So, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. You may be wondering, who is Lee Cronin? Do I even know that guy?
You probably do, if you saw 2023’sEvil Dead Rise, the story of a family trapped in their apartment as their mother turns Deadite and tries to murder them all.
You may have missed his 2019 Irish horror, The Hole in the Ground, where a changeling takes the shape of a woman’s young son, traps her in a house and tries to kill her.
Now Cronin takes on a mummy’s curse, trapping a family inside a house with their daughter, who is now a monster out to kill every one of them. By the third time, you have to think that the idea of an evil entity taking over the body of a loved one is a real fixation for the filmmaker. Lucky for us!
Jack Raynor and Laia Costa are the parents of three: little Maud (Billie Roy), tween Sebastian (Shylo Molina), and their oldest, Katie (Emily Mitchell, then Natalie Grace). Katie went missing in Cairo 8 years ago, but she’s been found and she’s ready to come home. It’ll just take some adjusting.
The trailer for the film gave it the look of a PG13 horror—quick cuts, jump scares, and black vomit. I’m pleased to report that this is not the film at all. Cronin mines the situation for grief and sorrow before descending into body horror. It’s a wild line he crosses, manipulating your emotions and then throwing gross-out body fluid horror all over the deviled eggs.
It’s nasty. Like almost early Peter Jackson nasty.
And Cronin is not afraid to take the film places you may not want to go. The darkest, sloppiest comedy butts up against emotional horror so moving you may want to look away. Or if that doesn’t make you divert your eyes, the pus, eyeballs, tongues, and unspecified body fluids will.
It’s a mixed bag, this one, and it gets a little tedious toward the end. Plus, Cronin doesn’t always balance the tone effectively. This is very much an R-rated horror, at times taking itself too seriously and at others, delivering some of the nastiest comic gags you’ve ever seen during a funeral.
I was unsettled at times and grossed out at others, but I must say, I was thoroughly entertained.
Those teenage years can be beastly! A lot of vampire movies channel the alienation, hormones, angst and general misbehavior into a cautionary tale about teeth. Here are some of our favorites.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
Back in ’92, Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens played vampires (thank you!) bent on draining a California town. But one superficial mean girl at the local high school happens to be the Chosen One, the Slayer, or so says Donald Sutherland, and it generally seems like a fine idea to listen to him. Kristy Swanson then flirts with Luke Perry while training to stake some bloodsuckers.
Swanson is joined by Ben Affleck and Hilary Swank as vacuous teens in a highly dated but no less fun horror comedy. Reubens was a huge inspiration for our own short film Drunkula. Plus, anytime you crown Rutger Hauer prom king, you can count us in.
4. The Lost Boys (1987)
Out and proud Hollywood director Joel Schumacher spins a yarn of Santa Carla, a town with a perpetual coastal carnival and the nation’s highest murder rate. A roving band of cycle-riding vampires haunts the carnival and accounts for the carnage, until Diane Weist moves her family to town. While hottie Michael (Jason Patric) is being seduced into the demon brethren, younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) teams up with local goofballs the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to stake all bloodsuckers.
Michael’s a recent high school grad, and the coven of vampires seems to also be allegedly the same roundabout age. Certainly Sam and the Frog Brothers would be high school age, although none of them turn. (Spoiler!)
What’s most fun about this movie is how gloriously gay it is, from the “will he or won’t he” chemistry between Michael and David to Sam’s Rob Lowe poster to the grinding sax man, Schumacher’s film finds sexuality in the vampire tale that swings.
3. Fright Night (1985)
Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.
Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.
Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.
2. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
Making an unnervingly assured feature film debut, writer/director Jonathan Cuartas commingles The Transfiguration’s image of lonely, awkward adolescence with Relic’s horror of familial obligation to create a heartbreaking new vampire tale.
Many things are left unsaid (including the word “vampire’), and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To confines itself to the daily drudgery of three siblings. Dwight (Patrick Fugit) longs to break these family chains, but sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) holds him tight with shame, love, and obligation to little brother, the afflicted Thomas (Owen Campbell).
