

Title: Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure.
Format: Live-action series on Netflix. It's the franchise's third spinoff overall, after the stage play and the animated Stranger Things: Tales From '85 .
Setting: The 1950s. The teaser's title card reads Marion, Nevada, April 19, 1955. Netflix says the story takes place before both the original series and The First Shadow , which is set in 1959.
Release: 2028. No month or date yet.
Creators: Matt and Ross Duffer and Kate Trefry. Trefry is showrunner, writer and executive producer.
Director: Joe Wright directs the first three episodes and executive produces.
Executive producers: Trefry, Wright, the Duffers through Upside Down Pictures, Shawn Levy through 21 Laps, Paul Dichter, Shelley Meals, Andrea Sperling and Pavlina Hatoupis.
Production: New Mexico.
Cast and episode count: Not announced. Netflix's own announcement more or less ends with "now, on to casting."

The Duffers' statement was coy about plot, promising a new setting, new heroes and new villains before claiming they couldn't say more. They signed off with a line that doubles as the show's first clue: "watch the skies, nerds!" Pair that with a sky splitting open over a restricted desert base in 1955, and the subtext writes itself. Nevada in the '50s means atomic tests, secret government programs and a whole decade of flying saucer paranoia, which is exactly the kind of Cold War soil Hawkins Lab eventually grew out of.

Who's Behind It

Kate Trefry, showrunner

Trefry isn't a new hire parachuted in to keep the lights on. She has been in the Stranger Things writers' room since season 2 and wrote The First Shadow , the stage prequel about a teenage Henry Creel that premiered at London's Phoenix Theatre on December 14, 2023, and moved to Broadway's Marquis Theatre in spring 2025. In Netflix's announcement she credited the Duffers with giving her "my first paying job in Hollywood." Ten years later she's running the franchise's next chapter, which tells you how much the brothers trust her with the mythology.

That matters. The First Shadow is the closest thing the franchise has to a proof of concept for a Stranger Things story with none of the original kids at the center, and it worked: it became a hit in both cities, and producers announced a $2,510,948 gross for the week ending December 28, 2025, a nine-performance house record at the Marquis.

Joe Wright directs the first three episodes. Photo: Joe Wright via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Joe Wright, director

Wright is the eyebrow-raiser. He's best known for lush prestige drama: Pride & Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007), which earned seven Academy Award nominations, and Darkest Hour (2017). But his genre résumé is more relevant than it looks. He made the fairy-tale assassin thriller Hanna (2011), directed "Nosedive," one of the most-discussed episodes of Black Mirror (2016), and already has a Netflix thriller under his belt in The Woman in the Window (2021), which was rough going critically. Most recently he directed the eight-episode Mussolini: Son of the Century , which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024. That last one is the key credit: it shows he can build a period world at series scale with a strong visual signature. Setting the tone across three opening episodes is exactly that job.

The Duffers and Shawn Levy

Matt and Ross Duffer created Stranger Things, but they no longer work for Netflix day to day. In August 2025, Variety reported that the brothers signed a four-year exclusive deal with Paramount covering film, TV and streaming, starting after their Netflix pact ended in April 2026. The same report said they would stay involved in Stranger Things, and Other Worlds is what that looks like: they co-created it and executive produce through Upside Down Pictures, while Trefry handles the daily running of the show. Shawn Levy, the producer-director who has been the brothers' partner on the franchise since the beginning, is back as executive producer through 21 Laps.

Shawn Levy executive produces through 21 Laps. Photo: Shawn Levy via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: How We Got to 1955

The original series premiered on July 15, 2016, set in 1983, and ran five seasons through the two-hour finale on December 31, 2025. Season 5 dropped in three parts: four episodes on November 26, three on Christmas, then the finale on New Year's Eve, when Netflix also put it in more than 600 U.S. theaters for a limited run that early industry estimates put around $25 million.

A live-action spinoff has been talked about for years. Last November, around the season 5 launch, the brothers told Deadline they felt finished with the 1980s and, half-jokingly, with kids on bikes too. Matt Duffer also said the next live-action story would tie up some loose threads, specifically pointing to the strange rock young Henry Creel finds in a scientist's briefcase in the Nevada caves. If you were wondering why the teaser sends us to Nevada instead of Indiana, that's your answer.

Meanwhile the franchise kept growing sideways. The animated Tales From '85 , set in the winter between seasons 2 and 3, premiered all 10 episodes on April 23, 2026, and a second season followed in September. The First Shadow closes its West End run on December 27 and its Broadway run on January 3, 2027, and Netflix filmed performances in February for a future screen release.

By the Numbers

1.2 billion+: views across seasons 1 through 4, per Netflix.
140.7 million: views for season 4 in its first 91 days, No. 3 on Netflix's all-time most popular TV list.
133.8 million: views for season 5 in its first 91 days, No. 4 on that same list.
59.6 million: views for season 5's first volume in five days, which TheWrap reported as the biggest premiere week ever for an English-language Netflix show.
About $25 million: estimated haul for the finale's two-day theatrical run in 600+ theaters.
$2.51 million: The First Shadow 's record Christmas week on Broadway.

Two of Netflix's four most-watched TV seasons ever belong to one show. That's the context for every decision here. Netflix doesn't have a Game of Thrones -sized library of IP to mine; it has a handful of homegrown franchises, and this is the biggest. Letting it go quiet after the finale was never a real option.

Analysis: What This Really Means

It's a smart way to keep the brand without cloning it. The easiest spinoff would have been "new kids, new town, same decade." Netflix and the Duffers went the other way: a different decade, a different state, and a period that comes with its own built-in genre language. The 1950s was the golden age of atomic monster movies and alien invasion pictures, the same way the '80s were the age of Spielberg and King that the original show riffed on. If Other Worlds treats '50s sci-fi horror the way Stranger Things treated '80s pop culture, it gets its own identity instead of a nostalgia hand-me-down.

Prequels live or die on whether they matter on their own. HBO's House of the Dragon worked because it told a self-contained war story with new characters; it didn't need Jon Snow. Better Call Saul outgrew its parent's shadow over six seasons by being a completely different kind of show. On the other side, HBO's first Game of Thrones prequel, the Naomi Watts pilot often called Bloodmoon , was scrapped in 2019 after it was shot. The lesson is that a prequel needs a reason to exist beyond answering trivia. Explaining the Nevada rock is a hook, not a show. The good news: Trefry already built a prequel audiences paid Broadway prices for, and she did it with characters most fans had never met.

The Wright hire is a statement. Netflix could have handed the pilot to a reliable streaming hand. Instead it hired a filmmaker whose name signals craft and a distinct look. That's a sign Netflix wants Other Worlds treated as an event, not filler, and it puts the show in conversation with prestige genre TV rather than franchise extensions.

The Paramount wrinkle is real, but manageable. The architects of the franchise now owe their exclusive time to a rival studio. Executive producer credits can mean a lot or very little, and fans have seen beloved creators drift away from their own universes before. What makes this setup more reassuring than most is that Trefry isn't a stranger; she is the person the Duffers already trusted with the canon's biggest backstory.

The risk is the two-year wait. 2028 is a long way off for a show with no cast. Franchise heat cools fast, and the gap between seasons 4 and 5 already tested fans' patience. Netflix will lean on Tales From '85 and the filmed First Shadow to keep the lights flickering in the meantime.

What We Still Don't Know

Who's in it. Casting is next, and the big question is whether any familiar names (younger versions of Brenner, the Creels or Hawkins Lab staff) appear, or whether it's a fully new ensemble.
How many episodes, and whether Netflix plans it as a limited series or an ongoing show.
How directly it connects to the Nevada caves and the rock from season 5, and to the 1959 events of The First Shadow .
When production starts in New Mexico, and whether the 2028 date holds.
Whether the "Sh-Boom" radio is this show's version of "Running Up That Hill." (We'd bet on a needle drop strategy.)

Bottom Line

Other Worlds is the right kind of risky. It moves the franchise to a new decade, a new place and a new genre lineage, keeps the mythology in the hands of the writer who already pulled off one successful prequel, and adds a director with a real eye. It still has to prove that "Stranger Things" can mean something without Eleven, Hawkins or a Walkman. We're cautiously in. A 1950s atomic-desert horror story with Upside Down roots is a better pitch than a fifth season's worth of nostalgia reruns.

So, are you in for a Stranger Things with no Hawkins and no original cast, or should Netflix have let the Upside Down rest? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer checks into the '1408' sequel with Elijah Wood

Header photo: Matt Duffer via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Netflix Tudum , Dread Central , Engadget , GamesRadar+ , Screen Realm , GeekTyrant , Variety , TheWrap (ratings) , TheWrap (Broadway) , Netflix Top 10 , CultureSlate , Wikipedia (Joe Wright) .

‘1408’ Sequel Checks In Natalia Dyer and Elijah Wood, With John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson in Talks: Everything We Know

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 12:49:08 GMT

Nineteen years after John Cusack checked into the worst hotel room in Stephen King's imagination, somebody is turning the key in room 1408 again. Variety reported on Friday, Nov. 6, that Natalia Dyer , Nancy Wheeler herself, will lead a sequel to the 2007 haunted-hotel hit 1408 , with Elijah Wood in a supporting role and original director Mikael Håfström back behind the camera. And the part that will make longtime fans sit up: Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are reportedly negotiating to return as Mike Enslin and Gerald Olin, this time in smaller, secondary roles.

It is one of the stranger legacy-sequel announcements of a year full of them. 1408 was a one-room movie with a self-contained ending (several of them, actually), and it never begged for a follow-up. So below we lay out everything that's confirmed, everything that's only reported, who's making it, how the original actually performed, why Spyglass Media Group is the company doing this, and what has to go right for a sequel to a movie about a room you can't leave to work.

Watch: No New Footage Yet

There's no teaser, trailer or first-look image for the 1408 sequel, and there won't be for a while: cameras aren't scheduled to roll until early 2027. We couldn't find the original 2007 trailer on an official studio YouTube channel either (the film has bounced between Dimension, The Weinstein Company, MGM and Lionsgate over the years), so rather than embed a fan re-upload, we're skipping the video until there's something official to show. If you've never seen the original, it's the kind of movie that rewards a dark room and a good pair of headphones.

The Details: What's Confirmed and What's Only Reported

Here's how the reporting breaks down, because not every piece of this is equally solid.

Natalia Dyer stars. Per Variety's exclusive, relayed by Dread Central , iHorror , JoBlo and Bleeding Cool , Dyer is the lead. Her character hasn't been named.
Elijah Wood co-stars in a supporting role. Also unnamed.
Mikael Håfström directs and co-wrote the script with Mark Verheiden , whose credits include the 2019 Swamp Thing series and NBC's 2014 Constantine .
Cusack and Jackson are in talks, not signed. The first whisper of their return came from scooper Daniel Richtman on Patreon, as Dread Central noted. Variety's report then indicated both actors are still negotiating, and that if deals close they'd play their original characters in secondary roles. Some outlets ran headlines saying they're "returning"; treat that as likely, not done.
Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura (who produced the original), Richard Saperstein of Bluestone Entertainment, Spyglass Media Group and Frank Mayor, per iHorror and Bleeding Cool.
Money and sales: Bluestone and FilmNation Entertainment are co-financing. FilmNation handles international sales and is co-repping domestic rights with WME Independent, according to iHorror. John Papsidera is casting.
Timing: production is slated for the first quarter of 2027. No release date, no distributor, no rating and no plot details have been announced.

That domestic-rights detail matters more than it sounds. With WME Independent and FilmNation shopping it, this is being packaged as an independently financed film that will be sold to a U.S. distributor, the same model that has delivered a lot of recent horror, rather than a studio tentpole with a date already on the calendar.

Who's Behind It

Mikael Håfström

The Swedish director came to 1408 off an unusually strong run. His 2003 boarding-school drama Evil ( Ondskan ) earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and he followed it with the 2004 Swedish slasher Drowning Ghost and the Clive Owen/Jennifer Aniston thriller Derailed (2005). After 1408 , he made the Anthony Hopkins exorcism movie The Rite (2011), the Schwarzenegger/Stallone prison break Escape Plan (2013), Netflix's Outside the Wire (2021), Stockholm Bloodbath (2023) and the space thriller Slingshot (2024), per his filmography . 1408 is still the high-water mark of that career, which tells you why he's going back.

Natalia Dyer

Dyer spent nine years as Nancy Wheeler on Stranger Things (2016-2025), the character who went from "Barb's friend" to the show's most reliable monster-hunter with a shotgun. Outside Hawkins, her genre résumé is short but pointed: she was in Dan Gilroy's art-world horror satire Velvet Buzzsaw (2019), Netflix's haunted-farmhouse drama Things Heard & Seen (2021) and the Russo brothers-produced horror thriller All Fun and Games (2023) opposite Asa Butterfield, according to her credits . This is her first time leading a theatrical horror movie with real name recognition attached, and it's her first big post- Stranger Things swing.

Photo: Elijah Wood via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Elijah Wood

Wood is one of the most committed horror people in Hollywood who happens to also be Frodo. He co-founded The Woodshed in 2010 with Daniel Noah and Josh C. Waller, the company that became SpectreVision, which iHorror credits with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night , Mandy , Daniel Isn't Real and Color Out of Space . On screen he won a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for playing the killer in the 2012 Maniac remake, went full deranged in Come to Daddy (2019), starred in Troma reboot The Toxic Avenger (2023) and joined Yellowjackets as Walter, per his filmography . A "supporting role" in a haunted-hotel movie could mean anything from a desk clerk to the person who opens the door. With Wood, we'd bet on something unsettling.

The legacy pair

Cusack's Mike Enslin was a cynical writer of paranormal travel guides who didn't believe in anything until the room made him. Jackson's Gerald Olin was the Dolphin Hotel manager who tried to talk him out of it, in a dialogue scene so good it's basically the movie's trailer. Cusack had already teased interest; JoBlo points to a People interview last year in which he said there was one sequel idea he thought would be interesting. Jackson has never been shy about returning to roles, though his schedule is famously crowded.

The Backstory: King's Story and the Endings Fight

King's short story "1408" first appeared in 1999 on the audio collection Blood and Smoke before landing in print in Everything's Eventual . King has said he wrote it partly to illustrate how he builds a story, which is why it's so lean: one man, one room, one hour.

Getting it to the screen took a few hands. Dimension Films hired Matt Greenberg to adapt it in the 2003-2004 window, then brought in Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski ( Ed Wood , The People v. O.J. Simpson ) for a rewrite in October 2005, the same month Håfström signed on, according to the film's production history . MGM, distributing for The Weinstein Company, released it on June 22, 2007.

Then there are the endings. Håfström shot the theatrical ending plus three alternates, and a darker director's cut exists. For years the story was that test audiences found the original ending too bleak and forced a change. Håfström has since pushed back on that: in a 2024 interview on The Kingcast he said the theatrical ending was the one he shot first and that the alternates came later as experiments, flatly rejecting the test-screening narrative, per JoBlo and iHorror. That matters for a sequel, because which ending is canon decides whether Enslin can plausibly come back at all. A legacy sequel built on the theatrical cut works neatly. One built on the director's cut would need a very good reason for him to show up.

The movie has also had a quiet second life. Lionsgate put the theatrical cut on streaming in 2021 and released a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray with both cuts on Jan. 13, 2026, a sign someone saw the catalog value before this sequel news broke.

Photo: John Cusack via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

By the Numbers

Opening weekend: $20.6 million from 2,678 theaters, second place, June 22-24, 2007 ( The Numbers ).
Domestic: about $72 million. International: about $59.3 million. Worldwide: about $131.3 million.
Budget: reported between $22.5 million (The Numbers) and $25 million (other estimates). Either way, it made more than five times its cost in theaters.
Home video: an estimated $51 million in domestic DVD sales.
Reviews: 80% on Rotten Tomatoes , 64 on Metacritic, and a B- CinemaScore. The audience score sits at 61%.
Format: PG-13, 104 minutes.

The interesting gap there is critics versus audiences. Critics liked that it played as a psychological pressure cooker with very little gore; the B- CinemaScore and 61% audience score suggest a chunk of opening-weekend crowds wanted more of a conventional scare machine. A sequel has to decide which audience it's chasing.

Analysis: Why Spyglass Is Doing This, and What It Has to Get Right

Spyglass Media Group owns a big piece of the old Dimension Films horror library, and it has become very good at monetizing it. Its Scream revival is the template: the 2022 relaunch made about $138.9 million worldwide on a $24 million budget, Scream VI grew to about $169.1 million on $35 million, and Scream 7 passed $204 million to become the franchise's biggest entry, per The Numbers and GamesRadar . The other Dimension title it revived, 2022's Hellraiser , went to Hulu instead of theaters. A modestly budgeted 1408 with a recognizable IP name, a King credit and a lead from the most-watched horror-adjacent show of the decade fits that same playbook neatly.

The formula here is obvious and it's a good one: new young lead, original cast as the bridge. It's what Scream did with Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera alongside Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox, what David Gordon Green's Halloween did with Jamie Lee Curtis, and what Doctor Sleep did for The Shining . That last one is the cautionary comparison. Mike Flanagan's King sequel was well reviewed and still underperformed in 2019, opening to about $14 million, partly because audiences weren't sure they needed a sequel to a self-contained classic. 1408 has the same problem in miniature. The original's power came from its claustrophobia: one man and one room for most of the runtime. Expanding that world risks explaining away the thing that made it scary.

The smart version of this movie treats the room as the franchise, not Enslin. The Dolphin Hotel's 1408 has, in the story's lore, a long list of victims, which is fertile ground for an anthology-ish sequel where a new guest walks in and the old survivors are the only people who know what's waiting. Dyer leading, with Cusack and Jackson in "secondary roles," suggests exactly that. Casting Wood also hints the filmmakers want genre credibility, not just a nostalgic cameo parade.

There's also a bigger King-economy angle. King adaptations are everywhere right now, and they tend to work at the box office when they're scary first and faithful second. A 1408 sequel isn't adapting anything King wrote; it's original material built on his premise. That gives Håfström and Verheiden freedom, but it also removes the safety net of a famous book.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether Cusack and Jackson actually close their deals. iHorror reports Cusack may not know until the new year.
Who Dyer and Wood are playing, and whether the story returns to the Dolphin Hotel or takes the room somewhere else.
Which ending the sequel treats as canon.
The U.S. distributor, the release window and the title. "1408 sequel" is a working description, not a name.
Whether Stephen King has any involvement or has weighed in.

The next real milestone is the start of shooting in early 2027. Expect more casting before then, and possibly a distribution deal if FilmNation and WME find a buyer quickly.

Bottom Line

This is a better package than most legacy sequels get: the original director, two returning stars in talks, a genuinely beloved lead from Stranger Things and one of horror's most dependable cult actors. The risk is the premise itself. 1408 works because the room doesn't need a sequel; it just needs a guest. If Håfström remembers that, this could be the rare follow-up that justifies itself. If it turns into a lore dump about the Dolphin Hotel, it'll be a checkout nobody remembers.

So be honest: does 1408 need a sequel, and would you check in for Natalia Dyer?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Natalia Dyer via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Variety (exclusive, Nov. 6, 2026, as reported by the outlets below); Dread Central ; iHorror ; JoBlo ; Bleeding Cool ; The Numbers (1408) ; The Numbers (Spyglass Media Group) ; Rotten Tomatoes ; GamesRadar ; Wikipedia (1408) .

Nicholas Galitzine Is Sydney Sweeney’s Ichabod Crane in ‘Hollow’: The Cast, the Erotic Sleepy Hollow Pitch and Everything We Know

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 23:49:25 GMT

Sleepy Hollow has its new schoolmaster. Nicholas Galitzine, the Prince Charming of Cinderella , the royal heartthrob of Red, White & Royal Blue and, as of this summer, He-Man himself, is reportedly in final negotiations to play Ichabod Crane in Hollow , Sony's gothic reimagining of Washington Irving's 1820 ghost story. He would join Sydney Sweeney, who plays Katrina Van Tassel and is producing the film through her new company, and Off Campus breakout Belmont Cameli, who is already on board as Brom Bones. Deadline broke the news on Nov. 5, and it was quickly picked up by Collider, JoBlo and World of Reel.

On paper this is a casting story. In practice it is the moment Hollow became a real movie with a real love triangle, and the moment fans started arguing about whether anyone should be stepping into a role Johnny Depp made iconic for a generation. Below: everything confirmed about the project, who is making it, the track records that matter, how this Sleepy Hollow is pitched differently from every version before it, and what Sony is actually betting on.

The Details: What's Confirmed

Here is what the trades and the outlets following Deadline's report agree on:

Title: Hollow , from Sony Pictures.
Ichabod Crane: Nicholas Galitzine, reportedly in final negotiations (not yet a signed deal).
Katrina Van Tassel: Sydney Sweeney, who also produces through her company Honey Trap.
Brom Bones: Belmont Cameli, whose casting TheWrap reported on Sept. 24, 2026.
Writer-director: Lindsey Anderson Beer ( Pet Sematary: Bloodlines ), adapting her own debut novel.
The book: Beer's novel was sold to Putnam, a Penguin Random House imprint, and is due in fall 2027, per JoBlo.
Producers: Margot Robbie's LuckyChap, Beer's Lab Brew banner and Sweeney's Honey Trap. JoBlo notes this is Honey Trap's first film; the company has a first-look deal with Sony.
Genre: a mystery and supernatural erotic thriller told from Katrina's point of view.
Production: World of Reel reports cameras roll early next year.
Release date: none announced.

The point-of-view detail is the whole ballgame. In Irving's story Katrina is barely a character at all: she is the heiress two men compete for, the prize that sets the plot in motion. Deadline's description, as cited by the French magazine Numéro, frames her instead as the center of "a dangerous mystery" rather than a romantic prize. Ichabod, the outsider who rides into town and gets in over his head, becomes the man she has to read correctly. That is a big swing, and it is the reason Galitzine's casting matters more than a typical supporting-role announcement.

Photo: Sydney Sweeney via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Watch: The Director's Last Horror Movie

There is no footage from Hollow yet, and with production not starting until next year there won't be for a while. The best preview of what Beer does with a classic horror property is her last one, Paramount+'s Stephen King prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines . Here is its official trailer:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Who's Behind It

Lindsey Anderson Beer, writer-director

Beer is the engine of this project: it is her novel, her script and her film. She wrote and executive produced Netflix's 2018 teen comedy Sierra Burgess Is a Loser , did uncredited writing on Chaos Walking , wrote and produced the Prime Video series The Magic Order , and is credited with additional literary material on this summer's Masters of the Universe , which means she has already worked on a movie starring her new Ichabod. Her feature directing debut was Pet Sematary: Bloodlines , which she co-wrote with Jeff Buhler. It premiered at Fantastic Fest on Sept. 23, 2023, and hit Paramount+ on Oct. 6, 2023.

Let's be straight about that film: critics did not love it. It sits at 24% on Rotten Tomatoes from 59 reviews and 31 on Metacritic. JoBlo reports it broke Paramount+ viewership records, though Paramount never released hard numbers we can check. So Beer arrives with a horror credit that audiences sampled in big numbers and reviewers shrugged at. Hollow is a chance to direct something that is entirely hers, rather than a prequel built around someone else's mythology, and that tends to bring out a filmmaker's best work.

Nicholas Galitzine, Ichabod Crane

Galitzine is best known for romance: Purple Hearts , Red, White & Royal Blue , and The Idea of You opposite Anne Hathaway. But horror fans have met him before. He played Timmy Andrews in Blumhouse's The Craft: Legacy (2020), had a main role as Elliott Lefevre in Netflix's 2019 horror series Chambers , and appeared in the 2017 TV remake of The Watcher in the Woods . He also played George Villiers in the period drama Mary & George , which is relevant here: it was a sexy, scheming costume drama, and that is close to the tone Hollow is selling.

His 2026 has been busy and mixed. He starred as He-Man in Amazon MGM's Masters of the Universe , released June 5, and he's currently in the war drama The Mosquito Bowl , which JoBlo notes is directed by Peter Berg.

Sydney Sweeney, Katrina Van Tassel and producer

Sweeney is the reason this movie exists at the studio level. Her psychological thriller The Housemaid , which opened Dec. 19, 2025, made about $400.5 million worldwide on a reported $35 million budget, and its sequel The Housemaid's Secret is dated for Dec. 17, 2027. Horror fans also know her from Neon's nun shocker Immaculate . Per World of Reel, her slate also includes a live-action Gundam , a Split Fiction adaptation with Jon M. Chu and Edgar Wright's Barbarella at Sony. Hollow is the first project from her own company, which makes it a statement about the kind of producer she wants to be.

Belmont Cameli, Brom Bones

Cameli broke out in Prime Video's Off Campus and has genre credit already: he was in Sony's video game adaptation Until Dawn . He also appeared in Warner Bros.' The Alto Knights . Brom is traditionally the town's swaggering rival, and the prime suspect behind the Headless Horseman in Irving's original. Making him a romantic heavyweight instead of a cartoon bully would sharpen the triangle considerably.

Photo: Nicholas Galitzine via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: 200 Years of Riding Into Town

Irving published "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in 1820 in The Sketch Book , and it has been adapted roughly once a generation since. Disney made it half of 1949's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad . Jeff Goldblum played Ichabod in a 1980 TV movie. Fox ran a modern-day action-horror Sleepy Hollow series starring Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie from 2013 to 2017.

The one everybody measures against is Tim Burton's. Paramount released Sleepy Hollow on Nov. 19, 1999, with Johnny Depp as a squeamish, scientific Ichabod, Christina Ricci as Katrina, Christopher Walken as the Hessian Horseman and Christopher Lee in a cameo. It cost a reported $70 to $100 million, grossed about $207 million worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Art Direction. It is a big reason Collider's headline frames Galitzine as Depp's "replacement," which is a little unfair: 27 years and a completely different take separate the two.

As for Hollow itself, the timeline is short. Sony picked up the project from Beer, Sweeney and LuckyChap in June 2026, which JoBlo says followed a competitive situation. Cameli was cast in September, and Galitzine's deal is now closing in November.

By the Numbers

$207 million: worldwide gross of Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999), the bar any version is compared to.
$400.5 million: worldwide gross of Sweeney's The Housemaid , on a $35 million budget.
About $114 million: worldwide gross of Galitzine's Masters of the Universe as of mid-July, against a reported $170 to $200 million budget. It opened to $29.3 million domestically and fell 70% in its second weekend.
24%: Rotten Tomatoes score for Beer's Pet Sematary: Bloodlines .
Fall 2027: when Beer's source novel is due from Putnam.

Analysis: What Sony Is Really Betting On

Strip away the headless rider and Hollow is Sony following the most reliable mid-budget formula of the last two years: a gothic or psychological thriller with a sexy hook, a hot young cast and a female point of view. The Housemaid is the obvious proof, and it is Sweeney's proof. Robert Eggers' Nosferatu proved that audiences will show up for desire-soaked period horror. LuckyChap's own Saltburn showed how much heat a provocative, beautiful-people thriller can generate online. Hollow sits right at the intersection of all three.

Galitzine is the logical piece of that puzzle. He has a huge, loyal romance fanbase from streaming hits, and he looks the part in a period costume. Ichabod as a romantic lead is not even a stretch from Irving, whose schoolmaster was courting Katrina for her family's wealth. What changes is the angle: if the story is told through Katrina, then whether we trust Ichabod becomes the suspense. That is a role built for an actor who can be charming and slightly unreadable at the same time, which is exactly what Galitzine did in Mary & George .

The risk is just as clear. Masters of the Universe was supposed to make Galitzine a box office lead and it didn't; Variety floated it as a possible bomb of the year. Hollow takes some of that pressure off him, since Sweeney is the draw, but a lot of people will judge his career trajectory on whether this one works. Beer, meanwhile, has to prove her directing can match her ambition after a debut critics dismissed.

And then there's the question horror fans will actually care about: is this horror? Every description so far leans harder on "erotic thriller" and "mystery" than on scares. World of Reel's Jordan Ruimy summed up the marketing tone in one cheeky line, calling it a Sleepy Hollow movie "being sold as horny and spooky." The Horseman is one of American literature's great monsters. If Hollow treats him as set dressing for a love triangle, the genre crowd will notice. If it uses him the way Nosferatu used Orlok, as the dark embodiment of the desire the heroine is fighting, it could be the most interesting take on Irving in decades.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether Galitzine's deal closes. "Final negotiations" usually means yes, but nothing is signed until Sony confirms.
Who, or what, plays the Headless Horseman, and whether it's practical or digital.
The rating. A film pitched as an erotic thriller practically demands an R.
Whether the movie lands before or after the novel. With the book due fall 2027 and shooting early next year, a late 2027 or 2028 release seems possible but is unconfirmed.
Theatrical or streaming. Sony usually means theaters, but nothing has been announced.

The Bottom Line

With Galitzine on board, Hollow now has its triangle: Sweeney's Katrina at the center, Cameli's Brom on one side and Galitzine's Ichabod on the other. It is a smart commercial package from a star-producer who just turned a $35 million thriller into a $400 million hit. Whether it is a smart horror movie depends on how much room Beer leaves for the thing in the woods. Telling the story from Katrina's side is the most promising change anyone has made to Sleepy Hollow in a long time. Now the movie has to remember to scare us.

Your turn: is Nicholas Galitzine the right Ichabod, or is the role still Johnny Depp's forever? And does Sleepy Hollow need to be horny, or just scary?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header and body photos via Wikimedia Commons, used under their free licenses; follow the "author and license" links for full credits.

Sources: Deadline , Collider , JoBlo , World of Reel , TheWrap , Numéro , Sleepy Hollow (1999) , Masters of the Universe (2026) , The Housemaid (2025) , Pet Sematary: Bloodlines , Nicholas Galitzine , Lindsey Anderson Beer .

‘Yellowjackets’ Final Season Trailer: The Homecoming Stings Nov. 20. Everything We Know Before the Hive Says Goodbye

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:54:08 GMT

Five years after a New Jersey girls' soccer team first went down in the Canadian wilderness, Yellowjackets is finally coming home. Paramount+ released the official trailer for the fourth and final season on Thursday, Nov. 5, two weeks before the season premieres on Friday, Nov. 20 . The tagline is "This homecoming is going to sting," and for once the marketing department isn't overselling it. The teen survivors are about to be rescued with a pile of buried sins, and the grown-ups they turn into are, per the official synopsis, plotting to kill one of their own.

This is the last lap for one of the most talked-about horror dramas of the streaming era: a show that opened with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, earned 10 Emmy nominations and grew its audience every season. Below we break down everything confirmed about the final season, the new faces (June Squibb, Elijah Wood, Molly Ringwald and Devon Sawa among them), how the end was announced, the numbers behind the show and the real question hanging over November: can Yellowjackets stick the landing that so many mystery-box shows have fumbled?

Watch the Final Season Trailer

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The roughly two-minute trailer is the third piece of official footage for the season. It follows an Oct. 14 teaser and the Aug. 20 date announcement, which ended on a desperate radio call into the void. If you want the full ramp-up, here's October's teaser too:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed

Premiere: Friday, Nov. 20, 2026, on Paramount+. The date was announced Aug. 20, landing the season right before Thanksgiving.
Which plan you need: Season 4 streams on the Paramount+ Premium tier, as Season 3 did. Seasons 1 and 2 are available on every plan, so there's time for a full rewatch before the 20th.
The story: In 1996, the teens race to bury what they did out there before rescue arrives, then watch those secrets rot once they're back in Wiskayok. In the present day, two of the survivors plot to kill a third, and an old flame rolls back into town with an agenda of their own.
Returning adults: Melanie Lynskey (Shauna), Christina Ricci (Misty), Tawny Cypress (Taissa), Warren Kole (Jeff), Sarah Desjardins (Callie), Kevin Alves (Travis) and Hilary Swank as adult Melissa.
Returning teens: Sophie Nélisse (Shauna), Jasmin Savoy Brown (Taissa), Sophie Thatcher (Natalie), Samantha Hanratty (Misty), Courtney Eaton (Lottie) and Liv Hewson (Van). Nia Sondaya (Akilah) and Jenna Burgess (teen Melissa) were promoted to series regulars earlier this year.
New guest stars: June Squibb, Elijah Wood, Molly Ringwald, Devon Sawa, Sam Braun and Dulé Hill. Ringwald has reportedly been cast as Van's mother.
Production: Lionsgate Television produces for Showtime. Cameras reportedly rolled from early March through late July 2026.

Who's Behind It

The show belongs to married co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson , who run it alongside executive producer and co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco. Paramount clearly likes how the partnership has gone: on Feb. 23, 2026, Paramount Television Studios signed Lyle and Nickerson to an overall deal to develop new series, with both staying on to finish Yellowjackets . That matters. The people landing this plane are the people who drew the flight plan.

Its horror DNA runs deep. Karyn Kusama directed the 2021 pilot and earned an Emmy nomination for it, years after her cult classic Jennifer's Body and her slow-burn dinner-party nightmare The Invitation . The pilot set the tone everything since has chased: '90s teen-movie gloss on top, something feral underneath.

The casting is the show's secret weapon. Melanie Lynskey made her screen debut in Peter Jackson's 1994 true-crime shocker Heavenly Creatures , so playing a woman with something violent in her past isn't new territory for her. Christina Ricci is genre royalty, from Wednesday in The Addams Family films to Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow to a role in Netflix's Wednesday . Her Misty, a true-crime sleuth who is also the scariest person in most rooms, is a career highlight, and she has an Emmy nomination for it.

Christina Ricci at Los Angeles Comic Con 2024. Photo: Christina Ricci via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

On the teen side, Sophie Thatcher has become one of the busiest young faces in horror, with A24's Heretic (2024) and the killer-robot thriller Companion (2025) both arriving during the show's run. Sophie Nélisse, who broke out in The Book Thief , carries the teen half of Shauna's story, which makes her as central as Lynskey to how this ends.

Sophie Nélisse at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photo: Sophie Nélisse via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The new guest list reads like a stunt-casting dare, and a fun one. Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank already joined in Season 3. Now there's June Squibb, an Oscar nominee for Nebraska ; Elijah Wood, whose SpectreVision company produced Mandy and Color Out of Space ; Devon Sawa, who has survived Final Destination , Idle Hands and the Chucky series; and Molly Ringwald, the most '80s-teen-movie casting imaginable for a show obsessed with '90s teen angst.

The Backstory: How the End Was Announced

Here's the timeline. Season 1 premiered on Showtime on Nov. 14, 2021, and ran 10 episodes into January 2022. Season 2 followed from March 26 to May 28, 2023, after a 14-month wait. Season 3 dropped its first two episodes on Feb. 14, 2025, on Paramount+ with Showtime, with linear airings on Sundays, and wrapped on April 13.

Paramount renewed the show for Season 4 on May 20, 2025. Then on Oct. 10, 2025, Lyle and Nickerson posted a joint statement confirming the fourth season would be the last. They said they'd always known the story would eventually tell them it was ready to end, called making the show deeply meaningful, promised a twisted conclusion and thanked "the Hive," the show's fanbase.

The timing tells its own story. Variety Australia noted the news landed as one of several Showtime series winding down after the Paramount-Skydance merger, alongside The Chi ending and Dexter: Original Sin getting canceled. Fans worried at the time that a corporate shake-up had cut the story short. The creators have pushed back on that idea for a while: back in April 2025, Lyle told Deadline, "We have an endpoint in mind. We know where we're heading." She said the team pitched the show around seven years earlier with a destination already in view, while leaving room for better ideas along the way.

By the Numbers

Rotten Tomatoes: Season 1 scored 100%, Season 2 94% and Season 3 84%, for a 92% series average. Season 4 has no score yet.
Metacritic: 78, 77 and 64 for Seasons 1 to 3, per Wikipedia's summary of the aggregator.
Emmys: 10 nominations and no wins, including two Outstanding Drama Series nominations (2022 and 2024) and back-to-back Lead Actress nods for Lynskey.
Season 2 premiere: nearly 2 million viewers across Showtime platforms, up 40% from the Season 1 finale's 1.3 million, according to TheWrap. Showtime called it its biggest second-season premiere in over a decade.
Season 3 premiere: 2.03 million cross-platform viewers worldwide in three days, 58% above Season 2's premiere and the most-streamed premiere in the show's history.
Season 3 finale: about 3 million cross-platform viewers, up 19% on Season 2, making Season 3 the most-watched season so far.

Put those side by side and you see the strange shape of this show's life. Critics cooled every year, from 100% to 84%, while the audience kept growing. Plenty of fans felt Season 3 spun its wheels in the wilderness, and plenty kept watching anyway. That gap is exactly what Season 4 has to close.

Analysis: Can Yellowjackets Beat the Mystery-Box Curse?

Yellowjackets is built on the same engine that powered Lost : two timelines, a wilderness that might be supernatural or might just be starvation and grief, and a fanbase running theories on every frame. That engine has a bad track record at the finish line. Lost 's 2010 finale still splits people. Showtime's own Dexter ended in 2013 so badly that the network brought it back eight years later with Dexter: New Blood largely to try a different ending. Ask Game of Thrones how a rushed final run lands with a fanbase that has spent years building theories.

The counterexample is HBO's The Leftovers , which knew it was a three-season story, refused to explain its central mystery and went out as one of the most beloved endings of the decade. That's the model Yellowjackets should be studying. The show's best moments were never about whether "It" in the woods is real. They were about what hunger, guilt and loyalty do to teenage girls, and how those girls grew into women who are still lying to everyone, including themselves. If the finale answers the emotional questions and stays coy about the supernatural, most of the Hive will forgive a lot.

There are reasons for optimism. The creators announced the end more than a year ahead, which gives the writers time to build to it instead of cramming. Their new overall deal suggests Paramount isn't treating the show as dead weight. And the 1996 rescue is the event the entire series has been circling since the pilot, when we learned that some of these girls came home and some didn't. The homecoming is where both timelines finally meet, which is a structural gift if the writers use it.

The business side is also worth watching. With Showtime's original slate thinning out, putting the season behind the Premium paywall makes Yellowjackets a subscription driver in its final weeks. It's the same playbook streamers have used with final seasons from Stranger Things to MGM+'s FROM : turn the ending into an event, then count the sign-ups. A stuck landing helps that math for years, because finished shows that end well keep getting discovered. A fumbled one hangs over the whole series.

What We Still Don't Know

Episode count and release pattern: Paramount's official materials don't state how many episodes there are or whether they'll drop weekly. Wikipedia lists 10 episodes running into late January 2027, but that hasn't been officially confirmed.
Showtime broadcast: Season 3 aired on Showtime two days after streaming. Official Season 4 materials mention only Paramount+ Premium, so whether cable viewers get Sunday airings is unclear.
Who the "old flame" is: The synopsis is deliberately vague, and no casting announcement has tied a name to it yet.
Reviews: No critics' consensus yet. Expect embargoes to lift close to Nov. 20.

The Bottom Line

The trailer delivers what the end of Yellowjackets needs to feel like: the kids back in Wiskayok, the adults out for blood and everyone carrying the woods home with them. The pieces are in place: the creators who planned the ending, a cast that has only gotten sharper and a premise built for this exact moment. Now it just has to stick the landing. Nov. 20 is two weeks away.

Your turn: Does the show owe us a real answer about what's in the woods, or should it leave the supernatural a mystery forever? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Melanie Lynskey via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Paramount+ , Paramount Press Express , Dread Central , iHorror , TVLine , TheWrap (final season) , TheWrap (overall deal) , TheWrap (Season 3 ratings) , TheWrap (Season 2 ratings) , Variety Australia , Deadline via Yahoo , Fangoria , Rotten Tomatoes , Wikipedia .

‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ Stomps In With $6M in Previews, Nearly Triple ‘Minus One’: The R Rating, the Reviews and What’s at Stake

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:53:27 GMT

Three years ago a subtitled monster movie with a budget smaller than some Marvel catering bills walked out of the Academy Awards with an Oscar. Today its sequel opens wide across North America, and the early numbers suggest nobody is treating it like a niche import anymore. Godzilla Minus Zero has reportedly banked about $6 million in U.S. previews before its first official Friday, which is nearly three times the $2.1 million its predecessor pulled from its own early shows. That kind of number used to belong to Hollywood's Godzilla, the one with the Warner Bros. logo on it.

It also arrives with something the franchise has reportedly never carried in its 72 years: an R rating. So the stakes this weekend are bigger than one box office chart. Below you'll find what's confirmed, what the critics are actually fighting about, why Takashi Yamazaki went back to the monster he shares a birth year with, and our math on what the preview figure really predicts.

Watch the Trailers

Toho's newest spot, Official Trailer 3, went up this week and gives the best look yet at King Ghidorah. Below it is the trailer cut in the IMAX 1.43:1 ratio, which is worth a look if you're still deciding what kind of screen to pay for.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details

Release: Japan on Nov. 3 through Toho; North America wide on Nov. 6 through GKIDS, with Cineplex Pictures handling Canada.
Theaters: more than 3,000 in North America, according to Variety's figures as relayed by MovieWeb. Minus One opened in about 2,300.
Rating and runtime: R for bloody images and some violent content, 2 hours 15 minutes, per Rotten Tomatoes' listing. That's 10 minutes longer than Minus One .
Format: GKIDS bills it as the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX.
Setting: 1949, two years after the first film. The survivors learn Godzilla was never truly destroyed, and something new has shown up too.
Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki returns as Koichi Shikishima and Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi, joined by returning players Yuki Yamada (Mizushima), Kuranosuke Sasaki (Akitsu), Munetaka Aoki (Tachibana), Hidetaka Yoshioka (Noda) and Sae Nagatani (Akiko). Masami Nagasawa and Min Tanaka are among the additions.

Photo: Minami Hamabe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who's Behind It

Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the effects, the same triple duty he pulled on Minus One . Genre fans may know him from the two-part Parasyte adaptation (2014 and 2015), but in Japan his name was made well before that. Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005) took 12 Japan Academy prizes, including Best Picture and Best Director, and he later co-directed the family smash Stand by Me Doraemon . Then came the 96th Academy Awards, where he and his team became the first Japanese crew to win Best Visual Effects.

His reason for choosing Ghidorah is pleasantly personal. He told Den of Geek he feels a special attachment because the creature debuted in 1964, the year he was born. He also described the dragon as a stand-in for natural disaster, specifically the typhoons Japan lives with, and said he wants his Godzilla to play as something spiritual, closer to a force of awe than a hero with a fan club. Talking to AFP at CinemaCon in April, he promised a much tighter view of the monster: "I don't think we've ever been able to get this close to Godzilla before."

Photo: Ryunosuke Kamiki and Takashi Yamazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory

Minus One reset expectations for what a Japanese Godzilla could do overseas. It opened to $11.4 million in December 2023, finished with $57.1 million domestically and, by GKIDS' count, passed $116 million worldwide. For scale, Shin Godzilla had held the Japan-produced franchise record at $78 million for seven years. A reported budget of $10 million to $12 million (Yamazaki himself would only say under $15 million) made the Oscar win look even more absurd.

