One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one...only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening. Trapped in the valley, they're forced to relive the nightmare again and again - only each time the killer threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. Hope dwindling, the group soon realizes they have a limited number of deaths left, and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.

IMDb

Steamboat Willie‘s reign of terror is now set to hit the big screen this spring.

Iconic Events Releasing has shifted the U.S. theatrical release date of the Steamboat Willie horror movie “Screamboat” from late January to April. The distributor has also unveiled a first look at the killer mouse, portrayed by David Howard Thornton, best known for his role as Art the Clown in the “Terrifier” franchise.

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Per the film’s official description, “‘Screamboat’ follows a group of New Yorkers on a late-night ferry ride that turns deadly when a mischievous mouse begins a rampage, targeting unsuspecting passengers. The unlikely crew must band together to thwart the murderous menace before their relaxing commute turns into a nightmare.”

Intermittently effective but grindingly repetitive, this lupine-themed horror posits a world where nearly a billion people have died after a supermoon turned anyone exposed to its light into a werewolf. A full year has passed, and in an unnamed city (San Juan, Puerto Rico and Los Angeles, California are listed as the locations used) folks are preparing for yet another supermoon-werewolf apocalypse by securing their homes with booby traps and arming themselves to the teeth.

Trailer

2024’s Christmas and New Year film calendar was interesting, to say the least. There wasn’t a genuine Christmas film in sight, so audiences had the option of singing their hearts out in the Land of Oz, watching a superfast blue hedgehog fight an evil egg man, beholding the CGI-rendered origin story of a famously deceased cartoon lion, or travelling to the lost island of Motufetu with an animated Dwayne Johnson. Fascinatingly, though, many cinemagoers chose to counter-programme their holiday season by embracing the darkness of Robert Eggers’ remake of the classic silent vampire tale Nosferatu. Most of them won’t have known, though, that Eggers’ Gothic fairytale wasn’t the only remake of that German Expressionist classic released in 2024. Instead, please spare a thought for the mostly-ignored Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, starring Doug Jones of The Shape of Water fame.

On December 3rd, 2014, David Lee Fisher’s proposed shot-for-shot remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter. Fisher’s intention was to make the same film again but with a new cast, a full script and symphonic musical score, and backgrounds created through a mixture of sets and CGI. At this point, Fisher’s version would have been the movie’s second remake after Werner Herzog’s 1979 opus Nosferatu the Vampyre. However, in July 2015 – only eight months later – Eggers’ own remake of the film was announced by Studio 8. This proved that Nosferatu remakes are like buses – you don’t see any for 35 years, then two come along at once.

Unfortunately for both Fisher and Eggers, though, the next decade proved extremely difficult when it came to translating their respective visions to screen. Jones, Hollywood’s premier monster actor, was cast as Fisher’s grotesque Count Orlok and shot his part in 2015, several years before he played the haunting Amphibian Man in Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning romantic oddity. He returned for some pick-up shots two years later before the film fell into what he described as “a very, very long post-production process.”

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Ultimately, Fisher’s film would finally premiere in Michigan in November 2023 but wouldn’t become widely available to the public until September 2024, when it was quietly released as a video-on-demand rental. Eggers’ star-studded $50million version followed on Christmas Day in the US and New Year’s Day in international markets. Naturally, most people were only aware of the version that starred Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård as Orlok instead of the strange low-budget version that quickly got lost in the streaming wasteland.

Looks like the Scream franchise is finally back in business. Original franchise creator Kevin Williamson shared a photo on Instagram of the first slate for Scream 7, revealing that the slasher sequel is officially filming, and that they’ve just wrapped their first day of shooting.

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The news of the sequel’s filming comes after several key cast members have returned to the franchise, notably Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox, but also Mason Gooding, who featured in the last two “legacy sequel” films in the franchise. Scream 7 is also set to star Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Celeste O’Connor and Mckenna Grace, as well as Anna Camp and Isabel May.

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Scream 7 hits theaters on February 27, 2026.

Images for Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare offer a first look at the horror version of Tinkerbell (Kit Green) and Captain Hook (Charity Kase). Written and directed by Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey director Scott Chambers, the upcoming horror retelling of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is a new entry in the Twisted Childhood Universe, only in theaters from January 13 to 15. The official synopsis sees Wendy Darling (Megan Placito) attempt to rescue her brother Michael (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from an evil Peter Pan's (Martin Portlock) plot to send him to Neverland.