What could easily have become its own figurative image of the masculine longing for freedom mines far deeper concerns. Cuartas weaves loneliness into that freedom, tainting the concept of independence with a terrifying, even dangerous isolation that leaves you with no one to talk to and no way to get away from yourself.
1. The Transfiguration (2016)
Milo likes vampire movies.
So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.
Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.
O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu. Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.
Ian Tuason’s paranormal podcast feature Undertone offers a lot of reasons to be impressed. It’s a single location shoot, and almost a one-hander. Aside from a catatonic mother (Michéle Duquet) and a variety of voices, Nina Kiri is on her own.
Kiri plays Evy, who is recording her paranormal podcast Undertone from her dying mother’s house. Evy’s been staying at Mom’s for a while now, and if she’s honest about it, she’d like it to just be over with. Evy’s waiting for the death rattle.
She loves Mama, but the relationship is thorny with Catholic guilt and shame. We sense this more than see it as Tuason crowds his set design with Catholic iconography. It’s a busy if impressive set, and Tuason makes great use of it with fascinating camera work. He uses mainly stationary cameras, often set off-angle so they feel more like a voyeur’s or ghost’s point of view, or even a security camera. The movement reinforces that sense. On the rare occasion that the camera does move, it does so in an obviously mechanical way that even more closely resembles security footage.
This gives the film a Paranormal Activity vibe—fitting, as Tuason is slated to write and direct the next installment in the found footage franchise.
But Undertone is less about what you see and more about what you hear. The somewhat oppressive sound design is intentional, of course, and frequently effective.
Kiri delivers a heroic performance. Not only has she no conscious actor to react to, but the vast majority of her performance is simply Evy, in headphones, listening to something.
The film falls apart at the story level. Evy and her podcast co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) decide to listen to a set of 10 audio files emailed to them anonymously. The files conjure up something supernatural that, combined with Evy’s isolated, spooky, guilt-laden environment, starts affecting her headspace.
But the sound files and podcast are silly. The mythology within the house—Evy’s relationship with Catholicism and her mother, the demonic yarn being revealed by the audio files—none of it comes together into a coherent horror story. And worst of all, nothing happens.
Undertone is an impressive technical achievement but the story’s just not there.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The time when we celebrate the bad horror lurking in Oscar nominees’ closets. Because we have a lot of return nominees, we have some overlap with earlier years. But there is also fresh blood…
5. Amy Madigan, Antlers (2021)
Scott Cooper reimagines the Wendigo legend to lead us through a dour metaphor full of familiar genre tropes and leave us with a brutal, great-looking, well-acted lecture.
Antlers is not a terrible film. But it has at least one incredibly stupid scene, and that scene stars the otherwise incredible Amy Madigan. She plays a school principal who stops at a student’s home to check on him and then–in a film that otherwise mainly avoids those “what a stupid decision” horror cliches—makes every stupid decision an educated professional could make. There is nothing believable about one step of it, however hard the talented veteran tries. It it so dumb that our friends Tyrone and Vernell abandoned the good characters and joined “Team Creature.”
4. Renate Reinsve: Dark Woods II/Villmark Asylum (2015)
Pål Øie followed up his surprise hit Villmark – a cabin in the woods horror – with this odd sequel set in the high hills above those woods, where an old hospital used after WWII is being prepared for destruction.
Øie lifts most of his story from Brad Anderson’s far superior Session 9, mixing in some Nazi style experimentation and creatures. It’s not a terrible movie, and characteristically, Renate Reinsve, gives a strong performance. There are some real scares, too, and the cast on the whole is solid. The mythology makes little to no sense, the leaps in logic are impressive, and in the end, it’s not memorable outside the early career work of one of the most talented actors working today.
3. Stellan Skarsgård: Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Skarsgård’s made his fair share of horror. We considered both of his Exorcist movies for this list, but since they’re basically the same movie, which too choose?
Deep Blue Sea is a fun B-movie creature feature. It’s mindless, violent, action packed, and Skarsgård gets one of the most ludicrous deaths in horror.
2. Benicio del Toro: The Wolfman (2010)
We had such hopes for this one when it came out. That cast! Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt!
Good God, was it awful. If you can look past the idea that Hopkins and Del Toro could be father and son, look past the insipid plot, look past Hopkins’s hamminess or del Toro’s disinterest, you cannot look past the heinous FX. But Blunt handles herself really, really well.
