Tag: Year in Review 2025

You can’t outrun it. Bloodlines, the first Final Destination movie in 14 years brings Death to the doorway of unsuspecting innocents once again courtesy of filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, and scribes by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor.

Bloodlines blows the doors open on the franchise, not only reminding people why they loved the series, and its Rube Goldberg death traps, but adding new wrinkles to the lore that bring a sense of unity to the six-film saga.

After a vision of a collapsing skyrise warns Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) of impending death in 1969, she manages to avoid her fate, while also saving the life of a young boy, William Bludworth, the franchise’s oft-recurring character played as an adult by Tony Todd. In the years since, Iris became a recluse, traumatizing her children in the process and leaving them estranged. But Death belongs to Iris’s family and when it comes for her children, it’s her grandchildren, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), Charlie (Teo Briones), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), Julia (Anna Lore), and scene-stealing Erik (Richard Harmon), who are forced to defeat Death’s grisly, tragic, and sometimes humorous, designs. Fresh filmmakers and fresh faces give Final Destination a new lease on life, and the result is a summer horror blockbuster that feels like an exciting launch point, and a moving sendoff to late, great horror-legend Tony Todd.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Osgood Perkins delivered two horror movies this year, following his 2024 hit, Longlegs. The first was The Monkey, a darkly comedic adaptation of Stephen King’s short story. The second, and far less critically acclaimed, is Keeper. The Monkey was a good time, but Keeper startled me and stayed on my mind. The film is reminiscent of Perkins’ works before Longlegs gave him notoriety outside of the horror fanbase. While all of Perkins’ films have a thematic through line steeped in dark fairy tales and revelations excavated from the past, Keeper has an intimacy reminiscent of The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), I Am the Pretty Young Thing That Lives in the House (2016), and Gretel & Hansel (2020).

What starts as an anniversary get-away for Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and her boyfriend Malcom (Rossif Sutherland) at his secluded family home, becomes a descent into madness and the supernatural. When Malcolm is called back to the city for work, Liz becomes aware of other presences inhabiting the home. These shapeshifting figures reveal secrets about Malcolm and his boorish cousin Darren (Birkett Turton), and Liz is forced to reckon with the fact that the man she’s been dating is not at all who he claimed to be. A slow burn of suspense and surrealism pays off with a confrontation that sees the true faces of these shapeshifting creatures revealed in all their uniquely horrific glory. Keeper is a disquieting folkloric tale about believing one’s sinful habits are in their control.

Heart Eyes feels carved out of the 1990s in the best way. No, it doesn’t rewrite the rules. But like the best of the post-Scream slashers of that era, it’s bloody, funny, and best of all, has a fair share of camp. That shouldn’t come as a surprise for those familiar with the works of director Josh Ruben, and writers Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, who are well versed at blending and remixing genre elements to deliver films that are wholly entertaining, surprisingly vulnerable and heartfelt. And Heart Eyes has plenty of heart — complete with warm, sputtering blood.

The film follows new co-workers Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), who both happen to be single but couldn’t seem more different. When they become the target of the Heart Eyes Killer, who mistakes them for a couple, they are forced to work together to survive Valentine’s Night, though their respective secrets threaten to tear them apart, if the Heart Eyes Killer doesn’t get to them first. The result is a film that works as both a sexy rom-com and a sharp-edged slasher. With a charming pair of leads in Holt and Gooding, the best slasher mask in some time, and an absolutely bonkers third act, Heart Eyes has the makings of an annual holiday horror favorite.

There’s something very wrong with Iris (Sophie Thatcher). No, it’s not simply that she’s discovered she’s a companion robot with implanted memories and a lack of free will. It’s that her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) is a monstrous man who seeks to hold her captive and force her to bend to his sadistic demands. This is the set-up of Companion, the directorial debut of Drew Hanock, whose script was so impressive that producer Zach Cregger almost directed this instead of Weapons, before deciding Hancock should take it on.