The 2022 Japanese horror Kisaragi Station from director Jirô Nagae is getting a sequel titled Kisaragi Station Re:, according to Yahoo! Japan.

Kisaragi Station is based on a real life urban legend surrounding a mysterious, non-existent train station which first appeared on message board 2chan back in 2004. The post allegedly came from a woman named Hasumi, who found herself stuck in a parallel universe after disembarking at a train station in the Hamamatsu Region that didn't appear on any maps.

In the first film, Yuri Tsunematsu starred as a a young woman studying folklore at university, who decides the subject of her graduation thesis will be on the legendary Kisaragi Station.

Nozomi Honda will star in the sequel, which is set three years after Kisaragi Station.

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Kisaragi Station Re: is set to hit Japanese theaters this spring.

In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, the dark shadow of a long-fingered hand looms over the fictional German port town of Wisborg. It is a chilling, striking shot: an aerial view of twinkling, snow-dusted houses, the ugly threat of a monster’s grasping hand gliding overhead.

Conjuring atmosphere is something that Eggers, the American horror director behind The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, is especially good at. His reimagining of the 1922 German silent film by FW Murnau, itself a barely disguised (and distinctly unauthorised) reimagining of Bram Stoker’s 19th century gothic novel Dracula, isn’t scary exactly: even its moments of gore and grossness are studied and artful. But it is spooky.

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Yet for all its sexual tension, the film ends up feeling oddly cold. The baroque displays of passion and extravagant flowing blood usually associated with vampire movies are deployed sparingly. Unlike in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Dracula (which is, for better or worse, the one imprinted on this critic’s mind), both necrophilia and the devouring of children are tastefully implied. In that film, the love story at its heart felt real and moving, in spite of its gleefully over-the-top trappings. In Nosferatu, Eggers leans away from, rather than into, anything that might be considered playful, but the deadly serious tone can have the opposite effect.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22408620

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better. His hugely enjoyable collaborations with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, had a perfect command of comedy horror. The tone here feels less good natured, more self-congratulatory, the comedy not quite so light on its feet. Though it comes into its own with a cheerfully gruesome gorefest in the last half-hour.

Frost writes and stars alongside Aisling Bea (who really does deserve a better horror film). They play Richard and Susan Smith, an ordinary-seeming middle-aged couple with the irritating habit of calling each other “mummy” and “daddy”. The Smiths have dragged their bickering grownup kids Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres) on holiday to a fictional Swedish island to watch the Karantän festival. Every year locals stage an eight-hour re-enactment celebrating a grisly episode of early 19th-century history when their ancestors turned cannibalistic and chomped four British soldiers who’d starved the island.

Of course, in folk horror tradition, the Smiths are hapless outsiders blundering like lambs to a freaky ritualistic slaughter.

Trailer

After the cult success of last year’s I Saw the TV Glow, filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun has set their next film, and much like their last two films, it looks like they’re planning to flip an entire genre on its head. The film, titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, takes a meta look at slasher franchises and their legacy, from a “psychosexual point of view.”

At a recent screening of I Saw the TV Glow, according to critic Siddhant Adlakha, Schoenbrun described the film as “Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel.” This lines up well with the logline for the film, which follows “a queer filmmaker hired to direct a new installment of a long-running slasher franchise. The director fixates on the prospect of casting the ‘final girl‘ from the original movie, and the two women descend into a frenzy of psychosexual mania.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22289030

Apologies to anyone with a birthday in the upcoming month, but, let's be honest, January famously kind of sucks. If you're on a comedown from the festive high, never fear – we have a balm for your blues in the form of 10 of the best upcoming 4K and Blu-ray releases hitting horror shelves this January.

They are:

• April Fool's Day (4K UHD) - Kino Lorber Films
• Azrael (Blu-ray) - IFC Films
• Cure (4K UHD) - Eureka Video
• The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Collector's Edition 4K UHD + Blu-ray) - Scream Factory
• Incubus (Limited Edition 4K UHD/Limited Edition Blu-ray) - Arrow Video
• Smile 2 (4K UHD SteelBook) - Paramount
• The Substance (Blu-ray/4K UHD + Blu-ray combo) - MUBI
• Se7en (4K UHD SteelBook) - Warner Home Video
• Vampires (4K UHD + Blu-ray Collector's Edition) - Shout Factory
• Yellow Dragon's Village/Visitors (Blu-ray Double Feature) - Terror Vision

So throw in your top ten horror movies (or top how many you saw) from 2024. No wrong answers.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22120096

Robert Eggers has confirmed that “Nosferatu” will be released on 4K Blu-Ray in an extended cut. Is it the near 3-hour version that was test screened earlier in the year? Quite possibly.