The follow-up came together fast. Filming ran through the back half of 2025, including extras work in Ibaraki from late August into September, and wrapped that December, with additional shooting reported in New Zealand and Norway. At a Tokyo event that same month, James Cameron jokingly offered his services as second-unit director if things ran behind. GKIDS, the distributor best known for animation, landed North America in January 2026. The first teaser dropped April 14, the IMAX trailer followed in September, and the film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival later that month.

By the Numbers

U.S. previews: roughly $6 million, reportedly a GKIDS record. Its previous best was the $2.39 million The Boy and the Heron did before a $13 million opening. Early reports differ on how that total splits between Godzilla Day fan events and regular shows.
Projection: $30 million or more for the weekend, with one estimate range running $25 million to $35 million, and The Cat in the Hat expected around $20 million to $25 million.
Japan: a reported 910 million yen (about $5.7 million) on opening day, said to be a live-action record that passes Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at 840 million yen. The three-day total reached 1.38 billion yen, or about $8.7 million.
Critics: 90% on Rotten Tomatoes from 122 reviews at last check, against 99% for Minus One . World of Reel puts Metacritic at 74, down from 81.
Audiences: a 96% Popcornmeter from 500-plus verified ratings so far. No CinemaScore has surfaced yet. Minus One earned an A.
Money in: Variety has reported a budget above $15 million, though World of Reel says the figure isn't firmly established, and it cites Deadline for a $10 million GKIDS marketing spend.

What This Really Means

Here's the napkin math we keep coming back to. Minus One turned $2.1 million in previews into an $11.4 million opening, a multiple of about 5.4. The Boy and the Heron did almost exactly the same thing, $2.39 million into $13 million. Run $6 million through that multiple and you land near $32.6 million, right on top of the industry projection. Godzilla: King of the Monsters , which took in $6.3 million in Thursday previews before a $47.7 million opening, implies a much rosier $45 million.

We'd bet on the lower end, and here's why. That Warner Bros. number was a straightforward Thursday figure for a four-quadrant studio release. The Minus Zero total includes event screenings aimed at the most devoted fans alive, the people who were always going to buy a ticket early. Add a subtitled film, an R rating and a 135-minute runtime that squeezes showtimes, and the front-loading risk is real. Still, even $30 million would be more than 2.5 times the last film's opening and over half of its entire domestic run in three days. On a budget reported in the mid-teens, nobody at Toho is losing sleep.

The more interesting test comes next weekend. Clayface showed how quickly goodwill can evaporate this fall: it opened strong with a rare A- CinemaScore for its genre, then fell 57% in its second frame. Minus One became a phenomenon because it held and people kept telling their friends. If the sequel's scores are softer, its legs are the thing to watch, not its Friday.

And those scores are softer in an interesting way. The reviews aren't split on spectacle; they're split on structure. Collider handed it a perfect score and Flickering Myth gave it five stars, while Empire went 3 out of 5, Screen Rant 5 out of 10, and our friends at Dread Central called it a disappointing step down, with Godzilla largely held back for the first 90 minutes. IndieWire's David Ehrlich may have found the most useful framing, calling it "very much like the middle chapter of a trilogy." If that's right, the question isn't whether it beats Minus One but whether audiences will reward a movie that's building toward something they haven't seen yet.

There's a wider win here for horror fans too. As we argued after the NC-17 cut of The Devils found paying crowds , restrictive ratings scare executives more than they scare ticket buyers. A Godzilla movie thriving with an R would be one more data point on our side.

What We Still Don't Know

The actual weekend number. Everything above is previews and projections until the Sunday estimates land.
The CinemaScore, which will say a lot about whether the slower build plays with general audiences.
Whether it tops the chart, which would reportedly make it the first foreign-language film to do so since Chainsaw Man .
How Yamazaki follows this up. Nothing we've seen confirms a third film, whatever that "middle chapter" feeling suggests.

Bottom Line

A Japanese-language, R-rated kaiju movie out of an animation-focused distributor is fighting for No. 1 against a Dr. Seuss adaptation, and it might win. Even if the critics are right that it can't match the near-perfect first chapter, that's a sentence nobody would have believed in 2022. Are you seeing it this weekend, and does the idea of an R-rated Godzilla get you more excited or more nervous?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Takashi Yamazaki at the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: GKIDS , Rotten Tomatoes , SuperHeroHype via Yahoo , World of Reel , MovieWeb , Cosmic Book News , Den of Geek , AFP via ARY News , Dread Central , Wikipedia .

Paul Bettany Joins Steven Yeun in Netflix’s Supernatural Horror ‘Pagans’: The Cast, the Team and Everything We Know

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 23:52:18 GMT

Netflix’s most intriguing unseen horror project just picked up a very strange neighbor. Paul Bettany has joined Steven Yeun in Pagans , the supernatural family series from Say Nothing creator Joshua Zetumer, as a charismatic stranger named Mag. Deadline broke the casting on Thursday, and it lands just as Bettany is finishing up with Marvel: TVLine notes that his Disney+ series VisionQuest wraps its run next week.

On paper, a charming stranger drifting into the life of a grieving family is one of horror’s oldest warning signs, and Bettany is the kind of actor who can make you enjoy the warning. Below: every confirmed detail, the people behind the show and how they’ve done in the genre, how a spec script set off a bidding war, why that Walking Dead connection is such a delicious bit of casting, and what all of this means for Netflix’s horror lineup.

Watch: No Footage Yet, So Here’s Why Yeun Matters

There is no Pagans trailer, teaser or first-look image yet, and given where production stands there won’t be for a while. In the meantime, here’s the official trailer for the last time Yeun stepped into mainstream horror, Jordan Peele’s Nope , in which he plays a former child star who has learned exactly the wrong lesson from his own trauma. Keep that performance in mind when you read the show’s description below.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: Everything Confirmed

Pagans is a straight-to-series order at Netflix. It centers on Gus (Yeun), a father left to raise two kids alone after the death of his wife. His son is an ordinary kid. His daughter is not, and the relationship between father and daughter curdles, in the words of the casting report as relayed by Dark Horizons, into “something far more sinister.” Netflix’s own pitch for the tone is “equal parts emotional, horrifying, and humorous,” which is a promising mix if the show can hold all three at once.

Here’s the cast and who they play:

Steven Yeun as Gus, the widowed father at the center of the story.
Paul Bettany as Mag, the charismatic stranger. One outlet, TV Insider, says his role is still under wraps, but TVLine and CBR, both citing Deadline, name the character.
Sabine Grace as Alice, Gus’s daughter and the apparent source of the trouble, in a breakout-sized part for a young newcomer.
Logan Kim as Nate, Gus’s son.
Marin Ireland as Janelle, a single mom.
Intae Kim as Casey, Gus’s younger brother.

Zetumer is creator, showrunner and executive producer. He’s joined as EPs by Yeun and Christina Oh through their company Celadon Pictures, Drew Goddard and Sarah Esberg through Goddard Textiles, plus Jonathan van Tulleken and Erica Kay. No episode count, director or premiere date has been announced. As of its October casting update, Netflix’s line on a release was simply that there isn’t one yet.

Photo: Steven Yeun at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The ‘Walking Dead’ Twist Hiding in the Cast

Yeun spent six years and 73 episodes as Glenn Rhee on The Walking Dead , leaving in 2016. Logan Kim, meanwhile, plays Hershel Rhee on the spinoff The Walking Dead: Dead City . Hershel is Glenn’s son. So Pagans casts the actor who plays Glenn’s boy as the son of the actor who played Glenn, giving the two a father-son story that universe never could. Fangoria and Dread Central both flagged the connection when the cast was announced in October. Deliberate or not, it’s a gift to anyone who has spent 16 years with these characters.

Who’s Behind It

Joshua Zetumer

This is the Hollywood fixer turned prestige creator. His film credits include the 2014 RoboCop remake and Patriots Day , plus uncredited rewrite work on Quantum of Solace . Then came Say Nothing , his nine-episode FX on Hulu adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Troubles, which premiered on November 14, 2024, scored 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, won a Peabody and earned him a 2025 Emmy nomination for writing. Pagans looks like his first big swing at horror, and Say Nothing showed he knows how to write about the things families refuse to talk about.

Steven Yeun

Beyond Glenn, Yeun has quietly built one of the more interesting genre filmographies around. He led Joe Lynch’s action-horror Mayhem in 2017, and the following year he was the unnerving rich guy in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning , a mystery that won him several critics’ group awards. Nope grossed roughly $172 million worldwide on a $68 million budget with an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score. Outside the genre, he earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Minari , the first for an Asian American actor in that category, and won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Beef .

Paul Bettany

Bettany’s horror history is thin but memorable in a B-movie way: he played the archangel Michael in 2010’s Legion and the title vampire hunter in 2011’s Priest . His stronger calling card here is menace with manners, going back to Gangster No. 1 in 2000, and he drew an Emmy nomination in 2021 for WandaVision , a show that was itself about grief warping a home. CBR reports VisionQuest premiered on Disney+ on October 13.

Drew Goddard and Jonathan van Tulleken

Horror fans know Goddard. He wrote Cloverfield , which made $168 million on a $25 million budget, and directed The Cabin in the Woods , a 92% Rotten Tomatoes favorite that took under $70 million on a $30 million budget and has only grown in stature since. He also picked up an Oscar nomination for The Martian and worked on Lost , so he understands slow-burn TV mystery. Van Tulleken directed the first two episodes of Shōgun , the opening stretch of an 18-Emmy-winning season, which would make him a very interesting fit if Netflix gives him the cameras here. His exact role beyond EP hasn’t been announced.

Photo: Drew Goddard by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Marin Ireland and the Rest

The secret weapon here may be Ireland, a genuine modern horror regular. She anchored 2020’s The Dark and the Wicked , earning a Fangoria Chainsaw nomination and a special mention at Sitges, and she has also turned up in The Empty Man , Birth/Rebirth and The Boogeyman . Notably, The Dark and the Wicked is also about a family being eaten alive by something it can’t name. Intae Kim’s credits include Succession and Best Medicine . Logan Kim is best known as Podcast in Ghostbusters: Afterlife .

The Backstory: A Bidding War and a Long Build

This show has been hot since before anyone was attached. In September 2025, Deadline reported that Netflix landed Zetumer’s spec script after a competitive sale, with JoBlo relaying that somewhere between 15 and 18 studios, platforms and producers took part. That’s a remarkable number for an original supernatural idea with no IP behind it. Netflix gave it a straight-to-series order and placed it with the studio group led by Nne Ebong, who reports to Jinny Howe.

Deadline reported Yeun’s casting in August 2026. On October 21, Netflix confirmed the supporting cast through its Tudum site and said the series was entering production. A July report from EntertainmentNow, citing Production Weekly, reportedly had filming starting on October 26, 2026 and wrapping on April 13, 2027, though Netflix hasn’t confirmed those dates. Bettany’s addition arrives right on that timeline.

Analysis: What This Really Means

The obvious template is The Haunting of Hill House . Mike Flanagan’s 10-episode series hit Netflix on October 12, 2018, scored 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and proved that the platform’s audience will sit through ten hours of grief as long as something is standing in the corner. Midnight Mass , which arrived on September 24, 2021 with seven episodes and an 87% score, followed the same recipe and added a charismatic newcomer who rolls into a broken community and changes everything. Sound familiar? Bettany’s Mag is walking a road Hamish Linklater’s priest already paved, and it’s a very good road.

The film comparison is Hereditary , which turned a $10 million budget into more than $80 million worldwide with a 90% score by treating a child and a grieving parent as the real horror. That’s the danger and opportunity of Alice. “Creepy kid” is one of the most worn-out tropes in the genre, and the whole series rests on a young performer in what amounts to her first major TV role. The “something is wrong with my daughter” story lives or dies on whether the father’s fear feels like love gone bad rather than a jump-scare delivery system. Zetumer’s Say Nothing track record is the best reason for optimism there.

Netflix’s motive is easy to read, too. The streamer has just seen how hungry people are for this stuff: per Nielsen figures reported this week, FROM pulled in 1.65 billion minutes during October 19 to 25, the week its first three seasons landed on the service, good for No. 1 on the streaming chart. With Haunted Hotel also renewed for a third season, the platform clearly sees room for grown-up supernatural series. Paying up for an original spec, then stacking it with a Marvel name and an Oscar nominee, is the expensive version of that bet. Originals with no brand name behind them have to win on word of mouth, and this cast is how you buy the first look.

What to watch for: whether the humor Netflix keeps mentioning is real or just marketing. A family horror that can actually make you laugh between dread beats is rare, and it’s exactly what the Cabin in the Woods director and the guy from Nope should be able to pull off.

What We Still Don’t Know

The release date. Nothing official. If the reported April 2027 wrap holds, late 2027 looks like the earliest plausible window, and EntertainmentNow guesses early 2028.
Episode count and format. Netflix hasn’t said how long the season runs or whether this is built to continue.
Who directs. No director has been named, though van Tulleken’s EP credit is worth watching.
Who Mag really is. And what the title means. No plot details explain either one yet.

Bottom Line

Between Yeun, Bettany, Ireland, Goddard and the guy who wrote Say Nothing , Pagans now has one of the strongest benches of any horror series in production, and nobody outside the production has seen a frame of it. The real test will be whether it can make a scary-kid story feel new. Are you in on a Yeun and Bettany horror series on the cast alone, or does the creepy-kid premise make you nervous? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Paul Bettany via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline , Netflix Tudum , TVLine , CBR , Dark Horizons , TV Insider , Dread Central , Fangoria , JoBlo , EntertainmentNow , Dark Horizons on FROM’s Nielsen numbers , and Wikipedia for film and series figures ( Nope , Hereditary , The Cabin in the Woods , The Haunting of Hill House , Midnight Mass , Say Nothing ).

Opinion: ‘The Devils’ Just Proved NC-17 Isn’t Poison. Horror Should Stop Cutting Its Hardest Scenes

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 17:52:40 GMT

A 55-year-old British movie about a priest, a convent and the machinery of religious hysteria went out with an NC-17 from a major studio label this fall. It was booked for one week. Three weeks later, it has taken in $3,803,134 in North America and it is still playing. Ken Russell’s The Devils was not supposed to be a business case for anything. It was supposed to be a repertory curiosity for people who own too many Blu-rays.

Here is my take: that little run should embarrass everyone in horror who still treats NC-17 as an automatic death sentence. The rating’s old curse was mostly about things that no longer govern how people find movies. Horror keeps paying for it anyway, one trimmed kill at a time. The Devils does not prove every slasher should go uncut. It proves studios should stop assuming they already know the answer.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Numbers Are Small, and That’s the Point

Let’s not oversell it. The film opened October 16 in 350 North American locations to $1.725 million, a $4,925 per-screen average. That was enough to kill the one-week plan. By October 29, label Warner Bros. Clockwork said the run would continue with no end date and bookings left to individual theaters. Halloween weekend added $275,452 from 217 theaters, which works out to roughly $1,270 a screen. Nobody is buying a yacht.

But look at what it was up against. Fangoria’s opening-weekend report had it sharing the market with Street Fighter at $31 million, and a repertory title has no new story to sell. Before it even opened, 35mm previews at 10 locations sold out more than six weeks early, and the official trailer pulled more than 21 million organic views. Those are not the signs of an audience scared off by two letters. If anything, the rating was the marketing.

Now compare it to the history. The Numbers’ top NC-17 chart runs Showgirls at $20.35 million, Bad Education at $5.2 million, Lust, Caution at $4.6 million and Shame at $4 million. By my count, a re-release from 1971 is already knocking on the door of the top four, with its run still going. World of Reel also reports this is the first NC-17 release in Warner Bros.’ 103 years, which makes the result stranger and more useful.

The Curse Was Built for a World That’s Gone

Why did studios fear this rating so much? The Ringer’s history of it lays out the practical reasons. When the MPAA introduced NC-17 in 1990, some newspapers refused to run ads for those films and Blockbuster banned them outright. Then MGM’s Showgirls arrived in 1995, earned about $20 million and became the cautionary tale everyone cited for decades. That year, per The Numbers, NC-17 titles took 0.38% of the domestic market. In most years since, the figure has rounded to nearly nothing.

Those were real commercial threats in 1995, when a movie’s fate depended on print ads and rental shelves. In 2026, Blockbuster is a nostalgia punchline and newspaper ad policy decides nothing. A horror audience finds out about a film from a trailer, a clip or somebody online yelling that it’s the most disturbing thing they’ve ever seen. The trailer for The Devils got its 21 million views without any of the old gatekeepers signing off. The distribution chokepoints that gave the rating its teeth have mostly disappeared. What’s left is habit.

Photo: Oliver Reed, who plays Father Urbain Grandier in The Devils, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Warner Spent 55 Years Proving My Point

The film’s own history is the best argument here. The 1971 U.S. release carried an X and was trimmed beyond the British version, and an R didn’t come until 1979. Warner and British censors both wanted a two-and-a-half-minute sequence known as “The Rape of Christ” gone entirely. In an interview with Inverse , critic Mark Kermode, who tracked the lost footage down through Warner UK shipping logs around 2000 or 2001, explains that the studio was alarmed by the material and doubted the film could earn much. After a 2004 screening of the reconstruction, nothing happened. Russell died in 2011 without seeing a proper release.

What finally changed it? Not new technology. Two people at Clockwork, Spencer Collantes and Christian Parkes, approached the studio in 2025, and the 4K restoration from the original camera negative became Clockwork’s first repertory title, premiering at Cannes. “They didn’t even wear them down. They woke them up,” Kermode told Inverse. That’s the whole story of NC-17 fear in one line. It was never tested. It was just never questioned.

Horror Keeps Paying the Tax

Horror gets hit by this constantly. As The Ringer notes, plenty of horror movies draw an NC-17 on the way to a multiplex-ready cut. SlashFilm’s rundown has Scream losing stabs in its opening and kitchen scenes, and Saw losing about eight seconds of its hacksaw scene. Saw III reportedly drew an NC-17 six separate times before it got its R. Ari Aster has said Midsommar carried the tag for six weeks of back-and-forth.

And it’s still happening, this year, on the movies we’re all talking about. Curry Barker has said he had to take out six or seven more hits from the face-smashing sequence in Obsession after swearing he wouldn’t lose any. And before Evil Dead Burn opened, director Sébastien Vaniček said in an interview : “There is a scene that is not R-rated.” He said he had to cut it. We never saw it.

Did the safe version save anything? Evil Dead Burn opened to $13.7 million against tracking of $25 million to $30 million , about 44% under the $24.5 million Evil Dead Rise debut, and finished with $32.2 million domestic. It reached $72.4 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, so it’s no catastrophe, and I can’t tell you an NC-17 would have done better. It probably wouldn’t have opened as wide. But it’s fair to say the cut didn’t buy the box office the cut was supposed to protect. For a franchise whose entire brand is going too far, that’s a bleak trade.

Photo: Damien Leone, writer-director of Terrifier 3, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The Terrifier Test

The obvious counterexample to studio caution is Terrifier 3 , which went out with no rating at all, took in $54 million domestic and $98.4 million worldwide, and did it on a $2 million budget . It became the highest-grossing unrated film ever, and Scott Mendelson noted at the time it had already passed the inflation-adjusted Showgirls number.

Damien Leone’s series showed that extremity can be the selling point, and that fans will drive to a multiplex for it. It didn’t need a big studio’s permission. It needed the movie to be exactly as nasty as the people buying tickets wanted.

Here’s What I’d Actually Do

I’m not asking a studio to bet a $100 million tentpole on this. Don’t replace the R cut. Add to it. Take a mid-budget horror movie, release the R wide and put the director’s version out as a limited event a few weeks later, with 200 to 350 theaters, 35mm if you can, and a marketing pitch that writes itself: the version they told you couldn’t play. The Devils just showed roughly what that footprint can do, and it did it with a movie older than most of its audience. Now imagine it with Vaniček’s missing scene and a current fanbase.

That costs relatively little beyond prints and a campaign, and it gives filmmakers something a trim note never does: a reason to believe the hard version will be seen. Warner’s Clockwork is even teasing what comes next, and Dread Central spotted it posting old VHS packaging with the date 11.10.26, which suggests a home release, though nothing’s confirmed. The appetite is there on the home side too.

The Other Side

There’s a strong case against all this, and it deserves a fair hearing. First, The Devils is an outlier. It’s a legendary, long-suppressed film with a built-in cult and a censorship story that doubles as an ad campaign. A new movie has none of that mystique. Second, $3.8 million is tiny, and we don’t know what the restoration and rollout cost. Third, the Halloween-weekend average of about $1,270 shows how fast this audience gets served.

Fourth, and most important: Terrifier 3 wasn’t NC-17. Dexerto reported that major chains generally treated it like an R, letting under-17s in with an adult. An NC-17 locks that crowd out entirely, and teenagers have always been a big part of horror’s business. Some exhibitors may simply refuse to book it. Those are real walls, and a wide NC-17 release of a big franchise film probably stays a bad bet. WBUR’s critic even worried that corporate change could put this film back in the vault. Nothing here is guaranteed to last.

I’d just point out that none of those objections argues against trying a limited second cut. They argue against betting the house, which nobody’s asking for.

Bottom Line

For 36 years, NC-17 has worked less like a rating than a ghost story, passed down from one nervous executive to the next. A restored 1971 film just walked through the haunted house and came out with $3.8 million and an open-ended run. That doesn’t make NC-17 a gold mine. It does make the automatic trim look like superstition, and horror, of all genres, should know better than to obey one of those.

So tell me I’m wrong: would you pay to see the uncut version of Evil Dead Burn or Obsession in a theater, or is the R cut enough? And is NC-17 still poison where you live?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Ken Russell in 1971 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central (box office and Nov. 10 tease) , Dread Central (extended run) , Dread Central (rating) , iHorror , World of Reel , Fangoria (The Devils) , Inverse , Boxoffice Pro , WBUR , The Numbers (NC-17) , The Numbers (Evil Dead Burn) , The Numbers (Terrifier 3) , The Ringer , SlashFilm , Bloody Disgusting , Epicstream , ComingSoon , Horror Obsessive , Fangoria (Terrifier 3) , Scott Mendelson , Dexerto .

DC Hires ‘Evil Dead Wrath’ Filmmaker Francis Galluppi to Write a New ‘Constantine.’ Where Does That Leave Keanu?

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:51:57 GMT

Twenty-one years after Keanu Reeves flipped off the devil, DC Studios is finally putting a new John Constantine movie on the board, and the first name attached isn't Reeves. According to a Deadline exclusive that spread across the trades on Wednesday night, the studio has hired Francis Galluppi, the writer-director of the upcoming Evil Dead Wrath , to write a Constantine feature. It's in early development, nobody has been cast and DC had no comment when TheWrap asked.

That would be an exciting horror story on its own. It gets messier because a Reeves sequel has been in the works, in theory, since 2022, and none of the reports say what happens to it. So this piece covers what's confirmed, what got garbled in the first wave of headlines, who Galluppi is, how the 2005 movie really performed, and what a horror-minded Constantine could mean for a DC slate that just took a risk on Clayface .

Watch: The Movie That Got Galluppi Hired

There's no footage of a movie that's still a script assignment, so here's the best evidence of why fans should care: the trailer for Galluppi's feature debut, from distributor Well Go USA, followed by Warner Bros.' production tease for Evil Dead Wrath .

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed, and What Got Scrambled

The confirmed list is short:

The job: Galluppi is writing a John Constantine movie for DC Studios, as Deadline first reported on Nov. 4.
The stage: Early development, with no other names attached.
The cast: None announced. Reeves isn't mentioned in the report, according to outlets summarizing it.
The studio: DC Studios had no comment for TheWrap.
Release date, rating, budget: None exist yet.

One point worth clearing up: not every outlet tells this the same way. TheWrap and Collider framed the news as Galluppi helming the movie, while iHorror, Cosmic Book News, SuperHeroHype and Screen Rant all describe a writing assignment, with several specifying that no director is on board. We're going with the writing version because that's how most outlets relaying Deadline's report describe it. Could he end up directing? Sure, and hiring the guy who just made an Evil Dead movie suggests that door is open. But nobody has reported that as a done deal.

Who's Behind It: Francis Galluppi

Galluppi, who turns 38 this month, came up through shorts like Palm Drive (2017) and High Desert Hell (2019), and music videos for Mt. Joy. His breakout was The Last Stop in Yuma County , a pressure-cooker crime thriller set around a desert diner, starring Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake and Barbara Crampton. It premiered at Fantastic Fest on Sept. 23, 2023, and reached U.S. digital on May 10, 2024.

It's a critics' darling that almost nobody paid to see in theaters: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 69 reviews and a 72 on Metacritic, against a $685,184 worldwide gross on a reported $1 million budget. Only $94,344 of that came from North America. It was still enough to catch the eye of the person who mattered most.

That was Sam Raimi, who hired Galluppi in April 2024 to write and direct a new Evil Dead film. Raimi told Deadline he's "a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension." That movie became Evil Dead Wrath , a prequel to the 1981 original set in 1972, starring Charlotte Hope, Jessica McNamee, Zach Gilford, Josh Helman and Ella Newton. It shot in Auckland, New Zealand from Feb. 21 to May 30, 2026, is now in post-production, and opens April 7, 2028 through Warner Bros.

Read that date again. Galluppi's first studio movie is about 17 months away, so DC hired him before anyone has paid to see his work at that scale. Warner Bros. is releasing Wrath , so it's fair to guess someone in that building likes what they've seen. That's a real vote of confidence.

Photo: Sam Raimi via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: Four Decades of Hellblazer, One Movie

John Constantine first showed up in Swamp Thing #37 in June 1985, created by Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben. He got his own title, Hellblazer , in 1988, and it became the longest continuously published Vertigo series. The character has always been a poor fit for superhero cinema: a chain-smoking English con man who wins by lying to demons and whose friends tend to die.

Hollywood has kept trying anyway. Here's how that's gone:

2005: Francis Lawrence's Constantine arrives Feb. 18, with Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton as Gabriel and Peter Stormare as Lucifer.
2012: Guillermo del Toro's Justice League Dark is reportedly in the works. It never happens.
2014-15: NBC's Constantine with Matt Ryan runs 13 episodes, from Oct. 24, 2014 to Feb. 13, 2015, and isn't renewed. Ryan carries the role into Arrow , Legends of Tomorrow and animation.
2022: Deadline reports a Reeves sequel in September, with Lawrence directing, Akiva Goldsman writing, and Goldsman, J.J. Abrams and Hannah Minghella producing.
2023: Reeves says he's spoken with DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn, with the film planned as an Elseworlds title outside the main DCU.
2024-25: A producer says a script is complete in September 2024. In February 2025, Lawrence says they're "closer than ever to being able to do a sequel," and Reeves says he and Lawrence pitched DC a story and got a go-ahead on a script.
October 2025: Gunn says he's discussed it with Reeves but hasn't read a script.
October 2026: Comic Basics, citing Deadline, reports the sequel is still in development with no greenlight and no date.

Photo: Matt Ryan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

By the Numbers

Constantine (2005): $230.9 million worldwide, $76 million of it domestic, on a reported $70-100 million budget. 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, 50 on Metacritic, B CinemaScore.
Evil Dead Rise (2023): $147 million worldwide on a budget of up to $19 million.
Evil Dead Burn (2026): $72.3 million worldwide as of late August on a $20 million budget, 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, B CinemaScore.
Clayface (2026): About a $40 million budget, more than $90 million worldwide so far per Comic Basics, after a 57% second-weekend drop.

Analysis: What This Really Means

The obvious read is that Keanu's sequel is dead. We don't think the evidence gets you there yet. World of Reel floated unsourced murmurs that Gunn and Peter Safran have killed it, while Screen Rant treats it as still in progress and Cosmic Book News says it's unknown whether Galluppi is writing something fresh or the sequel is changing hands. No trade has reported a cancellation. But here's our honest take: studios don't usually pay a hot horror filmmaker to write a separate movie about the same character for fun. Even if nothing's been formally shut down, this looks like DC building a Plan B, or at minimum no longer waiting on Plan A. Four years with a star, a director and a producer of Goldsman's stature, and no greenlight, says plenty on its own.

The more interesting signal is the choice of writer. Lawrence and Goldsman have talked for years about a darker, harder-R sequel, so scary isn't a new idea. What's new is that DC went to someone with no superhero résumé at all, whose calling card is a low-budget film built on slow dread in one location. Yuma County is about a room full of people waiting for something awful to happen. That is, weirdly, a great instinct for Hellblazer , where the best stories are about a man talking his way out of a bad room and leaving somebody else to pay for it.

Look at the economics, too. Clayface showed DC can make a character-driven horror film for around $40 million and pull in more than double that, even with a steep second-weekend fall. Evil Dead Rise showed how far under $20 million can go. The 2005 Constantine , meanwhile, earned about two-thirds of its gross overseas, but it needed a budget up to two and a half times the size of Clayface and a superstar to do it. A Galluppi version almost certainly lives closer to the first two models than the third, which is the reason it might actually get made when so many Constantine projects haven't.

The risk is real, though. Evil Dead Burn made less than half of what Rise did, so the franchise lift isn't automatic, and Galluppi's only released feature grossed under $700,000. And Reeves has spent two decades as the face of a role fans have turned into a cult favorite. A new Constantine has to survive comparisons to him on top of a comic fanbase that has been asking, with equal volume, for a blond English lead who actually looks like the guy on the page.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether Galluppi will direct, or only write.
Whether this sits in Gunn's DCU or stands apart, as the Reeves film was meant to.
What it means for Constantine 2 , and whether Reeves, Lawrence or Goldsman will say anything publicly.
Who plays the part. Nobody has been named, so treat any fan-cast headline accordingly.
Timing. With Evil Dead Wrath not out until April 7, 2028, and Galluppi also reportedly developing a snow-set western, don't expect this one soon.

Bottom Line

This is a writing deal in early development, not a green light, and it doesn't officially kill anything. But it's the first genuinely new idea the Constantine movie conversation has had in years: hand him to a horror filmmaker who likes making audiences wait. If DC wants the character scary rather than cool, that's the right phone call. So we'll ask you the only question that matters. Would you rather see Keanu get his long-promised sequel, or a full reboot from the guy behind Evil Dead Wrath ?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Keanu Reeves at TIFF 2025 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Reeves played the role in 2005 and is not attached to this project.

Sources: Deadline , TheWrap , Collider , iHorror , Screen Rant , Cosmic Book News , SuperHeroHype , World of Reel , Comic Basics , Bloody Disgusting , Fangoria , Wikipedia: Constantine (film) , Wikipedia: The Last Stop in Yuma County , Wikipedia: Evil Dead Wrath .

‘Jennifer’s Body 2’ Reportedly Has Its Needy: Amanda Seyfried Joins Megan Fox, and Everything We Know

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 23:50:39 GMT

The sequel to one of horror's most famous box office redemption stories reportedly just found its other half. Insider Daniel Richtman wrote on his Patreon on Tuesday, Nov. 3, that Amanda Seyfried will return for Jennifer's Body 2 alongside Megan Fox at 20th Century Studios, with Karyn Kusama directing from a Diablo Cody script. Dread Central ran with the report the same day, and it matters because Seyfried was the missing piece. Dread Central had already said in July that it confirmed Fox's return on its own, but Seyfried had not signed at that point.

Here is the important caveat up front: nobody at the studio has announced anything, and neither has the cast. This is a single-source report on Seyfried, sitting on top of months of smaller signals. So below we sort what is solid from what is still rumor, walk through how a film that cost $16 million and flopped became one of the most cherished cult titles of its era, and dig into the question nobody is asking loudly enough: does Disney put this in theaters?

Watch the Original Trailer

There is no footage from the sequel, and no sign cameras have rolled. So here is the 2009 trailer, which doubles as a time capsule of the marketing Cody still talks about. Watch who it is clearly selling to.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What's Confirmed, and What Isn't

It helps to separate this into tiers, because the headlines have flattened them all together.

On the record: Diablo Cody said on the Petticoat Revolution podcast in October that a sequel is coming very soon, using the word imminently, according to TheWrap . She also spent the spring talking openly about writing it.
Reported by trades or genre outlets: The A.V. Club pointed to Deadline confirming Cody is developing the film at 20th Century. Dread Central's July exclusive said Kusama would direct, Fox was back, and Disney was behind the project, with distribution unclear.
Single-source: Seyfried's return, via Richtman. Treat it as reportedly, not definitely.
Unverified timing: A Production Weekly listing pointed to an October 2026 shoot in Vancouver. No outlet has confirmed filming started, and Fiction Horizon notes one outlet now expects a later start.
Nothing yet: No release date, no plot synopsis, no rating, no announced platform.

What Cody Has Said About the Script

The most useful material comes from Cody herself, because she has been unusually chatty for someone with a sealed script. On Bloody Disgusting's Boo Crew podcast in March, she told listeners the project is not following the usual sequel route, and that she believes the culture has finally caught up with what the first film was attempting, per Inverse . Inverse's read is that this is a true continuation rather than a reboot, and that audiences will find out what became of both girls.

About a week later, JoBlo rounded up more from that conversation. Cody described the writing as pure pleasure, said the limits she felt in 2009 are gone, and made the most intriguing remark of the whole campaign: "this one is not just about Jennifer and Needy, it's about me." Producer Mason Novick, who has read the pages, praised them as both strong and funny.

Then came the October podcast, where she took on the character's reputation directly. "Jennifer is a sympathetic character for me, before and after the transformation," she told Petticoat Revolution. She went on to credit Fox for playing both versions, and to talk about a loneliness in the role that viewers tend to miss. That is a real signal about tone. A man-eating demon is usually the punchline or the villain, and Cody is telling you she sees a tragic lead.

Photo: Megan Fox at TIFF in 2009 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Who's Behind It

Karyn Kusama has become a far more bankable horror name than she was in 2009. Her credits include The Invitation , shot in 20 days for about $1 million and a Best Film winner at Sitges, plus a segment of the anthology XX , and directing and producing on Yellowjackets , which earned her an Emmy nomination. Her dance card is getting crowded: she is also attached to the first two episodes of The Terror season 3 and to Sony's Mouthwashing movie. Her last feature, Destroyer , came out in 2018.

Diablo Cody won the Oscar for Juno and a Tony for the book of Jagged Little Pill . In horror, she did revisions on 2013's Evil Dead and wrote Lisa Frankenstein , which shares a continuity with Jennifer's Body . That one is a cautionary tale: SlashFilm reported a $3.8 million opening weekend against a $13 million budget, well under forecasts of $9 million to $14 million.

Megan Fox has kept a toe in genre with Till Death in 2021, the android thriller Subservience in 2024, and the voice of Toy Chica in Five Nights at Freddy's 2 . Amanda Seyfried , meanwhile, arrives as a far bigger draw than in 2009. She has an Emmy for The Dropout , an Oscar nomination for Mank , and a big recent hit in The Housemaid , which passed $305 million worldwide by January on a $35 million budget. According to Cosmic Book News , she has also said she would not come back without Fox, so that pairing looks like the whole deal.

Photo: Karyn Kusama at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: From $6.8 Million to Feminist Classic

Jennifer's Body premiered at Toronto on Sept. 10, 2009, then hit theaters eight days later through 20th Century Fox and its Fox Atomic label. The cast was absurdly stacked in hindsight: Adam Brody, J.K. Simmons, Amy Sedaris, Kyle Gallner, Chris Pratt and Lance Henriksen. It landed at No. 5 that weekend and left with a 46% on Rotten Tomatoes and a C- CinemaScore.

The common explanation for that failure is the campaign. The film was sold on Fox's sex appeal to young men, while the actual movie is a queasy story about female friendship and predation. Cody has said it was marketed all wrong and, in a 2024 interview , that she felt humiliated by the reaction at the time. A decade later, the reappraisal arrived in force. Vox called it a forgotten feminist classic in 2018, and writer Carmen Maria Machado has championed it as a queer touchstone.

The sequel chatter has been building for years. Cody said in January 2024 that she wanted to make one. In March 2025, TheWrap notes, Seyfried let slip at a Toronto screening that she thought another was being made, then immediately tried to walk it back. Dread Central says it broke word of Cody's script in March of this year, followed by its Fox and Kusama report in July.

By the Numbers

Budget: $16 million
Opening weekend: $6.8 million
Final gross: about $16.2 million domestic, about $31.6 million worldwide
Scores: 46% Rotten Tomatoes, 47 Metacritic, C- CinemaScore

What This Really Means

A $31.6 million gross does not earn a sequel 17 years later. What earned it is the afterlife, and that creates the central business problem. Cult audiences are passionate, but they are not automatically a big opening weekend, and Lisa Frankenstein proved that hard. Cody's name and a shared universe wink were not enough to pull people out of the house in 2024.

So look at the comparisons. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come , from Disney's Searchlight label, opened to about $9.1 million in March and ended near $43.1 million worldwide on a $14 million budget. That is a fair floor for a modest sequel with a devoted fan base. Practical Magic 2 , a Warner Bros. follow-up to another 1990s misfire turned sleepover favorite, opened to an estimated $30 million in North America in September, which shows how far a beloved title can run with stars on the poster. And then there is the other Disney route: Hocus Pocus 2 skipped theaters and pulled a then-record 2.7 billion Nielsen minutes in its opening days on Disney+.

That is the real fork in the road. Our take: this should go to theaters, and Seyfried is the reason it can. With her Housemaid momentum next to Fox, the film suddenly has a two-hander poster that plays beyond the cult. A straight-to-Hulu release would be a perfectly profitable decision, and also a little bit of a repeat of 2009, when the studio could not see who this movie was for. Keep the budget in the low range, aim at the young women the first campaign ignored, and treat October as an event. There is also a creative trap worth watching. The original ends with spoiler-sensitive business that makes Jennifer's return tricky, and a sequel that leans on nostalgia alone would be easy to resent. Cody's comments suggest she knows that, since she keeps framing this as something personal rather than a reunion lap.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether Seyfried has actually signed. Whether cameras are rolling in Vancouver, or whether the Production Weekly date slipped. How Jennifer comes back, what Cody meant by making it about herself, and whether anyone else from the 2009 cast returns. Which Disney door it walks through, and when. Expect a formal announcement to be the next real news, and be wary of any release date until a studio says it out loud.

The Bottom Line

If the Seyfried report holds, the original lead duo, director and writer are all back for a film the industry laughed off 17 years ago. That is about as satisfying as sequel news gets, provided it is a real movie and not a victory lap. So tell us: does Jennifer's Body 2 deserve a theatrical release, or is streaming the smarter home?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Amanda Seyfried at the 2024 Berlinale via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central , TheWrap , The A.V. Club , Inverse , JoBlo , CinemaBlend , Cosmic Book News , Fiction Horizon , The Numbers , SlashFilm , ARY News , AFP via GMA News , Deadline via Yahoo , Wikipedia .

‘The Blood Countess’ Lost Up to 20 Minutes Against Its Director’s Wishes: What Ulrike Ottinger Said and Why It Matters

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:53:51 GMT

Ulrike Ottinger first sketched her vampire movie in 1998. It took her 28 years, one Nobel laureate and an Isabelle Huppert who kept saying yes to get The Blood Countess onto a screen. Now, with a U.S. release still ahead, the 84-year-old director says she lost as much as 20 minutes of it along the way, and not by choice.

She said so in Tokyo, and Variety reported it on Nov. 2. Here's what she actually said, what the movie is, what it cost her to make, and why those missing minutes could end up mattering to the small American distributor that bought it.

Watch the Teaser, Trailer and Berlinale Press Conference

The teaser below is the one embedded on the film pages of both Strand Releasing and Ottinger's official site; the trailer and the Berlinale press conference also come from her site .

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What Ottinger Said in Tokyo

The remarks came at a German cinema evening tied to the Tokyo International Film Festival, which is running a retrospective of her work that includes Ticket of No Return and Under Snow . According to Variety, her preferred cut ran 15 to 20 minutes longer than the finished film. "The film originally had a wonderful rhythm, exactly as it was," she told the audience.

She named no one. iHorror's write-up notes she described the pressure as coming from everybody around her, which is a very director way of saying it without starting a fight. Producers, financiers and sales agents all have reasons to want a tighter movie, but nothing she said pins this on any of them, so we won't either.

The part that gets lost in the headlines: she isn't calling the release version ruined. As Dread Central reported, she says the film is perfect now, after a heavy job of re-editing the whole thing to make the shorter length work. That's a filmmaker who lost the argument, did the labor and stands behind the result. It's also a filmmaker who still wanted you to know there was an argument. No longer cut has been announced.

The Details: What's Confirmed

The premise: Huppert plays Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Báthory, the Hungarian noblewoman of bloody legend, here an undead aristocrat in present-day Vienna. She reunites with her maid Hermine to hunt down a book that could wipe out vampires, with a vegetarian vampire nephew, his therapist and a police inspector all tangled in the chase.
Cast: Birgit Minichmayr as Hermine, Thomas Schubert as nephew Rudi Bubi, Lars Eidinger as therapist Theobald Tandem, Karl Markovics as the inspector, plus André Jung, Marco Lorenzini, Burghart Klaußner and Tom Neuwirth, better known as Conchita Wurst, as the master of ceremonies.
Runtime: 119 minutes on the Berlinale press kit and Ottinger's site, 118 on Strand's page , and an unexplained 100 on the Luxembourg Film Fund's catalog listing, which looks like an outlier.
Rating and language: Strand lists it as Not Rated, in German, French and Russian with English subtitles.
U.S. release: Strand plans a theatrical run in spring 2027, with no exact date yet. Its page also lists early screenings at The Loft Cinema in Tucson on Nov. 11 and AFI Silver in Maryland on Dec. 2.
Europe: Ottinger's site names Neue Visionen and Filmladen as German and Austrian distributors and advertises a cinema run from Oct. 29.

Who's Behind It

Photo: Ulrike Ottinger via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Ottinger, born in Konstanz in 1942, is a giant of queer German art cinema and an unusual person to be making a vampire comedy at this scale. Ticket of No Return (1979) opened her Berlin Trilogy, and Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) followed. Screen Daily notes this is her first film in six years, after the 2020 documentary Paris Calligrammes .

Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 and wrote the novel behind The Piano Teacher , has been billed as a co-writer in most coverage. Ottinger draws the line more finely: the press kit credits dialogues with Jelinek's participation, and she told 032c that she wrote the screenplay herself and her friend added the wordplay. Horror fans should note the cinematographer: Martin Gschlacht, who shot The Devil's Bath . Wolfgang Mitterer's score takes apart Johann Strauss waltzes, and Wurst sings "Rise Like a Phoenix," the song that won her Eurovision.