1. Leonardo DiCaprio: Critters 3 (1991)
Long before Django Unchained, Titanic, or even What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, a barely pubescent Leo DiCaprio donned a day-glow t-shirt and a pre-teen scowl to battle Gremlin rip-offs in Critters 3.
They are furry, toothy, ravenous beasts from outer space and, until episode 3, they were content to terrify rural folk. But now they’re in the big city, and (in a clear rip off of the not-quite-as-terrible film Troll), they are pillaging a single apartment building and terrifying all those trapped inside. It’s a comedy, really, the kind with farting furballs and dunderheaded people. Which is to say, one that’s not particularly funny.
Serving up the same derivative comedy/horror pap you can find in one out of every three films made that decade, Critters 3 has a lot of hair in scrunchies, oversized blouses belted over colorful leggings, stereotypes, and actors on their careers’ last legs. And Leonardo DiCaprio, which will forever be the only reason this movie was released to DVD.
New to Shudder this week is Matthew John Lawrence’s (Peckerhead) charming dismantling of the slasher genre and insightful look at the impact of adolescence on the generations.
Bloody Axe Wound stars a spunky Sari Arambulo as Abbie Bladecut. Her family video store lives and dies on the movies they package and rent, slashers starring her dad, the infamous serial killer Roger Bladecut (Billy Burke under heavy prosthetics), slashing his way through their hometown’s high school students and campers alike.
But ol’ Roger’s getting old. Well, technically he died as a boy at that campground, but for decades he’s been a grown man haunting Lover’s Lane and other tropey spots, coming back from the dead whenever the adventure takes that turn. But lately, well, he doesn’t seem to be healing as quickly. He’s lost a step or two.
Perfect! Because Abbie’s ready to step in. Dad reluctantly, tentatively agrees, sending her to the town high school to make minced meat of the chosen clique. But Abbie soon realizes that these kids are not so bad.
The film delivers some honest moments, however comedically staged, about watching your child outgrow you, lose their need for you, see what used to be honored tradition as old fashioned nonsense in need of change. Bloody Axe Wound is sharpest when Lawrence and his game ensemble use the coming-of-age storyline to make points about horror movies, and slashers in particular.
Burke and Arambulo share a delightfully begrudging chemistry, and their scenes at home and at the video store are populated with genre-loving easter eggs that suit the meta undertaking.
Likewise, the cast of high school misfits—Molly Brown, Margot Anderson-Song, Taylor Watson Seupel and Eddie Leavy—create a warm friend group you can see wanting to hang out with.
The kills (and near kills) are often clever and the characterizations are funny. The film’s mythology gets mushy and the story comes to a close with more of a nod to horror tropes than an acknowledgment of the internal conflicts and genuine emotion the story built, but it’s still fun.
In 2021, Kiwi filmmaker James Ashcroft made his feature debut with the lean and unforgiving thriller Coming Home in the Dark. While his follow up discards the taut terror of a road picture in favor of lunacy and a hand puppet, The Rule of Jenny Pen mines similar tensions. Vulnerability, institutional ignorance, helplessness, bullying—Jenny Pen comes at it from a different angle, but the damage done bears a tragic resemblance.
The great Geoffrey Rush is Judge Stefan Mortensen, a self-righteous ass who finds himself institutionalized after a stroke. But as soon as he’s better, he’ll be out of there. In the meantime, he will berate and belittle staff and patients alike—even his kind roommate, Sonny (Nathaniel Lees).
But Dave Creely (John Lithgow, never creepier) doesn’t think the judge is going anywhere. He doesn’t think he’s such a much, if you want to know the truth, and he looks forward to pressing every vulnerability the judge has, terrorizing him until he breaks him. Just as Dave has broken every other patient at the home—with the help of his bald little hand puppet, Jenny Pen.
Back in the Sixties, hagsploitation (or psycho-biddie films) featured middle aged women with likely mental health concerns that led to various kinds of horror: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte; Strait-Jacket. The women’s age was what made them suspect, the films reveling in the grotesquerie of their images.