In 2023, I read the script and after having seen the released cut, all I can say is that Eggers left a lot of footage out of version we saw in theaters.

Clip of the announcement (if you don't want to watch the full video linked), on Reddit

Christmas horror flicks have become an increasingly regular occurrence as filmmakers seek to balance the year-round affection for terror with the bells and whistles of the holiday season, but doing so back in the late 1970s and early 1980s ran the risk of making enemies on the highest rungs of the political ladder.

Writer and director Lewis Jackson’s Evil Christmas wasn’t prosecuted under the law like so many of its ‘Video Nasty’ contemporaries, but copies were seized and confiscated under the Obscene Publications Act, underlining that not even Santa Claus himself was immune from the wrath of Mary Whitehouse.

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At first glance, Christmas Evil could be accused of being nothing more than an exploitation flick that transforms Santa into a force of evil, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake instead of presents.

However, it also has some genuinely impressive cinematography and does a remarkable job of balancing its myriad of disparate tones. Sure, it’s a horror, but it’s also a story about unresolved trauma, and one that’s got lashings of dark comedy, a surprising amount of character-building, no shortage of introspection, and even touches on notions of identity and conformity after Harry goes public in his Santa garb after spending his life doing it in private.

A Waters-approved ‘Video Nasty’ it may be, but Evil Christmas doubles as an unexpectedly complex rumination on the darker side of the human condition. It’s still a blood-splattered horror at the end of the day, but it’s one with plenty of things to say beyond the brain matter and entrails.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/28619384

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is everything that’s beautiful and horrifying about classic vampire stories.

The distributor for Strange Darling has sued its marketing partner on the horror fan-favorite for fraud and breach of contract.

Bob Yari’s Magenta Light Productions, in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court that seeks at least $10 million, accuses Spellbinder of failing to contribute its half of the $2 million marketing spend for the film. It also claims that the company kept some of the funds and bought social media followers and views on various platforms to create the appearance of a successful marketing campaign.

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Strange Darling, a nonlinear serial killer thriller, premiered in August on over 1,100 screens across the U.S. It made $1.1 million its opening weekend, significantly below box office expectations for its media campaign, reviews and broad theatrical release. Miramax financed the film, which has grossed roughly $3 million, on a budget of at least $4 million.

After acquiring distribution rights to the film, Magenta approached Global Pictures Media, a now-defunct company that specializes in financing theatrical release of films, to fund P&A (prints and advertising) for the movie only to be told that the firm shut down and that its principals were raising capital to launch Spellbinder, the complaint says. They agreed to evenly split $2 million in marketing spend, with Magenta wiring Spellbinder the funds to start the campaign.

The lawsuit claims that Spellbinder in June failed to deliver a contractually obligated dashboard providing live updates on media spend and throttled back the campaign, which led Magenta to request invoices to confirm spending up to that date. Later that month, the distributor learned that Spellbinder brought in Myosin, another marketing agency, to assist.

In July, Magenta was told that the media purchases laid out in the contract had not yet been negotiated or purchased in breach of the deal, the lawsuit says. Spellbinder allegedly said that it required more funds despite it being responsible for half of the costs.

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The lawsuit claims that Myosin, which is named in the complaint, commingled funds with Spellbinder. The ownership of the two companies are “identical,” states the lawsuit, which alleges that they “operate as a single entity and identify themselves separately only for purposes of evading liability.” Sean Clayton is a founder of both companies, according to the complaint.

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Magenta also claims that Spellbinder purchased followers on Instagram to make it appear that it had enacted a successful marketing campaign. The platform flagged nearly 25,000 of the movie’s 27,000 followers as likely being bots, according to the complaint.

“Further, it appears that Spellbinder purchased views of videos posted to Plaintiff’s YouTube account,” the lawsuit states. “These videos have a high number of views but extremely limited engagement, which suggests that the views are not genuine. The few comments on these YouTube videos also appear to have been generated by bots. Additionally, despite gaining millions of views on the top videos posted to the account, the account itself has generated less than 500 subscribers.”