Huppert is the film's sales pitch. The Film Stage counts this as her 158th credit, and she revealed there that Ottinger originally imagined her as the maid, not the Countess. Minichmayr, who ended up with that part, brings a résumé including Downfall and The White Ribbon .

Photo: Birgit Minichmayr at the 2025 Austrian Film Awards via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: A 28-Year Road to Vienna

The idea began with a 1998 car trip from Berlin to Vienna, where the Narrenturm, the old Fools' Tower, and other strange locations lodged in Ottinger's head. She started the script in the early 2000s and approached Huppert in the late 2000s. "I think there are 28 versions of the script," she told Austrian Films in January. Money only came together in the last five years or so, and she says in the press kit that showing and selling her paintings at exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern was part of what made that possible.

Variety's casting report landed in February 2025. The world premiere followed on Feb. 16, 2026, in the Berlinale Special Gala at the Zoo Palast, and the film then toured Luxembourg, Sydney, Bucheon, Melbourne and Fantastic Fest. Strand's acquisition was reported on Aug. 31, the same day we first wrote about it .

The Báthory legend itself is well-worn screen territory, from Hammer's Countess Dracula with Ingrid Pitt and Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness , both 1971, to Julie Delpy's The Countess in 2009. Ottinger has said she cares less about the historical woman than about the fantasies that grew around her, and it shows in a movie more interested in Vienna than in biography.

By the Numbers

No budget has been published, so treat anything you see as a guess. But Ottinger gave Variety the useful outlines: it is the most expensive film she has made, she asked for 40 shooting days and got 30, and the crew passed 100 people. Her self-produced films cost €2.5 million to €3 million, she said, while meeting today's requirements takes €7 million to €8 million, which is why she has stopped producing alone. (She's still credited as a co-producer here.) That squeeze is the context for any argument about length: ten fewer days and more partners at the table.

Critically it's healthy but not unanimous. Rotten Tomatoes shows 84% from just 19 reviews, with no audience score yet. Guy Lodge at Variety was delighted and Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian gave it three stars out of five. Screen Daily called it slight but marketable, while Dread Central's Fantastic Fest review found it gorgeous and disappointing.

Analysis: Why 20 Minutes Could Be a Selling Point

Here's my read. Horror fans have been trained to treat missing minutes as a promise. The clearest example is Midsommar : A24 asked Ari Aster to trim his 171-minute cut for wide release, then turned the long version into an event, with a brief theatrical run, an Apple TV exclusive, a boutique disc and a one-night IMAX showing in 2024. A movie that cost about $9 million and grossed about $48 million got a second life out of its own deleted footage.

The conversation is live right now, too. Curry Barker told Rolling Stone he'd love to release a version of Obsession about 20 minutes longer, while insisting the theatrical cut already is his director's cut, Dread Central reports . That film hits Netflix on Nov. 17. Same number, opposite situation: Barker chose his cut and wants more, while Ottinger says hers was forced and has made peace with it.

Scale matters. Nosferatu turned $50 million into $182 million with Focus behind it, and even its extended home video edition only added about four minutes. The Blood Countess lives in a different neighborhood, closer to Only Lovers Left Alive , Jim Jarmusch's arty vampire picture that made $8.2 million on a $7 million budget. Strand doesn't need a phenomenon. It needs Huppert fans, queer cinema audiences and the midnight crowd to all show up, and a story about a legendary director's lost footage is the kind of thing that travels in those circles for free.

The risk runs the other way as well. A black comedy this loopy can be sunk by length, and several of the cooler reviews already found it more dazzling than filling. An extra 20 minutes wouldn't automatically help. If the 119-minute version is what she reworked to make sing, then the honest pitch may be that it's already her film, just not the one she first cut.

What We Still Don't Know

Who pushed for the cuts, and exactly when they happened. The 119-minute running time was listed at Berlinale, which suggests they came before the premiere, though Ottinger hasn't said so.
Whether the longer version still exists in finished form, and whether anyone has the rights or appetite to release it.
The exact U.S. date, and whether Strand plans anything beyond a limited rollout.
Which version, if any, ever reaches home video.

Bottom Line

An 84-year-old who waited 28 years for this movie gets to say what she lost, and she did it without trashing the result. That's a better story than most director's-cut drama, and it makes spring 2027 more interesting. The film sounds like a Viennese fever dream with Isabelle Huppert at the center of it, which is reason enough to go.

So tell us: when a director says the longer cut was better, do you want to see it, or do you trust the version that had to fight its way to the screen?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Isabelle Huppert at Cannes in 2017 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Variety , Dread Central , iHorror , Strand Releasing , Ulrike Ottinger , Austrian Films , Screen Daily , The Film Stage , 032c , Rotten Tomatoes .

The ‘Event Horizon’ Director Is Going Back to Cosmic Horror: ‘Nether Station,’ ‘Nether Vortex’ and Everything We Know

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:54:39 GMT

In 1997, Paul W.S. Anderson sent a starship to hell, watched audiences hand it a D+ CinemaScore, and then spent the next three decades mostly making video game movies with explosions. Now he is going back into the dark. Deadline reported on Nov. 3 that Anderson will direct film adaptations of Nether Station and Nether Vortex , a two-book cosmic horror saga from veteran sci-fi novelist Kevin J. Anderson (no relation is mentioned in any of the coverage, so don't go building a family tree).

That is a bigger deal than one more book option. Event Horizon is the rare flop that horror fans turned into scripture, and its director has spent years saying he is wary of touching it again. So what follows is everything confirmed about the Nether films, who is making them, why the book's own author credits Event Horizon as a touchstone, what Anderson's recent track record really looks like, and what would have to go right for lightning to strike a second time, this time on purpose.

Watch: The Trailer That Started It

The Nether films are only just announced, so no footage exists. Here is the next best thing: the original 1997 Event Horizon trailer, from Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers. Consider it homework.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Actually Confirmed

Here's the verified list, pulled from the trades and the publisher:

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson, attached to both films ( Fangoria ).
Screenwriter: Jonathan Wakeham, whose credits include Midas Man and To Catch a Killer ( CBR ).
Producers: Anderson, longtime partner Jeremy Bolt, plus Weird Tales president John Harlacher and Weird Tales film VP Tony Eldridge, a producer on The Equalizer ( CBR ).
Source material: Nether Station , released Oct. 29, 2024 at 316 pages, and its sequel Nether Vortex , dated Oct. 27, 2026 . That second book is barely a week old.
Publisher: the Weird Tales Presents imprint, through Blackstone.
The lead: Cammie Skoura, a neurodivergent young scientist on a deep-space mission. Coverage of the Deadline report compares her to Beth Harmon of The Queen’s Gambit , which is a very specific flavor of brilliant-and-doomed ( CBR ).
Not set: cast, release date and, as far as any report says, a studio or distributor ( Fangoria ).

The premise, without spoilers: a crew heads to a wormhole at the far edge of the solar system, hoping it's a shortcut to Alpha Centauri, and finds that someone left ruins there first. The publisher pitches it as a survival story. The word doing the heavy lifting in every write-up is “cosmic,” which tends to mean the ruins are not the problem. Whatever made them is.

Photo: Kevin J. Anderson via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Who's Behind It

Kevin J. Anderson is one of the most prolific working names in licensed sci-fi. He has more than 23 million books in print , co-wrote the Dune prequels with Brian Herbert, and wrote X-Files novels that hit bestseller lists. Nether Station went somewhere darker for him, and it landed: the publisher lists a 2025 Dragon Award nomination and a 2025 Colorado Book Award finalist slot, and Paul Di Filippo’s Locus review measured it against Lovecraft and came away impressed. In a statement carried by CBR , he says: “I tried to put all my fears and paranoia into Nether Station .”

Paul W.S. Anderson's résumé needs less introduction and more nuance. Plenty of coverage calls him the director of six Resident Evil films. His actual filmography has him directing four (2002, 2010, 2012 and 2016) and writing or producing the two he handed off. The commercial peak is real: Afterlife grossed about $300 million on a $60 million budget and The Final Chapter reached roughly $312 million on $40 million. Earlier, Mortal Kombat made $122 million on $18 million and Alien vs. Predator about $172 million on $60 million.

The more recent run is rougher. Monster Hunter took in about $47.9 million on a $60 million budget in the middle of the pandemic, and In the Lost Lands , the 2025 George R.R. Martin adaptation, managed just $3.6 million against a reported $55 million. That matters here, because the Nether films have no announced studio home yet.

Bolt is the quiet detail worth circling. He co-founded Impact Pictures with Anderson in 1992 and is credited as a producer on Event Horizon . So this is, in part, the same producing team returning to the same corner of the genre 29 years later.

The Backstory: A Masterpiece Nobody Can Watch

Event Horizon opened Aug. 15, 1997, with Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill leading a crew sent to find a lost experimental ship. Its budget has been reported anywhere from $50 million to $70 million. It made $26.7 million domestically and under $50 million worldwide, drew a 36% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned that D+ from opening-night audiences.

The legend is what came before release. Paramount greenlit it just 10 weeks before cameras rolled, then squeezed post-production when the Titanic delay shuffled its release calendar. Anderson's roughly 130-minute cut, which horrified test audiences, was hacked down to 96. When home video made the film a cult object, Paramount came back in 2004 willing to fund a director's cut, and the studio's storage turned out to have failed everyone: the material was mostly gone. A VHS rough cut surfaced in 2012, but Anderson has said real restoration would take something like the reshoot route used for the Snyder Cut.

Since then the property has refused to die. IDW has published the comics Dark Descent (2025) and Inferno (2026), and a TV version with Adam Wingard was announced in 2019 and has yet to appear. Anderson himself has stayed away. Asked about a sequel around the 25th anniversary, he admitted the idea comes up, and in comments published by Fandom he said: “I’ve always been very nervous about returning to the world of Event Horizon .”

Photo: Sam Neill, star of Event Horizon , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

By the Numbers: Does Space Horror Sell?

The honest answer is sometimes, and the spread is enormous:

Alien: Romulus (2024): $350.9 million worldwide on $80 million, 80% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Life (2017): $100.5 million on $58 million.
Pandorum (2009), which Anderson and Bolt produced: $20.6 million worldwide, 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Event Horizon (1997): under $50 million on at least $50 million.

Meanwhile, iHorror notes that 2026 has already produced three horror films past $400 million: Obsession , Backrooms and Zach Cregger's Resident Evil , which beat every film in Anderson's old series. Audiences are clearly there. The open question is what they'll show up for.

What This Really Means

First, the “spiritual successor” label deserves a little skepticism. Screen Rant is the outlet running with that framing, and it's the kind of phrase that sells a headline. What's established is more modest: the novelist has cited Event Horizon as an inspiration, per CBR and Dread Central , and the director happens to be the man who made it. This isn't a sequel, and nobody involved has said it shares a universe. That may be its greatest advantage. Anderson gets to chase the same dread without owing anyone a Gateway, a Dr. Weir or a canonical answer about what's on the other side.

Second, look at the deal structure. Weird Tales, the pulp brand that once published Lovecraft, isn't just licensing a book here. Its own executives are producers. A publisher building its own screen pipeline from a modern novel, with a 2024 book and a sequel landing a week before the announcement, looks a lot more like a franchise plan than an auteur passion project. Screen Rant's use of “franchise” is premature, but you can see why it's tempting.

Third, the real risk isn't scares. It's scale and control. Event Horizon was wrecked in post by a studio's calendar, and Romulus shows what happens when a space horror gets disciplined money and room to be nasty. Anderson's best work has always been about production design and spectacle, and his weakest late-career stretch came when budgets outran audiences. A mid-budget, R-rated Nether film could be the smartest move he's made in a decade. A $60 million effects epic with no studio safety net would be a familiar kind of dangerous.

And the lead may be the secret weapon. Giving a Lovecraftian story a protagonist whose mind works differently is a real idea, not decoration, because cosmic horror is fundamentally about what happens when a mind meets something it can't process. Handled with care, that's a fresh angle on a very old genre. Handled lazily, it's a gimmick. Wakeham's scripts will decide which.

What We Still Don't Know

Which studio or financier, if any, is behind the films.
Who plays Cammie Skoura. No cast has been announced, and no report mentions Milla Jovovich, so treat any fan-casting as just that.
Whether the two films shoot together or wait on the first one's results.
Budget, rating and release window.
Whether Anderson gets final cut this time. After 1997, that may be the only question that matters.

Bottom Line

A director who lost his masterpiece to a release calendar is getting a second run at the exact genre that made him a cult figure, with an acclaimed book and his original producing partner in tow. It may also be the most interesting thing he's attempted since 1997. So here's the question: after Monster Hunter and In the Lost Lands , do you trust Paul W.S. Anderson with cosmic horror again, or was Event Horizon a one-time trip?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Paul W.S. Anderson by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline , Fangoria , CBR , Screen Rant , Dread Central , Weird Tales , Locus , SYFY Wire , Fandom , The Numbers , iHorror , Wikipedia: Event Horizon .

‘REANIMAL’ Leads The Horror Game Awards 2026 With 10 Nominations, and Doug Bradley’s Pinhead Is in the Fight

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 23:50:10 GMT

The most stacked horror gaming year in recent memory finally has a scoreboard. The Horror Game Awards unveiled its 2026 nominees over Halloween weekend, and the frontrunner is not the eight-million-selling Capcom juggernaut most people would have bet on. Tarsier Studios’ creepy co-op nightmare REANIMAL leads the field with 10 nominations, one ahead of Resident Evil Requiem’s nine.

Scroll a little further down the ballot and it gets more fun. Doug Bradley is up for Best Performance for voicing Pinhead in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, in a category that also includes Leon S. Kennedy’s voice actor and Lost’s Terry O’Quinn. Public voting is open right now and closes Nov. 11, with the show streaming live from a graffiti tunnel in London on Nov. 20. Here’s who’s nominated, how the voting really works, what the numbers say and who we think can actually take home the Claw.

Watch the Frontrunners

REANIMAL’s launch trailer, from the game’s February release:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

And Capcom’s fourth major trailer for Resident Evil Requiem, which pairs Leon with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: Everything Confirmed

The fifth edition of the awards takes place Friday, Nov. 20 at 26 Leake Street in Waterloo, London, a venue carved out of the city’s famous graffiti tunnel. The stream starts at 7 p.m. GMT, which is 2 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Central and 11 a.m. Pacific, across the show’s YouTube and Twitch channels. In-person seats were limited; the organizers list room for 350 people in the main tunnel, and tickets were handed out by application and a guest draw rather than sold.

According to Bloody Disgusting’s rundown, more than 100 titles are competing across 21 categories, and 10 games landed at least five nominations. Here’s how the leaderboard shakes out:

10 nominations: REANIMAL
9 nominations: Resident Evil Requiem
8 nominations: Silent Hill: Townfall, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, Silver Pines
7 nominations: Project Songbird, The Skin Stapler, Tenebris Somnia
6 nominations: Andyland’s Endacopia
5 nominations: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake

All 10 of those are up for Game of the Year. They’re joined by six more: Routine, Directive 8020, Heaven Does Not Respond, No Means Nothing, Offering App and The Blood of Dawnwalker. That’s a 16-game race for the top prize, and the mix of nine-figure-franchise money and tiny indie weirdness is the whole charm of this show.

Six categories are brand new this year: Critics’ Choice, Scariest Horror Game of the Year, Best Cosy Horror Game, Best Ongoing Horror Game, Best New Multiplayer Game and Best Adaptation. To be eligible, a game had to come out between Nov. 27, 2025 and Oct. 26, 2026. There’s also a rule worth applauding: nominees must, as far as the jury and production team know, “not have been made using generative AI.”

The categories fans will argue about most

Best Performance (15 nominees): Doug Bradley, Terry O’Quinn, Nick Apostolides, Angela Sant’Albano, Kezia Burrows, Layna Lazar, Luis Bermudez, RJ Green, Valerie Rose Lohman, Hexy IRL, Joseph May, Nicole Tompkins, Chase Brown, Clara Kovacic and Willow Leef.
Lifetime Achievement (11 nominees): Sam Barlow, Thomas Grip, Frédérick Raynal, Jonathan Boakes, Shinji Mikami, Dr. Mick Donegan, Philippe Morin, Keiichiro Toyama, Will Doyle, Koshi Nakanishi and Akira Yamaoka.
Critics’ Choice (8 nominees): Hellraiser: Revival, REANIMAL, Resident Evil Requiem, Silent Hill: Townfall, Halloween, The Sinking City 2, Forbidden Solitaire and Photomaly.
Most Anticipated (15 nominees): the list includes Alien: Isolation 2, Metro 2039 and Saw Genesis.
Best Adaptation (9 nominees): the new category puts the Resident Evil movie in the same fight as Hellraiser: Revival, Halloween, Iron Lung, The Mortuary Assistant, Exit 8 and Backrooms.

Nominee names above are taken from the portrait and logo images on the official category pages, so exact spellings could differ slightly.

Who’s Behind It, and How Voting Works

The awards were founded in 2022 by Will Penkeyman and Phil Dickens, who bill the show as the world’s first dedicated horror game awards. It’s presented by Lost in Cult, and the two co-creators host again with co-producer Ash Millman. Game of the Year is sponsored by Creative Assembly, the Alien: Isolation studio, which is a fun bit of trivia given that Alien: Isolation 2 is sitting over in Most Anticipated.

The voting has more layers than a Cenobite’s wardrobe. Players’ Choice and Horror Content Creator of the Year are completely public, from nomination to win. Fifteen other categories are nominated by a jury of more than 60 content creators, and specialist juries handle accessibility, technical and lifetime awards. For the first time, a critics’ jury picks Critics’ Choice. Dead Meat’s Zoran Gvojic sits on the main jury, and Bloody Disgusting’s Harrison Abbott is on the critics’ panel. The hosts and presenters don’t get a vote.

For most categories, the public vote narrows the field and the jury then picks the winner from the finalists. One wrinkle: the official site says the top three go back to the jury, while Bloody Disgusting reports the top five. Either way, your vote matters now, because a game that misses the cut can’t win, and that window shuts Nov. 11.

The Backstory: From Online Show to Leake Street

Last year was the turning point. The 2025 edition, held Dec. 13, was the first live, in-person show, at London’s Kensington Conference and Events Centre. Silent Hill f cleaned up with four wins from six nominations: Game of the Year, Best Narrative, Technical Achievement and Best Performance for Konatsu Kato. Look Outside took Best Art Direction and Best Indie Horror Game, No, I’m Not a Human won the Players’ Choice, Markiplier took Content Creator, and Hideo Kojima received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

The winner of Most Anticipated Horror Game that night? Resident Evil Requiem. So Capcom’s game walks into this year’s show having already been crowned the thing everybody was waiting for. Now it has to prove it was worth the wait against a game that sold a fraction of its copies.

Photo: Terry O’Quinn via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

By the Numbers

Resident Evil Requiem: released Feb. 27. Metacritic scores run from 89 on PS5 to 93 on Xbox Series X/S, with 96% of OpenCritic critics recommending it. It sold five million copies in five days, the fastest start in series history, and Capcom had it at more than eight million by the end of June.
REANIMAL: released Feb. 13. Metacritic scores of 80 to 83, 82% recommend on OpenCritic, and more than one million copies sold by May, according to THQ Nordic and Embracer.
Silent Hill: Townfall: released Sept. 24. Metacritic 80 on PS5 and PC, with an 89% OpenCritic recommendation rate.
Hellraiser: Revival: released Oct. 8. OpenCritic shows a 74 top-critic average and 65% recommending across 111 reviews. Launch-day scores ranged from 9/10 at Insider Gaming to 4.5/10 at Game Informer, which Pure Xbox fairly called “seriously divided.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker: released Sept. 3. Metacritic 83 to 84, 94% recommend, and over a million copies in three days.
Directive 8020: released May 12. Metacritic 68 to 73 and just 53% recommend, which makes its Game of the Year slot one of the bigger surprises on the ballot.

Analysis: What This Ballot Really Says

The headline is that nominations and reputation aren’t lining up, and that’s a good thing. On pure review scores and sales, Requiem is in a class of its own. Eight million copies in about four months puts it more than halfway to the 16.04 million lifetime total of the Resident Evil 4 remake, and its Metacritic scores tower over the rest of the field. In a normal awards show, that’s the end of the conversation.

But REANIMAL’s 10 nods are not a fluke, and the game has been quietly collecting this kind of recognition all year. In September it won the narrative and direction prize at the Japan Horror Game Awards, where Silent Hill f took the grand prize. In August it picked up Sweden’s Utmärkt Svensk Form design award. Narrative lead David Mervik has talked about wanting story to be something you feel rather than get told, and that approach plays well with a jury of creators who’ve spent hours watching games from the inside. It’s also worth noticing what this ballot corrects: REANIMAL wasn’t among Fangoria’s five Chainsaw Awards nominees for Best Video Game in July, which did include Requiem and Silent Hill f.

The real test comes down to how the show’s format rewards different games. Look at last year: Silent Hill f won the top prize while a tiny indie, Look Outside, beat bigger titles for art direction, and the crowd’s favorite was the viral No, I’m Not a Human. This show has a track record of splitting the trophies, so don’t be shocked if Requiem takes Game of the Year while REANIMAL, Silver Pines or The Skin Stapler clean up in the craft categories. The Players’ Choice is its own animal too, since fans alone decide it and the shortlist includes Captured 2, The Plant Shop and Crisol: Theatre of Idols alongside the big names.

Then there’s Hellraiser: Revival, the most interesting case on the ballot. Eight nominations for a game with a 65% recommend rate tells you that horror people judge it differently than general critics do. A divisive, nasty, faithful game is exactly what this crowd tends to love, and Bradley is the perfect emblem of it. He’s 72, he’s been the face of Pinhead since 1987’s Hellraiser, and he’s finally playing the role in a game after decades of fans wanting exactly that. Against the likes of Apostolides, whose Leon carries a blockbuster, and O’Quinn, who brings serious prestige to Townfall, it’s a tough race. But it would be hard to imagine a more popular moment in that tunnel than Pinhead winning a trophy.

Photo: Akira Yamaoka via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The Lifetime Achievement list deserves its own moment, because it reads like a history of the genre. Frédérick Raynal made Alone in the Dark. Shinji Mikami directed the original Resident Evil. Keiichiro Toyama directed the original Silent Hill, and Akira Yamaoka gave that series its sound. Thomas Grip brought us Amnesia. Sam Barlow made Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Immortality. Any of them would be a worthy successor to Kojima, and the fact that Koshi Nakanishi is on there while also leading the Requiem push is a nice bit of drama.

What We Still Don’t Know

We don’t have the presenter lineup, any world premieres or a confirmed in-show announcement slate yet. Those are the things to watch in the next two weeks, since the organizers had promised jury, presenter and ticket news in stages. We also don’t yet know which games make the finalist cut, because the public vote is still open.

Dates to circle: Nov. 11 for the end of public voting, and Nov. 20 for the show itself.

Bottom Line

Requiem should still be the favorite on the strength of everything it did, but REANIMAL’s lead proves this isn’t a coronation, and Hellraiser: Revival’s eight nods prove horror fans grade on their own curve. That’s what a genre-specific show is for. So which game do you think takes the Claw on Nov. 20: REANIMAL, Requiem, Townfall or Pinhead’s big comeback? And does Doug Bradley deserve Best Performance on the name alone, or does Leon have this one locked?

Related on The Horror Feed

Photo credits: Header photo of Doug Bradley via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Bloody Disgusting , The Horror Game Awards , THGA venue announcement , Game Developer , Players , GameBusiness.jp , Pure Xbox , OpenCritic , GamesMarket , Fangoria , Bloody Disgusting (2025 winners) .

‘Victorian Psycho’ Reveals a Gutted-Baby Popcorn Bucket: The Nov. 13 Release, the Reviews and Everything We Know

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:51:21 GMT

Horror marketing has given us a monkey with a drum, a Jigsaw head and a facehugger wrapped around a cup. Now it has given us a bonneted infant with its stomach opened up so you can reach in for a handful of popcorn. The campaign for Victorian Psycho has unveiled a bloodied baby bucket, complete with frilly outfit, and the promo shots go all the way: people snacking from the torso, the thing parked under a butter dispenser, and artwork of it resting in an ornate wooden cradle. Dread Central reported the reveal on Nov. 2 , the same day the film's cast and creators turned out for a New York screening.

It is a gag, but it is also a statement of intent. Ten days from now, Maika Monroe's killer-governess movie finally reaches American theaters after losing its original star, losing its original distributor and moving off its original date. Here is everything confirmed about the film, who made it, how critics have responded, and why a tasteless piece of concession-stand plastic may be exactly the right way to sell it.

Watch the Trailer and Teaser

Bleecker Street released the full trailer on July 30, a little over two months after the teaser debuted alongside the film's Cannes premiere.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details

Release: Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, exclusively in theaters from Bleecker Street. True Brit handles the UK and Ireland.
Rating: R, for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material.
Setting: 1858, at a remote gothic manor called Ensor House, where a new governess arrives and the household staff start to vanish.
Cast: Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty, Thomasin McKenzie as Ms. Lamb, Jason Isaacs as Mr. Pounds, Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Pounds, Amy De Bhrun as Mrs. Fancey, and Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton as the Pounds children, Andrew and Drusilla.
Runtime: Listings disagree. Screen Daily and JoBlo's Cannes coverage put it at about 90 minutes, while Rotten Tomatoes currently shows 1 hour 42 minutes.

As for the bucket itself, nobody has said how you get one. Dread Central found no price, retailer or ordering information in the materials, which leaves open whether it will be a real concession item or a very committed publicity stunt.

Who's Behind It

Maika Monroe has spent more than a decade building one of the best résumés in modern horror: The Guest and It Follows in 2014, Watcher in 2022, Longlegs in 2024 and the The Hand That Rocks the Cradle remake in 2025. Almost all of those asked her to be the person something terrible happens to. This one makes her the terrible thing. Speaking to Rue Morgue , she described tearing through the script, getting sold on the project over a Zoom with the director, then preparing with a dialect coach, remote rehearsals and reference clips that included Jack Nicholson in The Shining . Of taking on something so far from her usual work, she admitted, "It was very nerve-wracking."

Zachary Wigon directs, and this is only his third feature. A former critic for Slant, Filmmaker and The Village Voice, he debuted with the crowdfunded The Heart Machine at SXSW in 2014, then made Sanctuary , a two-hander with Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott that premiered at TIFF in September 2022. It scored 88% on Rotten Tomatoes but grossed just $794,362 under Neon's limited rollout, so this is a major step up in scale and visibility.

Virginia Feito adapted her own 2025 novel. The Madrid-born author writes in English and broke through with her 2021 debut, Mrs. March , which won two Spanish literary prizes and was set up as a film with Elisabeth Moss. Producers include Dan Kagan of Traffic, who also worked on Longlegs , and Sebastien Raybaud of Anton, which fully financed the project. Behind the camera, Nico Aguilar shot it and Ariel Marx scored it.

Photo: Jason Isaacs via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The supporting cast has real genre mileage too. Thomasin McKenzie led Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho , Isaacs went gothic in A Cure for Wellness , Ruth Wilson starred in the haunted-house drama The Little Stranger , and young Jacobi Jupe recently worked on an Exorcist project, according to Dread Central's credits.

Photo: Thomasin McKenzie via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: A Long Way to Ensor House

This movie has already survived more upheaval than most of its fictional staff. Here is the path, per the film's production history and trade coverage:

October 2024: Margaret Qualley, Wigon's Sanctuary star, signs on as Winifred. McKenzie follows in November.
December 2024: A24 picks up U.S. rights.
May 2025: Monroe replaces Qualley , and A24 is no longer distributing. Isaacs joins the same month.
August 2025: Cameras roll in Ireland on Aug. 18, and Bleecker Street lands U.S. rights three days later.
May 21, 2026: World premiere in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section, where TheWrap, citing Variety, reported a five-minute standing ovation.
August 2026: The release moves from Sept. 25 to Nov. 13.
October 15, 2026: Outerlight Entertainment buys Bleecker Street , with its leadership staying in place to run the slate.
November 2, 2026: Monroe, Isaacs, Wigon and Feito attend a screening at New York's Village East .

No reason for Qualley's exit appears in the reporting we reviewed, so we won't guess at one.

By the Numbers

Rotten Tomatoes currently has the film at 80% from 40 reviews, and its consensus essentially says the movie is a gory good time carried by its lead. There is no audience score yet. Metacritic tells a cooler story, with Wikipedia's June snapshot listing 52 out of 100 from 12 critics. That gap is the movie in miniature: plenty of critics liked it, but few were bowled over.

The individual verdicts split in a useful way. JoBlo gave it 8 out of 10 and treated it as more satire than straight horror, with a cult future ahead. Fangoria's review came down positive, and Dread Central's critic called this Monroe's best work to date. Screen Daily supplied the best one-line pitch: "Not so much Pride And Prejudice with zombies, but with Michael Myers." On the other side, Time Out went 3 out of 5 , enjoying the excess while finding the killings light on tension and stakes.

Analysis: Why the Baby Bucket Actually Makes Sense

Collectible buckets are no longer novelty items. The National traces the trend's rise to about 2019 and notes that some designs vanish within hours. Horror took to it quickly: Cinemark had a Jigsaw head for Saw X , some Regal locations carried a facehugger design for Alien: Romulus , and AMC landed an exclusive for The Monkey . But those all relied on instantly recognizable franchises or icons. Victorian Psycho has neither, so it has to manufacture a reaction instead. A bucket like this one doesn't need to sell a single unit to work. It only has to get passed around by people saying "absolutely not," which is free reach for a mid-size independent release.

It also solves a tone problem. Costume drama can read as homework to a horror crowd, and a trailer full of corsets and candlelight risks attracting the wrong audience or none at all. A gutted infant in a bonnet says instantly that this movie is laughing, and that you should come ready to laugh with it. For Bleecker Street, whose best-known titles lean toward adult fare like Trumbo , Captain Fantastic and Logan Lucky , that signal matters. So does the timing, with the film landing less than a month after the company changed hands.

The date is the other big bet. Moving out of September could have looked like a retreat, and Dread Central framed the new slot as awards-season territory. We read it more as an escape from the crowd. We argued recently that horror doesn't need October anymore , and a mid-November opening lets a gothic title stand apart once the Halloween rush fades, ahead of bigger period horror like Robert Eggers' Werwulf on Christmas Day .

Three comparisons frame the stakes. Longlegs is the dream: Monroe, a $10 million budget, a $22.4 million domestic opening and about $125 million worldwide, built on a marketing campaign that turned mystery into an event, despite a divisive C+ CinemaScore. It Follows is the slow burn: another Monroe film that started at Cannes, it opened in just four U.S. theaters, expanded to 1,200 and reached $23.3 million worldwide on a $1.3 million budget. And Sanctuary , at under $800,000, is the floor for what happens when a Wigon film stays small and talky.

Victorian Psycho won't hit Longlegs numbers without a similar cultural moment, and it doesn't have that film's dread-soaked mystery to feed one. Its realistic path is It Follows money or somewhat better, followed by the long afterlife JoBlo predicted. That would be a fine result if costs stayed modest, though the budget hasn't been made public in anything we found. The real thing to watch is whether Monroe can open a movie as the monster. With They Follow in production, she is already a horror fixture. A hit here would prove she can do far more than survive.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether the bucket can actually be bought, at what price and through which theater chain.
The final U.S. runtime, given the conflicting 90- and 102-minute listings.
How many screens it gets. Rotten Tomatoes lists it as a wide release, but no theater count has surfaced.
The production budget, and any box office tracking ahead of opening weekend.
The audience verdict. Critics have had their say since May, but general moviegoers get their first look on Nov. 13.

Bottom Line

Victorian Psycho looks like the rare horror release that knows exactly how ridiculous it is, and that self-awareness may be its best marketing tool. The reviews suggest a big, gleeful showcase for Monroe rather than a new genre landmark, and honestly, there's room for that in a season of very serious prestige scares. The bucket is disgusting. It is also doing its job, because you've now read this far.

So be honest: if a theater near you stocked it, would you actually eat popcorn out of that baby, or is this where you draw the line?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Maika Monroe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central (bucket) , Dread Central (date change) , Rotten Tomatoes , Rue Morgue , TheWrap (Cannes) , TheWrap (Bleecker Street) , JoBlo , Fangoria , Screen Daily , Time Out , The National , The Numbers , Yahoo/Just Jared , Wikipedia .

Peacock Passed on Eli Roth’s ‘Hostel’ Series With Paul Giamatti. Here’s What’s Next for the Franchise

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:53:22 GMT

The most interesting horror show Peacock had on its board is gone, and the news was hiding in plain sight for three months. Eli Roth has confirmed the streamer will not move forward with its Hostel series, the franchise reinvention that had Paul Giamatti, of all people, attached to star. “Peacock said no,” Roth told interviewer Edward Douglas, in a conversation that surfaced as a headline this week when Bloody Disgusting picked it up and Dread Central and JoBlo followed.

The door isn’t fully shut, though. Roth and longtime producer Chris Briggs still have finished scripts, and Roth says he wants to do something with them, even if it isn’t television. Below: what was actually said and when, who was involved, what the three existing movies did, why a theatrical Hostel might be the better bet anyway, and the awkward part of that plan.

Watch: Roth’s Latest, and the Interview

There is no Hostel series footage to show you, because no footage was ever reported. What we can show you is the movie Roth was promoting when the news slipped out: the official teaser for Ice Cream Man , from his own label, The Horror Section. The full conversation is on Douglas’ YouTube channel .

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What’s Confirmed

The call: Peacock declined to go forward, Roth says. He told Douglas the decision surprised the team.
The timing: The interview went up on August 4, 2026, per JoBlo. It only became a news cycle on November 2, which means this isn’t a fresh corporate decision so much as a late discovery.
The scripts: Roth and Briggs wrote them, and Roth says they both love what they have.
The plan: It may not be a series. Douglas’ own write-up says Roth is taking the idea back to feature films, though no deal, studio or date has been announced.
The cast: Giamatti is the only actor named in the reports we read. His character was never revealed, and no plot details were released.
Peacock’s side: None of the reports we read carries a statement from the streamer, so treat Roth as the single on-record source here.

Photo: Paul Giamatti via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who Was Behind It

Roth was set to write, direct and executive produce, per TVLine . He wrote and directed the first two films, and his run since has been all over the place. Thanksgiving (2023) was a real win: $46.6 million worldwide on a $15 million budget with an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score. Borderlands (2024) was the opposite, sitting at 10%. Then came Ice Cream Man on August 7, 2026, an unrated film released through The Horror Section with Iconic Events Releasing. It cost a reported $5.5 million, opened to about $1 million and had reached roughly $6 million by the end of August, with critics under 30% on Rotten Tomatoes and a side controversy over Roth confirming generative AI in select scenes.

Chris Briggs and Mike Fleiss, the producers from the original films, were back as executive producers, and the show was being made through Fifth Season, the studio behind Severance . TheWrap described the pitch as a modern reinvention, which was the entire appeal: prestige TV people taking a grubby 2000s gore franchise seriously.

And Giamatti was the headline. An Emmy winner for John Adams , he is about the least expected name you could attach to the movie famous for its Slovakian torture warehouse. JoBlo notes he nearly had a cameo in the 2005 original, so the casting had a little history behind it.

The Backstory: From 2024 Exclusive to Quiet Pass

September 17, 2005: Hostel premieres at Toronto, then opens in the US on January 6, 2006, at No. 1.
January 2006: Critic David Edelstein’s New York magazine essay gives the wave its nickname, “torture porn,” and Roth becomes the poster child.
June 8, 2007: Hostel: Part II opens well below the first film. Roth blames piracy, citing leaked workprint downloads.
December 27, 2011: Hostel: Part III goes straight to home video from director Scott Spiegel, the only entry made without Roth.
June 2024: The Hollywood Reporter breaks the TV series with Giamatti attached.
July 31, 2025: The project lands at Peacock for development, reported by TheWrap and TVLine.
August 4, 2026: Roth tells Douglas that Peacock passed.
November 2, 2026: The comment becomes news.

That third movie is worth a moment. Back in May 2007, Roth said flatly, “I hate a lame third sequel, and I don’t want there to be one.” In July 2009 he confirmed he wouldn’t direct it, while giving the studio his blessing. So the series pitch was also a chance to take the brand back after 15 years away from it.

Photo: Jay Hernandez, star of the original Hostel , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

By the Numbers

Hostel (2005): $4.8 million budget, $82.2 million worldwide and a $19.6 million opening, per The Numbers . That is roughly 17 times its budget. Rotten Tomatoes 60%, CinemaScore C-.
Hostel: Part II (2007): $10.2 million budget, $35.6 million worldwide, an $8.2 million opening. Rotten Tomatoes 44%, CinemaScore C.
Hostel: Part III (2011): No theatrical release and no box office to report. Six reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
Crystal Lake (2026): 1.3 billion minutes in 11 days, per NBCUniversal , and 1.7 billion in 14, per TheWrap , making it Peacock’s fourth-biggest scripted original debut.

TVLine’s combined figure of $116 million for the first two films is the number that explains why anyone wanted this IP in the first place. Those two movies together cost $15 million.

What This Really Means

The timing is what stings. Roth’s comment dates from August, and Peacock has since had a very good horror October. Crystal Lake , the A24-produced Friday the 13th prequel with Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees, premiered October 15 and did exactly what a slasher brand is supposed to do on streaming. It also arrived after two horror misses for the service: Hysteria! and Teacup each ended after one season. Our read: Peacock didn’t need a second hard-edged legacy property competing for the same audience, least of all one whose whole identity is being hard to watch. That part is our inference, since nobody at Peacock has explained the decision publicly.

There is a content question too. A slasher prequel gives a streamer a mystery, a mother with a grudge and a body count that can run eight episodes. Hostel is built on the slow, specific dread of captivity, and stretching that across a season is a much harder sell, for viewers and for advertisers. The reinvention pitch was presumably the answer to that problem, and we’ll likely never see whether it worked.

Here’s the optimistic case for Roth: theaters may be the better home anyway. At the top end, big-screen horror has had a monster year. iHorror counts three horror films past $400 million worldwide in 2026, Fangoria has Obsession above $500 million, and Collider reports Other Mommy reaching $100 million. Hostel was always a business built on tiny budgets and big returns, and a lean R-rated feature fits that model far better than an expensive prestige season.

Here’s the harder case. Roth’s own recent numbers are mixed, and Ice Cream Man shows that his self-distribution route, however admirable, hasn’t yet produced a hit. Meanwhile Thanksgiving 2 was postponed in January over its stars’ schedules, and it is the safer sequel on his slate. A Hostel feature probably needs a real studio partner, and a franchise whose first two films drew C-range CinemaScores doesn’t make that pitch automatic. It also needs a reason to exist beyond the name. The franchise’s best argument was always the shock of it, and shock doesn’t age well.

What would make it worthwhile is what made the original matter. Under the gore, the 2005 film was about Americans abroad who assume the world exists for their enjoyment, which is why it angered Slovak politicians and impressed a Le Monde critic who named it the best American film of 2006. That idea feels no less relevant now. Do it again with Giamatti as a guy who pays for the experience, and you’ve got something. That last bit is our fantasy casting, not a report.

What We Still Don’t Know

Whether Giamatti would stay attached to a feature, or whether Fifth Season is still involved.
Whether the scripts can be reworked into one film or two, and who would finance them.
Whether Peacock will comment at all, or why it passed.
Who controls the theatrical rights today. None of the reports address this.
Where Thanksgiving 2 lands, since it’s competing for Roth’s next directing slot.

The Bottom Line

A streamer passing on a development project is normally a footnote. This one matters because it was the rare legacy-horror revival with an actual idea attached, and because it leaves one of the defining horror brands of the 2000s without a home again. Roth clearly isn’t letting it go. The question is whether anyone with a checkbook wants to go back to that factory with him.

So tell us: do you want a new Hostel in theaters, or should this franchise stay checked out?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Eli Roth via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Bloody Disgusting , Dread Central , JoBlo , Edward Douglas (interview write-up), Douglas interview video , TheWrap (July 2025), TVLine , NBCUniversal , TheWrap (October 2026), The Numbers , CarterMatt , TheWrap on Ice Cream Man , iHorror , Fangoria , Collider , Wikipedia: Hostel: Part III , Wikipedia: Ice Cream Man , Wikipedia: Thanksgiving .

Neve Campbell Confirms She’s Back for ‘Scream 8’: What’s Known, Who Might Direct and Why Sidney Is Still a Risk

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 23:52:17 GMT

Sidney Prescott has outlived more Ghostfaces than most fans can name from memory, plus one very public pay fight. Now she is going to outlive the suspense about her next move. Neve Campbell told the Associated Press, in an interview that surfaced Monday, that she will be part of Scream 8 , and she did it in the most Campbell way possible: first insisting she can never talk about the movie, then giving away the only thing anyone wanted to know. " I'll be in it ," she said, laughing.

It is four words, not a press release, and nobody at Spyglass or Paramount has formally announced a thing. It still matters. Scream 7 became the highest-grossing film in the series with Campbell back in the lead, and it also landed some of the weakest reviews and audience scores the franchise has seen. So the next movie has a clear star and a much less clear plan. Here is everything confirmed, what is still missing, and why keeping Sidney is both the safest and the riskiest call this franchise could make.

Watch: Where Sidney Left Off

There is no Scream 8 footage, because there is no Scream 8 shoot yet. To catch up on the chapter that sets it up, here are the official trailers for Scream 7 .

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What She Said and What It Confirms

Campbell was speaking to the AP at the premiere of the second season of Netflix's spy thriller Black Doves , according to TheWrap ; Dread Central places the interview in London. Asked what she has coming up, she said she has two shows in development, one of them already sold, and that the next Scream is also in the pipeline . Then came the tease and the confirmation in the same breath.

Black Doves season 2, which adds Campbell to a cast led by Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw, reaches Netflix on Nov. 5 , so expect her to be asked about Woodsboro a few more times this week.

Here is where the project stands as of tonight:

Cast: Neve Campbell is the only name confirmed, and only by her own comment.
Writers: Poker Face showrunners Lilla and Nora Zuckerman, reported by Deadline on March 31, 2026 .
Director: nobody is attached .
Studios: Spyglass Media Group is developing it, and Paramount distributed the last film.
Release date: none announced, and no production start has been reported.

Who's Behind It

The Zuckerman sisters are the most interesting names attached. Beyond Rian Johnson's Poker Face , their résumé includes the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot that never made it to air, plus writing and producing work on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. , Fringe , Suits and Prodigal Son . A pair of writers who built a show around clever whodunit mechanics is a logical hire for a series that lives or dies on the reveal. One caution: Dread Central says any changes to that writing team remain unconfirmed, and tonight's news came with no update on the script.