Given how accomplished the film feels, it’s a little surprising that Hancock doesn’t have a lengthy directorial resume under his belt. The film’s pacing, performances, and ability to juggle tone that veers from sweet to rage-inducing is the kind of breakout hit most first-time filmmakers dream of.

While there are clear cinematic influences on Companion, Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1975) being chief among them, the film offers a unique look into automatons, agency, modern love, and the horrors of incel “culture.” With a supporting cast that includes Harvey Guillen, Rupert Fiend, Lukas Gage, and Megan Suri, Companion relies on using audience expectations of character types to zag rather than zig, offering no shortage of surprises and scenarios that seem inescapable.

Companion doesn’t take The Terminator approach of the robot run amuck, but instead reveals itself be a crime film (at least, at first), with Josh and his friends robbing the home of a Russian millionaire. But when Iris is made aware of what she is, the film takes a turn, and it’s not the robots we have to worry about taking over, but the seemingly “nice guys” who want nothing more than to be told they’re great and powerful for simply pushing a button.

Not all is copacetic when a co-dependent couple moves out of the city and into their new home in the quiet countryside and get a dose of body horror that’s big enough to share. Michael Shanks, another filmmaker making his feature film debut this year, delivered the buzzy Sundance hit, Together, at the perfect time. With The Substance still high on people’s minds, there’s an appetite for body horror. But make no mistake, Together isn’t anything like The Substance, though I’d argue that effects wise both films do share an admiration for the works of Brian Yuzna and Screaming Mad George, with Together preferring the stretchy, sinewy effects over the fleshy lumps of The Substance. But both films serve as reminders in this modern era of horror filmmaking that body horror is a vast subgenre that can’t constantly be qualified as Cronenbergian.

Real-life couple, Dave Franco and Allison Brie, whose savvy marketing hijinks added another layer of intrigue to the film, star as Tim and Millie. The couple is wrestling with their recent move, one that allows Millie to teach elementary in a better school system but also forces Tim to forgo his music career and dreams of being a rock star.

But the couple, who have been together a long time, are also starting to question if they still love each other or have just grown comfortable with each other. It’s a scary question, made all the more frightening when a hike through the woods leads them into a mysterious underground cavern containing a pool of water with…transformative properties. Things only get weirder as the couple are drawn closer together even as their relationship seems to fray and they learn about the town’s local folklore. Anchored by two great performances, Together is a tense, eerie, disgusting, and at times surprisingly poignant reflection on relationships.

The Philippou Brothers wracked our nerves and left us feeling beaten and bruised with their debut feature, Talk to Me (2023). With their follow-up film, Bring Her Back, they do it again, though employ a different, quieter, beat. In Bring Her Back, Andy (Billy Barratt) and his blind sister, Piper (Sora Wong) are forced into foster care after the death of their father. Their caretaker, Laura (Sally Hawkins), whose own blind daughter died years ago, displays clear favoritism to Piper as soon as the siblings arrive. Her mute foster son, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), display signs that alert Andy that Laura may not be all that she seems. Laura proves to be a master manipulator whose strange rituals take hold of the children in her house as she abuses them emotionally and physically, sometimes without their knowledge, all in an effort to bring her daughter back to life.

Certainly, mileage may vary on feel bad horror movies, and the Philippou Bros. do have a mean streak, though I’d argue it comes with an unflinching look at broken people rather than any sadistic sensibilities.

Bring Her Back is undoubtedly uncomfortable to watch during a lot of its runtime, though, at least for me, it doesn’t come close to earning some of the reactions from people who claimed they got sick and had to leave, or that it was so hard to watch they’d never want to watch again.

It’s a bleak story and it’s impossible not to feel bad for the children put in harm’s way, but Talk to Me left me more perturbed, although that’s not all there is to horror. Yes, there are gruesome moments, one involving a table is a standout, but there is something grounding and deeply affecting about the Philippou’s lens into horror, and how even in a world where magic exists, and meaning can be obstructed and manipulated, life and death remain unshakable fixtures of reality. And reality hurts.

2025 was a big year for the King. Between The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, The Running Man, and the HBO series IT: Welcome to Derry, the works of Stephen King were all over our screens in 2025. But it was the long-gestating adaptation of The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence and penned by JT Mollner, that was the most harrowing on the film side of things.