Lately, though, filmmakers are realizing that the more powerful horror mines our own fears by empathizing with the aged characters, forcing us to see through their eyes. Relic, Bingo Hell, The Taking of Deborah Logan, The Demon Disorder and Bubba Ho-Tep all focus on the inevitable and terrifying vulnerabilities of aging.
The Rule of Jenny Pen fits neatly into this real estate. Ashcroft’s direction situates the sadistic within the well-meaning. Hospital staff, visiting musicians, family members—all genuinely hope to make the world better for these patients. But this is a world Dave knows well, and he exploits every opportunity to wield his and Jenny’s sadistic power.
Lithgow’s a maniac, making the most of his substantial physical presence among the fragile patients and delivering the most unseemly moments with relish. And Rush is his absolute equal. The veteran broadcasts pomposity with rigid authenticity that only lends power to the judge’s most helpless moments.
It’s a tale as old as time. Sweethearts get married to fix their very rocky relationship and – surprise, surprise – it makes things worse! Chloe and Jack are longtime lovers turned newlyweds taking a honeymoon trip to Miami, hoping that it might bring them closer together. When a chance encounter with a strange drug mule leaves them with a stash of designer drugs, they hope that tripping together might help them achieve that.
Spoiler alert: Things get even worse!
Sometimes couples want to tear each other apart. And other times, they want to – as the kids today say – “eat each other up, no crumbs left.” But in the case of Chloe and Jack, it’s both! You see, while the cocaine-by-way-of-peyote high that they’re on might initially make them more open to physical and emotional intimacy, their moments of sobriety between trips drive them further apart. The solution? Do more drugs. Problem there is that in addition to a trippy high, the substance has this bad habit of making one crave human flesh.
Cannibalism CAN be an interesting metaphorical delivery system for a romance. After all, when we’re in love, we want to be a part of one another as much as possible. What is more a part of you than what is inside you? Throw in cannibalism as an additional flavoring and you’ve taken the allegory to its most extreme conclusion. This is illustrated nowhere better than in Luca Guadagnino’s masterful road trip cannibal romcom, Bones and All.
While John Ainslie’s Do Not Disturb does not reach those same heights, there’s a lot to like here. Kimberly Laferriere and Rogan Christopher turn in good work as Chloe and Jack, although they’re more at home during the drug trips and horror elements than they are during the grounded dramatic beats. This is largely the fault of the writing not quite being up to snuff in those sequences, but the highs of the more genre-oriented fare go a long way toward balancing that out.
Do Not Disturb is slow to start, but once it gets going, it earns that build up and is at its best when it’s freaking out, man. If you’re a fan of the aforementioned Bones and All or even the psychedelic ferocity of Joe Begos’ Bliss, you’re bound to find something to like here. Just be sure not to snack on your loved ones while you watch it!
Gold (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek) are not your typical movie mermaids, and director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s feature debut The Lure is not your typical – well, anything.
The musical fable offers a vivid mix of fairy tale, socio-political commentary, whimsy and throat tearing. But it’s not as bizarre a combination as you might think.
The Little Mermaid is actually a heartbreaking story. Not Disney’s crustacean song-stravaganza, but Hans Christian Andersen’s bleak meditation on the catastrophic consequences of sacrificing who you are for someone undeserving. It’s a cautionary tale for young girls, really, and Lure writer Robert Bolesto remains true to that theme.
The biggest differences between Bolesto’s story and Andersen’s: 80s synth pop, striptease and teeth. At its heart, The Lure is a story about Poland – its self-determination and identity in the Eighties. That’s where Andersen’s work is so poignantly fitting.
Not that you’ll spend too much time in the history books. The context serves the purpose of grounding the wildly imaginative mix of seediness, hope and danger on display.
The film opens with a trio of musicians enjoying themselves on a Warsaw waterfront before hearing a siren song. Cut to screaming, and then to a deeply bizarre nightclub where a kind of Eastern European burlesque show welcomes its two newest performers – mermaids.
From there we explore a changing Warsaw from the perspective of a very fringe family. Mystical creatures play nice – and sometimes not-so-nice – among the city’s thrill seekers and the finned sisters need to decide whether they want to belong or whether they are who they are.