The director's chair is wide open. Kevin Williamson, who wrote the 1996 original and directed Scream 7 , told Hello Sidney in March that he would probably step back next time and was curious what another storyteller would do with the world. That is softer than the headlines declaring him out, but it reads like a door closing.

Photo: Kevin Williamson via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

The most entertaining candidate has already volunteered. Courteney Cox, promoting Evil Genius at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, said she should get the job. " Nobody knows more about that movie than I do ," she told Deadline. As JoBlo pointed out at the time, there is no sign the job has actually been offered. It is still a hard argument to dismiss: Gale Weathers is the one character who has been in every single film.

Photo: Courteney Cox via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

The Backstory: How Sidney Left and Came Back

Campbell led the first five films, then walked away from Scream VI in a pay dispute with the producers . She said publicly at the time that the offer did not reflect what she had brought to the series. The movie opened without her in March 2023 and did just fine, which made her absence feel permanent.

Then Scream 7 fell apart in slow motion. Radio Silence's Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett left over a scheduling conflict, and Christopher Landon took over in August 2023. In November 2023 Spyglass dismissed Melissa Barrera over pro-Palestinian social media posts, which the company called antisemitic and she denied. Jenna Ortega's exit was reported a day later; Deadline cited her Wednesday schedule, while Ortega herself later pointed to the creative and casting upheaval. Landon's departure became public that December, with the director saying the film he signed on for no longer existed.

The rescue came in March 2024, when Williamson was hired to direct and Campbell's return was announced. Variety reported she was paid $7 million, against $2 million for Cox. Filming ran from January to March 2025 in Atlanta, with the plot pulling in Sidney's daughter Tatum, played by Isabel May, and the film opened on Feb. 27, 2026. By the end of March, the Zuckermans were on Scream 8 , which is about as fast as the industry moves when a movie wins.

By the Numbers

Worldwide totals for the series, via Dread Central :

Scream (1996): about $173 million
Scream 2 (1997): about $172 million
Scream 3 (2000): about $162 million
Scream 4 (2011): about $96 million
Scream (2022): about $139 million
Scream VI (2023): about $169 million, without Campbell
Scream 7 (2026): about $214 million, the franchise high

Outlets differ on that last figure; TheWrap used $208 million on Monday, and JoBlo said more than $213 million. Everyone agrees it crossed $200 million, a first for the series, and the budget was $45 million before marketing, split evenly between Spyglass and Paramount. Its $63.6 million domestic opening beat the $44.4 million record held by Scream VI , and the global opening hit $97 million .

The rest of the scorecard is less flattering. Scream 7 sits around 30% with Rotten Tomatoes critics, scored 35 on Metacritic and got a B- CinemaScore, tying Scream 4 for the series low. Its second weekend fell roughly 73 to 74%. Dread Central's own review knocked the film as too safe while singling out Campbell as its grounded center, which is a neat summary of the whole situation.

Analysis: What This Really Means

Sidney is a proven opening-weekend weapon, and the data backs that up. The same franchise opened about $19 million higher with her than without her. Yes, three years of ticket inflation and a different release window played a part, but that gap is why this announcement was inevitable from the moment the first weekend numbers came in. If you are Spyglass, you do not let the person on the poster of your biggest movie walk over a second negotiation.

The trap is what happens after the opening. Look at the closest comparison: Jamie Lee Curtis's return as Laurie Strode. Fangoria's tally has Halloween (2018) at $255 million worldwide, Halloween Kills at $130 million and Halloween Ends crossing $100 million. Pandemic-era day-and-date releases muddy that slide, but the pattern is familiar: the legacy star buys you the event, and if audiences leave lukewarm, the next one pays for it. A B- and a 70-plus percent second-weekend drop are the kind of warning signs that show up in the following movie's opening, not the current one's.

The bigger context makes this even more interesting. This is the year Curry Barker's Obsession reached $521 million with no legacy character at all, and Zach Cregger's Resident Evil hit $400 million while skipping the game heroes many fans demanded. Audiences in 2026 are showing up for a filmmaker with a point of view at least as readily as for a familiar face. Which is why the director hire is the real story now. Campbell's "I'll be in it" tells you who is on the poster. It tells you nothing about whether the movie has an idea.

There is also an unavoidable question about where this story goes. The 2022 reboot and Scream VI built a younger core that the fallout of 2023 largely dismantled, and Scream 7 tried to rebuild around Sidney's family instead. The series turns 30 this December, and a smart Scream 8 would use Campbell as a legacy anchor while giving the audience someone new to worry about. A movie that simply asks Sidney to survive again risks answering a question nobody has asked since 2011.

What We Still Don't Know

Who directs, and whether the studios take Cox's pitch seriously.
Whether Campbell is leading the film or appearing in a smaller role. "In it" could mean either, and she did not elaborate.
Which other cast members return, including Cox, David Arquette, Isabel May, Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown. None have been confirmed.
When it shoots and when it opens. No dates exist, so any release year you see right now is a guess.
Whether Spyglass or Paramount will follow Campbell's remark with a formal announcement.

Bottom Line

Neve Campbell coming back was close to a foregone conclusion once Scream 7 broke the franchise record, but hearing it from her, laughing, still lands. Now the franchise needs to spend that goodwill on a director who can give fans something fresher than a bigger opening weekend. So here is the real question: should Courteney Cox get the job, or does Scream 8 need an outside voice? And is it time for Sidney to finally pass the phone to someone else? Tell us where you land.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Neve Campbell via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: TheWrap , Dread Central , Dark Horizons , JoBlo (Campbell) , Fangoria (writers) , JoBlo (Cox) , JoBlo (Williamson) , SlashFilm , Wikipedia: Scream 7 , Fangoria (Halloween box office) , Heaven of Horror , iHorror . The AP's original interview video was not directly accessible; quotes are as reported by the outlets above.

Opinion: Fans Wanted Leon. Zach Cregger’s ‘Resident Evil’ Proves They Asked the Wrong Question

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:07:28 GMT

Zach Cregger made the best-reviewed video game movie on record, watched it close in on $400 million worldwide, and still spent part of a recent podcast appearance explaining why the whole experience wore him down. That sentence alone tells you something has gone sideways in how we talk about game adaptations.

Here's my take, and I'll defend it with numbers: the fans who spent six months furious that Resident Evil didn't star Leon Kennedy were asking the wrong question. Fidelity to a game's cast and plot has never predicted whether one of these movies is any good, and in this franchise it hasn't even predicted whether one makes money. Hollywood has a lot more of these coming. Fans should want a better test before the next one arrives.

The Trailer That Started the Argument

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Can't see the video? Watch the teaser on YouTube.

What Cregger Actually Said

The latest round started with Cregger's stop on The Town , Matthew Belloni's podcast, where he said he got frustrated because so little of the discussion concerned the film he had actually made. "All the conversation just felt like it was about not the movie," he said, according to IGN's write-up . He also conceded he should have seen it coming, and that he still loves the film. Dread Central reports he didn't rule out ever touching another adaptation, which, given the last two years of his life, shows real stamina.

That isn't a director whining from a pile of money. His sharpest line came earlier, in a BBC interview quoted by TheGamer on opening day. Talking about the crowd demanding a straight adaptation, he figured they'd have been angry at that version too: "Because I would have messed it up somehow, inevitably." I've read that line five times, and I can't find the part where he's wrong.

What the Movie Kept, and What It Threw Out

A lot of the anger treats this film as though it wandered in from another universe. Look at the cast list. Austin Abrams plays Bryan Hodukavich, a medical courier having the worst shift in human history. Around him are Umbrella scientists played by Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser, an Umbrella enforcer played by Kali Reis, and an Arklay County sheriff. The corporate villain and the geography are all right there. Back in the spring, JoBlo noted that Cregger was describing the movie as obedient to the lore while openly worrying about how fans would take it.

What he dropped was the roster. And here's the thing about the roster: its stories are already told. Leon, Claire, Jill and Chris have decades of games, remakes and animated spin-offs behind them, and the series is still going strong; Resident Evil Requiem is up for Horror Game of the Year right now. A movie-length replay of a plot you've already controlled with your own hands asks a lot of a medium that takes away the controller.

What a movie can adapt is the feeling. Resident Evil at its best is a nobody with too little ammo and a building full of bad news, and a courier with no combat training gets you closer to that dread than a highly trained super-cop ever will. Dread Central's own review argued the film nails the survival horror experience better than anything before it. That's the correct kind of faithful, and it's a lot harder to pull off than casting someone with the right haircut.

Photo: Austin Abrams via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Scoreboard Is Not Close

If fidelity were the magic ingredient, the most faithful movies would be winning. Here's how the fidelity argument looks against the record. Box office for the new film comes from The Numbers through Nov. 1; the rest comes from the series records .

Resident Evil (2026), no game heroes: $75 million budget, about $400 million worldwide ($157.4 million domestic, $242.6 million international), 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, B+ CinemaScore.
Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), the game heroes: $25 million budget, $41.9 million worldwide , a $5.3 million opening, 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, C+ CinemaScore.
Return to Silent Hill (2026), aimed squarely at being faithful to Silent Hill 2: $23 million budget, $47.5 million worldwide , 18% on Rotten Tomatoes.

That Raccoon City comparison is the one that should end the debate. Johannes Roberts gave fans Chris, Claire, Jill, Leon and Wesker, the mansion and the police station, and audiences mostly stayed home while critics shrugged. Five years later, the movie without any of them outgrossed it nearly tenfold on three times the budget. It also became the highest-grossing film in the franchise, passing The Final Chapter 's $314.1 million, and earned the franchise's best CinemaScore. No earlier entry in the series climbed past 38% with critics, a run of reviews Gulf News neatly traced from the cellar to 96%.

The history is funnier than that, too. Six movies from the Paul W.S. Anderson era pulled in more than $1.2 billion on the back of Alice, a heroine invented for the screen, with game characters orbiting her as guest stars. So this franchise's biggest stretch on film has always been the unfaithful one. The audience has been voting on this question since 2002.

Filmmaker First, Brand Second

The bigger lesson is about who gets hired, and why. Constantin started planning this reboot in early 2022, and it got a whole lot more interesting when Cregger signed on in January 2025 and Sony won the bidding that March. He came in with Barbarian , a $4.5 million movie that made $46.2 million, and Weapons , a $38 million movie that made $270 million and won Amy Madigan an Oscar. A sketch comedian from The Whitest Kids U' Know became one of the most bankable names in horror by having ideas nobody else had. Then the studio paid for those ideas, and a loud slice of the fandom got mad that they were present.

You can't hire a distinctive filmmaker to color inside someone else's lines and expect the distinctiveness to survive. Pick one. If you want a visual checklist, there are competent directors who'll give you one, and we've seen how that goes.

This matters right now because the pipeline is filling up fast. Karyn Kusama is directing a Mouthwashing film for Sony , and Bloodborne has a writer and director lined up . Both games are beloved, and both are full of images that fans will measure frame by frame. I'd rather see those films attempt something strange than earn a passing grade on a lore quiz.

The Other Side, Fairly

The fans aren't crazy, and I don't want to pretend they are. First, there's a real grievance here: they've waited more than 20 years for a great movie about the characters they love, and the one serious attempt fumbled it. A studio that buys a famous name is trading on that affection whether it delivers the goods or not. Asking "why call it Resident Evil ?" is a fair question when the name is doing marketing work the movie doesn't have to earn.

Second, fan service can pay very well. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 , written by game creator Scott Cawthon, sat at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes and still made $239.6 million on a budget reported at $36 million to $51 million. That's a return in the same neighborhood as Cregger's movie, before marketing. And Iron Lung , Mark Fischbach's self-released labor of love based on David Szymanski's game, turned a budget of $5 million at the most into $51.2 million on sheer devotion from people who adore the source.

Photo: Mark Fischbach via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Third, Cregger's movie isn't a universal crowd-pleaser. That B+ CinemaScore sits below the A- for Weapons , and the second weekend fell 61% from a $60 million domestic debut. Some of that is standard horror gravity, but it's reasonable to suspect some of the people who showed up for a brand name left wanting what the name had promised.

I grant all of it. But notice what those examples prove. Five Nights and Iron Lung work because their creators love the material and audiences love them, not because they pass an accuracy test. Devotion can sell tickets. It just doesn't guarantee a good movie, and if you want the good movie as well, you have to let someone change things.

A Better Test

So here's what I'd ask fans to judge next time, and it's only three questions. Does the movie feel like the game feels? Does it know what makes this world scary? And is it good when you've never held the controller? Resident Evil can be argued on any of those. There's plenty of room to dislike it, and you can start with the reviews if you want to pick a fight about its tone. That's the conversation Cregger says he wanted, and it's the one a 96% movie deserves.

The Numbers lists the film's home video release for Nov. 3, which means plenty of people who skipped it on principle are about to have an easy way in. Give it the 94 minutes. If you still hate it, at least you'll hate the movie, not the casting announcement.

Bottom Line

Faithful isn't the same thing as good, and in this franchise the record says it hasn't even been the same thing as popular. The games aren't going anywhere, and Leon will be fine. A horror movie that took a risk with a beloved name and got rewarded for it is the best thing that could have happened to the next wave of adaptations, and I hope the studios learn the right lesson before the outrage teaches them the wrong one.

So tell me I'm wrong: if a movie carries the name of a game you love, does it owe you the characters? Or does it just owe you the fear?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Zach Cregger via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central , IGN via Yahoo , TheGamer , JoBlo , The Numbers (Resident Evil) , The Numbers (Welcome to Raccoon City) , Gulf News , Wikipedia (2026 film) , Wikipedia (film series) , Wikipedia (Return to Silent Hill) , Wikipedia (Iron Lung) , Wikipedia (Five Nights at Freddy's 2) , Wikipedia (Weapons) , Wikipedia (Barbarian) .

Sam Is Back: Michael Dougherty’s ‘Season’s Greetings 2’ Trailer, and What It Really Means for ‘Trick ’r Treat 2’

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 13:00:55 GMT

Of all the nights on the calendar, Michael Dougherty picked Oct. 30 to do this. The night before Halloween, known in parts of the country as Mischief Night, is when a scuzzy, scratched-up trailer for something called Season’s Greetings 2: Mischief Night landed on YouTube, starring the burlap-headed little rule enforcer that horror fans have been begging to see again for the better part of two decades. Its description offers exactly one piece of release information: “COMING SOON... ?” The question mark is doing a lot of work.

So is this the long-promised return of Sam, a loving fake-out, or something in between? Nobody outside Dougherty’s circle can say for sure, and no outlet we read could confirm a real feature behind it. But the credits, the copyright line and the 17-year saga of Trick ’r Treat 2 tell a more interesting story than the usual “sequel maybe happening” chatter. Here is the trailer, everything that’s actually confirmed, the full history, and why we think the most important words in this release are in the fine print.

Watch the Trailer

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What’s Actually Confirmed

The clip runs a little over two minutes and went up on Oct. 30. It is an animated piece dressed as a 1970s exploitation preview: a town full of jack-o’-lanterns, missing-child posters for a young boy, then the title card, with a carnival-barker narrator bragging that the picture got banned in a couple of counties. Dread Central reports the pitch centers on a single trick-or-treater whose love of the holiday proved fatal.

Here is everything in the official credits, from the video’s own description :

Director: Michael Dougherty
Animation: Cyrus T. Hayley of Dragline Pictures
Executive producers: Dougherty, Evan Gorski, Hayley and Curtis Waugh
Music: Alexander Taylor
Masks: the Halloween Trio, courtesy of Trick or Treat Studios
Copyright: Minor Demons Inc., with the project billed as based on the film Season’s Greetings

What isn’t confirmed: a cast, a shooting schedule, a distributor or a date. Au Coeur de l’Horreur notes there’s no announced production behind it, FilmoFilia stresses that the only confirmed release is the trailer itself, and both Horror Fuel and ComingSoon flag that fans are split on whether they’re looking at a preview or a gag. Treat any headline calling this “the sequel” with suspicion.

The trailer also wasn’t a one-off. It’s the climax of a month-long campaign from Sam: The Soul of Halloween , a new hub with a shop and its own YouTube channel. The Horrors of Halloween logged about 20 uploads between Sept. 30 and Nov. 1, including Trent Shy’s handmade Pumpkin Girl and Sam’s Harvest , a three-part safety series co-starring a talking pumpkin named Pumpums, more than three hours of graveyard ambience, and Michael Ballif’s He Is Risen . Regal’s Halloween screenings of Trick ’r Treat added a new 4K restoration of the 1996 short, per Dread Central. Dougherty’s channel closed the run with this Nov. 1 video:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Who’s Behind It

Dougherty came up as an animator, working for MTV and Nickelodeon according to his site bio , before a screenwriting run on X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006). His directing résumé is short and very much in our lane. Krampus (2015) took a $15 million budget to $61.5 million worldwide, opening to $16.3 million and landing 66% on Rotten Tomatoes. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) went the other way, grossing $387.3 million against a $170-200 million production budget and finishing as the lowest earner in the MonsterVerse. He also co-wrote the story for Godzilla vs. Kong , and his bio now lists him as an executive at Colossal Biosciences.

The team around Sam has stayed remarkably stable. Curtis Waugh, an executive producer here, also co-wrote on the new Witching Hours graphic novel, and Dougherty’s longtime collaborators Todd Casey and Zach Shields have been writing the Trick ’r Treat 2 script with him, with Simeon Wilkins on storyboards and Breehn Burns on concept art, CinemaBlend reported.

Anna Paquin led the Halloween-night ensemble of Trick ’r Treat . Photo: Anna Paquin via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: 30 Years of Sam, 17 Years of Waiting

Sam first showed up in Season’s Greetings , the hand-drawn 1996 short Dougherty made while studying animation at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, which makes this trailer a 30th-anniversary gesture as well. The short grew into Trick ’r Treat , a $12 million anthology from Legendary and Warner Bros. with Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, Leslie Bibb and Rochelle Aytes, and Quinn Lord under the sack. It premiered at Butt-Numb-A-Thon in Austin on Dec. 9, 2007, then sat around for nearly two years before going to U.S. home video on Oct. 6, 2009. Its recorded theatrical gross is a comic $27,909, all from the U.K.

Then the cult did what cults do. The film holds 86% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes , got a Shout! Factory collector’s edition in 2018 and an Arrow 4K in October 2024, returned to theaters through Fathom in October 2025 and now plays Regal at Halloween. Few movies have done more with less.

The sequel timeline, meanwhile, reads like a stress test for fans:

2009: Dougherty says he has ideas for a follow-up.
2013: At Beyond Fest, he says Legendary has greenlit it.
2019: He says a leadership change at Legendary stalled things.
2022: “Active development,” but not officially greenlit.
October 2023: Several script drafts exist, and Sam will face a real nemesis, he tells a Los Angeles crowd.
October 2024: On Arrow’s 4K commentary, he says the script is done and storyboarded but the studio side is complicated, telling Dead Meat’s hosts , “It’s not dead by any stretch.”
October 2026: Trick ’r Treat: Witching Hours , the Legendary Comics anthology that began on Kickstarter in 2024 , reaches retail with four new stories, one of which sends Sam to space, per Dread Central .

Brian Cox played Mr. Kreeg, Sam’s most memorable victim. Photo: Brian Cox via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

What This Really Means: Read the Fine Print

Here’s our read, and it is our read rather than anything Dougherty has said. Look at what this trailer is not called. It isn’t Trick ’r Treat 2 . It’s a sequel to the 1996 short, it credits a company called Minor Demons Inc., and no Legendary or Warner Bros. logo appears in the credits listed in its description. FilmoFilia reports that Dougherty held on to the rights to Season’s Greetings , and describes his Sam shorts as independent, artist-driven work. If that’s accurate, it’s a big deal. It would mean there’s a version of Sam that doesn’t need a studio’s signature to exist.

That recasts the whole October campaign. For 13 years the sequel has been stuck between a “yes” and a green light, with a finished script waiting on a studio. A direct-to-fan YouTube channel, a storefront and a month of handmade shorts build something a studio can’t easily take away: an audience relationship that belongs to the creator. Whether it’s a route around Legendary or a very public nudge to them, it’s the smartest thing that has happened to this character in years.

History says fake trailers shouldn’t be dismissed, either. Three comparisons are worth keeping in mind:

Thanksgiving : Eli Roth’s holiday slasher began as a fake trailer in Grindhouse in 2007 and became a real movie 16 years later, making $46.6 million on $15 million. A grindhouse gag can absolutely turn into a holiday horror franchise, though Roth said in January that its sequel has been postponed, so even hits hit walls.
Terrifier : Art the Clown came from short films starting in 2008 , and Terrifier 3 turned $2 million into $90.3 million in 2024. That’s the dream model for an independently owned Halloween icon, and it’s the number any producer hearing “Sam” should be thinking about.
Krampus : Dougherty’s own proof of concept. A $15 million holiday horror film with a seasonal hook quadrupled its budget, with a B- CinemaScore, and that was without Sam’s decades of built-in love.

The stakes are also bigger than one mascot. We’ve argued recently that the genre’s real talent pipeline runs through YouTube . Dougherty is coming at that from the other direction: a filmmaker who has run a $170 million-plus Godzilla movie now going back to the platform and making something small on purpose. If a veteran can use it to keep a stalled property alive, plenty of other studio-trapped horror projects will have a template.

The honest counterargument: this could simply be great merchandising. There’s a shop on the site, and “COMING SOON... ?” costs nothing to type. A two-minute animated trailer is no evidence of a funded film. Fans have been promised Sam since the Obama administration, and they’re entitled to a little skepticism.

What We Still Don’t Know

Is Mischief Night an actual project, and if so, is it animated like the 1996 original or live-action?
Does Legendary still hold the keys to Trick ’r Treat 2 , and has anything changed since the 2024 commentary?
Will the “proper nemesis” from the sequel script turn up in any of this?
What happens to the Sam channel after Halloween? Its first post-holiday uploads will say a lot about whether this is a one-month stunt or a standing operation.

Bottom Line

Don’t mark your calendar, but do pay attention. The only thing officially coming is a question mark, and yet Dougherty has spent October showing that Sam can thrive without waiting on anyone’s permission. Whether Mischief Night becomes a movie or stays a beautiful prank, it’s the most alive this character has felt since 2009. So tell us: would you rather see Sam return in a scrappy, handmade indie, or keep waiting for the full-budget Trick ’r Treat 2 ?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Michael Dougherty via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: official trailer and credits (YouTube) , Sam: The Soul of Halloween , Dread Central (trailer) , Dread Central (Witching Hours) , ComingSoon via Yahoo , Horror Fuel , FilmoFilia , Au Coeur de l’Horreur , The Horrors of Halloween , Bloody Disgusting , CinemaBlend , Fangoria , Rotten Tomatoes , Wikipedia ( Trick ’r Treat , Krampus , Terrifier 3 , Thanksgiving ).

‘Haunted Hotel’ Renewed for Season 3 at Netflix: The 2027 Plan, the Numbers and Why the Undervale Survived

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 23:51:00 GMT

The Undervale is keeping its lights on, and its candles lit. Netflix has renewed Haunted Hotel , the adult animated horror-comedy from former Rick and Morty writer Matt Roller, for a third season set to arrive in 2027. The news landed on Friday, October 30, right on top of Halloween weekend, and three weeks after Season 2 checked in on October 9 with eight new episodes.

On paper this is a small story: a cartoon about a family-run hotel full of ghosts gets another season. In practice it says a lot about where Netflix is putting its animation money, how the streamer is treating October as a programming tentpole, and whether a horror-comedy can build a cult audience in a year when the platform has been quick to cancel. Below: the trailer, everything that's confirmed, the team behind it, the numbers, and what Season 3 needs to pull off.

Watch the Season 2 Trailer

If you haven't caught up yet, this is Netflix's official Season 2 trailer, which dropped on September 16 alongside new key art and first-look images. Expect a puzzle box, a giant shark, witches and a very needy demon.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed for Season 3

Here is what Netflix and the show's creator have actually put on the record so far:

Renewal: Season 3 is officially ordered and slated for 2027, according to What's on Netflix , which reported the pickup on October 30.
Timing: No date yet. Roller has said publicly that a third season would land before Halloween 2027, telling an interviewer that hitting "that spooky season cycle" matters to him, as Just Jared reported.
Episodes: Roller has said the plan is 10 episodes, back up from Season 2's eight. Netflix has not confirmed that number.
Scripts: On Sonny Bunch's Bulwark Goes to Hollywood podcast in mid-October, Roller said the Season 3 scripts were already written, per What's on Netflix.
Voice cast: The core five are expected back: Eliza Coupe as Katherine Freeling, the single mom running the place; Will Forte as Nathan, her late brother and the hotel's ghostly former owner; Skyler Gisondo as her son Ben; Natalie Palamides as her daughter Esther; and Jimmi Simpson as Abaddon, an ancient demon stuck in a little boy's body.
Not confirmed: Fan favorites like Duncan Trussell's Stabby Paul and Drew Tarver's Lonny are widely expected to return, but Netflix hasn't said so.

Roller's own statement on the renewal was pure Haunted Hotel : he said he was excited to "invite viewers back to the Undervale," promised the most Abaddon-heavy stories the show has done, and signed off with a one-word shout of "Candles!" If you've watched the show, you know. If you haven't, that's your homework.

Who's Behind It

Matt Roller created the series and runs it. According to Netflix's Tudum , he sold the show in a competitive auction and got a straight-to-series order, which is rare for an original animated comedy. His résumé runs through some of the sharpest comedy rooms of the last 15 years: he wrote for Community , Rick and Morty , Archer , Speechless and Son of Zorn , and co-executive produced Krapopolis , Mr. Mayor and two seasons of The Goldbergs . He also voices a recurring character, Candle Head.

The producing bench is stacked with Community alumni. Dan Harmon , who created Community and co-created Rick and Morty , is an executive producer, along with Harmon's longtime producing partner Steve Levy and Chris McKenna , the Community writer who went on to co-write the MCU's Spider-Man trilogy, including No Way Home . Erica Hayes , another Rick and Morty veteran, is supervising director.

Photo: Dan Harmon via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The animation comes from Titmouse , the Los Angeles studio founded by Chris Prynoski in 2000, whose catalog includes Big Mouth , The Legend of Vox Machina , Star Trek: Lower Decks , The Midnight Gospel and the eerie, much-loved Scavengers Reign . Chris and Shannon Prynoski, Antonio Canobbio and Ben Kalina are executive producers for the studio.

The voice cast is where the show gets its genre credibility. Jimmi Simpson is a horror and sci-fi fixture: he played William in HBO's Westworld , which earned him an Emmy nomination, and the lead in Black Mirror 's "USS Callister," which earned a BAFTA nod. He's also a main cast member on The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3. Skyler Gisondo already did suburban horror-comedy as Eric on Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet , and more recently played Jimmy Olsen in James Gunn's Superman . Eliza Coupe ( Happy Endings , Scrubs , Hulu's Future Man ) has Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites voice work behind her, and Will Forte brings the SNL and Last Man on Earth energy that makes a dead man feel very alive. Natalie Palamides , Buttercup on the 2016 Powerpuff Girls reboot, rounds out the family.

Photo: Eliza Coupe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: From Auction to Season 3

The show's timeline moves fast, which is unusual for animation:

June 2025: Netflix unveils the cast and premiere date, as Wikipedia's production history notes, citing Animation Magazine.
August 2025: The first trailer arrives.
September 19, 2025: All 10 Season 1 episodes drop at once, starting with "Welcome to the Undervale" and building to "The Acolytes of Abaddon."
September 26, 2025: Netflix renews the show for Season 2 just one week after launch, per Fangoria .
September 16, 2026: The Season 2 trailer, key art and first-look images arrive, as Dread Central reported.
October 9, 2026: Season 2's eight episodes premiere.
October 30, 2026: Season 3 is ordered for 2027.

That's a new season every 12 to 13 months, a pace Roller has talked about as a deliberate goal. Most adult animated shows take 18 months to two years between seasons. Turning around Season 2 in about a year meant a shorter order, eight episodes instead of 10, but it kept the show locked to the Halloween window.

Season 2 also leaned harder into horror homage. It opens with Esther solving a puzzle box to send a nail-headed demon back to Hell while Abaddon tries desperately to befriend the thing, a gag Dread Central called a hilarious nod to Hellraiser . The trailer also teased winks at Ghostbusters and The Ring , plus a new living employee and Katherine's push to turn the Undervale into a real business, according to What's on Netflix .

By the Numbers

Netflix's public Top 10 data tells a clear but not flashy story:

Season 1 launch: 1.8 million views in its first three days, landing in the global English TV Top 10.
Season 1 peak: 2.8 million views in its second week (Sept. 22-28, 2025), with daily Top 10 placements in more than 50 countries. It logged 4.6 million views across its first two weeks on the chart.
Lifetime: Netflix says the show has passed 15 million views.
Season 2: Missed the weekly chart in its first week, then entered the English TV list at No. 9 in week two (Oct. 12-18) with 2.7 million views and 9.1 million hours.
Critics: On Rotten Tomatoes , Season 1 sits at 79% and Season 2 at 100% (on a small pool of reviews), with a 95% audience score across 250+ ratings. Metacritic had Season 1 at a mixed 58.

Read those together and you get the picture: a slow-ish start for Season 2, then word of mouth and Halloween did their job. ComicBook.com noted that Season 2 had been tracking more slowly than Season 1, which is likely why the renewal took three weeks instead of one. The critics, meanwhile, liked the second season a lot more than the first, which is the opposite of how most sophomore seasons go.

Analysis: Why Netflix Kept the Lights On

Netflix's adult animation slate is a graveyard. Inside Job got a Season 2 order and was then cancelled. Q-Force , Farzar and Agent Elvis were all one-and-done. Against that backdrop, a third season for an original animated comedy is a genuine vote of confidence, and three things stand out.

One: it's built for rewatching in October. Netflix has spent years trying to own Halloween with titles like Wednesday , the Mike Flanagan shows and Fear Street . Haunted Hotel is the rare horror title that works as background comfort viewing, the way The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" episodes do. A show that people throw on every fall is worth more to a streamer than its week-one numbers suggest, because those 15 million views keep growing every year the catalog sits there.

Two: it fills a gap that live-action horror-comedy left open. Santa Clarita Diet was cancelled after three seasons in 2019, and Netflix hasn't really had a family-dysfunction horror-comedy since. CBS's Ghosts and FX's What We Do in the Shadows proved there's a big appetite for haunted-house sitcoms; Haunted Hotel is Netflix's version, with animation letting it get far gorier and stranger than a network sitcom could. It's telling that Gisondo is in both.

Three: the yearly schedule is the strategy. Roller's insistence on hitting every October is smart. Gaps kill animated comedies; audiences forget, and algorithms stop recommending. By committing to a fall release every year, the show becomes a seasonal event rather than a title you have to rediscover. If Season 3 lands with 10 episodes before Halloween 2027, it will have delivered 28 episodes in about two years, a remarkable pace for a show with this level of visual detail.

The risk is obvious, too. Season 2's slower start is a warning light. Netflix renewals for animation increasingly hinge on completion rates and how fast people finish a season, not just total views. Season 3 will need to grow the audience, not just hold it, if the Undervale wants a fourth booking.

What We Still Don't Know

The exact 2027 premiere date (Roller's target is before Halloween).
Whether Netflix approves the 10 episodes Roller wants.
Which recurring ghosts and guest voices return. Season 1's guest list included Keith David, Jenifer Lewis, Kumail Nanjiani, Gaten Matarazzo and Randall Park, so expect big names.
Story direction. Roller has teased the most Abaddon-centric season yet, which, given Simpson's unhinged performance, sounds like the right call.

Bottom Line

In a year when Netflix keeps cutting animated shows, Haunted Hotel earned its third season the hard way: a slower Season 2 launch, a strong Halloween run, the best reviews of its life and a creator who has already written the next batch. It's not the biggest horror show on Netflix, but it may be one of the most reliable, and a horror-comedy that shows up every October like clockwork is exactly what the genre's streaming calendar needs.

So, are you checking back in? Who's the real star of the Undervale: Abaddon, Nathan, or Katherine holding the whole haunted mess together?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Jimmi Simpson (the voice of Abaddon) by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: What's on Netflix (Season 3 renewal) , What's on Netflix (Season 2 first look) , Netflix Tudum , ComicBook.com , Just Jared , Dread Central (trailer) , Dread Central (Season 2 premiere) , Fangoria , The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood , Rotten Tomatoes , Wikipedia .

‘Clayface’ Drops 57% and Loses No. 1 to an Elizabeth Holmes Doc: What Its Halloween Weekend Really Means

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 17:57:02 GMT

One weekend after Clayface opened at No. 1 with a rare A- CinemaScore, DC's first true horror movie got knocked off the top of the box office on Halloween weekend, and not by a slasher, a sequel or a ghost story. It lost by about $200,000 to You Can See Everything , A24's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Early estimates have James Watkins' body-horror origin story taking in $10.4 million in its second frame, down 57%, for a domestic total of $44.1 million, according to the Associated Press. TheWrap puts the worldwide total at $83 million after ten days.

On paper that sounds like a stumble. In context, it's more interesting than that. A 57% second-weekend drop is in line with how most front-loaded horror plays, Halloween landing on a Saturday hammered the whole marketplace, and Clayface was made for a fraction of what a superhero movie usually costs. Below we break down the numbers, compare them to recent horror and comic-book films, look at who made the movie and what they've said about it, and get into what this run really means for horror inside the DC Universe.

Watch the 'Clayface' Trailers

If you haven't seen the movie yet, here's the official teaser from DC, followed by the official trailer from Warner Bros. Pictures International.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Halloween Weekend Numbers

Here's where things stand, based on Sunday estimates (final figures arrive Monday):

Second weekend: about $10.4 million, No. 2 nationally, down 57% from opening (AP).
Margin of defeat: roughly $200,684 behind You Can See Everything 's $10.6 million (AP).
Domestic total: $44.1 million after ten days (AP).
Worldwide total: about $83 million (TheWrap), which implies roughly $39 million from overseas by our math.
Friday, Oct. 30: $3.25 million from 3,478 theaters, down 69% from opening Friday (The Numbers).
Opening weekend (Oct. 23-25): $24.0 million from 3,458 theaters, plus about $19 million internationally (The Numbers, AP).
Reported budget: $40 million per TheWrap and The Numbers; AP reports $44 million.

The whole market was soft. AP expects the weekend's total to land under $63 million, which would make it the third-lowest-grossing weekend of 2026. With Halloween falling on a Saturday, the biggest moviegoing day of most weekends turned into a night of parties, trick-or-treating and costume runs. That hurts a horror movie more than anything, because the people most likely to buy a ticket for an R-rated body-horror film are the same people dressed up as one.

The rest of the horror on the chart tells a similar story. Universal's Other Mommy , the Rob Savage-directed Jessica Chastain chiller, took in about $2.5 million at No. 7 in its fourth weekend; The Numbers had it at $53.9 million domestic and $100.6 million worldwide through Friday on a reported budget of around $19 million. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil also made about $2.5 million at No. 6 and has passed $155 million domestic and $385 million worldwide since its franchise-best $60.2 million opening in September. The only new horror wide release, Briarcliff's R-rated holiday horror-comedy Christmas at the Kringles , managed just $370,000 on Friday from 1,825 theaters.

The Movie It Lost To

Losing No. 1 to a documentary is unusual, but You Can See Everything isn't a normal documentary. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim and released by A24, the Holmes film reportedly cost just $7 million and has already grossed $63.9 million domestically, which TheWrap says makes it the sixth-highest-grossing documentary ever in the U.S. and Canada. It was No. 2 behind Clayface last weekend and fell only 43% this time. It's a word-of-mouth phenomenon, and it was always going to hold better than a genre movie whose fans show up opening night.

So the headline "Clayface loses to a doc" is technically true and a little misleading. The two films essentially tied, and Clayface is still well ahead of where the doc stood after its own second weekend.

Who Made 'Clayface'

James Watkins directed. Horror fans know him from the 2008 survival nightmare Eden Lake , the 2012 Hammer ghost story The Woman in Black starring Daniel Radcliffe, and the 2024 Speak No Evil remake with James McAvoy. He's a filmmaker who builds dread out of ordinary people behaving badly, which makes him a smart fit for a villain origin story. In an AFP interview, he argued that body horror might be "one of the most relatable scares," and he told CinemaBlend he deliberately pulled back on one of the film's bloodiest scenes because he didn't want audiences walking out.

Mike Flanagan wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Hossein Amini . Flanagan is the creator behind The Haunting of Hill House , Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher , and his Prime Video Carrie series was just renewed for a second season. Amini's credits include Drive and the Watkins-directed BBC crime drama McMafia , which means the director and co-writer have worked together before.

Photo: Mike Flanagan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

In front of the camera, Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a rising movie star who undergoes experimental facial surgery after a mob boss disfigures him. Naomi Ackie plays Dr. Caitlin Corr, and Max Minghella , best known for The Handmaid's Tale , plays John Borelli. David Dencik, Eddie Marsan and Rob Brydon round out the cast, and Aaron Paul turns up in a cameo as Jimmy Hagen. Harries told AFP that Clayface is a character uniquely suited to body horror, and joked that some costume store probably has clumps of his prosthetic face stuffed in its pockets.

Photo: Max Minghella via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The producers are Matt Reeves, Lynn Harris, James Gunn and Peter Safran. The film is rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, language, some nudity and brief drug use, and runs 108 minutes.

How We Got Here

Clayface is the third film in Gunn and Safran's rebooted DC Universe, after Superman and Supergirl , and the first to go all-in on horror. Warner Bros. originally dated it for Sept. 11, 2026, then moved it to Oct. 23, right into the heart of spooky season. That move made sense on paper, but it also put the film's crucial second weekend directly on top of Halloween night.

Critically, it landed in decent shape. Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at 77% from 206 reviews, with a 94% audience score, and the site's consensus calls it a slow starter that turns into a gross, satisfying revenge thriller. Metacritic had it at 59 during release week. For reference, Slashfilm noted that Superman sits at 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and Supergirl at 52%. Audiences liked it more than critics did, and the A- CinemaScore is excellent for horror, a genre where a B is normal and a C is common.

Gunn has been clear about how he wants people to see it. In Threads posts reported by Variety, he described the film as "a great, fun horror movie unto itself," and stressed that audiences don't need DC homework to enjoy it.

By the Numbers: How a 57% Drop Stacks Up

Horror is the most front-loaded genre in Hollywood. Fans show up on night one, and the second weekend almost always falls hard. Here's how Clayface 's drop compares to recent horror and comic-book films (opening / second weekend / drop / domestic total, per The Numbers unless noted):

Smile 2 (2024): $23.0M / $9.5M / -59% / $69.0M. Same pre-Halloween slot, nearly the same opening.
Black Phone 2 (2025): $27.3M / $12.9M / -53% / $77.4M.
Venom (2018): $80.3M / $35.0M / -56% / $213.5M.
The New Mutants (2020): $7.0M / $3.0M / -57% / $23.9M.
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025): $51.6M / $19.4M / -63% / $138.3M.
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025): $64.0M / $19.4M / -70%.
Morbius (2022): $39.1M / $10.2M / -74%, which JoBlo reported as the biggest second-weekend drop ever for a comic-book movie.
Weapons (2025): $43.5M / $24.5M / -44% / $151.6M.
Sinners (2025): $48.0M / $45.7M / -5% / $280.0M, the freak exception.

Put simply, Clayface held the way a normal, well-liked horror movie holds. It did a little better than Smile 2 , matched Venom almost exactly, and was nowhere near the collapse of Morbius . It just didn't do what Weapons and Sinners did, where word of mouth turned a movie into an event.

What This Really Means

It's on track to make money. The usual industry rule of thumb is that a film needs to gross roughly two and a half times its production budget worldwide to break even once marketing and the theaters' cut are factored in. With a reported $40 million to $44 million budget, that puts the line somewhere around $100 million to $110 million worldwide. At $83 million after ten days, Clayface should get there. Our own rough estimate, using the multipliers of Smile 2 and Black Phone 2 as a guide, puts its final domestic total somewhere in the high $50 millions to low $60 millions. Marketing costs haven't been reported, so treat that as a ballpark, not a verdict.

It proves the mid-budget DC model can work. This is the real story. For years, comic-book movies were all-or-nothing bets costing $200 million or more. Clayface is a genre film priced like a genre film, closer to Smile 2 than to The Flash . A $24 million opening would be a disaster for a $250 million superhero movie. For a $40 million R-rated horror film, it's a solid start, and the A- CinemaScore says the people who went were happy. That's exactly the outcome Gunn and Safran would want if they plan to make more smaller, scarier DC films.

The calendar did it no favors. Moving from September into late October looked like a gift. In practice, Clayface opened opposite a breakout doc, spent its second weekend competing with actual Halloween, and arrived after Other Mommy and Resident Evil had already soaked up a lot of horror spending this fall. Back in October we argued that horror doesn't need October anymore , and this weekend is another data point.

Overseas is the swing factor. International audiences delivered about $19 million on opening weekend, close to the domestic number. Superhero brands usually travel well, but horror tends to be more local. If foreign markets keep pace with North America, the film finishes comfortably in profit. If they fade faster, it gets tighter.

What Comes Next

The good news for Clayface is that November is thin on horror. Next weekend brings Warner Bros.' own The Cat in the Hat and the monster movie Godzilla Minus Zero , which will likely grab premium-format screens and some of the genre audience. Ti West's dark Christmas Carol riff Ebenezer arrives Nov. 13, and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping takes over Nov. 20. Without Halloween night competing for attention, a third-weekend drop in the 40% range is realistic.

Questions we still can't answer: Warner Bros. hasn't announced a premium video-on-demand date, there's no official word on a Clayface sequel, and nobody at DC Studios has said whether Tom Rhys Harries' Matt Hagen will appear elsewhere in the DCU. Final weekend numbers arrive Monday, and we'll be watching whether the ten-day worldwide total holds above $80 million.

The Bottom Line

Clayface didn't win Halloween weekend, but it didn't flop either. It dropped like a normal horror movie, tied a documentary in a dead marketplace, and is on course to earn back its modest budget. The bigger takeaway is that DC finally made a horror film that horror fans liked, at a price that lets it succeed without being a phenomenon. If that's the template, we'd happily take more.

Did you see Clayface yet, and should DC make more R-rated horror movies like it? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Mike Flanagan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Associated Press , TheWrap , The Numbers , The Numbers daily chart , Rotten Tomatoes , Dark Horizons , Slashfilm , AFP via eNCA , CinemaBlend , Khaleej Times (via Variety) , JoBlo , Dread Central .