Set in an alternate 1970s dystopia, The Long Walk tells the story of Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), who, along with fifty other boys, has volunteered to compete in the Long Walk, in which the boys most walk continuously at three miles an hour until only one boy is left.

Failure to keep pace or continue walking after three warnings results in the walker being executed by the militia, led by The Major (Mark Hamill), who follow in tanks behind them. Ray’s relationship with fellow walker, Peter McVries, portrayed immaculate by David Jonsson, and brilliant supporting cast including Tut Nyuot, Ben Wang, Garret Wareing, Charlie Plummer, Jordan Gonzalez, Joshua Odjick, Roman Griffin Davis and Judy Greer, create a poignant and painful tapestry of loss, hope and systemic oppression.

There are some who wouldn’t classify The Long Walk as horror, and it’s a debate I’ve had with myself. It’s a fair consideration, but I think unlike Lawrence’s Hunger Games films in which revolution is sparked and attained, The Long Walk exists in a system where revolution is not possible and hope is not rewarded.

The world of The Long Walk is one built on fear, fear of being shot in the back by faceless soldiers moving in the shadows behind the walkers, fear of losing one’s friends and family, and fear of a fate worse than death – the never-ending walk. In my eyes, there’s nothing quite so horrific as taking a character like Peter, who can see beyond the walk, who has faith and serenity, and light, and in a shocking moment of violence, has that all driven out of him, forcing a psychological change in which madness, shared by no one, is the only escape. The Long Walk is a masterclass example of psychological horror and one of the great Stephen King adaptations.

“Are you watching?” Weapons, the latest film from Zach Cregger who surprised audiences in 2022 with Barbarian, inundates the viewer with sublime discomfort punctured by brief moments of humor that release tension but never allow for relief. The former sketch comedian turned horror filmmaker spins a twisty tale around the disappearance of seventeen third-grade children who all left their homes at 2:17 a.m. and went out into the dark.

The mystery unravels through the perspective of a collection of characters: the missing children’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), whose outwardly meek composure hides a troubled past; Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the inattentive father of one of the missing children; Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), a police officer involved in an affair with Justine; James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict who stumbles into the mystery during a burglary; Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), the school’s principal; and Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only child in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear. Through these characters, and shifting timelines, Cregger creates a rich tapestry of a small town caught in the throes of horror and grief.

And then, of course, there’s Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys, Alex’s aging aunt who may be of no relation, who became one of the year’s breakout horror characters. As the witch at the center of Cregger’s modern fairy tale, it’s almost too easy to blame all of the evil on her designs and manipulation of Alex.

But the truth is, each of the characters, in their own way, are weapons used to harm themselves and those around them, making it possible for children to be lost and hurt in the process. There’s plenty of meaning in Weapons and everything from school gun violence and child trafficking to the older generation trying to hold onto their power and deny its transference to the younger generation can be seen as the metaphor driving the narrative. But if there’s a central takeaway from Weapons, it’s that the world we’ve created for them, the dangers seen and unseen, leave their marks.

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland returned to the world that redefined zombie movies for the 21^st century with the first part of a new trilogy. In the three decades since the initial infection spread, the quarantined British Isles and its inhabitants have evolved, and so have the infected, spawning monstrous variations. On Holy Island, we’re introduced to12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his parents, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his ailing mother, Isla (Jodie Comer) who is prone to fits of rage, confusion and memory loss.

After his first hunt, Spike learns that his father has been having an affair, one born of loneliness and frustration over his dying wife. Betrayed by this revelation, Spike sets out with his mother to find the mysterious and so-called mad Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who he believes can cure his mother and heal his family.

While there’s no shortage of infected, and grisly demises, Boyle and Garland have no interest in doing a legacy sequel by way of a soft remake. Rather, the filmmakers consider what three decades of isolation and a culture built on traditions of the past would actually mean. Infection spreads in multiple ways, not only in terms of the red-eyed creatures that haunt the land outside of feudal style villages, but the people within those villages whose perverted sense of nationalism and selective memory keeps ideas and figures alive when they should have died long ago.