But that’s really too tidy a description for a film that wriggles in disorienting directions every few minutes. There are slyly feminist observations made about objectification, but that’s never the point. Expect other lurid side turns, fetishistic explorations, dissonant musical numbers and a host of other vaguely defined sea creatures to color the fable.
In fact, Olszanska’s film is strongest when it veers away from its fairy tale roots and indulges in its own weirdness.
Whatever its faults, The Lure will hook you immediately and change the way you think of mermaids.
I like to imagine the pitch meeting went something like this:
Picture it: a desperate man, trapped in a remote roadside rest stop with an ancient monster named Ghat.
Who’s playing the monster?
The voice of J.K. Simmons.
Go on.
So our man’s in one stall, with the monster in the other, offering commands from behind a glory hole.
What’s it called?
Glorious.
You’re damn right it is, and Shudder wants it for August.
Well now it’s here, and while the downsized cast and location recalls a host of pandemic-era productions, director Rebekah McKendry makes the most of what she’s given. Glorious proceeds at an intriguing pace that never feels sluggish, showing us just enough of the tentacled bathroom beast to strike an effective balance between bloody Lovecraftian spectacle and doomsday humor.
True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten is perfect as a sad, pantsless bathroom sack named Wes. Screenwriters Joshua Hull, Todd Rigney and David Ian McKendry give Wes a wisecrack-fueled arc that shifts from wallowing in the pain of losing Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim) to bargaining with Ghat for the fate of humanity (and Simmons, of course, is priceless). While the character is never quite compelling, Kwanten settles in a notch of two below Ryan Reynolds on smartass scale, making it easy have an interest in where Wes’s trippy toilet trip ends up.
And you may catch on early to that destination, but the real test of how Glorious will hit you is how much love you have for Lovecraft. Even if it’s minimal, this is a bathroom break full of squalid, forgettable fun.
Short films rarely get their due, and getting an audience is rarer still. Any opportunity to sit down with a set of shorts that made a splash in the festival circuit is an opportunity worth taking. If arterial spray and laughter are your thing, Hellarious is a chance worth taking.
The compilation contains seven short films, each a horror
comedy. There’s no framing device or theme, simply a collection of sometimes
bawdy, once in a long while sweet, mostly viscous horror. There are a lot of
fluids here.
Like an automatic door to hell, James Feeney’s Killer
Kart opens things. His creeping camera sets a fun tone for an absurd “ordinary
item” monster movie (a la Rubber). An inspired score by Daniel Hildreth,
Christine Rodriguez and Ray Bouchard matches the mayhem nicely.
Robert Boocheck’s charming Horrific—a tale of mutant
varmints, hula hoop porn and besotted tidy whities—lands laughs thanks to Mike
Nelson’s semi-heroic central performance. Likewise the Deathgasm-esque Death
Metal offers a highly enjoyable and sometimes morally questionable
bloodbath with the most delightful practical effects.
A sweet authenticity drives Bitten, Sarah K. Reimers’s
romantic, dog-loving upending of the werewolf tale. (Who’s a good boy? Iggy is!
Iggy’s a good boy!) If you can take your eyes off that adorable dog, you’ll
notice two tenderly funny performances by Francine Torres and Michael Curran.
Director Jason Tostevin, who also compiled the films, helms two of the shorts in the program, both co-written with Randall Greenland. ‘Til Death offers a post-mortem comeuppance tale boasting several strong performances. Born Again, though, is one of the compilation’s two highest points.
Six and a half minutes with the worst Satanists ever exposes you to a really beautifully filmed subversion of expectations. Slyly comical performances top to bottom entertain, but Greenland is a laugh riot in a starring role.
The collection’s second high peak comes thanks to Clarissa Jacobson and J.M. Logan’s sloppy concoction, Lunch Ladies. This is a delirious fantasy about underdogs rising to the challenge and making their dreams come true—becoming personal chefs to “the Depper,” Johnny Depp. Donna Pieroni and Mary Manofsky deliver consistent laughs in a film that almost makes a person want to love Johnny Depp again.
Variety, laughs, mayhem, blood spatter, romance, cheerleader pot pie—Hellarious is a tasty treat of bite sized horror.