The ‘Bloodborne’ Movie Has a Writer and Director: Jacksepticeye’s Update, What’s Confirmed and What It Means

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 12:52:49 GMT

Seven months after Sony stunned a CinemaCon ballroom by announcing an R-rated animated Bloodborne movie, the hunt finally has hunters. Producer Seán McLoughlin, the YouTuber millions know as Jacksepticeye, told IGN in an interview published this week that the film now has a writer and a director attached, and that the project has moved much further down the pipeline than it was in April. He didn't name them. But for a fanbase that has spent more than a decade begging Sony for anything new from Yharnam, even a vague progress report counts as a blood vial.

It also lands at a strange time for FromSoftware fans. Just yesterday, the studio's gothic vampire game The Duskbloods slipped to 2027, and A24's live-action Elden Ring is already shooting. Below: everything confirmed about the Bloodborne film, who's making it, how we got here, the numbers behind the gamble, and what this update really tells us (and what it doesn't).

Watch: The Hunt That Started It All

There's no footage from the film yet. Sony hasn't released a teaser, a poster or a single frame. So here's the official PlayStation TV spot from the game's 2015 launch, a reminder of the tone fans expect the movie to match.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

And here's McLoughlin's own announcement video from April, posted to his channel the day after CinemaCon, where he explains how he ended up attached to the project.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Actually Confirmed

Format: an animated feature film, aimed squarely at adults. Sony announced it as R-rated.
Studios: Sony Pictures is financing and distributing, co-financing with Lyrical Media. PlayStation Productions and Lyrical Animation (Lyrical Media's animation arm) are producing.
Producer: Seán "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin.
Creative team: a writer and a director are now attached, per McLoughlin. Names have not been announced.
Story: McLoughlin says it will be a new story set in Yharnam, not a beat-for-beat retelling of the game.
Release date, cast, animation style: none announced.

That last point matters. Every outlet that picked up the IGN interview, from iHorror to Pixel Twelve and tbreak, landed on the same conclusion: this is a progress report, not a reveal. McLoughlin said the team has much more mapped out than at the announcement and that he hopes the creative names can go public sooner rather than later. Some coverage has floated The Game Awards in December as a natural stage for a reveal, but nobody involved has promised that, so treat it as speculation.

Who's Behind It

Seán McLoughlin (Jacksepticeye). The Irish creator's main channel has more than 31 million subscribers and over 17.5 billion views across 5,000-plus videos, according to Push Square. Variety put his total online following at around 48 million. He's been a loud FromSoftware evangelist for years, and in his April video he called the project a dream come true. He was also quick to set expectations: in a video covered by GamesRadar, he said plainly, "I'm a producer, I'm not the writer or director." In a later IGN interview reported by Kotaku, he insisted the film isn't a money play for him and that he's approaching it as a fan.

What does a YouTuber producer actually do here? In September, on the podcast 100 Questions with Tom Simons , McLoughlin described his job as something like the project's vibe-checker, with real input into who gets hired, according to tbreak's write-up. In other words, the guy on the hook for whether this feels like Bloodborne is a superfan with a massive audience that will tell him, loudly, if it doesn't.

Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions. The announcement came from Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group, who told CinemaCon the movie would be "very true" to the game's gory spirit, per Variety. PlayStation Productions, launched in 2019 under Sony Interactive Entertainment, is the in-house engine behind Sony's game-to-screen push.

FromSoftware. Here's the hole in the story: no source has reported any creative involvement from FromSoftware or Bloodborne director Hidetaka Miyazaki. Sony owns the Bloodborne IP as the game's publisher, so it doesn't need FromSoftware to make a film. Whether Miyazaki's team gets a consulting role is one of the biggest open questions.

Photo: Hidetaka Miyazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The Backstory: Ten Years of Waiting for Yharnam

Bloodborne launched on PS4 on March 24, 2015. Developed by FromSoftware, directed by Miyazaki and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, it swapped the medieval armor of Dark Souls for Victorian streets, beast plagues, blood-soaked hunters and a slow slide into cosmic horror. It sold over a million copies in under two weeks, and Sony announced it had crossed two million by September 2015. The Old Hunters expansion followed that November.

Then: nothing. No sequel, no remaster, no PS5 update, no PC port, not even a 60fps patch, despite years of fan campaigns. A sales sheet that leaked in the December 2023 Insomniac Games ransomware attack put the game at about 7.46 million copies sold through early 2022, per WN Hub's breakdown of the leak. That's leaked data, not an official figure, but it shows a game that kept selling for seven years with zero new content.

The movie timeline is short. McLoughlin hinted during his 2024 Thankmas charity stream that he was working on something he couldn't discuss, Tubefilter noted. Sony made it official at CinemaCon on April 13, 2026, alongside updates on its Helldivers movie (Justin Lin directing, Jason Momoa starring) and Nintendo's live-action Legend of Zelda . The backlash was immediate, and McLoughlin owned it: in September he estimated that roughly 80% of early reactions to his involvement were critical, mostly surprise that a YouTuber was attached to such a beloved game. Now, in late October, comes the writer-and-director update.

By the Numbers: Sony's Game-Movie Track Record

PlayStation Productions' theatrical results have been all over the map, according to figures compiled on its Wikipedia page from box office trackers:

Uncharted (2022): about $401.7 million worldwide on a $120 million budget. A clear hit.
Gran Turismo (2023): about $121.9 million worldwide on a $60 million budget. Modest.
Until Dawn (2025): roughly $50 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, with a 51% Rotten Tomatoes score and a C+ CinemaScore. The studio's only horror film so far, and a cautionary tale.

On TV, the picture is much rosier: HBO's The Last of Us is the gold standard for the whole genre and has been renewed for a third season, and Peacock's Twisted Metal is headed into Season 3 too. The lesson Sony seems to have learned: the adaptations that win are the ones that respect the source.

Analysis: What This Update Really Means

Animation is the smart bet. McLoughlin argued in the IGN interview that animation suits Bloodborne better than a live-action approach like the one A24 is taking with Elden Ring , and he's right. Yharnam's horror runs on impossible scale: towering beasts, eldritch Great Ones, architecture that folds in on itself. Live action would need a nine-figure budget to do that justice. A24's Elden Ring , written and directed by Alex Garland and dated for March 3, 2028 in IMAX, reportedly costs well over $100 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter as cited by VGC. That's the studio's biggest swing ever. Animation lets Sony chase that cosmic dread for a fraction of the risk, and it frees the film from the uncanny valley that sinks so many creature-heavy game movies.

The R rating is the promise that matters. Adult animation has proven it can carry dark fantasy: think Netflix's Castlevania and Arcane on streaming. A theatrical R-rated animated horror feature is a rarer beast, which makes Sony's commitment to that rating the most encouraging line in the whole announcement. A PG-13 Bloodborne would have been dead on arrival.

A new story is the right call, too. Bloodborne 's plot is famously cryptic, told through item descriptions and half-mad NPCs. Retelling the game's exact path would either over-explain the mystery or confuse everyone. An original hunt inside Yharnam lets the film keep the lore's ambiguity while giving newcomers a story with an actual spine. It's the same approach that worked for The Last of Us when it took detours, and the opposite of Until Dawn , which used the game's name for a loosely connected time-loop slasher and paid for it.

The YouTuber factor cuts both ways. We argued just this week that Hollywood keeps finding horror's future on YouTube and then wasting it. McLoughlin is a different case: he isn't directing, and his value is as a fan advocate inside the room. If he really has a say in hiring, the director announcement will tell us whether that voice carries weight. A respected genre name would quiet a lot of that 80% skepticism overnight. An anonymous hire would feed it.

The stakes. For Sony, this is a test of whether PlayStation's horror-adjacent catalog can deliver on the big screen after Until Dawn stumbled. For fans, it may be the only new Bloodborne they get for years, with no sequel or remaster in sight and FromSoftware busy elsewhere.

What We Still Don't Know

Who the writer and director are.
Which studio is actually animating it, and in what style (2D, CG, anime-influenced).
Whether FromSoftware or Miyazaki will be involved in any capacity.
Voice cast, runtime and a release window. No date has been set.
Whether the film goes to theaters or lands on a streamer. Sony is distributing, but hasn't said where.

The next big moment to watch: The Game Awards in December, a natural place for a creative-team reveal, though nothing is confirmed.

The Bottom Line

This isn't the reveal fans want, but it's the first proof since April that the Bloodborne movie is a real production and not just a CinemaCon slide. The ingredients are promising: R-rated, animated, an original story in Yharnam, and a producer who has more to lose with gamers than anyone at Sony. Now the whole thing hinges on one name: the director. Fear the old blood, and keep an eye on December.

Your turn: who should direct an R-rated animated Bloodborne ? And are you in, or still on Team Skeptical?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Jacksepticeye (Seán McLoughlin) by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: IGN , iHorror , tbreak , tbreak (Sept.) , Pixel Twelve , Variety , TheWrap , NME , Push Square , GamesRadar , Kotaku , Tubefilter , WN Hub , Bandai Namco , VGC , PlayStation Productions (box office figures) , Until Dawn (film) .

FromSoftware’s ‘The Duskbloods’ Delayed to 2027: What Went Wrong, What’s Changing and Everything We Know

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 22:51:21 GMT

The vampires are going to have to wait a little longer to feed. FromSoftware confirmed on Oct. 29 that The Duskbloods , Hidetaka Miyazaki’s gothic multiplayer bloodbath and the most anticipated exclusive on Nintendo Switch 2, has slipped out of 2026 and into 2027. There is no new month, no new date, and no new trailer. Just a year on the box, an apology, and a promise that the studio is fine-tuning how the game actually plays.

For a lot of horror gamers, this one stings on Halloween weekend. The Duskbloods has been sold since day one as the closest thing to a spiritual heir to Bloodborne that the studio has made in a decade: Victorian streets, cursed bloodlines, firearms in one hand and a blade in the other. Below, we break down exactly what FromSoftware said, what went wrong during August’s rough network test, who is making the game, how this delay fits the studio’s track record, and what to watch for between now and whenever 2027 actually means.

Is There a Trailer?

Not a new one. The delay came by way of social posts, not a video, and we couldn’t confirm an official Nintendo or FromSoftware upload of the earlier trailers that we could safely embed here (the copies circulating on YouTube are re-uploads from outlets and fan channels, which we don’t embed). The most recent official footage debuted during the June 9, 2026 Nintendo Direct, a roughly minute-long, mood-heavy teaser with no new gameplay and no date, per VGC . Meanwhile, Nintendo’s own store listing for the game now shows its release date simply as 2027. Tellingly vague.

The Details: What FromSoftware Actually Said

The announcement landed on the game’s official X account on Oct. 29, and was quickly picked up by Gematsu , GamesRadar and Wccftech . Paraphrasing the statement: development has reached its final adjustment stage, and the team decided to move the launch window to 2027. It apologized to fans who have been waiting and thanked them for their patience.

A follow-up post, reported by GamesRadar , gave the reasoning. During the network test, the team saw strong interest in the game’s core pillars, which it described as combat, strategic depth and player expression. To push those further, FromSoftware wants more time for what it called adjustments to “game rules and balancing.” That’s it. No feature list, no new modes, no mention of the server problems that dominated the test’s first day.

Here is everything confirmed about the game right now:

Platform: Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. FromSoftware is listed as developer and publisher on Nintendo’s store page.
Release: 2027. No month or day.
Director: Hidetaka Miyazaki, his first directing credit since Elden Ring .
Players: Up to eight in a match, mixing PvP and PvE. Nintendo’s own description has you fighting alongside and against up to seven others using blood-based powers.
Characters: A roster of vampire-like fighters called Bloodsworn, with more than 10 planned at launch according to previews; six were playable in the August test.
Online: The network test required a Nintendo Switch Online membership.

Who’s Behind It

Miyazaki is the reason this game carries so much weight. He directed Demon’s Souls , Dark Souls , Bloodborne , Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring , the run of games that turned “FromSoftware” into a genre shorthand. Bloodborne in particular, a 2015 PlayStation 4 game about a plague-ridden gothic city and the horrors beneath it, remains one of the most beloved horror games of its generation, and fans have begged for a sequel or remaster for years. When The Duskbloods was revealed with its blood-soaked Victorian look, the comparisons were instant.

Photo: Hidetaka Miyazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

According to Wikipedia’s entry on the game , Miyazaki has described the original pitch to Nintendo as closer to a loose bundle of ideas than a polished presentation. Nintendo bit. The project reportedly began on the original Switch, then pivoted once Nintendo briefed the studio on Switch 2, which pushed the team to lean harder into online play. In previews from FromSoftware’s Tokyo offices in August, Miyazaki said the game has been in development since 2021, per Tech Times .

Producer Yasuhiro Kitao has been the other public face of the project. In a Famitsu livestream recapped by GamesRadar in August, Kitao said network test applications outstripped those for Elden Ring Nightreign ’s own test, which he admitted surprised the team given Switch 2’s smaller install base compared with Nightreign’s multi-platform audience. Miyazaki, in the same coverage, pushed back on the idea that FromSoftware is pivoting to multiplayer as a new studio direction.

The Backstory: From Reveal to Delay

The Duskbloods’ road to 2027, in order:

April 2, 2025: Revealed during the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct as a PvPvE multiplayer action game, Switch 2 exclusive, due in 2026, per Gematsu’s announcement report . It was FromSoftware’s first game exclusive to a Nintendo home console since Lost Kingdoms II in 2003.
June 5, 2025: Switch 2 launches; The Duskbloods is still pegged for the following year.
June 9, 2026: A new teaser airs in a Nintendo Direct, along with word of a closed network test later that summer. FromSoftware still says 2026, and Kadokawa, the studio’s parent company, reportedly keeps it on its 2026 slate, per VGC .
Aug. 20, 2026: Hands-on previews go live from outlets that visited FromSoftware’s Tokyo HQ, per Tech Times .
Aug. 21, 2026: The first network test session collapses. Players are stuck on login and menu screens, and FromSoftware closes the session, per Nintendo Life .
Aug. 24, 2026: Kitao reveals the test drew more applicants than Nightreign’s.
Oct. 29, 2026: FromSoftware confirms the move to 2027.

The network test is the key chapter. Session one opened Aug. 21 at 6 a.m. Eastern and never really got going. Nintendo Life reported the studio’s support account apologized and closed the session, promising updated schedules later; Tech Times listed four more windows across that weekend. Coverage afterward was mixed: GamesRadar noted complaints about performance and that the PvP side didn’t land with everybody. Previews described a single map, Lowarno City, matches built around four timed phases, attacks that don’t cost stamina while dodging still does, and a target of 60 frames per second at roughly 1080p.

By the Numbers

2021: the year Miyazaki says development started.
8: maximum players per match.
6: Bloodsworn playable in the August test, out of more than 10 planned.
5: network test windows scheduled for the opening weekend, the first of which was canceled.
30 million+: lifetime Elden Ring sales as of July 2025, with Shadow of the Erdtree past 10 million and Nightreign at 5 million within about two months of its May 30, 2025 launch, per PC Gamer .
23 years: the gap between FromSoftware’s last Nintendo home-console exclusive and this one.

Analysis: What the Delay Really Means

Start with the good news, because there is some. FromSoftware delaying a game is not a red flag on its own. The studio has moved release dates before, and nobody remembers those waits once a game is good. The key line in the statement is about rules and balancing, not content or technology. That reads like a studio that has a game, has data from thousands of testers, and doesn’t love the way matches currently feel. For an eight-player competitive game, that is exactly what you want them worrying about.

The comparison that matters most is Elden Ring Nightreign . It was also a multiplayer spin on the FromSoftware formula, it also had a bumpy first network test session, and it shipped anyway and sold 5 million copies in roughly two months. That proves the studio can fix server problems quickly and that its audience will follow it into co-op and competitive experiments. What Nightreign had that The Duskbloods doesn’t is reach: PlayStation, Xbox and PC at once. The Duskbloods lives or dies on one platform, which is why Kitao’s applicant numbers matter so much. If a Switch 2 test beat a multi-platform one for sign-ups, the demand is real.

The bigger concern is the gameplay feedback. Inven Global’s preview, as summarized by Tech Times , found that the roguelike-style upgrades during a match gave only small stat bumps, making rounds feel repetitive. Repetition is poison for a multiplayer game that needs people coming back nightly. If the extra months go toward making each match feel different, with more maps, more meaningful power spikes and a sharper PvE threat, the delay will look smart in hindsight. If 2027 drifts toward late in the year, it starts to feel like a game still searching for its hook.

There is also a platform-strategy angle. Nintendo built a lot of Switch 2’s grown-up credibility on getting a FromSoftware exclusive at all. Losing it from the 2026 lineup means the console’s first full holiday season goes without its most horror-forward exclusive. For Nintendo, a polished hit next year beats a rushed one now. For players who bought a Switch 2 partly for this, the wait is the price.

And for horror fans specifically: The Duskbloods is not Bloodborne 2, and FromSoftware has never said it is. It is a competitive multiplayer game wearing gothic horror clothes. The delay is a reminder to set expectations around what it actually is, a vampire battle royale with FromSoftware combat, and judge it on that.

What We Still Don’t Know

When in 2027. Wccftech guesses March or later is likely, but that is speculation, not an official window.
Whether there will be another network test before launch, and whether it will run on improved servers.
What the rules and balancing changes look like in practice: new maps, revised upgrades, changes to PvP.
Final roster size and whether there’s any meaningful solo or PvE-only option.
Price, physical edition plans and any post-launch content roadmap.

The next likely venue for news is a future Nintendo Direct or Kadokawa’s next earnings update, either of which could narrow the window.

Bottom Line

FromSoftware is choosing to tune its vampire brawler instead of shipping it into a crowded holiday with a rough test still fresh in players’ minds. Based on the studio’s history, that’s a safe bet. Based on the August feedback, it might also be a necessary one. The blood can wait. The question is whether the game we get in 2027 gives people a reason to keep coming back night after night.

So tell us: does a 2027 delay make you more confident in The Duskbloods, or are you starting to worry? And would you still rather FromSoftware just make Bloodborne 2?

Related on The Horror Feed

Photo: Hidetaka Miyazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Gematsu , GamesRadar , Wccftech , Nintendo , Nintendo Life , GamesRadar (network test applicants) , Tech Times , VGC , Gematsu (2025 announcement) , PC Gamer , Wikipedia .

‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Drops a Surprise Halloween Special, ‘A Story of Derry,’ Set Centuries Before Pennywise

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 16:51:18 GMT

HBO Max did not send out a press release, cut a long trailer campaign or tease a date. It just waited for the clock to hit midnight on Halloween and put a brand-new chapter of It: Welcome to Derry on the service. The 30-minute special, titled "A Story of Derry," is streaming now, and it goes further back than anything the franchise has shown on screen: hundreds of years before Pennywise ever put on the greasepaint.

That matters for more than a holiday treat. The special is directed by Reservation Dogs veteran Tazbah Chavez, adds Zahn McClarnon to the Derry mythology, and fills in the origin story that season one only sketched in a single vision sequence. It also lands while the show sits between a hit first season and a second season heading to the 1930s. Below: what the special is, who made it, how it fits the larger three-era plan, the numbers behind the franchise, and what this surprise drop says about where HBO is taking Stephen King's clown.

Watch the Teaser

HBO Max announced the drop with a short teaser on its official channel, captioned with a line that sums up the whole stunt: "IT's a surprise Halloween treat."

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What "A Story of Derry" Is

Release: Midnight, Saturday, Oct. 31, 2026, with no advance announcement.
Where: HBO Max. It lives as a standalone title, and some viewers have reported it is easier to find through search or the series page's Related tab than in the episode list. An ASL version is also available.
Runtime: About 30 minutes.
Director: Tazbah Chavez.
Writers: Cherie Dimaline and Jasmyne Flournoy.
Cast: Zahn McClarnon, Kiawentiio, Morningstar Angeline, Kimberly Guerrero, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Michael Podemski-Bedard and Thosh Collins.
Pennywise? No. Bill Skarsgård does not appear. This story predates the clown.

The official logline sets it centuries before the town existed, as three young Indigenous people head into the Western Wood and run into an ancient spirit. Season one fans will recognize the setup. In episode four, Chris Chalk's Dick Hallorann has a vision showing how the people who lived on this land first fought the entity they called the Kollu, and why it cannot leave the area. "A Story of Derry" expands that fragment into a full tale, built around the making of the blade the creature fears.

The episode opens with a title card framing everything as the part of a warning story that elders deliberately softened for children: the version they did not teach. It is a smart device. It turns the special into the "true" history hiding behind a legend, which is exactly how King's novel treats Derry's past.

McClarnon plays the warrior who forges that weapon, according to several outlets that have watched it. Kiawentiio and Morningstar Angeline return from the season one flashback material, and GeekTyrant reports Kimberly Guerrero is back as well. Multiple reviews also note that Maturin, the cosmic turtle King fans have waited decades to see properly, finally gets a moment on screen. We will leave the rest for you to discover.

Who's Behind It

Tazbah Chavez came up through FX's Reservation Dogs , one of the most acclaimed series of the 2020s, which mixed comedy, grief and the occasional genuinely eerie spirit visit. She has also directed on Fox's anthology Accused . Handing her a story about an Indigenous community's first war with an ancient evil is not a token hire. It is giving the material to someone who has already shown she can make the supernatural feel lived-in instead of exotic.

Cherie Dimaline , a Métis novelist, is best known for The Marrow Thieves and the horror-tinged Empire of Wild , a book built on the rogarou legend. If there is a writer suited to telling a monster story from inside the community that survived it, she is on the short list. Co-writer Jasmyne Flournoy rounds out the script team.

Zahn McClarnon is the casting that should make King fans sit up. He has already lived in this author's universe: he played Crow Daddy, second-in-command of the True Knot, in Mike Flanagan's 2019 Doctor Sleep . Beyond that, he anchors AMC's Dark Winds , delivered one of Westworld 's best episodes as Akecheta, played the terrifying Hanzee Dent in Fargo season two, and was a fan favorite on Reservation Dogs . Going from a villain who feeds on children to a hero forging the weapon against a child-eating monster is a neat bit of King karma.

Photo: Andy Muschietti via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Above all of them sit the show's architects. Andy and Barbara Muschietti , who made the two It films, developed Welcome to Derry with Jason Fuchs , who co-ran season one alongside Brad Caleb Kane . Andy Muschietti's genre résumé starts with 2013's Mama and runs straight through the highest-grossing Stephen King adaptation ever made.

The Backstory: How Derry Got Here

King published It in 1986, and one of the novel's quiet strengths is a set of "Derry Interludes," written by the town librarian Mike Hanlon, that dig up the town's bloody history in roughly 27-year cycles. Those interludes are the DNA of this series. Andy Muschietti has said the show tells its story backward on purpose, era by era, toward the creature's origin, with a three-season shape in mind.

Oct. 26, 2025: Season one premieres on HBO, set in 1962.
Dec. 14, 2025: The eighth and final episode, "Winter Fire," airs.
March 2026: Barbara Muschietti confirms a second season is happening.
August 2026: HBO officially renews the show. Season two jumps to 1935 and the Great Depression, centered on the Bradley Gang, bank robbers who stop in Derry for ammunition. Kane becomes sole showrunner.
Oct. 31, 2026: "A Story of Derry" drops, jumping centuries past both seasons.

Kane has pitched the next season in vivid terms, describing it to Entertainment Weekly as "a Warner Bros. gangster picture through the lens of Pennywise and Stephen King." Readers of the book know the Bradley Gang shootout as one of its nastiest interludes, a moment where the town's ordinary citizens prove as monstrous as anything in the sewers.

By the Numbers

The reason HBO is investing in bonus material is simple: this franchise performs.

It (2017): about $704.1 million worldwide on a $35 million production budget, per The Numbers.
It Chapter Two (2019): about $473.1 million worldwide on a $70 million budget.
Season one debut: 5.7 million viewers in its first three days, the third-biggest debut in HBO Max history behind House of the Dragon and The Last of Us .
Finale: 6.5 million viewers, the series high, up from 5.8 million for the penultimate episode.
Reviews: 80% on Rotten Tomatoes from 166 reviews and 61 on Metacritic.

Put those together and you get a property that grew week to week, a rare thing for streaming, where audiences usually leak away after the premiere. A show whose finale is its biggest night is a show with an audience waiting for more, and a 30-minute special is a cheap way to feed them during the long gap before season two.

Analysis: Why This Surprise Drop Is Smarter Than It Looks

It keeps the brand alive with no Pennywise at all. The obvious move for a Halloween stunt would be a Skarsgård cameo. HBO did the opposite. By building a special with no clown, the studio is testing whether Derry itself, its curse, its history and its people, can carry the brand. That is exactly the question a three-era anthology has to answer. Season two will be a period gangster story, and a final chapter reaching toward the creature's origin may not look much like a killer-clown show either. "A Story of Derry" is a low-risk rehearsal for that future.

It gives the origin story room to breathe. In season one, the Indigenous history behind the curse arrived mostly through one vision and a handful of scenes, which left it feeling more like backstory than story. Giving that history its own episode, written and directed by Indigenous creators, turns a thin spot into a selling point. Whether it fully works is up to viewers, but the intent is clear and overdue.

It follows a playbook that has worked before. The closest comparison is Marvel's Werewolf by Night , a roughly hour-long Halloween special that Disney+ released in October 2022. It was a standalone, stylistically bold side story that earned strong reviews and became a seasonal rewatch, precisely because it was not homework for a bigger saga. A year later Marvel brought it back as Werewolf by Night in Color , proof that a holiday special can become a tradition. HBO now has the same opportunity: a half-hour Derry story every October could become the show's version of a Treehouse of Horror.

The risk is the hunt. A surprise drop only works if people can find it, and early reports that the special is hidden off the main episode list are a real problem. Streaming services bury things constantly. If HBO does not surface it in the app this weekend, the stunt becomes a story about bad menus instead of good horror.

What to watch: whether HBO publishes viewing numbers for the special, whether McClarnon's warrior or the blade become plot threads in season two, and whether the network turns this into an annual October tradition.

Photo: Bill Skarsgård via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

What We Still Don't Know

A premiere date for season two. HBO has not announced one.
Season two casting beyond the setting and the Bradley Gang premise.
How much Bill Skarsgård will appear in the 1935 story, and in what form. Kane has teased a different flavor of Pennywise next time.
Whether "A Story of Derry" counts as canon groundwork for the planned final era or a one-off side story.

Bottom Line

"A Story of Derry" is a confident move: a clown-free, half-hour folk horror tale from a team that understands the people at its center, dropped on the one night of the year when horror fans are guaranteed to be looking for something new. It gives Zahn McClarnon a second home in King country, finally puts Maturin on screen, and proves Derry is bigger than one monster. Now HBO just has to make sure people can find it.

Have you watched it yet? Should Welcome to Derry make a Halloween special an every-October tradition? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Zahn McClarnon by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central , SlashFilm , Winter Is Coming , TheWrap via Yahoo , GeekTyrant , Horror Fuel , Comic Book Club , Soap Central , Wikipedia (viewership, reviews, timeline) , The Numbers: It , The Numbers: It Chapter Two .

‘Pendulum’ Trailer: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Returns to Horror in Aronofsky-Produced Cult Nightmare, and Everything We Know

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 11:51:26 GMT

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has not made a horror movie since he was a teenager playing one of the doomed kids in Halloween H20 back in 1998. That drought ends on New Year's Day. Vertical dropped the full official trailer for Pendulum on October 29, and it makes a strong case that the first big horror release of 2027 is going to be a slow, sun-bleached cult nightmare set in the New Mexico desert, from the man who wrote Black Swan and with Darren Aronofsky's company behind it.

The trailer is the loudest marketing push yet for a film that has been quietly assembling a serious pedigree for two years: Gordon-Levitt and Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor as a grieving married couple, two-time Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver as the spiritual healer who gets her hooks into one of them, plus Norman Reedus, Jena Malone and Anna Deavere Smith. Below you'll find both official videos, every confirmed detail, the people behind the camera and how their past genre work performed, the full development timeline, the box office math for a January horror launch, and what we think this movie needs to pull off.

Watch the Official Trailer

The full trailer, released by distributor Vertical on its official YouTube channel:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

And the shorter official teaser, which Vertical premiered on August 27:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Where the teaser leaned on mood and one nasty sound cue near the end, the new trailer shows its hand a little more: apparitions, visions, ritual work, and a lead character who can no longer tell whether the retreat is dangerous or whether his own grip on reality is slipping. It is a smart pitch. Cult horror lives or dies on that question, and the trailer asks it without answering it.

The Details: Everything Confirmed

Release: January 1, 2027, in theaters nationwide.
Distributor: Vertical, which acquired North American rights in May 2026.
Rating: R, for strong and bloody violent content, sexuality, drug use, nudity and language, per Dread Central.
Writer-director: Mark Heyman, making his feature directing debut.
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Patrick), Phoebe Dynevor (Abigail), Jacki Weaver (Ella-Rose, the retreat's revered spiritual healer), Norman Reedus, Jena Malone and Anna Deavere Smith.
Producers: Darren Aronofsky (Protozoa Pictures), Jacob Jaffke (Motel Mojave) and Dave Caplan (C2 Motion Picture Group), with Élan Klein Jaffke, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Gesas, Will Greenfield and Heyman also credited across announcements.
Music: Ben Lovett.
Setting and shoot: New Mexico, where filming began in April 2025.

The setup, in our words: after a shared tragedy, Patrick and Abigail head to a remote new-age retreat hoping to heal. Abigail falls hard for Ella-Rose's unconventional methods. Patrick becomes convinced they have walked into a cult, while the movie keeps nudging the possibility that the problem is inside his own head. The marketing has kept the exact nature of the couple's loss under wraps, so we will too.

Who's Behind It

Mark Heyman, the writer finally stepping behind the camera

Heyman is a long-time Aronofsky collaborator who came up inside Protozoa. He was development director there and a co-producer on The Wrestler (2008) before writing Black Swan (2010), which earned him BAFTA and Writers Guild nominations for original screenplay. That film is still one of the great psychological horror crossovers of the century: made for about $13 million, it grossed roughly $332 million worldwide according to The Numbers, landed five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and won Natalie Portman Best Actress.

He has touched mainstream horror too. Heyman shares screenplay credit with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods on Rob Savage's Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman (2023), which made about $82 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. Outside the genre he co-wrote The Skeleton Twins , a Sundance screenwriting winner, and created the period drama Strange Angel , which ran two seasons. In a statement released with the teaser, he called Pendulum "deeply personal and inspired by my family lore," and said shooting in New Mexico, where he grew up and where the real events took place, lifted every scene.

Photo: Darren Aronofsky via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa

Aronofsky is producing rather than directing, but his fingerprints matter. The Requiem for a Dream , Black Swan and mother! filmmaker has built a career on stories where faith, obsession and the body collide, which is exactly the territory a grief-and-guru horror movie wants to live in. Having his name on the poster gives a first-time director's genre film instant credibility with the arthouse crowd.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

This is the hook for casual audiences. Gordon-Levitt's only previous horror credit is Jimmy, one of the teens in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998). Since then he's done paranoid genre work in Brick , The Lookout , Inception and Looper , and most recently the 2024 thriller Killer Heat . A man who suspects everyone around him is lying is something he plays extremely well. Coming back to the genre almost three decades later is a genuinely fun storyline for the press tour.

Photo: Phoebe Dynevor via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Phoebe Dynevor and Jacki Weaver

Dynevor broke out as Daphne in the first two seasons of Bridgerton , then pivoted hard into darker adult material with the erotic thriller Fair Play (2023), Inheritance (2025) and Tommy Wirkola's shark thriller Thrash (2026). Pendulum is her first true horror lead, and the role of the believer is arguably the harder one.

Weaver might be the secret weapon. She is a two-time Oscar nominee for Animal Kingdom and Silver Linings Playbook , and her genre résumé runs from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Haunt (2013), Bird Box (2018) and the 2020 The Grudge . Anyone who saw her in Animal Kingdom knows how terrifying she can be while smiling sweetly. A warm, motherly cult leader is perfect casting.

The Backstory: Two Years From Announcement to Trailer

October 30, 2024: Variety and Deadline report Heyman will write and direct, with Aronofsky producing. The full trailer arrived almost exactly two years later.
March 2025: Gordon-Levitt and Dynevor sign on.
April 2025: Reedus and Weaver join, and cameras roll in New Mexico.
May 8, 2026: Vertical buys North American rights and dates it for January 1, 2027. Ben Lovett is announced as composer the same month, and the first image of the two leads follows.
August 27, 2026: The official teaser debuts.
October 6, 2026: A blood-red poster lands with the tagline "Surrender completely."
October 29, 2026: The full official trailer is released.

By the Numbers

There is no budget or tracking data public yet, so the useful numbers are the comparisons. New Year's horror is a real lane, and it can work for modest films. Blumhouse's Night Swim opened January 5, 2024, to about $11.8 million and finished near $54.8 million worldwide against a $15 million budget, per The Numbers. The lesson: audiences coming off the holidays will show up for a horror movie when there is nothing else scary in theaters.

Vertical itself just tested this exact slot. Its horror thriller We Bury the Dead opened January 2, 2026, on 1,172 screens and took in about $2.5 million over its opening weekend, per Box Office Mojo. For context, The Numbers' distributor charts show Vertical's top domestic grosser in any single year from 2016 to 2023 was Gotti at roughly $4.3 million. Vertical is a company that usually lives on digital and limited releases, so a nationwide New Year's Day launch with a recognizable star is one of its biggest theatrical swings.

The ceiling example is the Heyman connection. Black Swan 's $332 million worldwide is not a realistic target, but it shows how far elevated psychological horror can travel when word of mouth catches.

What This Really Means

Our read: Pendulum is a bet that "grief horror" still has gas, filtered through the cult subgenre that Midsommar made fashionable again. The difference is the setting. Instead of a Swedish commune, it is the very American wellness economy of crystals, breathwork and charismatic healers, which feels more current than ever and is a far more relatable trap. Most viewers have never been near a pagan festival. A lot of them know someone who has gone on a retreat and come back talking differently.

The release date is the boldest choice. January 1 is a Friday in 2027, so this gets a full three-day opening weekend on the holiday, with almost no horror competition. That is the Night Swim playbook. The risk is that January horror carries a reputation as a dumping ground, and a movie with this much prestige DNA could get lumped in with studio leftovers. Vertical's partner Peter Jarowey framed it differently, saying the team wants to ring in 2027 by "scaring the hell out of audiences." Confidence is the right posture. The trailer suggests a film that should be sold as an event, not filler.

Heyman's debut also matters for the Aronofsky pipeline. Protozoa has been a director's shop for decades, and launching a long-time collaborator as a horror filmmaker is the same move that has paid off for other producer-led companies building genre voices. If Pendulum lands, expect Heyman to be on every studio's shortlist for elevated horror, the same way Black Swan made him a go-to writer.

What We Still Don't Know

Runtime and budget have not been announced.
Norman Reedus, Jena Malone and Anna Deavere Smith's roles are still under wraps.
No festival premiere has been confirmed, and no reviews are out, which means the first critical reactions could come very close to release.
International distribution has not been announced.
How much of the story is supernatural and how much is psychological, which is exactly what the marketing wants you wondering.

The Bottom Line

Pendulum has the ingredients that make horror fans pay attention: a writer with a genuine psychological horror classic behind him, an Aronofsky stamp, a star returning to the genre after almost 30 years, and Jacki Weaver as a smiling guru. The trailer sells dread instead of jump scares, and New Year's Day gives it a clear runway. Whether a first-time director can turn a deeply personal story into a crowd-pleasing scare remains the open question.

So tell us: are you starting 2027 at a cult retreat with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or does January horror still make you nervous?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Joseph Gordon-Levitt by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Videos: Vertical official YouTube channel.

Sources: Dread Central (trailer, rating) , Dread Central (poster) , JoBlo (trailer) , JoBlo (teaser, Heyman statement) , JoBlo (Vertical acquisition) , ScreenAnarchy , Dark Horizons , Horror Fuel , Wikipedia (development timeline, citing Variety and Deadline) , The Numbers (Black Swan) , The Numbers (Night Swim) , Box Office Mojo (We Bury the Dead) , The Numbers (Vertical) , Wikipedia (The Boogeyman) .

‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 3 in the Works at Apple TV, With a New Showrunner and New Titans: Everything We Know

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 22:50:00 GMT

Godzilla's TV career isn't over, but it may be about to get a brand-new brain. Apple TV is in talks with Legendary Television about a third season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters , the Kurt and Wyatt Russell kaiju drama that wrapped its second season on May 1. The catch, reported Thursday by Deadline and also covered by Variety , The Hollywood Reporter and TVLine , is that any renewal would come with a creative overhaul: a new showrunner, a new writers room and new Titans stomping through the MonsterVerse.

Nothing is signed yet, and nobody has said a word about who stays in front of the camera. But the shape of the deal says a lot about where Legendary wants its monster franchise to go on the small screen, especially with a Wyatt Russell spinoff already in the works and Godzilla x Kong: Supernova heading to theaters in March. Here's everything confirmed, who's behind the show, the numbers that make it worth saving, and what a reboot-within-a-series could mean for the King of the Monsters.

Watch the Season 2 Teaser

If you skipped Season 2, this is the official teaser Apple released ahead of the February premiere. It is the best look at Titan X, the tentacled, warship-wrecking original creature the season was built around.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Actually Confirmed

Let's separate what's real from what's wishful thinking. Here is where things stand as of October 30, 2026:

No official renewal yet. Apple TV and Legendary Television are in talks. TVLine says its sources confirmed the negotiations, but the streamer has not ordered a third season.
A new showrunner. Co-creator Chris Black, who ran both seasons, would reportedly not return, according to Deadline's report as summarized by iHorror . Variety reports several candidates have been approached, but no names have surfaced.
New writers and new Titans. Every outlet agrees the plan is a fresh writers room and fresh monsters from the MonsterVerse roster.
The cast is an open question. As Dread Central and TVLine both note, it is not confirmed whether any actors would leave.
The show so far: 20 episodes across two 10-episode seasons. Season 1 ran November 17, 2023, to January 12, 2024, on what was then Apple TV+. Season 2 ran weekly from February 27 to May 1, 2026, on the rebranded Apple TV.

The core ensemble that carried Season 2: Anna Sawai as Cate Randa, Kiersey Clemons as May Olowe-Hewitt, Ren Watabe as Kentaro Randa, Mari Yamamoto as Keiko Miura, Anders Holm as Bill Randa and Joe Tippett as Tim. Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell share the role of Army officer Lee Shaw, with Wyatt playing him in the 1950s and Kurt playing the older version half a century later. That father-son casting trick has been the show's calling card since day one.

Who's Behind It

Chris Black and Matt Fraction developed the series. Fraction is one of the most celebrated comic writers of his generation, best known for Marvel's Hawkeye run, while Black steered both seasons as showrunner. If Black really is out, it is the single biggest change in the show's history, because the series' slow-burn family mystery, bouncing between decades, has been his structure from the start.

Photo: Matt Fraction via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell of Safehouse Pictures executive produce, and Harold oversees the MonsterVerse on the Apple side. That matters, because Harold is already running the next show. Toho, Godzilla's home studio, is a full partner through executive producers Hiro Matsuoka and Takemasa Arita, which is why the series can use the real Godzilla rather than a lookalike.

In front of the camera, the genre pedigree is real. Kurt Russell is horror royalty as MacReady in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), still the gold standard for creature paranoia. Wyatt Russell has his own genre credits, including the Nazi-zombie war movie Overlord (2018) and the "Playtest" episode of Black Mirror . Anna Sawai came to Monarch before her Emmy-winning breakout in FX's Shōgun , which turned her into one of the most in-demand actors on TV and makes her availability a fair question for any third season.

Photo: Anna Sawai via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The Backstory: From Greenlight to Titan X

Apple greenlit Monarch in January 2022 as a joint venture between Legendary Television, Safehouse and Toho, according to the show's production history . Casting rolled out across mid-2022: Sawai, Watabe, Clemons and Tippett in June, the Russells in July, Yamamoto in August and Holm in September. The first season premiered in November 2023, the same month Toho's own Godzilla Minus One hit theaters, which made for a very crowded month of atomic breath.

Apple renewed the show for Season 2 on April 11, 2024, and fans then waited almost two years for it. When it finally arrived on February 27, 2026, it moved the action to Skull Island and to a coastal village where an ancient Titan rises from the sea. That creature, nicknamed Titan X, was an original design rather than a classic Toho monster. TechRadar described it as a kraken-like horror with a horned, reptilian head, and the trailer shows its claw-lined tentacles shredding a warship. GamesRadar pointed out that the season also brought Kong into the show alongside Godzilla.

Then, in December 2025, before Season 2 had even aired, Legendary and Apple announced a spinoff built around young Lee Shaw. Wyatt Russell leads it, Joby Harold is the showrunner and, per Dread Central and iHorror, JD Dillard ( Sweetheart ) directs the pilot. It is set in 1984 and follows Shaw as he tries to stop the Soviet Union from unleashing a new Titan on the United States. iHorror lists Millie Brady, Pilou Asbæk, Corey Stoll, Ralph Ineson, Nyasha Hatendi, Connie Nielsen and Stana Katic in the cast, under what it describes as a multi-series deal between Legendary and Apple.

By the Numbers

Apple doesn't publish viewership, so the clearest numbers are the franchise's. According to the MonsterVerse box office tallies , the five films have earned about $2.53 billion worldwide:

Godzilla (2014): about $529 million
Kong: Skull Island (2017): about $569 million
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): about $387 million
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021): about $470 million, during the pandemic and a same-day HBO Max release
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024): about $572 million, the franchise high

The next one, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova , opens March 26, 2027, from director Grant Sputore with a script credited to David Callaham, and stars Kaitlyn Dever, Dan Stevens, Jack O'Connell, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Matthew Modine, Delroy Lindo and Sam Neill. On the critical side, Monarch 's first season landed in the high 80s on Rotten Tomatoes, a better critical showing than most of the films have managed. Meanwhile Toho's own lane is hot: Godzilla Minus One grossed $116 million worldwide on a famously small budget and won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and its follow-up, Godzilla Minus Zero , reaches North American theaters November 6.

Analysis: Why Legendary Wants a New Brain for Its Monster Show

Read between the lines and this looks less like a rescue and more like a franchise tune-up. Legendary now has three things running at once on the Apple side: the flagship, a 1984 Lee Shaw prequel with a growing cast, and a theatrical tentpole every couple of years. A new showrunner on Monarch means a writers room built to fit that bigger machine rather than one story told on its own schedule. The phrase that keeps repeating in every report, "new Titans," tells you the priority. The monsters are the selling point, and Season 3 will lean harder on them.