28 Years Later reconfigures Arthurian legend, with Kelson serving as a Merlin-esque figure, who instead of helping a young warrior obtain immortality, imparts the importance of death onto him. 28 Years Later is the first chapter in a coming-of-age story, where growing up means more than maturing into yet another reflection of a stagnant culture, but of allowing for the frightening possibilities of growing spiritually and mentally beyond the ideals imparted in youth.

When it comes to cinematic works of fiction, Sinners is the most important film of the year. It also happens to be the best film of the year, regardless of any genre categorization.

In Sinners, twin brothers and prohibition era gangsters, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), set up a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta, with the help of their musically gifted cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), aging blues musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), their Chinese friends, Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace, (Li Jun Li), good-natured sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) and the heart of the film, the hoodoo practitioner and Smoke’s lover, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku).

Opening night brings a host of familiar faces, like Stack’s old flame, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a white woman who was raised around Black people, and the singer, Pearline (Jayme Lawson) who catches Sammie’s attention. But not all faces are friendly. The night also brings the Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell), and former KKK members turned vampires, Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and his wife Joan (Lola Kirke), who seek the power of Sammie’s voice to commune with their ancestors.

Ryan Coogler, along with his cast and crew, achieve what we all hope for filmmaking to achieve. It moves us, excites us, scares us, and breaks our hearts. It shows a range of images and sounds never before seen or heard on screen before. It imparts knowledge to its audience with the expectation they have their eyes open and ears ready to listen and invites us to a world unseen by most and immerses us in a story told to the widest possible audience, by voices that have too long gone unheard and undervalued.

I think what makes Coogler such an immense talent is that he is a born collaborator. From cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, editor Michael P. Shawver, composter Ludwig Goransson, producer Zinzi Coogler, and his cast, Coogler’s working relationships are also his friendships and familial relationships. There is a feeling that everybody gets their big moment to shine and there are truly no small players, all of which can be felt in the film but also highlighted in the way Coogler actively points towards and celebrates his cast and crew.

Coogler showcases value in the Black experience. This has been the case for his entire filmography, but I think Sinners is his most personal film, a story Coogler needed to tell because so much of his love of music, of genre, of his ancestors, and the art of storytelling stems from the history of Black America, a history shaped by the blues, by horror and by love.

Without denying all of the film’s contextual meaning, Coogler first and foremost makes a great vampire film. He doesn’t stray far from the familiar lore but still finds a way to make it feel fresh and frightening, adding a layer of cultural appropriation and consumption into the mix. There is an aversion to preaching in Sinners, and commitment to entertaining an audience, because when entertained to the degree Sinners provides, there’s no need to preach. The message becomes inherent and inescapable. Without any hyperbole, Sinners is a new American classic, a term I do not use lightly. It’s a celebration of Black culture and ownership made for us but gifted to everyone, much like Blues.

Honorable Mentions: The Conjuring: Last Rites, Wolf Man, The Monkey, Death of a Unicorn, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Opus.

Best Streaming and Limited Releases

The popular ongoing horror anthology franchise returned to capture the spirit of Samhain with V/H/S Halloween. Comprised of six stories, boasting the talents of filmmakers Casper Kelly, Paco Plaza, Bryan M. Ferguson, Anna Zlokovic, R.H. Norman and Micheline Pitt-Norman and Alex Ross Perry, the latest V/H/S installment captures both the fun and horror of the holiday with a fair share of tricks and treats. Zlokovic’s “Coochie Coochie Coo” is my favorite of the six, and the grossest. While Perry’s “Kidprint” is easily the most disturbing. There’s not a weak link in the bunch and the yearly franchise has become one of streaming service Shudder’s most dependable offerings. Fingers crossed for a V/H/S/ Christmas somewhere down the line!