That is a real tension for fans. The best thing about Monarch has always been that it treats kaiju like a horror movie treats a haunting: mostly unseen, terrifying when it arrives, and less important than what it does to the families living in its shadow. The biggest complaint has always been the opposite: not enough Godzilla. A creative reset is the obvious way to fix that complaint, and also the easiest way to lose what made the show different from the movies.

TV history is full of genre shows that survived a showrunner change. The Walking Dead went through four showrunners and ran for 11 seasons. But plenty of others lost their voice when the original architect left, and Monarch is a serialized mystery whose two timelines only work if someone knows exactly where they meet. The smartest version of Season 3 keeps the Randa family and Kurt Russell's Shaw as its emotional spine while the new team widens the monster roster. The riskiest version treats the show like a soft reboot to sync up with Supernova .

There's also the competition. Toho has proven with Minus One that a grim, human-scale Godzilla story can win Oscars and fill theaters. Netflix's animated Skull Island already explored the Kong side of the MonsterVerse. A third Monarch season needs to give Apple subscribers something those can't, and a dread-heavy, character-first monster drama is still that thing.

What We Still Don't Know

Whether Apple formally orders Season 3, and when.
Who replaces Chris Black as showrunner. Several people have reportedly been approached.
Whether Kurt Russell, Anna Sawai and the rest of the ensemble return, especially with Wyatt Russell busy leading the prequel.
Which Titans join. No creature has been named.
How Season 3 and the Lee Shaw spinoff connect to Godzilla x Kong: Supernova on March 26, 2027.

Bottom Line

Monarch isn't dead, and that is the good news. The worrying part is that the show is reportedly coming back without the person who built it, and with a mandate for more monsters. If the new team keeps the dread and the family story while finally letting the Titans off the leash, this could be the season that wins over the people who bailed after Season 1. If it turns into a two-hour commercial for Supernova , it will lose the people who stayed.

So tell us: should Monarch Season 3 give us way more Godzilla, or keep the monsters in the shadows? And which Titan do you want to see next?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Kurt Russell by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline , Variety , The Hollywood Reporter , TVLine , Dread Central , iHorror , 9to5Mac , TechRadar , GamesRadar , Wikipedia: Monarch , Wikipedia: MonsterVerse , Wikipedia: Godzilla x Kong: Supernova , Wikipedia: Godzilla Minus One .

‘Mouthwashing’ Movie Is Happening: Karyn Kusama Directs Sony’s Adaptation of the Viral Horror Game, and Everything We Know

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:50:27 GMT

The most talked-about indie horror game of the last two years is going to the movies, and Sony did not hand it to a gun-for-hire. Karyn Kusama , the director of The Invitation and Jennifer's Body and the filmmaker who set the tone for Yellowjackets , is attached to direct a feature adaptation of Mouthwashing , the low-poly space-freighter nightmare from Swedish studio Wrong Organ. The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline both reported the deal on Thursday, Oct. 29, and the developer confirmed it the same day on X with a blunt "The rumors are true."

It is a stacked team. Kusama's longtime writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi are on script, and the producers are Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the duo behind Sinister and The Black Phone , through their Crooked Highway banner alongside Vince Cheng. Below: the details, the people, the game's unlikely rise, the numbers that made Hollywood pay attention, and why this is the most interesting video game horror adaptation on the board right now.

Watch: Mouthwashing's Console Announcement

No footage exists for the film yet, so here is the official console announcement video from publisher Critical Reflex. It is a good, quick look at the game's grimy, crushed-PS1 aesthetic and the claustrophobic world Kusama now has to translate to the big screen.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What's Confirmed

Studio: Sony Pictures acquired the film rights from developer Wrong Organ and publisher Critical Reflex. Several outlets, including World of Reel and Cosmic Book News, place the project at Sony's genre label Screen Gems, where Crooked Highway has its deal.
Director: Karyn Kusama.
Writers: Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.
Producers: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill and Vince Cheng for Crooked Highway.
Cast, release date, production start: none announced. Story specifics are being kept under wraps.

The timing is not an accident. The film news landed the same day Mouthwashing finally reached consoles. According to iHorror and Engadget, the game launched Oct. 29 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch, with Xbox Game Pass availability from day one (iHorror also lists PS4 and Xbox One). Those ports were first announced back in February 2025 for "sometime in 2025," so console players waited a long time, and they got a movie announcement as a launch-day bonus.

Worth noting for the scoop-trackers: Cosmic Book News says it first reported a Screen Gems Mouthwashing project on Oct. 16, citing scooper Daniel Richtman. That was a rumor until this week. Now it is a deal with names attached.

Wait, What Is Mouthwashing?

If you missed it, here is the spoiler-free pitch. Mouthwashing is a short, first-person narrative horror game set aboard the Tulpar, a cargo freighter owned by a delivery company called Pony Express. After a crash leaves the ship stranded in deep space, its five crew members are trapped together as supplies run down: the captain, Curly, who can no longer speak or move; co-pilot Jimmy; medic Anya; mechanic Swansea; and the intern, Daisuke. There is barely any combat and almost no survival mechanics. The horror comes from the people, from what they did, what they are hiding, and what they become when there is no rescue coming. The game jumps around in time, and the less you know going in, the harder it hits.

It also deals with very heavy subject matter, which is part of why it became such a phenomenon and part of why adapting it is a real challenge. More on that below.

The game was made by a small Swedish team (Wrong Organ previously made the short How Fish Is Made ), written by Johanna Kasurinen, who also served as art lead, with music by Martin Halldin. GamesRadar reported it was built in about 15 months. It ran in Steam Next Fest as a demo in February 2024 and launched on PC via Steam on Sept. 26, 2024.

Who's Behind the Movie

Karyn Kusama, Director

Kusama is one of the most respected genre directors working, and one of the most under-used. She broke out with Girlfight in 2000, which shared Sundance's Grand Jury Prize and won its Directing Award. Then came the studio sci-fi detour Æon Flux (2005), a $62 million Paramount film that grossed about $52 million worldwide and was recut over her head. In 2009 she made Jennifer's Body from Diablo Cody's script. It was sold as a sexy teen thriller to the wrong audience, grossed roughly $31.6 million on a $16 million budget, scored a C- CinemaScore, and has since been reclaimed as a feminist cult classic. If you were a horror fan in 2009 who defended it, you were right early.

Her real calling card, and the reason this match makes so much sense, is The Invitation . The 2015 dinner-party thriller premiered at SXSW on March 13, 2015, was made for about $1 million, won Best Film at Sitges, and holds a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a slow squeeze of dread among people who share a terrible history, in a single location, where the audience senses something is deeply wrong long before anyone says it. Swap the Hollywood Hills house for a dying spaceship and you are halfway to Mouthwashing already.

After that came her segment "Her Only Living Son" in the 2017 anthology XX and the Nicole Kidman crime drama Destroyer (2018), which grossed just over $5 million on a budget north of $10 million. On TV she directed and executive produced the Yellowjackets pilot and earned Emmy recognition for it. As World of Reel points out, she has not directed a feature since Destroyer . She came close with a modern-day Dracula at Blumhouse, also written by Hay and Manfredi, which was canceled in April 2022, just weeks before filming. World of Reel also notes there is no word yet on whether Mouthwashing will be her next film.

Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, Writers

Hay (who is married to Kusama) and Manfredi met in an improv group at Brown and have written together for over two decades. Their credits swing wildly, from Crazy/Beautiful and Æon Flux to the 2010 Clash of the Titans , R.I.P.D. and both Ride Along movies. But their best work by far has come with Kusama: The Invitation and Destroyer , both of which are about characters crushed by the past and lying to everyone around them, including themselves. That is the exact emotional engine of this game.

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, Producers

Photo: C. Robert Cargill via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Crooked Highway has quietly become one of the most reliable names in commercial horror. Derrickson and Cargill co-wrote Sinister (2012), which turned a $3 million budget into $87.7 million worldwide. The Black Phone (2022) made $161.4 million on a $16-18 million budget with an 81% Rotten Tomatoes score, and Black Phone 2 (2025) added about $132 million on $30 million. These are producers who know how to make a disturbing, character-driven horror movie that also sells tickets. That is exactly the balancing act Mouthwashing needs.

By the Numbers: Why Hollywood Came Calling

Sales: Over 500,000 copies on Steam by February 2025, per Game Developer. Dark Horizons and Cosmic Book News (citing Deadline) now put it at close to 1 million units.
Reviews: 88 on Metacritic, 92% "recommend" on OpenCritic, a 9/10 from IGN and an "Overwhelmingly Positive" Steam rating within two weeks of launch.
Long tail: GameDiscoverCo's Simon Carless told GamesRadar it had sold at least 10 to 15 times its first-week numbers, calling that "incredibly rare compared to most games." Concurrent players grew nearly 260% in its second month.
Awards: Best Narrative and Players' Choice at the 2024 Horror Game Awards, Best Hidden Gem at the 2025 New York Game Awards, plus nominations at DICE, the GDC Awards and the Indie Game Awards, and an honorable mention for the IGF's Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
Social: Cosmic Book News reports Mouthwashing content has racked up nearly 1 billion TikTok views, and GamesRadar noted the soundtrack hit 1 million Spotify streams within a couple of months.

That last pair of numbers matters most. This game did not get big through a marketing budget. It got big through word of mouth, streamers, theory videos and fan art. That is the same pipeline that turned Five Nights at Freddy's into a movie franchise.

Analysis: Sony Is Betting on a Director, Not Just an IP

Video game horror adaptations have a messy record, and the comparisons here are useful. Blumhouse's Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) is the ceiling: made for $20 million, it opened to $80 million while streaming on Peacock the same day and finished at $297.2 million worldwide, despite a 33% Rotten Tomatoes score. The fanbase showed up no matter what. Sony's own Until Dawn (2025), made through Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions, is the cautionary tale: $54 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, a C+ CinemaScore, and a story that drifted far from the game. It was profitable, but nobody is calling it a franchise-starter. And Sony's Resident Evil run, which Engadget suggests the studio would love to repeat, proved game horror can carry a decade of sequels if the brand is strong enough.

Mouthwashing is a different animal from all three. FNAF had a decade of lore and a mascot-friendly PG-13 hook. Until Dawn and Resident Evil are built on set pieces and monsters. Mouthwashing has five people, one ship and a moral rot at the center of it. There is no monster to put on a poster. The scares are guilt, denial and the slow realization of what happened before the game began. That is why hiring Kusama is the smartest move here. A studio chasing a quick cash-in would have hired a commercial director and leaned on jump scares. Sony hired the person who made The Invitation , a movie that runs almost entirely on the audience reading a room.

It is also a statement about scale. The Invitation playbook is cheap: one location, small cast, maximum tension. A Mouthwashing movie could be made for a fraction of a tentpole budget, and with Crooked Highway's history of turning small horror budgets into nine-figure grosses, the math looks good even if it does not hit FNAF numbers.

The real risk is tone. The game handles grim material through implication, abstraction and its deliberately ugly low-poly look, which puts a strange distance between you and the worst of it. Live action removes that buffer. Lean too hard and it becomes punishing; soften it and the fans who made this game a hit will notice immediately. The other risk is the structure. So much of the game's power comes from its time jumps and the player slowly piecing together the truth, and that is hard to replicate when the audience is not holding the controller. Kusama and her writers have handled unreliable perspective and dreadful reveals before. This will be their biggest test of it.

What We Still Don't Know

Who is cast as Jimmy, Curly, Anya, Swansea and Daisuke. Fan casting has already started, and it will get loud.
Whether the film stays faithful to the game's plot or invents a new story set in the same world, the route Until Dawn took.
How involved Wrong Organ will be. Their public reaction suggests they are thrilled, but no creative role has been announced.
Whether this is Kusama's next feature, and when cameras roll. No production date has been set.
Rating. An R seems essential, but nothing is confirmed.

Bottom Line

This is the rare game adaptation announcement that inspires more excitement than dread. A cult hit built on guilt and silence is going to a director who specializes in exactly that, with writers who share her wavelength and producers who know how to sell quiet horror to a wide audience. The hard part is still ahead, but the people in charge are the right ones.

Your turn: can Mouthwashing work in live action, or is that low-poly look doing too much of the heavy lifting? And who's your Jimmy?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Karyn Kusama at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter , Deadline , iHorror , World of Reel , Engadget , Dark Horizons , Cosmic Book News , GamesRadar , Game Developer , Wikipedia (Mouthwashing) , Wikipedia (Karyn Kusama) , Wikipedia (Five Nights at Freddy's) , Wikipedia (Until Dawn) , Wikipedia (The Black Phone) .

Patrick Stewart Dies at 86: Remembering His Horror Legacy, From ‘Lifeforce’ to ‘Green Room’

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:50:15 GMT

Sir Patrick Stewart, the Yorkshire-born Shakespearean who became Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier for generations of fans, has died at 86. His longtime spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak, announced the news Thursday, October 29, in a statement shared on his social media, and Good Morning America reports he died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. According to the statement, he died "in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny" after a short final chapter with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, surrounded by family, friends and live music.

The headlines this week are rightly about the bridge of the Enterprise and the halls of Xavier's school. But The Horror Feed wants to talk about the other Patrick Stewart, the one who kept wandering into the dark: the scientist chasing space vampires in Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce , the ghost rattling chains in The Canterville Ghost , the blood-soaked king of a hospital-ward Macbeth , the man who was turned into the Borg's mouthpiece, and, best of all, the soft-spoken skinhead boss who made Green Room one of the most frightening films of the last decade. Here's what we know about his death, the career behind it, and why genre fans owe him more than a thank-you.

Watch: Patrick Stewart in Green Room

If you have only ever seen Stewart in a captain's chair or a wheelchair, start here. A24's official trailer for Jeremy Saulnier's punk-versus-neo-Nazi siege thriller shows how much menace he could pack into a calm voice.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What we know

Who: Sir Patrick Stewart, born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England.
When and where: He died Wednesday, October 28, at his home in Los Angeles, per Good Morning America. The death was announced Thursday, October 29.
Announced by: His spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak, via a statement on his social media accounts.
Cause: The family statement said he had Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia. ABC News notes it is unclear when he was diagnosed.
Survivors: His wife, Sunny Ozell, and his two children from his first marriage, Daniel Stewart and Sophie Alexandra Stewart.
Final role: Professor X in Marvel's Avengers: Doomsday , due in theaters December 18, 2026.

From Mirfield to the Royal Shakespeare Company

Stewart's path to Hollywood ran straight through the classics. ABC News, citing his Hollywood Walk of Fame biography, reports he left school at 15 to work in local theater. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and stayed a core member until 1982, appearing in productions including Macbeth , The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV . The RSC later named him an Honorary Associate Artist. His screen career began on British TV, including a 1967 appearance on Coronation Street , and he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on June 2, 2010.

That training is the key to everything that came later. Stewart treated pulp material with the same seriousness he gave Shakespeare, and that is exactly why so much of his genre work holds up. He never winked at the audience, whether he was facing a vampire, a cybernetic hive mind or a punk band locked in a green room.

The horror résumé you might have missed

Lifeforce (1985)

Before Picard, there was Dr. Armstrong. Stewart played the head of an English psychiatric facility in Tobe Hooper's gloriously unhinged Lifeforce , a Cannon Films production written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby from Colin Wilson's 1976 novel The Space Vampires . Cannon reportedly spent nearly $25 million on it, and the film earned just $11.6 million at the U.S. box office after its June 21, 1985 release. It has a 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, which badly undersells its status today as a cult object: a film where London collapses into a zombie apocalypse and Stewart delivers one of the most bizarre possession scenes of the decade with total commitment.

Photo: Tobe Hooper via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

The Borg: Star Trek's best horror story

Trek purists may wince, but the most important horror Stewart ever made was on television. In "The Best of Both Worlds," which aired June 18 and September 24, 1990, Picard is abducted and assimilated by the Borg, emerging as Locutus, a hollowed-out mouthpiece for a collective that erases the self. It is body horror and identity horror on a syndicated TV budget, and Stewart played it as a violation rather than a costume change. Six years later, Jonathan Frakes' Star Trek: First Contact (November 22, 1996) leaned all the way in, with Alice Krige's Borg Queen, dark corridors, and crew members being converted one by one. The film made $146 million worldwide on a $45 million budget, and it remains the most horror-forward entry the franchise ever produced.

The Canterville Ghost (1996) and Macbeth (2010)

Stewart got to play the haunting itself in ABC's The Canterville Ghost , which premiered January 27, 1996. He starred as Sir Simon de Canterville opposite a pre- Scream Neve Campbell in Sydney Macartney's take on the Oscar Wilde story, mixing gothic gloom with comedy. Fourteen years later he went much darker in Rupert Goold's Macbeth , adapted from Goold's 2007 Chichester Festival Theatre production, aired on BBC Four in December 2010 and on PBS's Great Performances in the U.S. Set in a cold, Eastern Bloc-style world, it recast the three witches as hospital nurses. To our eyes it plays as a horror film in all but name, and it is the closest thing we have to Stewart headlining a straight-up chiller.

Green Room (2016): the role that should have been the start of something

Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes on May 17, 2015, and A24 released it in the U.S. on April 15, 2016. Stewart, who joined the cast in October 2014, played Darcy Banker, the leader of a white-supremacist gang who runs a remote Pacific Northwest club and calmly organizes the murder of a punk band (Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole and Callum Turner) after they witness a killing. Made for $5 million, it grossed only $3.8 million, but it earned a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score from 250 reviews and a 79 on Metacritic.

Photo: Jeremy Saulnier via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

What makes the performance terrifying is how little Stewart changes. Darcy uses the same measured, reassuring cadence that made Picard and Xavier feel like the safest people in any room. Saulnier weaponized seven decades of audience trust. You keep waiting for the decent man to surface, and he never does. It is the kind of against-type casting horror does better than any other genre, and it is a little heartbreaking that nobody gave him three more roles like it.

The franchises that made him a household name

None of this diminishes the work everyone else is talking about this week. Stewart was cast as Jean-Luc Picard in 1987 and led Star Trek: The Next Generation for seven seasons through 1994, then four feature films and, starting in 2020, Star Trek: Picard . In 2000 he became Professor Charles Xavier in Fox's X-Men , a role he would carry across more than two decades. The darkest of those appearances, James Mangold's Logan (March 3, 2017), showed an aging Xavier whose failing mind had become a danger to everyone around him. It grossed $619.2 million worldwide and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Stewart's frail, frightened, furious Charles remains one of the bravest late-career performances in any blockbuster. He went on to play another version of Xavier in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), a Sam Raimi film that was itself half a horror movie.

He also published a memoir, Making It So , in 2023, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1996, and spent years as an outspoken advocate for survivors of domestic violence, refugees, veterans' mental health and LGBTQ+ equality.

How Hollywood is remembering him

Tributes poured in within hours. Ian McKellen, his friend since their RSC days and his on-screen rival-turned-brother as Magneto, posted a long remembrance that included the line "He wore his heart on his sleeve," and noted that Stewart's farewell performance is still to come in Avengers: Doomsday . Hugh Jackman called him one of the great talents of stage and screen. Jonathan Frakes said there was no one he had acted with or directed more often. LeVar Burton described him as family, and Wil Wheaton and William Shatner both sent him off with a version of "Godspeed, Captain." Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, the Russo brothers, Picard showrunner Terry Matalas, Seth MacFarlane, George Takei and the Royal Shakespeare Company all added their own tributes.

Why it matters for horror

Horror has a long tradition of borrowing gravitas from classically trained actors. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee built Hammer's world on it. Donald Pleasence gave Halloween its doom-prophet. Anthony Hopkins turned Hannibal Lecter into an Oscar. Stewart belongs in that line, even if he visited the genre less often than fans would have liked. His horror box office was rarely kind, and both Lifeforce and Green Room lost money in theaters, but the films have outlived their opening weekends because his performances give them weight.

The bigger lesson is about casting. Green Room proved that the most frightening thing a horror film can do with a beloved actor is take away the comfort we expect from him. Today's genre filmmakers keep finding that, from prestige stars in A24 nightmares to sitcom favorites in slashers. Stewart did it a decade ago, in his mid-70s, and made it look effortless.

This has also been a heavy few weeks for the genre. Stewart's death follows the losses of Alien 's Tom Skerritt, Audition author Ryū Murakami and The Changeling director Peter Medak, all within days of each other. It's a reminder to go back and watch the work while we're talking about it.

What's next

Stewart's final screen appearance arrives December 18 in Avengers: Doomsday , where Marvel has confirmed he returns as Xavier. Expect retrospective screenings and streaming bumps for The Next Generation , Logan and, we hope, Green Room . Details about memorial plans have not been announced.

Bottom line

Patrick Stewart spent his life making strange material feel important, and horror was lucky every time he chose to visit. Our suggestion for this Halloween weekend: double-feature Lifeforce and Green Room and watch the same actor go from chasing monsters to being one. Which Patrick Stewart genre performance scared you most: Locutus, Darcy, or something else? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Patrick Stewart by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: ABC News , Good Morning America , The A.V. Club , Variety , Bloody Disgusting , Wikipedia: Patrick Stewart , Green Room , Lifeforce , Star Trek: First Contact , The Best of Both Worlds , Macbeth (2010) , The Canterville Ghost (1996) , Logan .

Peter Medak, Director of ‘The Changeling,’ Dies at 88: Remembering a Master of Quiet Horror

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 22:53:19 GMT

Peter Medak, the Hungarian-born director who gave horror one of its most quietly devastating ghost stories with The Changeling , has died. He was 88. His family confirmed he died peacefully on Tuesday, Oct. 27, in Los Angeles, according to reports first published by Variety and picked up across the trades. No cause of death has been made public.

If you only know one Medak film, it's probably the one with the red rubber ball bouncing down the stairs. But his career ran for more than six decades and 27 films, from swinging-London black comedies to gangster epics to some of the most celebrated hours of prestige TV ever made, including Breaking Bad , The Wire and NBC's Hannibal . Here's what we know about his death, the life that led to The Changeling , why that film still terrifies people 46 years later, and how to watch it this Halloween weekend.

Watch: The Changeling

We couldn't find an official trailer for The Changeling on a rights-holder's YouTube channel, and we don't embed fan uploads. The film's original trailer and TV spot are included as extras on Severin Films' 4K UHD release, alongside Medak's own audio commentary, which is the best way to hear the story of the film from the man who made it.

What We Know About His Death

Died: Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, in Los Angeles, at 88.
Confirmed by: his family, who said he died peacefully.
Cause: not disclosed.
Survivors: four children, Christopher, Cornelia, Joshua and Karen, and five grandchildren.

Tributes started almost immediately. Malcolm McDowell, a friend for decades, wrote on Instagram, "One of my oldest and dearest friends, Peter Medak, has left us." Anderson Entertainment, the company behind the Gerry Anderson archive, remembered him as a veteran whose career crossed genres and continents, a nod to the two Space: 1999 episodes he directed in 1976.

Malcolm McDowell, a longtime friend of Medak's, was among the first to pay tribute. Photo: Malcolm McDowell via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

From Budapest to Borehamwood

Medak was born Péter Medák in Budapest on Dec. 23, 1937, to a Jewish family; his father, Gyula, was a textile manufacturer. The family survived World War II in hiding in Budapest, and his father was later imprisoned under the Communist government. In 1956, at 18, Medak fled Hungary during the uprising and landed in England with no film credits and no connections.

He worked his way up the old-fashioned way. He started at the Associated British Picture Corporation studio in Borehamwood as an assistant editor and assistant cameraman, then became a first assistant director. Horror fans will appreciate that his early assistant credits include two Hammer pictures, The Phantom of the Opera and Captain Clegg , both from 1962. Universal signed him in 1963, and he reportedly spent his first six months there watching Alfred Hitchcock work. Paramount signed him for features in 1967.

Before features took over, he was a busy British TV director, guest-helming ITC series like Strange Report and The Persuaders! , and later the Space: 1999 episodes "Space Warp" and "The Séance Spectre."

The Films: Black Comedy, Gangsters and Ghosts

Medak's feature debut, Negatives (1968), starred Glenda Jackson. He followed it with two of the sharpest British films of the early '70s: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972), with Alan Bates and Janet Suzman, and The Ruling Class (1972), a savage satire that played in competition at Cannes and earned Peter O'Toole a Best Actor Oscar nomination as an aristocrat who believes he is God.

Then came the famous disaster. Ghost in the Noonday Sun , a pirate comedy with Peter Sellers shot in Cyprus in 1973, went so badly that it sat unreleased until 1985. Medak told the Directors Guild in 2007 it was "probably the biggest nightmare of my life," and he turned that nightmare into a documentary decades later, The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018). It is one of the rare cases of a filmmaker turning his own worst experience into honest, funny, painful film history.

After The Changeling (more on that below), he made the Zorro spoof Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981), and then delivered his second great run in Britain: The Krays (1990), with Spandau Ballet's Gary and Martin Kemp as the twin gangsters, which won him the Evening Standard British Film Award for best director, and Let Him Have It (1991), with a young Christopher Eccleston. In the U.S. he made the neo-noir Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) with Gary Oldman and, for genre fans, Species II (1998), the MGM sci-fi horror sequel.

The Changeling: Why It Still Works

Here's the part people forget: Medak wasn't supposed to direct The Changeling . He was the third director on the project, after Donald Cammell and Tony Richardson both walked over creative differences. He reportedly had roughly a month to rework the script and get sets built before cameras rolled on Dec. 4, 1978. Shooting wrapped on Feb. 25, 1979.

The story, credited to playwright Russell Hunter and scripted by William Gray and Diana Maddox, follows composer John Russell (George C. Scott), who moves into a huge Seattle-area mansion after his wife and daughter are killed in an accident, and finds that the house has been waiting for someone to listen. Trish Van Devere, Scott's real-life wife, plays Claire Norman of the local historical society, and Melvyn Douglas plays a powerful senator whose connection to the house is the film's slow-burning secret. John Colicos and Jean Marsh round out the cast.

Trish Van Devere, who played Claire Norman in The Changeling and won a Genie for it. Photo: Trish Van Devere via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Hunter claimed the story was based on things he experienced in the late 1960s while living in the Henry Treat Rogers mansion in Denver's Cheesman Park. That claim has never held up well: the Denver Public Library has no record of Hunter living there, and local historian Phil Goodstein couldn't find the wealthy family the story hinges on. The mansion itself was demolished in the 1980s. Whether it happened or not, the legend is part of the film's power, and Severin later devoted a whole featurette to it.

Although set in Seattle, the film was shot mostly in British Columbia. Vancouver's Hotel Europe stood in for the historical society, Hatley Castle at Royal Roads in Victoria played the senator's estate, and the haunted house was a facade built on a lot in Vancouver's Oakridge neighborhood, with interiors on stages at Panorama Film Studios in West Vancouver. Fun trivia: a seven-month-old Joshua Jackson made his first screen appearance in the film; his mother, Fiona Jackson, was an assistant director.

What makes it work is what Medak refused to do. There's almost no gore. The scares are a wheelchair, a ball, a séance, a tap that runs by itself and a long camera move up a staircase toward a sealed room. Scott plays grief straight, not as a plot device, and Medak lets scenes breathe until the silence turns hostile. It's a haunted house movie made by a director whose strongest earlier work was about class and power, and that's exactly what the ghost turns out to be about.

By the Numbers

$6.6 million: The Changeling's budget.
$12 million: its box office, making it the highest-grossing Canadian production of 1980.
264: investors who bought $25,000 shares to finance it, and came out with a profit.
8: Genie Awards won, including Best Motion Picture, Best Foreign Actor for Scott, Best Foreign Actress for Van Devere, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography.
11: the length of Martin Scorsese's list of the scariest horror films ever made. The Changeling is on it.
27: films Medak directed over a career that ran more than six decades.

The film premiered at the USA Film Festival in Dallas on March 26, 1980, and opened in the U.S. and Canada two days later. For context, 1980 was the year of Friday the 13th and The Shining . Medak's film had neither a franchise killer nor a Kubrick budget, and it still became the ghost story a generation of filmmakers cite.

The TV Director Hollywood Trusted With Its Best Shows

Medak's second act might be his most influential. He directed episodes of The Twilight Zone revival in the mid-'80s, Tales from the Crypt , Homicide: Life on the Street , two first-season episodes of The Wire in 2002, HBO's Carnivàle , House and Showtime's Masters of Horror . In 2009 he directed "Peekaboo," the sixth episode of Breaking Bad 's second season, still one of the show's most uncomfortable hours. And for Bryan Fuller's Hannibal he directed two episodes, "Œuf" in season 1 and "Hassun" in season 2.

That list matters for horror because it shows how his approach traveled. Patience, performance and dread over shock is basically the house style of modern prestige horror TV, and Medak was doing it in 1980 with a ball and a staircase.

What It Means: The Changeling's Long Shadow

The obvious comparison is The Haunting (1963), Robert Wise's black-and-white classic that proved you could terrify people without showing them anything. The Changeling is that film's most direct heir, and you can trace a straight line from it to the modern grief-haunting boom: the slow, sad houses of The Others (2001), James Wan's séance set pieces in The Conjuring (2013), and Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House (2018), which treats ghosts as unfinished family business. A child's unsolved death driving a haunting, a historian helping the living dig up the truth, a powerful man protecting a buried secret: the template is so familiar now that it's easy to forget someone had to build it.

The film's reputation has only grown. Severin Films gave it a limited Blu-ray in 2018 and a 4K UHD in 2022, built from a 4K scan of the internegative, with roughly four and a half hours of extras: a commentary by Medak and producer Joel B. Michaels, a 2018 Mórbido Fest interview with Medak, a featurette on the Cheesman Park legend, and a segment with Mick Garris. That a boutique label lavished that much on a 1980 Canadian ghost story says a lot about where it sits in the canon.

There's also been remake talk. In 2018 a new version was set up with Michaels producing and Mark Steven Johnson attached to direct, with the story moved to Venice. By 2020, Anders Engström had replaced Johnson, the setting had shifted to Ireland, and Tab Murphy was writing what he called a reimagining. No new movement has been reported since, and nothing has been announced in the wake of Medak's death.

What's Next

No memorial or funeral details have been announced. Expect repertory theaters and streaming services to give The Changeling a fresh push, and with Halloween this weekend, the timing is almost too fitting. If you've never seen it, this is the weekend. If you have, watch it again and pay attention to how little Medak actually shows you.

Bottom Line

Peter Medak escaped a revolution at 18, talked his way onto British film sets, survived one of the most notorious productions of the 1970s, and then made a ghost story so patient and so sad that filmmakers are still borrowing from it more than four decades later. Horror lost a craftsman this week, and one who never needed a jump scare to make you check the stairs.

What's the scariest moment in The Changeling for you: the ball on the stairs, the séance or the wheelchair? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: George C. Scott, star of The Changeling, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. No freely licensed photo of Peter Medak was available.

Sources: The Daily Beast , iHorror , Dread Central , BANG Showbiz via Yahoo News UK , Anderson Entertainment , Budapest Reporter , Variety , Rue Morgue , Wikipedia: The Changeling , Wikipedia: Peter Medak .

Opinion: Hollywood Found Horror’s Future on YouTube. Stop Handing Them Reboots.

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:50:57 GMT

Today, two days before Halloween, the director of the biggest original horror movie of the decade is putting out his newest scary story the same way he put out his first ones: free, on YouTube, to anyone with a phone. Curry Barker's short Mama Bear premieres on YouTube on October 29, made in partnership with Windows. It comes with, as Dread Central put it, "just a title and the promise of something new before Halloween." It is the most Curry Barker move possible, and it lands six months after Hollywood handed him the keys to a 52-year-old chainsaw.

Here's my take, and I'll defend it all the way down: YouTube is now the most reliable source of new horror filmmakers in the business, and the industry's first instinct with every one of them is to point them at somebody else's franchise. That instinct is backwards. The whole reason these filmmakers are worth hundreds of millions is that they made things nobody asked for. If studios want the next Obsession , they have to stop treating that kind of talent as a cheap way to reboot The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .

The Scoreboard Doesn't Lie

Look at what came out of YouTube in the last twelve months alone. Obsession , which Barker wrote, directed and edited, cost at most $750,000. It premiered in TIFF's Midnight Madness section on September 5, 2025, Focus Features grabbed it for a reported $14 million to $15 million (the most ever paid for a genre film at TIFF), and it opened May 15, 2026. It started with a modest $17.2 million, good for third place, then actually grew 39% in its second weekend. It has now made roughly $520 million worldwide, including about $263 million domestic. It's Focus Features' biggest film ever, the top-grossing festival acquisition of all time (passing The Blair Witch Project ), and it holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes with an A- CinemaScore.

Two weeks after Obsession opened, A24 released Backrooms , the feature version of the web series Kane Parsons started uploading to his Kane Pixels channel in January 2022. Made for under $10 million with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, it opened to $81.5 million domestic on May 29 and had reached $394.1 million worldwide by late August, with an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. Film Stories calls it the most successful movie in A24's history. Parsons is 20 years old.

And back in January, Mark Fischbach, the YouTuber the internet knows as Markiplier, put out Iron Lung himself. No studio. He planned on roughly 60 independent theaters, fans demanded more, and it opened on 4,161 screens worldwide, eventually earning about $51.2 million on a budget reported at $3 million (Fischbach says closer to $4 million to $5 million). He even pressed the discs himself.

That's three movies, three very different routes to theaters, and more than $960 million combined from creators who learned the craft uploading videos. No other farm system in horror is producing numbers like that right now. Not festivals, not film schools, not the shorts circuit.

Can't see the video? Watch the official Obsession teaser from Focus Features on YouTube.

This Pipeline Is Older Than You Think

None of this is brand new, which is exactly why the pattern deserves a hard look. In 2013, David F. Sandberg and his wife, Lotta Losten, made a short called Lights Out for a film competition. It didn't win. It did spread across the internet, agents came calling, and James Wan's team helped turn it into a 2016 feature for New Line that cost $4.9 million and made $148.9 million worldwide.

Then look at what Sandberg got to do next: Annabelle: Creation (a franchise spinoff), Shazam! and Shazam! Fury of the Gods (superhero films), and Until Dawn (a video game adaptation). Talented work, every bit of it. But after the second Shazam! in 2023, Sandberg said publicly that he was done with superheroes and wanted to get back to horror. It took a filmmaker with a proven original voice about a decade to get away from other people's IP, and he still landed on a game adaptation.

Photo: David F. Sandberg by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian brothers behind the RackaRacka channel, are the other cautionary tale. Talk to Me cost $4.5 million and made about $92.2 million worldwide for A24 in 2023. Within weeks, in August 2023, a sequel called Talk 2 Me was in the works, and the brothers were also being linked to a Street Fighter movie. To their enormous credit, they made the original Bring Her Back next instead. It cost $15 million and opened to about $7 million in late May 2025. Smaller than Talk to Me , yes. But it was theirs, and it proved they weren't a one-trick séance.

Now Look Where Curry Barker Is Being Pointed

On April 21, 2026, weeks before Obsession even hit theaters, Variety reported that A24 had hired Barker to direct a reimagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre . A24 won the franchise rights in a heated 2025 bidding fight. Original co-writer Kim Henkel is an executive producer, Roy Lee and Steven Schneider are producing, and it's actually A24's second Leatherface project: a TV series from Glen Powell's Barnstorm with JT Mollner directing is also in development. Mollner, tellingly, has said he doesn't want to remake the original because he considers it perfect.

The last time anyone tried, it went badly. Netflix's 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre , the franchise's ninth film, sits at 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. Barker's would be the tenth. The single most valuable new voice in horror, whose film made half a billion dollars out of a story nobody had heard before, is spending prime years of his career on a property that has been remade, rebooted, prequeled and requeled since 1974.

Kane Parsons' trajectory is drifting the same way, just inside his own world. In September, Dread Central reported Parsons will direct Backrooms 2 next for A24, reportedly under a deal worth around $65 million. A planned collaboration with Longlegs filmmaker Osgood Perkins, with Perkins writing and Parsons directing, now sounds like it has been pushed back. A sequel to your own creation is a lot less troubling than a 50-year-old reboot. Still, the brand-new idea just moved to the back of the line.

Can't see the video? Watch A24's official Backrooms trailer on YouTube.

Why YouTube Makes Better Original Horror

It's worth being specific about why this pipeline works, because it explains why the reboot instinct wastes it. YouTube horror filmmakers learn in public, at volume, with instant feedback. Barker and his creative partner Cooper Tomlinson have run the sketch channel That's a Bad Idea since 2017, building it to about 1.6 million subscribers while Barker worked at Starbucks. His 2023 horror short The Chair pulled more than 10 million views. His first feature, Milk & Serial , cost $800, spent a year without a distributor, and only found its audience when he posted it free.

Can't see the video? Watch Milk & Serial free on the That's a Bad Idea channel.

That is a filmmaker who was trained by an audience, not by notes from a franchise steward. The same goes for Parsons, who built the Backrooms mythology episode by episode while viewers picked apart every frame, and for Fischbach, who has spent more than a decade learning exactly what makes his audience lean in. What these people are uniquely good at is building something from nothing and making strangers care about it. Rebooting Leatherface uses almost none of that skill. It uses their marketability.

The economics point the same way. Studios love IP because it feels safe. But no reboot in recent memory has delivered anything like a 690-to-1 return on budget. The originals are the safe bet now. Obsession and Backrooms together made more than $900 million on combined budgets of under $11 million. The franchises are the gamble.

The Other Side

The fair counterargument is a strong one, so let's give it room. First, nobody is forcing Barker to do anything. He signed on to Texas Chain Saw , and filmmakers have every right to want to play with the toys that scared them as kids. Some of the best horror ever made is a remake: John Carpenter's The Thing , David Cronenberg's The Fly . A filmmaker with Barker's sense of dread might make the first Leatherface movie in decades that actually matters.

Second, he isn't only doing IP. Anything But Ghosts , his original horror-comedy with Tomlinson, hits theaters through Focus on May 7, 2027, and in June he signed on to write, direct and produce another original horror film for Universal. Third, the YouTube pipeline isn't a guaranteed hit machine. Iron Lung sits at 59% on Rotten Tomatoes. Chris Stuckmann's Shelby Oaks , funded by a record-setting Kickstarter of about $1.39 million from 14,720 backers, earned around $8.1 million worldwide after Neon released it in October 2025, with a 55% critics score. Studios aren't wrong to want a recognizable title as insurance when a creator's fanbase doesn't automatically become a ticket-buying audience.

All true. But that argument is about individual choices, and mine is about the pattern. When the reward for making the most successful original horror film of the decade is a reboot offer before your movie even opens, the industry is telling every 19-year-old uploading shorts tonight what it actually values. That message matters more than any single movie.

What Studios Should Do Instead

Here's the fix, and it isn't complicated. Give YouTube-trained filmmakers original-first deals: two original features before anyone mentions a franchise. Give them the budgets the Philippous got for Bring Her Back , not blockbuster money that comes with blockbuster notes. Let them keep their channels alive as testing grounds, the way Barker is doing with Mama Bear today. And when a sequel makes sense, let it be a sequel to something they invented, the way Backrooms 2 at least is.

Because the next Obsession is probably already online right now, sitting at 40,000 views, made by somebody who has never been inside a studio. The question is whether they'll get to make their second idea, or whether they'll be handed someone else's first one.

Bottom Line

YouTube has become horror's best talent scout, and 2026 proved it with real money: about half a billion for Obsession , nearly $400 million for Backrooms , and a self-distributed Iron Lung that cleared $50 million without a studio. Pointing those filmmakers at Texas Chain Saw reboots might produce a good movie. It will almost certainly produce fewer great new ones. I'd rather watch Curry Barker's fifth original idea than his take on Leatherface, and I'll be watching Mama Bear tonight to remind myself why.

Now tell us we're wrong: would you rather see Curry Barker's Texas Chain Saw Massacre or a brand-new Barker original nobody has heard of yet?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central (Mama Bear) , Obsession box office and release history , Curry Barker career overview , TheWrap , Fangoria (Texas Chain Saw) , Film Stories , Backrooms box office , TheWrap (Backrooms trailer) , Iron Lung box office , Talk to Me box office , JoBlo (Talk 2 Me) , Fangoria (Bring Her Back) , Lights Out , David F. Sandberg , Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) , Shelby Oaks .

‘Smile 3’ Lands ‘Hellraiser’ Director David Bruckner and ‘Channel Zero’ Creator Nick Antosca: Everything We Know

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:49:31 GMT

The smile is getting a new face behind the camera. Paramount is moving forward with Smile 3 , and for the first time the franchise won't be directed by its creator. According to Variety , which broke the news on Wednesday, Oct. 28, David Bruckner, the filmmaker behind The Ritual , The Night House and Hulu's 2022 Hellraiser , will direct the third chapter from a script by Nick Antosca, the writer-showrunner behind Channel Zero , The Act and Apple's new Cape Fear series.

Parker Finn, who wrote and directed both Smile and Smile 2 , isn't walking away. He's staying on as a producer and reportedly pitched the framework the new film is built on, while he's busy directing Paramount's remake of Possession . Below we break down everything confirmed, who these two filmmakers are, how the first two films performed, why this handoff is smarter than it might look, and the questions still hanging over the most unsettling grin in modern horror.

Watch the Smile 2 trailer

There's no Smile 3 footage yet (cameras haven't rolled), so here's a refresher on where the curse left off: Paramount's official trailer for Smile 2 .

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The details: what's actually confirmed

Here's what the trade reporting has locked down so far:

Director: David Bruckner.
Writer: Nick Antosca, working from a pitch by Parker Finn.
Producers: Parker Finn and Temple Hill Entertainment, the company that has produced the series since the start. Jonathan Fass is executive producer.
Studio: Paramount Pictures, home of both previous films.
Release date, cast, plot, budget: none announced.

That last line matters. Nobody has said whether Naomi Scott's pop star Skye Riley, Sosie Bacon's Dr. Rose Cotter or Kyle Gallner's cop Joel (the one actor besides Caitlin Stasey to appear in more than one entry so far) will be back. Several outlets are describing this as the film that completes a trilogy, but Paramount hasn't used that word officially, so treat it as framing rather than fact.

Who's behind it

David Bruckner, director

If you've been watching indie horror for the last 15 years, you've seen Bruckner's work even if you didn't clock his name. The Atlanta-raised filmmaker co-directed the 2007 indie The Signal , which earned an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award nomination, then made one of the most talked-about segments in anthology horror: "Amateur Night" in 2012's V/H/S . It was popular enough to be spun into the feature Siren . He followed with "The Accident" in Southbound and has stayed in the V/H/S family as a producer and story contributor, directing the "Total Copy" wraparound in V/H/S/85 .

His features are where the Smile fit really shows. The Ritual (2017), adapted from Adam Nevill's novel and released by Netflix, turned a hiking trip into folk-horror grief therapy. The Night House premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and, after pandemic delays, reached theaters via Searchlight on Aug. 20, 2021. Starring Rebecca Hall as a widow unraveling in her late husband's lakeside house, it holds an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 68 on Metacritic, and earned about $15.5 million worldwide on a $12 million budget. Then came Hellraiser , the October 2022 Hulu Original reboot that cast Jamie Clayton as the first female Pinhead. It landed at 67% on Rotten Tomatoes and 55 on Metacritic, and a sequel was confirmed to be in the works with Bruckner in March 2024.

Reporting on the hire also lists a busy slate: a The Blob remake at Warner Bros., a Universal adaptation of The Caretaker starring Sydney Sweeney, and Mice at A24. Where Smile 3 lands in that queue is one of the bigger open questions.

Photo: Naomi Scott via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Nick Antosca, writer

Antosca might be the more exciting half of this pairing. He created and ran Syfy's Channel Zero (2016-2018), the anthology that turned creepypasta like "Candle Cove" into some of the strangest horror TV of the decade. He co-wrote three episodes of Hannibal 's third season, co-created Hulu's The Act and Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor , created Peacock's A Friend of the Family , executive produced Syfy's Chucky , and this year created Apple TV's Cape Fear . On the film side, 2021's Antlers was based on his short story "The Quiet Boy," and he's credited on this year's Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity . He's also a Shirley Jackson Award winner, taking Best Novella in 2009 for Midnight Picnic .

The through line in his work is psychological rot: people whose minds, families and identities are being eaten from the inside. That's exactly what the Smile entity does.

Parker Finn, producer

Finn built this franchise from an 11-minute short, Laura Hasn't Slept , which played SXSW in March 2020 with Caitlin Stasey as a patient haunted by a grinning man. Paramount turned it into a feature, signed Finn to a first-look deal in March 2023, and announced Smile 2 at CinemaCon a month later. His company Bad Feeling is now producing his Possession remake, which stars Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley alongside Paul Dano, Diego Calva, Madeline Brewer, Emory Cohen and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, with Robert Pattinson among the producers. Paramount has it dated for June 11, 2027.

The backstory: a strange history, and an old connection

The Smile story nearly never happened in theaters. Paramount originally planned the first film for streaming, but strong test screenings pushed it to a theatrical release on Sept. 30, 2022. It opened at No. 1 with roughly $22.6 million domestic and was widely described as the highest-grossing original horror film of 2022. Smile 2 followed on Oct. 18, 2024, moving the curse from a therapist's office to a stadium tour, with Scott as Skye Riley, Lukas Gage, Rosemarie DeWitt and a Drew Barrymore cameo.

Talk of a third film started almost immediately. In September 2024 Finn said each entry could get more unhinged than the last, and by December 2024 reports had Smile 3 in development with a 2025 shoot in mind. That shoot didn't happen, and Finn's attention turned to Possession . The new hires explain the gap: Paramount has kept Finn's blueprint and handed the execution to two filmmakers with deep genre résumés.

Here's the fun footnote. Bruckner and Antosca have been paired by Paramount on a horror franchise before. Antosca was hired to write the studio's Friday the 13th reboot in 2014, Bruckner was set to direct, and the film was dated for May 13, 2016. Both left before production, with Bruckner's exit reported in late 2015, and that version never got made. A decade later, the same studio is betting on the same duo for a different killer brand.

By the numbers

Smile (2022): $17 million budget, $105.9 million domestic, $217.4 million worldwide. 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, 68 on Metacritic, B- CinemaScore.
Smile 2 (2024): $28 million budget, opened No. 1 with about $23 million, $69 million domestic, $138.1 million worldwide. 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, 67 on Metacritic, B CinemaScore.
Franchise total: about $355.5 million worldwide on $45 million in combined production budgets.

The headline is that the sequel made roughly 36% less than the original worldwide while costing 65% more to produce, and it still earned nearly five times its budget. Critics actually liked it a bit more (86% vs. 80%), and audiences graded it higher. That's the profile of a franchise with a loyal core rather than a fading one: smaller, but very profitable.

Analysis: why this handoff makes sense

Losing the creator's hands on the camera is usually where horror franchises start to wobble. But the comparisons cut both ways. Insidious stayed healthy after James Wan stepped back to produce, with Leigh Whannell, Adam Robitel and Patrick Wilson taking turns in the director's chair. The Conjuring universe has thrived on handing spinoffs and sequels to new directors with Wan producing. The franchises that fell apart, think the later Paranormal Activity run, usually did so because the studio swapped in anonymous hired hands and a stale formula, not because the creator left.

This isn't that. Bruckner is a filmmaker with a distinct voice, and his best work is about the exact theme Smile runs on: trauma that follows you, warps your perception and won't let you trust your own mind. The Night House in particular, with its grief, its haunted perspective tricks and its dread of what's hiding in plain sight, plays like a cousin of the first Smile . He's also proven he can steer a legacy property without embarrassing it; Hellraiser wasn't a smash, but it was widely seen as the strongest entry the series had produced in decades.

Antosca brings something the series could use: an eye for how a horror premise plays across people and institutions. Finn's films have been tightly locked on one cursed protagonist each. Antosca's TV work is built on wider canvases, families, towns, true-crime ecosystems. If Paramount wants the third film to feel bigger without just being louder, that's the right instinct to hire.

The risk is the box office trend line. Smile 2 was more ambitious and better reviewed, yet it made less. A third entry needs a hook that brings back casual viewers, not just fans. The smart money is on Finn's framework doing what Smile 2 did with the pop tour: drop the curse into a fresh, very public pressure cooker. And with Finn's Possession landing in June 2027, Paramount suddenly has two horror tracks running off the same creative engine, which is the real strategy here.

What we still don't know

When it shoots and opens. No production start or release date. Bruckner's slate is crowded, so the order of his projects matters.
Who comes back. No word on Naomi Scott, Kyle Gallner or any returning character.
What Finn's framework is. Finn has teased that the first two films barely scratched the surface of the entity's mythology, but no plot is public.
Theatrical or streaming. The first two were big October theatrical plays, but nobody has said how Paramount will release this one.

The next confirmed date on this creative family's calendar is June 11, 2027, when Possession hits theaters. Expect casting news on Smile 3 to come first.

Bottom line

Smile 3 just got a director whose whole career is about minds coming apart and a writer who's spent a decade making TV that gets under your skin. With Finn still steering the story from the producer's chair, this is about as safe a handoff as a horror franchise gets. Now the curse has to pick its next host.

Who do you want to see haunted in Smile 3 : a brand-new victim, or should Naomi Scott's Skye Riley come back? Tell us on Facebook.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: David Bruckner via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Variety , The Hollywood Reporter , Bloody Disgusting , FilmoFilia , MEAWW , TheWrap , Fangoria , Smile film series (box office and reviews) , David Bruckner , Nick Antosca , The Night House , Hellraiser (2022) .

‘Halloween’ Icon Danielle Harris Gets Her Own Documentary: The Teaser, the Team and Everything We Know

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:49:45 GMT

She was 11 years old the first time Michael Myers came for her. Before she was old enough to drive, Danielle Harris had survived Halloween 4 and Halloween 5 , and in the decades since she has become one of the few horror performers who can claim a place in two separate eras of the same franchise. Now, three days before Halloween, the woman who played Jamie Lloyd is getting the thing scream queens almost never get: a feature-length documentary about her own life.

Deranged Minds Entertainment announced the untitled film on Tuesday, October 27, with an exclusive in Variety and a 29-second teaser on YouTube. The directors spent three years following Harris, and the pitch makes clear this is not a nostalgia reel of convention panels. Below we break down everything confirmed, the people making it, Harris's four decades in horror by the numbers, and why a documentary like this could matter more than another legacy-sequel cameo.

Watch the Teaser

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The official teaser was posted by Deranged Minds Entertainment on October 27, 2026, under the tagline "Meet the woman who outran the monsters."

The Details: Everything Confirmed So Far

Title: None yet. The teaser and the YouTube upload simply call it the Danielle Harris documentary.
Directors: Destinie Orndoff and Tristan Clay, who also produce.
Producers: Orndoff, Clay, Hayden Todd Wilberger and Jordan Wyant, under the Deranged Minds Entertainment banner.
Shooting period: Roughly three years, with cameras following Harris at home, on film sets in Los Angeles and across the fan-convention circuit.
What's in it: Archival footage, private home video never shown publicly, and interviews with Harris, her family, friends and collaborators.
Status: In post-production.
Release: A festival run is planned for 2027. No distributor is attached; the company says it is taking distribution inquiries directly.

The official synopsis, as reported by Dread Central and iHorror , goes well beyond the screen. Alongside her years as a child actor working with Bruce Willis and Roseanne Barr, the film addresses several painful chapters of Harris's private life: the death of her father in a car accident that was never solved, the loss of a former partner and a close friend to suicide, a stalker who followed her for about two decades, and a pregnancy complication serious enough that her heart stopped. The filmmakers are billing it as the first documentary ever made about her life and career.

Orndoff's pitch is that audiences who grew up with Harris only know the performer, and that they've "never seen what it cost her," as she told Variety. Clay, for his part, said the three years of filming let him get to know the woman behind the roles, and that he's eager for viewers to meet that version of her.

Who's Behind It

Orndoff and Clay are not established names in the documentary world, and that's worth being upfront about. Deranged Minds Entertainment is an independent outfit, the teaser lives on its own YouTube channel, and updates are being pushed through a fan-facing Instagram account, @danielleharris.hq. That scrappy setup is common for genre docs, many of which start life on the festival and convention circuit before a streamer or boutique label picks them up.

What the team does have is access, and in this kind of film, access is everything. Three years with a subject, including home video and family interviews, is the kind of commitment that separates a real portrait from a highlight package. The real test will be whether the finished film handles the hard material with care and gives Harris room to tell it in her own words.

The Backstory: Four Decades of Running From Monsters

The kid who saved the franchise

Born June 1, 1977, Harris was already a working actor before horror found her. According to SlashFilm , she joined the soap One Life to Live in 1985 at age 7. Her feature debut came as Jamie Lloyd, Laurie Strode's orphaned daughter, in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). She has said in past interviews that the audition came down to whether she could scream and cry on cue. She returned for Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers a year later.

Those films matter to the franchise's survival. After the Michael-free Halloween III , part 4 brought the Shape back and handed the emotional weight to a child, and Harris's performance is a big reason it works.

The sequel she walked away from

The most famous "what if" of her career is Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). As her Wikipedia biography and SlashFilm both lay out, the producers wanted an adult in the role, so a teenage Harris went through legal emancipation to be eligible. She ultimately passed: the offer was reportedly around union scale for a week of work, Jamie was killed early in the script, and she objected to the storyline built around the character. J.C. Brandy took over the role.

The comeback

The 1990s kept her busy outside horror: Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead , The Last Boy Scout , Free Willy , Daylight , a recurring role on Roseanne and the voice of Debbie on The Wild Thornberrys . She came back to the genre as Tosh in Urban Legend (1998), then did something almost no franchise alum has done: she returned to Halloween as a different character. Rotten Tomatoes reported in January 2007 that Rob Zombie had cast her as Annie Brackett in his remake, which opened August 31 that year. She played Annie again in Halloween II (2009).

Scream queen, then director

From there Harris became a fixture of 2010s indie horror: Marybeth Dunston in Hatchet II (2010) and Hatchet III (2013) with a cameo in Victor Crowley (2017), Belle in Jim Mickle's Stake Land , and See No Evil 2 (2014). She moved behind the camera too, directing the short "Madison" and then her first feature, the dark comedy Among Friends , released in 2013. Her latest, Last Chance Motel , which she co-directed with fellow Zombie Halloween alum Scout Taylor-Compton and also stars in, is in post-production. The two also co-host the horror podcast Talk Scary to Me .

Scout Taylor-Compton, Harris's Halloween (2007) co-star and her co-director on Last Chance Motel . Photo: Scout Taylor-Compton via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

By the Numbers

$17.8 million: domestic gross for Halloween 4 (1988) on a $5 million budget, per The Numbers .
$11.6 million: domestic gross for Halloween 5 (1989) on a $6 million budget, after a $5.1 million opening.
$58.3 million: domestic gross for Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007), per Boxoffice Pro , the series' top domestic earner until the 2018 reboot.
$33.4 million: domestic gross for Halloween II (2009).
4 films in the Halloween series, as two different characters, across 21 years.
3 years of filming for the documentary, with a 2027 festival target.

Put together, Harris has headlined or co-starred in roughly $121 million worth of domestic Halloween box office before you count Urban Legend , Hatchet or anything else. That's a real footprint for an actor who has spent most of her adult career in independent genre film.

Analysis: Why This Doc Could Matter

Dread Central's write-up compares the project to two recent celebrity documentaries, and the comparison is telling. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premiered at Sundance in January 2023, landed on Hulu that spring and earned an Emmy nomination. Pamela, a Love Story hit Netflix on January 31, 2023. Both films took women whose public images were shaped as young performers by an industry that did not protect them, and let them reclaim the story. That is clearly the lane Orndoff and Clay are aiming for, and Harris's history, from a child on R-rated slasher sets to a teenager emancipated to chase a role, fits it uncomfortably well.

Horror has rarely given its own stars that treatment. The closest genre precedent is I Am Nancy (2011), in which Heather Langenkamp examined why Nightmare on Elm Street fandom celebrates Freddy far more than the girl who beat him. Most horror documentaries are about franchises, effects artists or the making of a film. Final girls usually show up as talking heads, not as the subject. A serious, personal film about Harris would flip that.

There's a timing angle too. The Halloween brand is in a strange in-between moment, with the Blumhouse trilogy finished, Halloween: The Game leaning hard on Halloween 5 nostalgia, and the franchise looking for its next form. Harris notably did not appear in the 2018 to 2022 trilogy, even after saying in 2020 that she'd be open to the right role. "I'm forever indebted to this franchise and I love it," she told Dread Central at the time. A documentary gives her a way to own her place in that legacy without waiting for a studio to call.

The risk is execution. The heaviest material here, the suicides, the stalking, the medical emergency, needs a careful hand, and celebrity docs made by first-time teams can tip into either hagiography or exploitation. The good sign is that the filmmakers stress that Harris held nothing back, which suggests she was a partner, not just a subject. The bigger business question is distribution: with no buyer attached, the film's 2027 festival premiere will decide whether it reaches a streamer audience or stays on the convention circuit.

What We Still Don't Know

The title, runtime and which festival will premiere it.
Who appears on camera beyond family and friends. Interviews with Halloween collaborators would be the obvious draw, but none have been named.
Whether a streamer or distributor picks it up, and when.
How it connects with Last Chance Motel , her directing project with Taylor-Compton, which is also still in post.

Bottom Line

For a generation of fans, Danielle Harris is the kid at the top of the stairs at the end of Halloween 4 . This documentary is promising to show the rest of the story, the parts that never made a convention panel. If Orndoff and Clay get the tone right, it could be the most important thing to come out of the Halloween universe in years, and a long-overdue sign that horror is ready to treat its final girls as people, not props.

Which Danielle Harris role means the most to you: Jamie Lloyd, Annie Brackett or Marybeth? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Danielle Harris, photographed by Casey Florig (2014), via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Variety (via Yahoo) , Dread Central , iHorror , Bloody Disgusting , Deranged Minds Entertainment (YouTube) , SlashFilm , Wikipedia , Rotten Tomatoes , The Numbers , Boxoffice Pro , Dread Central (2020) .

‘Obsession’ Director Curry Barker’s New Horror Short ‘Mama Bear’ Premieres on YouTube Oct. 29: Everything We Know

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:50:31 GMT

Most filmmakers who make a half-billion-dollar horror movie never look back at the place they started. Curry Barker is heading straight back to it. The writer-director of Obsession , the $750,000 wish-gone-wrong nightmare that turned into one of the biggest original films of the decade, is premiering a brand-new horror short called Mama Bear on YouTube on Thursday, October 29, two days before Halloween.

It is a small release with big implications. Barker is sitting on a May 2027 Focus Features movie, an A24 Texas Chain Saw Massacre reimagining and an original film at Universal, and he still chose to drop his Halloween project for free on the platform that made him. Below: everything confirmed about Mama Bear , who's in it, how Barker got here, the numbers behind Obsession , and what this move says about where horror's next generation is building its audience.

Watch: The ‘Mama Bear’ Premiere

The premiere page is already live on YouTube under the title "MAMA BEAR (Directed by Curry Barker)," with a reminder button and no synopsis. It goes live Thursday at 11:30 AM Eastern (10:30 AM Central).

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: What We Know About ‘Mama Bear’

Here is everything that has been confirmed so far, and it is deliberately not much:

Premiere: Thursday, October 29, 2026, at 11:30 AM ET on YouTube, free to watch.
Written, directed and edited by: Curry Barker.
Partner: Windows. Microsoft's Windows account announced the short on social media with a teaser, and the project is a sponsored release.
Cast: Jon Lee Richardson as Floyd, Katie Sarife ( Annabelle Comes Home ) as Lacey, Ericka Kreuz as Ms. Wilson and Joshua Snyder as Floyd's doppelgänger.
Crew: Vivian Gray, the production designer on Obsession , is back on board.
Plot and runtime: Not announced. No synopsis has been released.

That cast list is doing a lot of quiet work. A character credited only as a "doppelgänger" tells you the short is playing with doubles and identity, and anybody who has seen Barker's earlier shorts knows he likes to let a mundane setup curdle slowly before the floor drops out. The title is the other tease. Obsession 's lead character is Baron "Bear" Bailey, so fans are already wondering whether Mama Bear connects to that world. Nothing official says it does, so treat that as fan speculation until Thursday.

Photo: Katie Sarife via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who’s Behind It: From Starbucks Shifts to a Record-Breaker

Barker's origin story is the kind of thing studios now put in pitch decks. He and creative partner Cooper Tomlinson have been making videos together on their channel That's a Bad Idea for roughly a decade, moving between sketch comedy, cringe humor and increasingly ambitious horror. According to the Associated Press, the pair came up through YouTube and TikTok sketches before Barker's horror work started getting noticed.

The turning point was The Chair , a 2023 horror short that passed 10 million views and prompted producer James Harris to suggest turning Barker's ideas into a feature. Then came Milk & Serial , a found-footage feature reportedly made for about $800. When it couldn't land a distributor, Barker posted it free on the channel in August 2024. It went viral and has since passed 3 million views.

Can't see the video? Watch Milk & Serial on YouTube.

Barker's full $800 feature Milk & Serial , posted free on the That's a Bad Idea channel.

The cast of Mama Bear is a mix of familiar faces and Barker's circle. Katie Sarife is the best-known genre name of the group, thanks to her role in Warner Bros.' Annabelle Comes Home . Keeping Obsession production designer Vivian Gray on the team is a signal that this isn't a phone-shot throwaway; Barker is bringing feature-level craft to a free short.

The Backstory: How ‘Obsession’ Changed Everything

Obsession premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and set off a bidding war. Focus Features won it for a reported $14 million to $15 million, depending on the outlet. Focus opened it in U.S. theaters on May 15, 2026, and the movie did something almost nothing does anymore: it got bigger. The AP noted it kept pulling more than $20 million on several weekends after opening, an unusually long run, and became the biggest hit in Focus Features' history.

The success turned Barker into one of the most sought-after directors in the genre almost overnight. Here's the timeline of what followed:

April 22, 2026: Variety reported A24 hired Barker to direct its Texas Chain Saw Massacre reimagining. A24 had won the rights in an auction, beating offers that included one from Blumhouse. Producers include Roy Lee and Steven Schneider of Spooky Pictures, Stuart Manashil, and Exurbia Films' Pat Cassidy, Ian Henkel and original co-creator Kim Henkel. A separate Texas Chainsaw series is in the works with Glen Powell and director JT Mollner.
Summer 2026: Barker told The Hollywood Reporter he wants to "capture the rawness and the grounded-ness of the original," with victims you care about and a focus on the deeply uncomfortable family at the farm, not a guy chasing people with a saw.
September 29, 2026: Focus set Anything But Ghosts for May 7, 2027. Barker and Tomlinson co-wrote and co-star as fame-hungry fake ghost hunters who stumble into something real, alongside Bryce Dallas Howard, Aaron Paul, Violet McGraw and Chris Reinacher. Jason Blum, Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath produce through Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, Spooky Pictures and Divide/Conquer.
October 19, 2026: Netflix announced Obsession will stream in the U.S. starting November 17. Barker has said Netflix once offered to take the film straight to streaming before it ever reached theaters.
October 27, 2026: Windows announces Mama Bear .

Barker also has an original horror film set up at Universal with Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, though no details have been shared.

By the Numbers

$521.3 million worldwide for Obsession , per The Numbers: $263.5 million domestic and $257.8 million international.
$17.2 million domestic opening weekend (May 15 to 17). In other words, the film ended up earning more than 15 times its opening domestically, a ratio blockbusters almost never touch.
About $750,000 production budget, per Barker (The Numbers lists it at $1 million). Either way, that's a return of hundreds of times its cost.
$800 reported budget for Milk & Serial ; 10 million+ views for The Chair .
May 7, 2027: Anything But Ghosts hits theaters. November 17, 2026: Obsession hits Netflix in the U.S.

Analysis: Why a $500 Million Director Is Posting a Free Short

The easy read is that this is a brand deal, and it is one. Windows is paying for a filmmaker with a massive young audience to make something people will actually choose to watch on Halloween week. But the more interesting read is that Barker is protecting the thing that made him valuable in the first place: a direct line to an audience that doesn't wait for a studio to tell it what's coming.

Look at the gap in his calendar. Obsession left theaters months ago, Anything But Ghosts is more than six months out, and Texas Chain Saw hasn't even been scripted, by his own account in the THR interview. Without Mama Bear , his name would be quiet during the single most important week of the horror calendar. With it, he owns a piece of Halloween, primes his audience three weeks before Obsession lands on Netflix, and keeps the channel active for the fans who were watching before Toronto ever was.

He isn't the first creator to make the YouTube-to-studio jump, but he may be the first to refuse to fully leave. Danny and Michael Philippou went from their RackaRacka channel to A24's Talk to Me and Bring Her Back , and the short-to-feature path has a long history in horror, from David F. Sandberg turning his short Lights Out into a studio feature to Kane Parsons taking his Backrooms videos to A24. Most of those filmmakers kept the online work as a résumé once Hollywood called. Barker is treating YouTube as a permanent second stage, and a sponsor is now willing to fund it at a level that lets him bring in his feature collaborators.

There's a risk, of course. A free short from a director whose last movie made half a billion dollars will be judged on a much steeper curve than The Chair was. If Mama Bear feels like an ad, the backlash will be loud and immediate, and brand partnerships in horror have a way of sanding off the edges that made the work exciting. Barker's track record argues against that: he has spent years making scary things with almost no money, and the AP interview found him openly wrestling with impostor syndrome and seeing mostly the flaws in his own work. His advice to young filmmakers was disarmingly simple: "You just got to make it." A filmmaker that self-critical is unlikely to phone in a Halloween short with his name in the title.

For the industry, Mama Bear is another data point that the horror pipeline has flipped. Studios used to discover directors at festivals. Now festivals and studios are often confirming what millions of YouTube viewers already decided. Expect more brands to chase genre creators for October releases, and expect more studios to write "keep your channel" into deals instead of fighting it.

What We Still Don’t Know

The plot, the runtime and whether the doppelgänger concept is the whole hook or a twist.
Whether Mama Bear connects to Obsession in any way. Barker has said he can imagine more stories built around other characters' wishes, and Anything But Ghosts reportedly exists in the same world, but nothing ties this short to it yet.
How visible Windows will be inside the film itself.
Whether Barker's next feature after Anything But Ghosts is Texas Chain Saw or his Universal original. He told THR he was still weighing it.

Key dates: Mama Bear premieres October 29, Obsession streams on Netflix in the U.S. from November 17, and Anything But Ghosts opens May 7, 2027.

The Bottom Line

Curry Barker could have spent Halloween week doing victory-lap interviews. Instead he made another scary movie and is giving it away, on the same channel where he once uploaded an $800 feature nobody would buy. That's the most encouraging thing a hot young horror director can do, and it raises the stakes for Thursday. Are you setting a reminder for Mama Bear , and do you want it tied to Obsession or completely separate? Tell us below.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Obsession star Michael Johnston by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Dread Central , GamesRadar+ , iHorror , Mandatory via Yahoo Entertainment , Associated Press , Variety (Texas Chain Saw) , Variety (Anything But Ghosts) , JoBlo / The Hollywood Reporter , Dread Central (Netflix date) , The Numbers .

‘Crystal Lake’ Is a Hit: Peacock’s ‘Friday the 13th’ Prequel Logs 1.3 Billion Minutes, and Everything We Know About Season 2

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 11:50:28 GMT

Seventeen years. That is how long Friday the 13th fans waited for anything new out of Camp Crystal Lake, while the franchise sat frozen in a rights fight that seemed like it might never end. Now the numbers are in on Peacock's Crystal Lake , and the verdict is loud: according to figures NBCUniversal released on October 27, the A24-produced prequel racked up 1.3 billion minutes viewed in its first 11 days , making it the fourth-biggest scripted original series Peacock has ever launched.

That is not a niche result for a niche slasher. It puts Pamela Voorhees in the same weight class as the streamer's biggest dramas, and it comes with the best reviews the franchise has ever earned. Below, we break down every number that's been released, who made the show, the long and messy road it took to get here, what critics and fans are saying, and the big question hanging over Peacock right now: when does Season 2 get the green light?

Watch the Trailer

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Peacock released that full trailer on September 13. If you want the slow-burn version, the first teaser from July leans hard on fog, a camp song and Linda Cardellini's voice:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Numbers: Exactly What Peacock Announced

Here is everything that's been confirmed about how Crystal Lake performed in its opening stretch:

1.3 billion minutes viewed in the first 11 days after the October 15 premiere, per NBCUniversal's internal data.
No. 4 scripted original ever on Peacock. According to ComicBook.com, only The Best Man: The Final Chapters , All Her Fault and the first season of The Five Star Weekend opened bigger.
Nielsen, week of October 19: the No. 3 streaming original series and the No. 3 freshman season across all of streaming, per TheWrap.
Social: 1.8 billion earned impressions in the first 24 hours and more than 7.6 million video views in the first 11 days, according to Sprout Social data cited by Peacock.
Reviews: 76% on Rotten Tomatoes from 76 critics as of this writing, with an 88% Popcornmeter from 500+ audience ratings.

Minutes are a flattering metric, but Peacock ranks every show the same way, so the ranking is what matters. For a horror series with a TV-MA rating and a premise that requires you to sympathize with a future murderer, cracking the top four of everything Peacock has made is a genuine win.

The Details: What Crystal Lake Is

Crystal Lake is an eight-episode prequel to the 1980 original, produced by A24 and streaming exclusively on Peacock, which dropped all eight episodes at once on October 15. In the UK and Ireland it arrived on Sky Atlantic and NOW on October 19, and HBO Max carries it in much of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It's rated TV-MA.

The setup is spoiler-safe: Pam Voorhees is a single mother in the 1970s, still grieving her young son Jason, who drowned in the town lake about a year earlier. When two strangers show up asking questions about her past, things start to unravel, and the town begins to wonder who Pam really is. Anyone who's seen the 1980 film knows roughly where this ends. The show's bet is that the journey is the scary part.

The cast:

Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees
William Catlett as Levon Brooks
Devin Kessler as Briana Brooks
Cameron Scoggins as Dorf
Gwendolyn Sundstrom as Grace
Callum Vinson as young Jason, with Nick Cordileone (Ralph), Joy Suprano, Danielle Kotch and Phoenix Parnevik recurring

Behind the camera, Michael Lennox directed episodes 1 through 3, the duo Celine Held and Logan George handled 4 through 6, and cinematographer-turned-director Quyen Tran closed out the season with 7 and 8. Fans will notice the episode titles are a love letter to the films: "Part 2," "Part III," "A New Beginning," "The New Blood," "Kill Them, Mommy" and, of course, "The Final Chapter." Harry Manfredini's classic theme is back too.

Photo: Linda Cardellini via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who's Behind It

Linda Cardellini, the reason to watch

If there's one thing critics agree on, it's Cardellini. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus essentially says her Pamela anchors the whole show, and TVLine, which gave the series a B-minus, called her performance a knockout and said she carries it. Her genre résumé is more substantial than people remember: she was Velma in the live-action Scooby-Doo (2002) and its 2004 sequel, led The Curse of La Llorona (2019) in the Conjuring universe, and spent three seasons playing a grieving woman with a dark streak in Netflix's Dead to Me , which earned her an Emmy nomination. That last role looks, in hindsight, like an audition for this one. She also has Bill Hader's horror debut They Know on the way.

She's following Betsy Palmer, whose wild-eyed Mrs. Voorhees in 1980 became one of the great twist villains in the genre. Palmer only had a handful of scenes. Cardellini gets eight hours, and the reviews suggest she uses them.

Brad Caleb Kane, the showrunner who got it over the line

Kane created, wrote and executive produced the series. He came in as showrunner in August 2024 with credits that include HBO's It: Welcome to Derry , Tokyo Vice and Warrior . His pitch, in interviews around the premiere, was a psychological study of grief rather than a simple revenge story. He told Dread Central he knows some longtime fans won't like his more grounded take on Jason's origins, especially those who prefer the character mysterious and supernatural, and said he'd accepted that going in.

The executive producers include original screenwriter Victor Miller and attorney Marc Toberoff, which tells you how much of this show's story happened in court.

Photo: Betsy Palmer, the original Pamela Voorhees, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: Two Decades to Get Back to Camp

A Friday the 13th series has been "coming soon" for most of this century. Sean S. Cunningham was floating a TV version at conventions as early as 2003, and by 2005 he was describing a coming-of-age show called Crystal Lake Chronicles with Jason lurking in the background. The CW developed a version in 2015, then dropped it in 2016.

What really stalled everything was the courtroom. Victor Miller, who wrote the 1980 screenplay, moved to reclaim his rights under copyright termination law, and Cunningham's side argued the script was a work for hire. Miller won at trial in 2018, and in 2021 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that he'd been an independent contractor, handing him the U.S. rights to the original film's story. Cunningham's side kept foreign rights and the material introduced in the sequels, which is why for years nobody could make a new Jason movie without a lawyer in the room. Cunningham said in March 2026 that the two had resolved their dispute.

With the streaming rights secured, A24 announced Crystal Lake in October 2022 with Bryan Fuller ( Hannibal ) as showrunner and Kevin Williamson attached to write an episode. Then the 2023 writers' strike froze production, and in May 2024 A24 parted ways with Fuller over a change in creative direction; Williamson left too. Kane took over that August, and Fuller still shares story credit on the premiere episode.

From there it moved quickly: Cardellini was cast in March 2025, the rest of the main cast through the summer, and cameras rolled June 20, 2025, in New Jersey under the decoy title Mama's Boy . Production later moved to Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Blairstown, the same camp where Cunningham shot the 1980 original. Filming wrapped in October 2025, it previewed at TIFF, New York Comic Con and Beyond Fest, and it finally premiered on October 15, 2026, a year after wrap and four years after it was announced.

By the Numbers: A Franchise Record on Reviews

Let's be honest about the Friday the 13th films: fans love them, critics never did. Per the Rotten Tomatoes rundown compiled by ComicBook.com, the 1980 original sits at 48%, and it's the franchise's best-reviewed movie. Jason Lives has 39%, the 2009 remake 27%, and Jason Takes Manhattan bottoms out at 8%.

Crystal Lake opened at 86% from its first 28 reviews, according to Dark Horizons, and has settled at 76% with more than 75 reviews counted. That's still the best critical score anything with this name on it has ever received, by almost 30 points.

The franchise's box office history explains why Warner Bros., Peacock and A24 all wanted in. The original cost roughly $550,000 and grossed about $59.8 million worldwide. Across 12 films the series has earned around $468 million, and the 2009 reboot turned a $19 million budget into about $92.7 million. The audience has always shown up for Jason; the question was whether anyone could untangle the rights long enough to give them something new.

Analysis: What This Really Means

Legacy horror on TV is now a proven play. Crystal Lake joins a small group of shows that took a slasher or horror brand and built a character study around it. Kane's own It: Welcome to Derry did it for HBO. Chucky ran three seasons on Syfy and USA. The common thread in the ones that work is that they stop treating the killer as the main character and find someone more interesting to follow. Making Pamela, not Jason, the lead was the smartest decision this show made, and the numbers suggest audiences agree.

The drop-all-at-once release worked for a binge-able mystery. Peacock released all eight episodes on day one, right before the Halloween stretch. With a story built around a reveal fans already know, letting people race to the finale paid off: an 11-day window covering two weekends in peak spooky season is close to ideal.

The reviews were good, not great, and that's fine. The critical picture is more "very solid" than "masterpiece." TVLine flagged thin supporting characters, a draggy flashback episode and lore additions nobody asked for. A TIME critic argued the premise was always thin, and IndieWire suggested die-hards might prefer their own imaginations. But the 88% Popcornmeter says the people who actually love these movies are having a good time. For a franchise that's lived on fan loyalty for 46 years, that's the score that matters.

It changes the math for the movies. The film rights still sit with New Line and Warner Bros., where a new sequel and a video game were reported in development in July 2025, and Cunningham said in March 2026 that a treatment for an "old school" film was done. A billion-plus minutes on a rival platform is the strongest evidence in years that Jason still has a mass audience. Expect that to speed things up.

What We Still Don't Know

Season 2 hasn't been ordered yet. As of October 27, Peacock had not announced a renewal. With these numbers it's hard to imagine a pass, but nothing is official.

Kane has a plan. He told Dread Central he built Season 1 to stand on its own in case it was the only one, but he knows where a second season would start. The idea is to widen the town in a Twin Peaks direction, dig into minor characters the films barely touched, and lean into a mid-1970s New Jersey setting, all with Sackhead Jason now loose in the world. In his words, "There are more stories to tell in Crystal Lake." He also told SlashFilm that Tommy Jarvis and his family could turn up, suggesting the Jarvises may have been around the lake longer than the movies let on.

What about the hockey mask? Jason doesn't pick it up until Part III in 1982, so a faithful Season 2 might keep the sack. Whether fans will tolerate a whole season without the most famous mask in horror is a fun question for Kane to sort out.

Bottom Line

After 17 years of lawsuits, false starts and a fired showrunner, Friday the 13th is back and it's a hit. Crystal Lake drew 1.3 billion minutes in 11 days, landed in Peacock's all-time top four, earned the best reviews in franchise history and gave Linda Cardellini a role people will be talking about for a long time. All that's left is for Peacock to make Season 2 official, and right now it would be a surprise if it didn't.

Have you finished Crystal Lake ? Does Cardellini's Pamela rank with Betsy Palmer's, and do you want a Season 2 with Sackhead Jason, or bring on the hockey mask?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Linda Cardellini via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Videos: Peacock official YouTube channel.

Sources: TheWrap , ComicBook.com , Deadline , NBCUniversal , Peacock , Rotten Tomatoes , TVLine , Dark Horizons , Dread Central (Season 2) , Dread Central (Jason's origin) , SlashFilm , The Hollywood Reporter , Wikipedia: Crystal Lake , Wikipedia: Friday the 13th franchise .

Sarah Snook Leads HBO’s ‘The Birds’ Series: Hitchcock’s Classic Heads to Alaska, and Everything We Know

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:49:28 GMT

Alfred Hitchcock's birds are coming back to roost, and this time they're heading north. HBO has picked up a limited series inspired by The Birds for development, with Emmy and Tony winner Sarah Snook attached to star and executive produce and Tom Spezialy , a veteran of HBO's The Leftovers and Watchmen , writing the pilot. Deadline broke the news on October 27, 2026, describing the project as a "visceral, present day reimagining" of the 1963 classic, relocated to present-day Alaska and rebuilt around a murder mystery.

That matters for a simple reason: Hollywood has been trying and failing to remake The Birds for almost two decades. A Naomi Watts film fell apart. A BBC series from the same producer now attached to this one never happened. This is the furthest a new version has gotten in years, and it's landing at the network that has quietly become one of horror's best homes on television. Below, we break down everything confirmed, the people behind it, the long and messy history of remake attempts, and what an Alaskan murder mystery with killer birds could mean for HBO's growing horror slate.

Is There a Trailer?

Not yet, and there won't be for a while. The series is in development, which means HBO has a pilot script in hand but has not formally ordered the show to production. No footage exists, no directors have been named and no cast beyond Snook has been announced. We'll update the moment HBO releases a first look. In the meantime, here's a reminder of the image the new series has to live up to: Tippi Hedren under attack in the original 1963 trailer.

Photo: Tippi Hedren in the 1963 trailer for The Birds , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Details: Everything Confirmed So Far

Here is what the trades have confirmed about HBO's The Birds :

Network: HBO, as a limited series. It is in development, not yet greenlit, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Studios: HBO and Universal Global Television are co-studios. Universal's film side made Hitchcock's original, and Variety reports Universal Pictures and the Daphne du Maurier estate control the rights.
Star: Sarah Snook as Myra Massey. Snook also executive produces.
Writer: Tom Spezialy wrote the pilot and executive produces.
Producers: David Heyman and Danny Samit for Heyday Television, Heyman's joint venture with Universal, plus Jennifer Gabler Rawlings of Omni Artists.
Setting: Present-day Alaska, Spezialy's home state. He was born in Anchorage.
Not announced: episode count, directors, additional cast, production start and premiere window.

The story is new. Per the official logline reported by Variety and Deadline, Myra flees a bitter custody battle and returns to her hometown with her young daughter. While quietly looking into the suspicious disappearance of a childhood friend, she finds herself tangled up with a killer on the loose and with what Variety's report calls "vicious, deadly bird attacks inexplicably tied to the crime." So this isn't Melanie Daniels driving lovebirds up the coast to Bodega Bay. It's a single mother, a missing friend, a small town that clearly knows more than it's saying, and a sky that has turned hostile.

Who's Behind It

Sarah Snook

Most viewers know Snook as Shiv Roy, the role that won her the 2024 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and Golden Globes in 2022 and 2024 across 39 episodes of HBO's Succession . Since then she has gone on a remarkable run. She played all 26 roles in a one-woman stage version of The Picture of Dorian Gray , winning the Olivier Award in London in 2024 and the Tony Award on Broadway in 2025. She then starred in and executive produced Peacock's 2025 thriller All Her Fault , which earned her a Critics' Choice Award plus Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG nominations.

Horror fans have seen her before, too. She led the Southern Gothic ghost story Jessabelle (2014), played a fiendishly tricky dual role in the time-loop sci-fi cult favorite Predestination (2014), appeared opposite Helen Mirren in the haunted-house film Winchester (2018), did a Black Mirror episode ("Men Against Fire") and both starred in and executive produced Netflix's 2023 horror-thriller Run Rabbit Run , playing a mother whose daughter begins to change in frightening ways. That last one is worth noting: a mother protecting a child from something she can't explain is clearly territory Snook wants to be in, and Myra Massey sounds like a sharper, bigger-budget version of it.

Tom Spezialy

Spezialy has a long résumé that started in comedy ( Parker Lewis Can't Lose , Weird Science ) and moved through Desperate Housewives , where he was an executive producer and writer. The genre credits are what jump out here. He was a writer and executive producer on The Leftovers , a Peabody winner, and on HBO's Watchmen , which won 11 Emmys including Outstanding Limited Series in 2020. He also worked on Hulu's Stephen King anthology Castle Rock , the pilot of Starz's Ash vs Evil Dead and Prime Video's upcoming Blade Runner 2099 . In short, he's spent the last decade inside prestige TV built around unexplained catastrophes, which is exactly the muscle a modern The Birds needs.

David Heyman

Heyman produced all eight Harry Potter films and is a producer on HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series, so he already has a direct line into the network. More importantly for this project, he's been chasing The Birds for nearly a decade. That persistence is a big part of why this version exists.

Photo: Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock in the teaser for The Birds , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: 70 Years of Birds, and 20 Years of Failed Remakes

It all starts with Daphne du Maurier, the Cornish author of Rebecca . Her story "The Birds" first appeared in 1952 in the collection The Apple Tree . It's set in Cornwall shortly after World War II and follows Nat Hocken, a disabled veteran working part-time on a coastal farm, as flocks of birds lay siege to his family's cottage. Du Maurier reportedly got the idea after watching a farmer get mobbed by gulls while ploughing. Critics have long read the story as a product of postwar British anxiety: air raids, a government that can't protect you, and threats breaking into the home.

Hitchcock kept almost nothing but the premise. Screenwriter Evan Hunter moved the action to Bodega Bay, California, and built it around socialite Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren in her film debut, alongside Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and a young Veronica Cartwright. The film opened on March 28, 1963, on a $3.3 million budget and grossed about $11.4 million. Ub Iwerks earned an Oscar nomination for special effects for a film with roughly 370 effects shots, and its final image alone is a composite of 32 elements. The AFI ranked it No. 7 on its list of the 100 most thrilling American films, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2016.

The follow-ups have been rough. The Birds II: Land's End (1994), a made-for-TV sequel with new characters, was so poorly received that director Rick Rosenthal took the Alan Smithee pseudonym. Hedren appeared, but in a different role.

Then came the remake era, which never actually produced a remake:

2007: Universal announced a feature remake with Naomi Watts set to star, Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale ) directing and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes producing. Directors Dennis Iliadis and later Diederik Van Rooijen were attached over the following years before it stalled for good.
August 2017: The BBC announced a TV version from Heyman's Heyday Television, written by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who had already adapted the story for Dublin's Gate Theatre in 2009. That version stuck closer to du Maurier, staying in postwar Cornwall with a farmhand at its center. It never got made.
May 2026: Deadline reported Snook was set to lead a new limited series from Spezialy, Heyday and Universal. JoBlo noted the project had already been in the works for about a year by then, and Heyday's Sue Gibbs had previously said it would draw on du Maurier's story rather than directly remake the film.
October 27, 2026: The package lands at HBO.

Analysis: Why This Version Might Actually Fly

The past attempts all stumbled on the same problem: what do you do with The Birds once the central shock is common knowledge? Everyone knows the birds attack. The Watts film was going to be a bigger, louder version of the same thing, and that's a hard sell when your effects are competing with the memory of a film that did it with real birds and matte paintings. The BBC version tried to go back to the source, which is admirable but tough to stretch across a season.

Spezialy's version solves it by making the birds a symptom instead of the whole story. Bolting on a missing-person mystery gives the show an engine that can run for several episodes, and it puts the question of why right at the center. Hitchcock famously never explained the attacks, and that ambiguity is a big part of why the film still unsettles people. The logline's suggestion that the attacks are tied to a crime is the riskiest choice here. Explain too much and you've made a supernatural procedural. Explain too little and viewers who signed up for a mystery will feel cheated. Spezialy's time on The Leftovers , a show that refused to explain its central event and was praised for it, suggests he knows how to walk that line.