Part of the thrill of the horror genre, especially within the independent space, is watching something that unexpectedly clings to you nearly a year after watching it. It’s a different relationship than with studio releases, where the films are in constant conversation and always present in the form of GIFs, fan art and memes. There’s a more private appreciation that comes from the underseen, like knowing a secret and cherishing it. That’s how The Dead Thing, directed by Elric Kane, and co-written by Webb Wilcoxen, felt.

It stays with you, even after it’s over. You belong to it. That’s what Alex (Blu Hunt) discovers after a series of disastrous app-match dates lead her to the sensitive Kyle (Ben Smith- Peterson) who seems like her soul mate. But Kyle isn’t the life partner Alex has been pining for. In fact, Kyle isn’t alive at all. This revelation is only the start of a haunting and heartbreaking look at love and possession. There’s a timeless quality to the story here, a challenge for something that is so centered around our contemporary relationship with technology and digital matchmaking. But the quiet, palpable loneliness, and lingering desire feels both prescient to our day and age and like a ghost that’s always been there.

Santa slays (again) in Mike P. Nelson’s remake of 1984’s controversial cult classic, Silent Night, Deadly Night. Orphaned as a child, Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell), is a drifter who has been wandering around the U.S. with a voice in his head, a voice he calls Charlie (Mark Acheson), that come every December, encourages him to dress up as Santa and commit brutal murders. But his victims aren’t just chosen at random. They are carefully selected wrong doers who have escaped justice.

They are “naughty.” But Billy’s latest yuletide slaughter hits a snag when he falls for a small-town Christmas antique store clerk, Pamela (Ruby Modine), whose not without her own personality quirks and dark impulses. As Billy tries to keep his bloodlust at bay, and dreams of a life different than the one he’s led, a series of child kidnappings means it’s time to don the white beard once again.

Silent Night, Deadly Night extends the themes of the original film while adding its own new twists and turns and thus succeeds at what horror remakes should aspire towards. But big swings, and great performances and chemistry from Campbell and Modine aren’t all the new film has to offer. It’s also a righteously blood-soaked affair, and a sequence where Billy turns a Neo-Nazi Christmas party into a slaughterhouse is a highlight.

David Cronenberg peels back another layer in his storied body horror oeuvre, with what may be one of his most challenging films. In The Shrouds, grieving widower, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) invents GraveTech, a tombstone that allows viewers to see a live, 3D, image of their loved one’s decomposing body. Just when Karsh plans to expand his technology globally, several of the gravestones, including his wife Becca’s, are destroyed and the technology is encrypted by hackers, Karsh finds himself caught up in a technological conspiracy involving his wife’s twin sister, Terry (Diane Kruger), her husband Maury (Guy Pearce), and Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) the wife of a CEO who wants to sponsor GraveTech in Budapest. The discovery of strange protrusions on his wife’s decaying body, part of which had been amputated as a form of treatment before her death by the doctor she was having an affair with, adds another to the mystery Karsh finds himself embedded in.

The Shrouds is a deeply personal film for Cronenberg, who made it after the death of his wife, Carolyn Zeifman. But of course, Cronenberg’s lens into the personal is partially obfuscated to the viewer, feeling, at times, clinical rather than comprised of raw emotion. But this plays into the film’s themes: a person’s ability to detach from the physical form of the deceased all while knowing that that the person they loved are no longer within.

The act becomes more of a science project than a religious reflection. The conspiracy at the center of The Shrouds really isn’t central at all, it’s merely a husk with no clear answer inside, leaving us with questions. These questions about the film’s conspiracy are the same ones grappled with in the face of loss: Do we ever really know someone? Are their bodies as close as we can ever get? What part of them is lost in decay and amputation? Partial bodies and partial mysteries, neither with any hope of reconstruction, can lead to endless stagnation to the point where moving on is only a shroud covering inescapable grief and questions.

Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals is the best shark movie since Jaws. Now, that’s not to overhype it and say that it’s on the same level as Jaws. I mean, what is? But in terms of making the ocean terrifying and inhospitable to humans, Dangerous Animals has a hell of a mean bite. Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a boho surfer with trouble connecting with people is kidnapped by shark-obsessed boat captain and serial killer, Tucker (Jai Courtney), who makes his living off selling snuff videos of feeding his captives to sharks. With no contacts, friends, or family, Zephyr must rely on fellow captive Heather (Ella Newton) to escape their sharp-witted captor. Meanwhile, Moses (Josh Heuston), who caught feelings for Zephyr after a one-night stand, is the only one concerned about her disappearance and takes it on himself to find her, unaware of the danger lurking above the sea and below it.

Jai Courtney delivers what is easily his best performance. And the actor, who Hollywood once tried to position as a pretty boy leading man, has found his niche in playing deranged psychopaths. Courtney plays Tucker like a human shark: patient, cunning, quick, and pure muscle. As far as horror villains of the year go, Tucker is definitely in the conversation, elevating the entire movie and the performances of his fellow actors in a movie that feels destined for cult status.

Stephen Soderbergh and writer David Koepp’s Prescence is a haunted house movie for the modern age. Shot in the first-person perspective of a presence haunting a suburban house, the viewer gets an up close and personal look at the Payne family, Chris (Chris Sullivan), his wife Rebekah (Lucy Liu), and their children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), ordinary suburbanites who, when held under a microscope, showcase the cracks in the perfect American dream.

Prescence requires some degree of patience. Before the presence makes itself known to the Payne family, it’s merely an observer and is the audience. We witness sibling rivalries, martial struggles and financial hurdles, but none of this seems particularly impactful. But when Tyler’s friend Ryan (West Muholland) enters the picture and takes an interest in Chloe, the film shifts and we’re caught in this presence’s desperate, rageful feeling to do something while the horrible and inevitable creeps closer. The reveal of the presence recontextualizes the entire film and all of the moments spent watching the family earlier in the film take on additional meaning resulting in a devastating ending.

“There’s a house under the house.” Frewaka, which translates to “roots,” is an Irish folk horror movie from Aislinn Clarke that creeps and snarls around history and long buried secrets. After the death of her mother, a home care worker, Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is assigned to an elderly and deeply superstitious woman, Pieg (Brid Ni Neachtain), who fears her neighbors and the evil being called the Na Sidhe who she claims kidnapped her decades earlier.

While Shoo initially assumes Pieg, whose moods shift dramatically, is suffering from dementia or another mental affliction, she learns that Pieg’s superstitions may be warranted. Shoo is drawn to a sealed door she’s been forbidden to open but feels may hold the answers she’s spent her life looking for.

Frewaka is a genuinely frightening affair, one that’s worth going into knowing nothing more than what’s above. Directed with unnerving precision, and beautifully shot by Narayan Van Maele, this folk horror film will pull you down into its steadily growing nightmare residing just beneath the surface.

In 1980s-set and heavily stylized Dead Mail, a post office receives a letter from a kidnapping victim, leading Jasper (Tomas Boykin) — a postal employee who investigates undeliverable mail — to investigate its origins. That is, until his mystery is abruptly cut short by his murder. The film — directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy — then circles back to Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.) a keyboardist who catches the attention of Trent (John Fleck), who claims to be fellow synthesizer aficionado who offers to bankroll Josh in the hopes of being able to create a synthesized woodwind sound. Josh, initially grateful for Trent’s interest and investment in his work, grows concerned as Trent starts showing up increasingly frequently to his home uninvited, and begins to reveal how little he knows about synthesizers. With Josh established as the kidnapping victim, the postal workers introduced in the beginning, Ann (Micki Jackson) and Bess (Susan Priver), continue Jasper’s work.

There’s a surreal, neighborly element to Dead Mail, that when coupled with its synth score and period accurate clothing and setting makes the film feel like some undiscovered relic of the past – a result that is somehow both disorienting, quirky and a little dangerous. The world created here feels like you could round the corner and run into either Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson or Ted Bundy and be unsurprised by either. Rife with unease about overly friendly strangers, yet also celebratory of postal workers who interact with strangers every day, Dead Mail is a unique and memorable experience that can’t be boxed neatly into a single package.