Alaska is a smart move, too. Isolation is horror's oldest friend, and the state comes built-in with endless daylight or endless dark depending on the season, small towns with one road out, and massive seabird colonies. It also neatly echoes True Detective: Night Country , HBO's 2024 season set in a fictional Alaskan town that paired a crime investigation with creeping supernatural dread. That season became the most-watched in the anthology's history at the time, which surely isn't lost on HBO executives looking at this pitch.

Then there's HBO's broader horror strategy. The network has built a serious genre lineup: The Last of Us , The Outsider , Lovecraft Country and, most recently, IT: Welcome to Derry , which HBO renewed for a second season this summer, according to Fangoria. Pairing a beloved horror IP with a prestige star and a limited-series format is exactly the formula that has worked for the network, and it lines up with what's happening across TV right now. Just this week, Apple TV added Bill Nighy to Alfonso Cuarón's cult series Ascension , and MGM+ cast Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in The Black Tapes . Star-led, mystery-driven horror is the TV trend of the moment, and The Birds brings name recognition that few original concepts can match.

The stakes are real, though. Remaking Hitchcock has a poor track record: Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho (1998) remains a punchline. The encouraging precedent is A&E's Bates Motel , which ran five seasons by treating the original as a starting point, not a blueprint. The more this new The Birds commits to being an Alaskan mystery that happens to have birds in it, the better its odds.

What We Still Don't Know

Will HBO greenlight it? Development is not a series order. Plenty of HBO projects with big names attached never make it past this stage.
How many episodes, and who directs? Neither has been announced. A strong genre director would tell us a lot about the tone.
How much of du Maurier survives? Earlier statements from Heyday pointed toward the original story. It'll be interesting to see whether any Nat Hocken DNA, like the boarded-up house or the radio going quiet, makes it into Myra's story.
Practical or digital birds? The 1963 film's mix of real and mechanical birds is part of its legend. Fans will be watching closely to see how much the new version leans on CG flocks.
Who else gets cast? Myra's daughter, the missing friend and the townspeople are all major roles still open.

Bottom Line

After nearly 20 years of false starts, The Birds finally has a real shot at coming back, with one of the most decorated actors working today, a writer who knows how to keep a mystery unsolved and a network that knows how to make horror feel prestigious. It's still only in development, so don't clear your calendar yet. But this is the most promising version anyone has put together, and turning it into an Alaskan whodunit is a smart way to avoid the trap every other attempt fell into.

Now we want to hear from you: should HBO explain why the birds attack, or keep Hitchcock's mystery intact? And is Sarah Snook the right lead? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Sarah Snook, photographed by Philip Romano, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline , Variety , The Hollywood Reporter , JoBlo , JoBlo (May 2026) , Dread Central , /Film (2017) , Fangoria , Wikipedia: The Birds (film) , Wikipedia: The Birds (story) , Wikipedia: Sarah Snook , Wikipedia: Tom Spezialy .

‘Halloween: The Game’ Tower Farm Update Is Live: Free ‘Halloween 5’ Map, New Michael Skins and Everything in the Drop

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:58:52 GMT

Michael Myers just left the suburbs. The first big post-launch update for Halloween: The Game landed today, October 27, and it drags the Shape out of Haddonfield’s neat lawns and into cornfields, barns and a trailer park on the edge of town. The headliner is Tower Farm, a free fifth map inspired by Halloween 5 , joined by a free scythe, two new paid Michael skins, two new playable civilians and a costume pack.

It’s also the first real test of how IllFonic and Gun Interactive plan to keep this game alive, seven weeks after a huge launch and a steep drop in players since. Below: everything in the update and what it costs, the trailers, the history behind the farm, the numbers, and what this drop tells us about the game’s future.

Watch: Tower Farm and the New Michaels

These videos are embedded on the game’s official site alongside the update announcement.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

What’s in the Update

The drop is live on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC through Steam and the Epic Games Store. Here’s the full breakdown, per the official announcement :

Free for everyone who owns the game

Map #5, Tower Farm: a farming community outside Haddonfield with farmhouses, barns stuffed with tools, sheds, cornfields, a lit filling station, a harvest festival, a trailer park with a laundromat and convenience store, and pumpkin gardens. IllFonic describes it as open ground with little clear cover.
The Scythe: a new weapon found on Tower Farm, unlocked by completing in-game challenges.
Features, fixes and quality-of-life changes: promised, though IllFonic hasn’t itemized them.

Paid DLC

Halloween 5 Michael skin ($9.99): the 1989 film’s version of the Shape. Buying it unlocks the Scythe instantly.
Halloween (2018) Michael skin ($9.99): the David Gordon Green-era look, with the mask design supervised by Oscar winner Christopher Nelson.
Civilian Characters Pack ($9.99 for both): Eugene Kelly, a one-time kid genius turned tabletop game master stuck in a dead-end job, and Michelle Blanton, a local artist who turned her bedroom at her parents’ house into a studio.
Civilian Costumes Pack 1 ($9.99): 14 Halloween outfits, one per civilian, plus 42 color tints.

The new civilians aren’t just cosmetic. Eugene’s Lurker trait boosts stamina regeneration and speeds up stalk degradation while he hides in bushes, which sounds tailor-made for a map full of hedges and ditches. Michelle’s Therapeutic trait shares part of the healing from health items with nearby teammates. If you buy everything, the update runs about $40, roughly the price of the base game itself.

Tower Farm at night. Image: IllFonic / Gun Interactive (official screenshot).

Who’s Behind It

IllFonic developed the game, with Gun Interactive co-publishing alongside Compass International Pictures, the company behind the original Halloween , and Further Front. The game was made with input from John Carpenter and longtime franchise producer Malek Akkad. That team has history together: IllFonic built and Gun published Friday the 13th: The Game in 2017, which sold 1.8 million copies in its first three months before a rights lawsuit froze it.

IllFonic’s Chief Creative Officer Jared Gerritzen framed Tower Farm as a deliberate change of pace, taking the dread of the first film into an open setting. His pitch, in short: “1978 was only the beginning.” The new skins required fresh licensing deals with Trancas International Films and Miramax, which control different eras of the film series.

Christopher Nelson , who supervised the 2018 mask, won an Academy Award for Suicide Squad ’s makeup and worked on all three films of the David Gordon Green trilogy. Fans may also know him as Officer Francis, the cop with the brownies, in the 2018 film.

The Backstory: Why Tower Farm?

Deep-cut fans will clock the reference right away. In Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (October 13, 1989), the teens’ Halloween party takes place at the Tower Farm, and the production dressed the location with small pine trees for Michael to mow down in a car chase. Directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard with Don Shanks under the mask, the film is famously divisive: it opened to about $5.1 million, finished with roughly $11.6 million domestic on a $5.5 million budget, the lowest gross in the franchise, and sits at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Its mask, made by Greg Nicotero from a mold of his own face and enlarged for Shanks, is weathered and discolored, and it has its own cult following. That’s exactly the kind of oddity a licensed game can celebrate.

The game itself has had a busy year:

August 2026: Australia refuses the game classification, so it doesn’t launch there. New Zealand later gets a digital release.
September 4: Four-day early access opens for the $59.99 Digital Deluxe Edition.
September 8: Full launch at $39.99, with 1v4 multiplayer (one Michael against four civilians) across three maps and a six-chapter single-player campaign narrated by Dr. Loomis.
September 12: IllFonic announces more than 1 million players.
September 22 to October 16: Four patches (1.0.3, 1.0.4, 1.1.0 and 1.1.1). Patch 1.1.0 reworked match pacing, Bloodthirst gain and melee stun-locking; 1.1.1 was all crash fixes.
October 5: The Tower Farm update is announced for October 27.
October 26: Halloween-week Twitch Drops start, running through November 3.

The filling station on Tower Farm. Image: IllFonic / Gun Interactive (official screenshot).

By the Numbers

1 million+ players within days of launch, per IllFonic.
33,223 : the all-time peak of concurrent Steam players, hit in September, according to the tracker Raijin.gg.
4,973 : the same tracker’s October peak on Steam, down roughly 85% from launch. Steam isn’t the whole picture, since a big share of the audience plays on PS5 and Xbox, but the trend is clear.
About 66% positive across roughly 16,700 Steam user reviews.
75 : the game’s reported Metacritic average on PC, with critics praising the atmosphere and Michael’s menace and knocking the bugs, AI and a short campaign.
$9.99 for each of the four paid items, about $40 total.

Analysis: Free Map, Paid Michaels, and a Game Racing the Calendar

IllFonic made the right call on the part that matters most. Maps split a player base when they’re paid, and an asymmetric horror game with an already shrinking pool can’t afford that. Making Tower Farm free for everyone keeps matchmaking healthy and gives lapsed players a reason to reinstall during the one week of the year when Halloween sells itself. The timing, with Twitch Drops running alongside, is no accident.

The paid side is where people will argue. Ten dollars per Michael skin is steep next to genre standards, and buying the Halloween 5 skin unlocks the Scythe right away, while everyone else grinds challenges for it. It’s a weapon, not a stat boost, but anything that blurs the line between cosmetic and gameplay tends to irritate a competitive community. The counterargument is real, though: licensed skins cost real money, and these needed new deals with two rights holders. A Michael Myers from a specific film is exactly what fans of this franchise collect.

The bigger story is the history IllFonic is trying not to repeat. Friday the 13th: The Game launched hot in 2017, then lost all new content in June 2018 when Gun Media called further DLC unfeasible during the Cunningham-Miller rights fight. It was delisted at the end of 2023 and its online services shut down on December 31, 2024. Fans have watched a great horror multiplayer game starve before. A steady drumbeat of free maps and paid cosmetics is how a licensed game avoids that, and IllFonic says this is the first of several updates planned through the first year.

Gun’s other licensed hit is also worth remembering here. Its Texas Chain Saw Massacre game showed that a slasher license can draw a crowd at launch, and that keeping players for the long haul is harder. Asymmetric horror is crowded, and Dead by Daylight keeps adding big names (Art the Clown hit its test build today). Halloween: The Game doesn’t need to beat that game. It needs to give its own players a reason to come back every few months.

Tower Farm itself also matters as design. The launch maps were all suburban Haddonfield: tight streets, houses and fences. An open farm with cornfields, ditches and long sightlines changes how both sides play, with fewer chokepoints for civilians and more ambush spots for Michael. If it plays well, it could freshen up the whole rotation, not just add a fifth option.

What We Still Don’t Know

Full patch notes. The “features, fixes and QoL” bundled in today haven’t been itemized.
Scythe details. No word yet on the exact challenges or its damage numbers.
What’s next. IllFonic says paid and free content are planned at least once per season, but the next drop has no date or contents.
Whether players return. Watch Steam concurrents through Halloween weekend for the first real sign.

Bottom Line

A free Halloween 5 map on Halloween week is a smart, fan-friendly move, and the farm setting could be the shake-up this game needed. The $40 pile of paid extras and the Scythe shortcut will divide people, but the core of the update costs nothing. The real verdict comes over the next few months: does IllFonic keep this kind of support coming, or does Michael end up stranded like Jason?

Are you jumping back into Halloween: The Game for Tower Farm, and is a $9.99 Michael skin worth it to you? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header image: Tower Farm farmhouse and cornfield, official screenshot from Halloween: The Game. Image: IllFonic / Gun Interactive, with text added. Videos are embedded from the game’s official site.

Sources: Halloween: The Game (content update) , Halloween: The Game (Tower Farm) , Halloween: The Game (Eugene and Michelle) , Halloween: The Game (1 million players) , Halloween: The Game (Twitch Drops) , MKAU Gaming , Techtroduce , MP1st , Bleeding Cool , Notebookcheck , AllThings.How , Raijin.gg , Wikipedia (Halloween 5) , Wikipedia (Friday the 13th: The Game) .

Robert Eggers’ ‘Werwulf’ Is Playing in 35mm on Christmas Day: Where to See It and Everything We Know

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:49:58 GMT

Robert Eggers spent the last six months of 2025 dragging a camera through English mud, fog and forest, and he did it on actual film stock. Now Focus Features wants you to see it that way. On Monday, October 26, the studio opened ticket sales for 35mm screenings of Werwulf , Eggers’ medieval werewolf film, at 17 theaters across the U.S. for its Christmas Day release. In an era where almost every multiplex runs a digital file off a server, that is a small but loud statement about what kind of movie this is.

It also tells us a lot about how Focus plans to sell the darkest thing Eggers says he has ever written. Below: where the 35mm prints are playing, both official trailers, the full cast and crew, the two-year road from announcement to release, the box office math behind a second straight Eggers Christmas, and what is riding on it.

Watch the Trailers

Focus has released two full trailers on its official YouTube channel. The first arrived June 29; the second dropped September 26 alongside the launch of an alternate reality game.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: Where to See It on Film

Werwulf opens exclusively in theaters on December 25, 2026 in the U.S. through Focus Features, with Universal handling the U.K. release on January 1, 2027. Theaters without a print will show it digitally. According to JoBlo , the 35mm venues announced so far are:

Alamo Drafthouse Downtown LA (Los Angeles), Cedars (Dallas), Downtown Brooklyn and New Mission (San Francisco)
Angelika Film Center at Mosaic (Fairfax, VA), Angelika Dallas and Village East by Angelika (New York)
Belcourt Theatre (Nashville), Enzian Theater (Maitland, FL) and Plaza Theatre (Atlanta)
Harkins Tempe Marketplace (Tempe, AZ) and Heights Theater (Columbia Heights, MN)
Hollywood Theatre (Portland, OR), Jacob Burns Film Center (Pleasantville, NY) and Philadelphia Film Society East
Screenland Armour (North Kansas City, MO) and Somerville Theatre (Somerville, MA)

A few wrinkles worth knowing. iHorror reports that the Belcourt’s listing has showtimes starting Thursday, December 24, a day ahead of the national date, and that the Jacob Burns Film Center is charging a premium ticket to cover extra projectionist staffing. Both venues are handing a limited-edition Werwulf hat to the first 25 ticket buyers. Theater listings put the film at an R rating and a 120-minute runtime, though Focus hasn’t formally announced either. And because the same title will play digitally in the same buildings, double-check the format before you buy. Tickets are linked from the official Focus Features site .

The format isn’t a gimmick bolted on after the fact. Per Esquire’s first-look feature, the film was shot on Super 35mm in the boxy 1.37:1 Academy ratio with an orthochromatic look, the kind of black-and-white-adjacent tonal palette that makes skin, fire and fog behave strangely. Projecting a print is about as close as an audience can get to what came out of the camera.

What the Movie Is

Focus is keeping the plot tight. The film is set around 1300 in 13th-century England, in a plague-thinned village where a beast is killing people and folklore starts turning real. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a farmer cursed to become the werewolf who seeks salvation through love; Lily-Rose Depp plays his wife; Willem Dafoe plays a hunter. The studio’s logline sells it as a tale of “devotion, damnation and the devil within.”

Two details stand out. Eggers has said nobody in the film has a name except a dog, which fits a movie that wants to feel like a folk tale rather than a biopic. And Dafoe told The Playlist on October 15 that his hunter is the only character drawn from a real person: a man appointed by the English crown to wipe out the country’s wolves because they threatened sheep, and wool was the kingdom’s economic lifeline. Eggers has tied the werewolf legend’s fade in England to that same extermination campaign. iHorror floated Peter Corbet, hired by Edward I in 1281 to destroy wolves across five western counties, as the likeliest model, but neither Dafoe nor Focus has confirmed a name.

Photo: Willem Dafoe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who’s Behind It

Robert Eggers directs and co-wrote the script with Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón , his writing partner on The Northman . This is Eggers’ fifth feature after The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), The Northman (2022) and Nosferatu (2024). He grew up in New Hampshire, came up through experimental theater in New York, and has built a career on obsessive period research; for this one, he and Sjón consulted two University of Oxford professors.

The cast is close to a Nosferatu reunion. Taylor-Johnson (Friedrich Harding in Nosferatu , and fresh off 28 Years Later ), Depp (Ellen Hutter), Dafoe (Professor von Franz) and Ralph Ineson (Dr. Sievers, and the voice of doom in The Witch ) all return. Dafoe is now on his third Eggers film after The Lighthouse and The Northman too. Joining them: Hamnet ’s Bodhi Rae Breathnach as the farmer’s daughter, Kate Dickie (another Witch alum), Jan Bijvoet, Vidal Arzoni, Valeriia Karaman, Hannah Harpin, Ritchi Edwards and Jack Morris.

Behind the camera, cinematographer Jarin Blaschke is back for a fifth straight collaboration (his Nosferatu work earned an Oscar nomination), with Louise Ford editing and Robin Carolan scoring. Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner produce with Eggers, Sjón and Garrett Bird, alongside Focus and Maiden Voyage Pictures.

Photo: Aaron Taylor-Johnson by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: From Announcement to Full Moon

January 22, 2025: The Hollywood Reporter reports Eggers is developing Werwulf at Focus; the studio later locks in Christmas 2026.
February 2025: Eggers calls it the darkest script he has written.
July 15-17, 2025: Variety reports Taylor-Johnson cast in the title role with Depp in talks; Deadline reports Dafoe in talks two days later. Working Title comes aboard that month.
Fall 2025: Cameras roll at Sky Studios Elstree, then on location at Bourne Wood in Surrey, on Dartmoor near Sharp Tor, and in the Forest of Dean.
January 2026: Blaschke and Ineson confirm the wrap; Deadline reports Breathnach’s casting on January 21.
April 2026: First footage screens at CinemaCon, including a frothing full-moon transformation, per TheWrap.
June 29 and September 26, 2026: Trailers one and two. The second launches an ARG at DevourethAllMankynde.com running across the September, October and November full moons, with the prize revealed in November.
October 26, 2026: 35mm tickets go on sale, timed with the October full-moon challenge and a Snapchat moon-scanning lens.

By the Numbers

Eggers’ track record explains why Focus is leaning in. The Witch turned a $4 million budget into about $40.4 million worldwide. The Lighthouse cost $11 million and grossed roughly $18.3 million. The Northman was the stumble: a $70 million epic that took in about $75 million, nowhere near break-even once marketing is counted.

Then came Nosferatu . Released on Christmas Day 2024 on a $50 million budget, it made $11.55 million on December 25 alone, $21.7 million over its first weekend and $40.8 million across the five-day holiday frame, finishing third behind Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mufasa: The Lion King . It ended near $182 million worldwide ($95.6 million domestic), drew an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 78 on Metacritic, and earned four Oscar nominations. TheWrap notes it ranks among Focus’ five highest-grossing releases ever. The one soft spot: a B- CinemaScore, a reminder that general Christmas crowds don’t always love what critics do.

For contrast, look at the most recent studio werewolf movie. Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man opened in January 2025 on a $25 million budget and finished with about $36.8 million worldwide, a 47% Rotten Tomatoes score and a C- CinemaScore. Werewolves are not an automatic sell.

Analysis: Why 35mm Matters More Than It Looks

Seventeen screens won’t move a box office chart. That isn’t the point. The 35mm run is a positioning move, and it’s aimed at the people who make an Eggers opening work: the cinephile and horror-fan core who show up on day one, post about it and drag their friends the following weekend. Focus chairman Peter Kujawski has promised Werwulf is “on a whole other level,” and selling it on film is how you make that sound like more than marketing copy.

The strategy has recent proof behind it. Format-as-event has become one of the few reliable ways to turn a movie into a must-see-in-theaters night: Oppenheimer ’s IMAX 70mm shows sold out weeks ahead in 2023, Sinners leaned hard on its 70mm presentations in 2025, and Paul Thomas Anderson pushed VistaVision prints for One Battle After Another that fall. Those were bigger swings with bigger footprints, but the logic is the same. When streaming windows are short, “you can only see it like this in a theater” is a real selling point, and a medieval nightmare shot on celluloid in the Academy ratio is about as on-brand for that pitch as it gets.

The Christmas date is the other half of the bet. Nosferatu showed that a dark, adult horror film can thrive as counterprogramming against family tentpoles, and Focus is running the same play with largely the same cast. That’s smart, but it raises the bar. Nosferatu had the advantage of a famous title and a century of vampire iconography. Werwulf is an original story in an unfamiliar period, built on Middle English-flavored dialogue and a creature genre that just struggled with Wolf Man . It looks a lot more like The Witch or The Lighthouse in temperament, with a budget and release slot closer to Nosferatu . Whether holiday audiences who came for Count Orlok will follow Eggers into the mud is the real question.

The B- CinemaScore on Nosferatu is the stat to keep in mind. Eggers makes divisive movies on purpose, and Focus’ marketing so far, from the ARG to the moon-scanning lens to the 35mm prints, has been aimed at people who already love that. If the opening skews heavily toward that crowd, the film could post a strong first weekend and then fade. If word of mouth breaks wider, Eggers will have proven Nosferatu wasn’t a one-off and that he can headline the holidays on his own terms.

There’s also a bigger stake for the genre. After an October where, as we’ve argued, horror crowded itself into a bottleneck, a prestige werewolf film owning the last week of December is a healthy sign. Horror doesn’t have to live only in the Halloween corridor.

What We Still Don’t Know

The official rating and runtime. Theater listings say R and 120 minutes; Focus hasn’t confirmed either.
More 35mm (or 70mm) dates. Only 17 venues are announced. Expect more if demand is there, but nothing is confirmed, and no 70mm or IMAX run has been mentioned.
The ARG prize. It gets revealed with November’s full moon.
Reviews and budget. No festival bow has been announced and Focus hasn’t disclosed a budget.

Bottom Line

Focus is treating Werwulf like an event, and the 35mm run is the clearest sign yet. With the Nosferatu team back, Eggers shooting on film again and a Christmas slot that worked last time, this could be the horror release that closes 2026 with a howl. It could also be the most uncompromising film ever to open against a holiday family slate. Either way, if you live near one of those 17 theaters, this is the way to see it.

Are you hunting down a 35mm screening of Werwulf on Christmas Day, or is digital good enough for you? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Robert Eggers at Fantastic Fest 2015 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added. Trailers: Focus Features official YouTube channel.

Sources: Dread Central , JoBlo , iHorror (35mm) , iHorror (Dafoe) , Focus Features , Dread Central (trailer 2) , Fangoria , TheWrap , The Hollywood Reporter , Variety , Deadline , The Numbers , Wikipedia (Werwulf) , Wikipedia (Wolf Man) .

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Leads MGM+’s ‘The Black Tapes’: Everything We Know About the Horror Podcast Series

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:49:37 GMT

Ten years ago, a fake documentary podcast about a skeptic and his locked cabinet of unexplained videotapes convinced a lot of listeners it might be real. Now it is finally getting a body. MGM+ has handed The Black Tapes a straight-to-series order of eight episodes, and it has a genuine star at the center: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the man who spent eight seasons as Jaime Lannister, is playing Dr. Richard Strand, the psychiatrist whose whole job is proving ghosts don't exist.

It is a big swing for a streamer that has quietly become one of the better homes for TV horror, and it is a second chance for a project that already died once at NBC. Below: everything confirmed about the series, who is making it, how a 2015 audio drama became one of horror podcasting's defining hits, the long and bumpy road to the screen, and the real question hanging over the whole thing: how do you adapt a story that never actually finished?

Is There a Trailer?

Not yet, and there won't be for a while. Cameras don't roll until January 2027, so there is no footage, no first-look still of Coster-Waldau as Strand, and no teaser. When MGM+ releases official video, we'll add it here. In the meantime, the best preview is the source itself: all three seasons of the original podcast are still free on podcast apps, and they run about 35 to 50 minutes an episode.

The Details: Everything Confirmed

MGM+ made it official on Monday, October 26, 2026. Here is what the announcement and the trades that covered it lock down:

Order: a full series pickup, eight episodes, no pilot stage.
Star: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Dr. Richard Strand, a psychiatrist with a mysterious past who investigates paranormal cases in order to debunk them.
His partner: Alex Regan, described as an obsessive, relentless scientist. The role has not been cast. (Note the spelling: the press materials use "Regan," while the podcast's host was "Alex Reagan.")
The story: Strand and Regan chase hauntings, possessions, disappearances and local legends, and their debunking work drags them into a hidden occult world and a conspiracy with apocalyptic stakes that stretches back centuries.
Writers: podcast creators Terry Miles and Paul Bae are writing the adaptation with showrunner John Rogers.
Executive producers: Miles, Bae, Rogers, Kearie Peak of Peak Pictures and Jennifer Court of Kung Fu Monkey Productions. MGM+ Studios is the studio.
Production: filming starts in January 2027 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Premiere date: none announced.

MGM+ global head Michael Wright pitched the show as a story built around "our cultural fascination with the unexplained," and said the team wants something both provocative and hugely entertaining. The casting itself leaked a few days early: scooper Daniel Richtman reported it to his Patreon subscribers, and Dread Central ran it over the weekend before the network confirmed it.

Photo: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

Who's Behind It

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Most of the world knows him as the Kingslayer, but Coster-Waldau's horror résumé is older and better than people remember. He broke out in Denmark in Ole Bornedal's 1994 morgue thriller Nightwatch ( Nattevagten ), a film good enough that Hollywood remade it a few years later with Ewan McGregor, Patricia Arquette, Nick Nolte and Josh Brolin.

His biggest horror hit came in January 2013 with Andy Muschietti's Mama , the Guillermo del Toro-produced ghost story in which he played opposite Jessica Chastain. It was a monster for its size: built on a reported $15 million budget, it opened to $28.4 million domestically, finished at $71.6 million in North America and grossed about $148 million worldwide, per The Numbers. Its success also helped put Muschietti in line for It . Since Thrones ended he has stayed busy on TV, most recently playing William the Conqueror in the BBC One and Prime Video drama King & Conqueror , and he is an Emmy nominee.

The casting is smart for a specific reason: Strand only works if the audience half-trusts him and half-suspects him. Coster-Waldau spent a decade making a charming, arrogant, possibly monstrous man into the most sympathetic character on television. That is exactly the muscle this role needs.

Terry Miles and Paul Bae

The creators aren't handing the show off; they're in the writers' room. Miles in particular has built an entire shared universe out of Pacific Northwest Stories, the audio label behind The Black Tapes . Its sister show Tanis launched in October 2015 and ran five seasons and 60 episodes through 2020, and his 2017 podcast Rabbits , about a deadly alternate reality game, became a novel in 2021. All three live in the same fictional world, which matters a lot if MGM+ ever wants more than one season.

John Rogers

The showrunner pick is the surprise. Rogers is not a horror guy. He co-created Leverage , which ran five seasons on TNT from 2008 to 2012 and was revived as Leverage: Redemption in 2021, and he developed TNT's The Librarians . Before TV, he co-wrote the disaster movie The Core and relaunched DC's Blue Beetle comic in 2006 with the Jaime Reyes version of the hero.

What Rogers does know is the "team of specialists works a case every week while a bigger mystery builds" format, and he knows how to run a show on schedule. That is the format The Black Tapes lives in. The open question is whether he can keep the dread intact when his natural register is wit.

Photo: John Rogers via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ).

The Backstory: A Podcast That Fooled People

The Black Tapes premiered on May 21, 2015, and its trick was the format. It sounded like public radio. Host Alex Reagan (voiced by Lori Henry) presented herself as a journalist making a documentary about people with interesting jobs, and she landed on Dr. Richard Strand (voiced by Christian Sloan), a famous skeptic offering a cash prize to anyone who could prove the supernatural. Strand had a set of cases he couldn't explain, kept on black-labeled VHS tapes. Reagan wanted to watch them. Things got worse from there.

A year after Serial made true-crime podcasts a phenomenon, that true-crime cadence was the perfect costume, and plenty of first-time listeners weren't sure whether they were hearing fiction. The Guardian praised the way the show folded math, music theory and history into clues about a possible demonic invasion. The numbers followed: by the count cited in coverage of this week's announcement, the podcast has passed 60 million downloads.

The run itself was short and strange. Season 1 had 12 episodes in 2015, season 2 had 12 more in 2016, and season 3 wrapped with just six episodes in fall 2017, 30 in total. The creators announced a fourth season in March 2018. It never arrived. In January 2020, the finale was quietly relabeled a "mid-season finale," and Pacific Northwest Stories hasn't released new audio since 2021. Fans have been left hanging for nine years.

The Long Road to TV

This is attempt number two. In December 2018, NBC took the podcast into development as a drama, with Miles and Bae executive producing alongside Emerald City co-creator Matthew Arnold and Entertainment 360, and Universal Television attached. The network floated it for the 2019 season. It never made it to a pilot. By the AV Club's account, the version now at MGM+ has been in development since 2019, which means it took roughly seven years to get from "we're working on it" to a series order and a lead actor.

By the Numbers

60 million+ podcast downloads since 2015
30 episodes across three seasons (2015 to 2017)
8 episodes ordered by MGM+
2 networks that have tried to adapt it (NBC in 2018, MGM+ now)
$148 million worldwide for Mama , Coster-Waldau's last big horror lead, on a $15 million budget
January 2027 start of filming in Vancouver

Analysis: What This Really Means

MGM+ is building a horror brand on purpose

MGM+ has spent years struggling to stand out against the giants, and its one undeniable breakout is a horror show. FROM is in its fourth season, has been renewed for a fifth and final run, and just jumped into Netflix's top 10 after landing there in October. With FROM heading for its ending, MGM+ needs its next "what is going on in this town" obsession. The Black Tapes is built for exactly that audience: a mystery box with a case-of-the-week engine, so viewers get answers every episode while the bigger puzzle keeps them hooked. Putting a recognizable star at the top tells you the network is treating this as a tentpole, not filler.

The podcast-to-TV track record is mixed

Audio horror has been a farm system for TV for a while, and the results cut both ways. Netflix's Archive 81 , adapted from a 2016 podcast and produced by James Wan, debuted in January 2022, earned an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, logged about 128 million hours viewed in its first few weeks, peaked at No. 2 in Nielsen's streaming chart, and was still canceled after one season that March. Homecoming gave Prime Video a prestige hit with Julia Roberts; Limetown with Jessica Biel came and went on Facebook Watch. The lesson is that a podcast's fan base gets you sampled, not renewed. The show has to work for people who have never heard an episode.

The real challenge: the format and the ending

Two things made the podcast special, and neither transfers cleanly. The first is the fake-documentary frame: the dread came from the possibility that it was real. A scripted series with a movie star can't fool anyone, so the show has to find a new way to unsettle people. Notably, the press release reframes Regan from a journalist into a scientist and makes the pair investigative partners, which reads like a deliberate move away from the faux-doc approach toward something closer to The X-Files , the comparison nearly everyone reached for this week.

The second is the ending, or the lack of one. Listeners have waited since 2017 for answers. That is a liability and an opportunity at the same time. Miles and Bae can finally finish the story, and TV gives them the budget and runway to do it. But if the series lands on another cliffhanger and doesn't get a second season, fans of the podcast will have been left hanging twice. The best thing MGM+ could do is let the eight episodes close a real chapter.

What We Still Don't Know

Who plays Alex Regan. That casting is the next big announcement, and it matters as much as Strand.
Whether Nic Silver, the podcast's producer character (voiced by Miles), or anyone from Tanis shows up.
Who directs, and whether the series keeps any found-footage or documentary elements.
A premiere date. With filming starting in January 2027, a late-2027 debut is the earliest realistic window, and 2028 is entirely possible.
Whether the show follows the podcast's plot or uses it as a launching pad, and whether the podcast's unfinished ending finally gets resolved.

Bottom Line

This is the right star, a smart home and a story that has waited nine years for a real ending. The concerns are real too: a showrunner with no horror on his résumé, a format that loses its best trick on screen, and a podcast-to-TV pipeline that has burned fans before. But Coster-Waldau playing a confident man slowly losing his certainty sounds like the kind of performance that carries a show, and MGM+ has already proven with FROM that it will let a slow-burn mystery breathe.

So tell us: did you listen to The Black Tapes back in 2015, and is Jaime Lannister the right Richard Strand?

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau at Cannes 2018 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: The Playlist , The A.V. Club , ShowbizJunkies , Deadline , Variety , Dread Central , Winter Is Coming , ComingSoon.net (2018) , Cancelled Sci Fi (2018) , The Numbers , Wikipedia: The Black Tapes , Wikipedia: Archive 81 , Wikipedia: John Rogers .

Bill Nighy Joins Alfonso Cuarón’s Cult Horror Series ‘Ascension’ at Apple TV: Everything We Know

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 22:49:52 GMT

Bill Nighy has played a vampire elder, a zombie-bitten stepdad and a cardinal with secrets inside the Vatican. Now he's walking into a cult. Deadline reported on Monday, Oct. 26, that Nighy has joined Ascension , the Apple TV horror series from Alfonso Cuarón, opposite Outlander star Caitríona Balfe. It's the first casting addition since Apple gave the show a series order in August, and it turns an already serious-minded project into one of the most stacked horror shows in development anywhere.

On paper, Ascension is a strange and exciting cocktail: a five-time Oscar winner who has been trying to make this story for almost a decade, the filmmakers behind Relic running the show, and an award-winning cult novel as the source. Below, we break down everything confirmed so far, the long road the project took to get here, who's behind it, how their past horror work landed, and what the Nighy casting tells us about the kind of show Apple is building.

Watch: Cuarón's Last Apple Series

Ascension hasn't released any footage yet, and it's not clear whether cameras have even started rolling, so there's no trailer to show. The best preview of what Cuarón brings to an Apple series is Disclaimer , his 2024 psychological thriller with Cate Blanchett. Here's Apple's official trailer:

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details: Everything Confirmed About 'Ascension'

What it is: A one-hour horror thriller series for Apple TV, made by Apple Studios.
Source: Inspired by Adam Nevill's 2012 novel Last Days .
The story: Rose, a documentary filmmaker and recently divorced mother, starts a project about the Church of Ascension, a cult that operated through the 20th century. She finds an unexpected sense of comfort in the group's teachings before realizing something far more sinister lives underneath them. Apple's logline describes her as "brilliant at uncovering others' truths but struggling to resolve her own."
Cast: Caitríona Balfe as Rose (she also executive produces) and Bill Nighy. Per Deadline's report, as relayed by iHorror, Nighy plays Zac, a documentarian who hires Rose for the new project.
Writers: Alfonso Cuarón, his brother Carlos Cuarón, Natalie Erika James and Christian White.
Showrunners: James and White, with James also serving as lead director.
Producers: Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Cuarón, James, White and Balfe executive produce, along with Gabriela Rodriguez and Richard Schwartz of Cuarón's Esperanto Filmoj and Steve Golin, David Levine and Zack Hayden of Anonymous Content.
Release: No premiere date, release window or episode count has been announced.

That premise is a smart inversion of the book. In Nevill's novel the documentarian is a man named Kyle Freeman, a struggling guerrilla filmmaker hired to shoot a film about the Temple of the Last Days, a cult tied to a massacre in 1975. The series swaps in a woman whose own life is coming apart, which shifts the horror from "what happened to those people" to "why does this feel so good to me." That's a much scarier question, and it's the one cult horror does best.

Who's Behind It

Alfonso Cuarón

Cuarón isn't a horror director in the traditional sense, but genre fans know his fingerprints. Children of Men is one of the bleakest, most frightening dystopias ever filmed, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is still the darkest, moodiest entry in that franchise, dementors and all. He has 11 Oscar nominations across his career and five wins: directing and editing for Gravity , then directing and cinematography for Roma . He also shared a screenplay nomination with Carlos for Y tu mamá también .

His company Esperanto Filmoj has an overall TV deal with Apple, and Ascension is his second series there. The first was Disclaimer , a seven-episode limited series based on Renée Knight's novel that premiered on Oct. 11, 2024, starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville. The difference this time: Cuarón is writing and producing, but he hasn't been announced as a director. The camera belongs to James.

Photo: Alfonso Cuarón via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Natalie Erika James and Christian White

This is the hire that should make horror fans sit up. James and White co-wrote Relic , the 2020 Australian haunted-house film that used a crumbling house as a metaphor for dementia. It premiered at Sundance on Jan. 25, 2020, was released by IFC Midnight that July (opening in drive-ins during the pandemic), and holds a 92% Tomatometer score from 231 reviews. It only grossed about $3.2 million, but it was produced by Jake Gyllenhaal with the Russo brothers as executive producers, and it became one of the most talked-about horror debuts of that strange year.

The duo reunited on Apartment 7A , the Rosemary's Baby prequel with Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest that went straight to Paramount+ on Sept. 27, 2024. That one was more divisive, sitting at 45% with critics and 64% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. James followed it with Saccharine , a gross-out body horror film starring Midori Francis and Danielle Macdonald that premiered in Sundance's Midnight section on Jan. 22, 2026, opened in U.S. theaters on May 22 and landed on Shudder on July 24. It scored 71% with critics but made only about $559,000 in theaters.

The pattern is clear: James is at her best when horror is a vehicle for family grief and identity, and she's less comfortable working inside somebody else's famous IP. Ascension sits much closer to Relic than to Apartment 7A : a story about a woman whose personal life is cracking open, set against a slow, creeping dread.

Caitríona Balfe

Balfe spent eight seasons as Claire Fraser on Starz's Outlander , which has now wrapped, and Ascension marks her return to series TV. She earned four Golden Globe nominations for Outlander and another for Kenneth Branagh's Belfast , and her film credits include Ford v Ferrari , Super 8 and Now You See Me . She also has the Apple film Tenzing on the way. This is her first true horror lead, and a character who's both investigator and potential convert gives her a lot to play.

Photo: Caitríona Balfe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped.

Bill Nighy

Nighy is a 2023 Best Actor Oscar nominee for Living , and he's spent a surprising amount of his career in the genre. He played the ancient vampire Viktor in the Underworld films starting in 2003, Shaun's stepfather Philip in Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead in 2004, and Cardinal Lawrence in Arkasha Stevenson's The First Omen in 2024. That last one matters most here: in The First Omen he played a kindly authority figure inside an institution hiding something awful, and he was unsettling precisely because he seemed so trustworthy. A documentarian who hires a vulnerable filmmaker to dig into a cult is a role built for that exact energy.

The Backstory: A Nine-Year Road

Ascension has been in Cuarón's hands for a long time. Back in 2017 he was shopping a series based on the same material with Casey Affleck attached to star, and that version never came together. The Playlist described the project as having been in development for nearly nine years by the time Apple ordered it, and noted that the new version is substantially different from the 2017 one, starting with the switch to a female filmmaker at its center.

Here's the timeline as reported:

May 2012: Pan Macmillan publishes Nevill's Last Days in the UK. St. Martin's Griffin releases it in the U.S. in February 2013.
2013: The novel wins the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel at the British Fantasy Awards.
2017: Cuarón's first attempt at a series surfaces, with Casey Affleck attached. It stalls.
Aug. 10, 2026: Variety reports Apple TV has ordered Ascension , with Balfe starring and James and White as co-showrunners.
Oct. 26, 2026: Deadline reports Bill Nighy has joined the cast.

Nevill's work has a solid screen track record, too. David Bruckner's The Ritual , based on Nevill's 2011 novel, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 8, 2017, starring Rafe Spall. Netflix paid $4.75 million for its international rights and released it on Feb. 9, 2018; it holds a 74% Tomatometer score. Netflix adapted Nevill again with No One Gets Out Alive in 2021, directed by Santiago Menghini. Ascension will be the first Nevill adaptation made as a series, and the first with this level of awards pedigree attached.

By the Numbers

11: Oscar nominations for Alfonso Cuarón, with five wins.
9: Roughly how many years the project has been in development.
92%: Relic 's Tomatometer score, the high point of the James and White partnership.
5: Golden Globe nominations for Caitríona Balfe.
10: Executive producers credited so far.
0: Announced premiere dates. Patience required.

Analysis: What This Really Means

The first thing the Nighy casting signals is that Apple is treating Ascension as a prestige drama that happens to be terrifying, not a horror show that hopes to be taken seriously. You don't hire an Oscar nominee to play a supporting role unless the character is meant to carry weight, and pairing him with Balfe gives the show two leads who can make quiet, two-person scenes crackle. That's exactly what a slow-burn cult story needs. The scariest parts of cult fiction are rarely the rituals; they're the conversations where someone reasonable makes something unreasonable sound like a relief.

It also fits a clear Apple pattern. The streamer's horror catalog has leaned toward literary, talent-driven projects rather than franchise scares: M. Night Shyamalan's Servant ran four seasons, and Stephen King adapted his own novel for Lisey's Story with Julianne Moore. Ascension slots right into that lane, with a celebrated novel, an auteur's name on top and a cast built for awards season.

The closest comparison, though, is Netflix's Midnight Mass from 2021: seven episodes about a community slowly seduced by a charismatic religious movement, with horror that builds out of sermons and small kindnesses before it turns. That show proved a mainstream audience will sit through long, talky, faith-and-grief horror if the payoff is earned. Ascension adds a found-footage-adjacent wrinkle, since its heroine is literally making a documentary, which could let James play with archival footage, interviews and the unreliable truth of what gets put on camera. Nevill's book leaned hard on that docu-horror structure, and if the show keeps it, it could give prestige TV a texture that's usually reserved for indie horror.

The risk is the same one that hangs over a lot of auteur-driven horror TV: a story that's so tasteful it forgets to be scary. James's Apartment 7A showed what happens when atmosphere outweighs bite. The good news is that Last Days has teeth, and James's best work, Relic , is a film that saves its most horrifying image for the final minutes and makes it devastating rather than cheap. If she brings that instinct to a long-form series with Cuarón's backing, this could be the cult horror show the genre has been waiting for.

What We Still Don't Know

When it premieres: No date or window. With casting still underway in late October, 2027 seems the earliest realistic bet, but that's our guess, not anything Apple has said.
How many episodes: Unannounced, as is whether it's a limited series or built to return.
Who leads the cult: The Church of Ascension needs a face, and that casting will tell us a lot about the show's tone.
How faithful it stays: The gender swap is the only major change confirmed. Readers will want to know whether the book's most notorious set pieces survive.
Will Cuarón direct any episodes: So far, James is the only announced director.

The Bottom Line

A nine-year passion project from Alfonso Cuarón, the Relic team running it, Caitríona Balfe out front and now Bill Nighy as the man who pulls her into the story: Ascension just became one of the most promising horror series on anyone's slate. It's a long way from screens, but every piece announced so far points toward serious, slow-burning dread instead of cheap jolts.

Your turn: Is Bill Nighy the perfect choice for a man who lures someone toward a cult, and have you read Last Days ? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

Header photo: Bill Nighy via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license ), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline , Variety , Variety (series order) , The Playlist , The Playlist (project history) , iHorror , Dread Central , Bloody Disgusting , JoBlo , Apple TV Press , Rotten Tomatoes , Wikipedia entries for Relic , Saccharine and The Ritual .