As previously alluded to, fairy tales and horror just fit together and feed off each other. That’s true for original, modern fairy tales like Weapons and Keeper, but also classics like Cinderella. Norwegian film, The Ugly Stepsister, directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, turns the Cinderella story on its head, focusing on Elvira (Lea Myren) who is caught in a battle of beauty with her arrogant new stepsister, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) who has been forced to serve as housemaid by her new stepmother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp). Despite her thoughtful sister Alma’s (Flo Fagerli) concerns, Elvira sets her sites on the boorish prince and is determined by beautiful by any means possible – be that finishing school, early forms of cosmetic surgery, tape worms or a butcher’s knife.

Bleakly amusing and alarming, The Ugly Stepsister is a cringe-worthy experience that practically dares the viewer to look away during some of its more extreme body horror sequences.

But The Ugly Stepsister has far more going for it than just gross-out moments. It is a surprisingly empathetic film. Myren’s performance as Elvira is so wonderfully pained and desperate that you can’t help but feel for her, and what she’s done to herself. The ugliness she submits herself to is juxtaposed by the dreamy cinematography of Marcel Zyskind, John Erik Kaada’s score, and Sabine Hviid’s production design. Blichfedlt kaleidoscopic approach to a beloved fairy tale may not startle with new revelations but does allow for a different perspective and color that illuminate our continued fascination with these frequently adapted, centuries-old stories.

Speaking of frequently adapted, centuries-old stories, Frankenstein looms large within that vast library. Mary Shelley’s novel is credited for the birth of science fiction, and while it’s not the first horror story, it’s arguably the most impactful. Whether it’s Shelley or filmmakers like James Whale or Terence Fisher who adapted her work, the bones of horror cinema is Frankenstein. It is then no surprise that Guillermo del Toro has been playing with these bones his entire career, frequently citing both Shelley’s novel and Whale’s 1931 as reasons he became a filmmaker. At long last, he’s arranged these bones together to deliver his take on a celebrated story of creation, madness, life, death, and obsession.

The pieces that make Frankenstein…well, Frankenstein, are all present. The morose, mother’s boy Victor Frankenstein, the Creature he creates and abandons, the fear and loathing the Creature inspires from both his creator and those around him, resulting in his loss of innocence, and the deadly consequences of playing God. But it should be abundantly clear that this is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, not Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (or Kenneth Branagh’s for that matter). What this means is that while the pieces are Shelley’s, del Toro’s provides the stitchwork, constructing his own vision and spilling his own blood in the needlework. The result is a more sympathetic and romantic Creature (Jacob Elordi), and a crueler, less aloof Victor (Oscar Isaac), though he still shares the inherent queerness of Shelley’s characterization. Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is also given far more agency in this iteration, standing in contrast to both Victor and her uncle, Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), unable to be made to feel small by them like her fiancé William Frankenstein (Felix Kammerer).

When you consider del Toro’s rise in Hollywood, it’s no surprise that he empathizes greatly with outsiders, and what are monsters than the greatest outsiders shaped by societal fears? The Creature in Frankenstein becomes a less guilty figure in del Toro’s because he is examining the character through his own experience, a romantic rarely considered a romantic filmmaker despite love being the fundamental element of his filmography. But Frankenstein is unequivocally a love story. It’s one filled with monsters, mischievous humor, extreme flashes of violence, and women who both create and do not shrink away in the face of abnormality and are envied as result. But a love story nonetheless, and oh how existential, brutal, horrific, and transformative Guillermo del Toro showcases love to be.

Honorable Mentions: Influencers, Bone Lake, Queens of the Dead, Strange Harvest, Hell of a Summer.

Looking ahead to next year, horror films on the radar include: We Bury the Dead, Primate, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Night Patrol, Return to Silent Hill, Send Help, Whistle, Cold Storage, Psycho Killer, This is Not a Test, The Bride!, They Will Kill You, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, Hokum, Obsession, Evil Dead Burn, Insidious: The Bleeding World, Resident Evil, Other Mommy, and Robert Eggers’ Werwulf, along with many more yet to be revealed. See you then and as always, stay scared!