I’ve never been great at the whole Halloween thing. By the time I remember it’s happening, all the good sweets are gone from grocery store shelves, so any visiting trick-or-treaters get butterscotch suckers, breath mints or candy corn. I don’t do costume parties. I never got the point of carving pumpkins.

But movie and TV marathons? Sign me up – along with a lot of other homebodies. The horror genre is bigger than ever, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report that says this year’s domestic box office reached nearly $1.3 billion as of the start of October.

Horror’s surge has also yielded more films designed to play with our perception as opposed to the “Saw”-style torture porn dominating years past. Think “Obsession” or “Backrooms,” both of which are among the 10 highest-earning movies of 2026 thus far. That’s good news for anyone who isn’t partial to splatter flicks or slashers but still enjoys a creep show that makes you think, especially ones that are more thoughtful than scary. If that’s your speed, the following options may be perfect for your reclusive Samhain.

 

 

(Manuela Hidalgo)

“Black Zombie”

I will bet good money the first bong-ripping undergrad to declare that all horror is metaphor cited George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” as a prime example. That’s not wrong; Romero’s 1968 benchmark established the modern cinematic zombie as a stand-in for mindless capitalist consumption. But “Black Zombie” rewinds to the monster’s Haitian roots to examine an even darker origin tied to that country’s shared history with ours.

You may be wondering why I’d recommend a documentary in a horror roundup, let alone one that explains how the modern movie flesh gobbler began as a manifestation of white fear. The answer is that Maya Annik Bedward’s film doubles as an impressive cinematic syllabus.

By braiding America’s media history with its national history, Bedward and her assemblage of academics, creatives, authors and Vodou practitioners invite us to think differently about the prejudices driving movies like, say, Victor Halperin’s 1932 effort “White Zombie,” or 1943’s “I Walked with a Zombie.”

“Black Zombie” opens with a truth that has long escaped those fascinated by the shambling undead. To some, they’re simply mindless hunters. But Haitians understand the horror of zombies to be one of dispossession, a curse enacted by enslavers that binds victims to mindless servitude, denying them liberation in the afterlife. But long after Romero transformed them from blank-eyed puppets to ravenous murder machines, Bedward’s film demonstrates how Hollywood’s version of the zombie impacts America’s perception of Vodou, Haitians and immigration.

“Black Zombie” not only asks us to think differently about an overexposed subgenre, but also thoughtfully examines Vodou’s central role in the revolution that drove out French colonizers, and France’s imposition of debt to punish Haitians for winning their freedom.

All of this informs the zombie’s continued proliferation across popular culture, in films like “World War Z” and shows such as “The Last of Us” and “The Walking Dead.” They’re terrific entertainment, certainly. But each is, in its own way, built upon decades’ worth of misrepresenting Haiti’s syncretic faith to the detriment and demonization of a people. At the same time, “Black Zombie” recognizes this subgenre’s cultural resilience, arguing that recognizing the zombie’s true roots broadens its narrative possibilities.

Proving that point, one of Bedward’s subjects, a Vodou priest, says he grew up loving Wes Craven’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” despite its message that visitors to his country risk having their nuts nailed to a chair.  “It’s a fantastical world to scare children,” he says, before adding that his main problem is its inaccurate messaging about his faith. “We say, ‘Wow – Haitians are devils.’ That’s what we’re taught.”

I’d nearly forgotten about that movie. Now I might rewatch it for the first time in decades and expect to be horrified for entirely different reasons.

Available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango.

 

(© Amazon Content Services LLC)

“Carrie”

Stephen King’s classic may be more than half a century old and has undergone multiple adaptations, but it endures because its central moral that high school is hell never ages. Still, Mike Flanagan’s interpretation has divided the audience. Some, including King, appreciate Flanagan’s kinder portrait of Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) as an innocent unjustly sequestered from the world by fundamentalist parents who repudiate her extraordinary power. Others disagree with Flanagan’s alteration to the story’s climactic scene, which shifts culpability for the prom massacre from Carrie to a character created expressly for the series.

Pretty much everyone questions the season finale, which hints at taking an “X-Men”-style turn for its recently greenlit second season.

As someone who accepts nothing is sacrosanct now, not to mention a fan of the creator’s other adaptations, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I appreciated Flanagan using Carrie’s story to critique ignorance, knowledge suppression, and the dehumanizing effect of social media.

Besides, nearly all the key elements of “Carrie” remain. The bullies are still awful, and the famous “plug it up” shower scene in Brian DePalma’s 1976 standard-setter is worsened by her tormentors posting Carrie’s frightened sobs on social media.

 

Some changes retain the spirit of past performances. Carrie’s mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) is still an abusive religious zealot fond of locking her daughter in a prayer closet, for instance. But after the law forces her homeschooled girl to join the festering sin den that is their local public school, Margaret throws herself into advocating for parents’ rights, entirely disregarding her teen’s desire for a “normal” adolescence.

Part of the additional fun Flanagan has with this marquee property is strewing cultural Easter Eggs throughout. Some nod to what’s happening in America, such as when Carrie discovers the school library and gravitates straight to books that have been banned from classrooms and community libraries across the country. Another winks at “Army of Darkness” fans; look for the logo on Margaret’s work uniform.

By the time we reach Carrie’s bloodbath, we may be left to question whether she’s simply a bullied victim pushed beyond her limit or some version of a Final Girl empowered to vanquish tormentors who earn their reckoning. Even if you don’t ultimately see Howell’s Carrie that way, it’s a fine dance with one of horror’s oldest friends.

“Carrie” is streaming on Prime Video.

(Crave and Christopher Lawrence)

“Yaga”

For adults, Halloween is an excuse to mingle sensuality with morbid themes. Why cosplay as a grizzled cop when you can be a flirty detective? Why settle for pretending to be a humpbacked wiccan when you can troll for hookups as a sexy witch?

“Yaga” has it all ways, resplendent with softcore interludes dangled between clue-finding excursions and unexpected chicken violence. The latest infatuation bait from Crave, the Canadian streamer that brought us “Heated Rivalry,” also gives us a new view of Hudson Williams and his naked hindquarters.

Only now, they’re humping away in a mystery taking place in a verdant seaside community called Whittock. There, dirtbag P.I. Charlie Rapp (Noah Reid) is drawn into a tense partnership with Carson (Clark Backo), a no-nonsense cop fatigued with her colleagues’ disrespect.

At first, Carson is repulsed by Rapp’s slimy overstepping, but she slowly learns not to loathe him. Implied in this, perhaps, is that a spell has ensnared the two as they probe the disappearance of rich playboy Henry Park (Williams). This pursuit leads them to encounter free-range poultry in odd places, along with strange symbols, a variety of nubile temptresses and a roommate, Logan (also Williams), who resembles Henry to an unsettling degree.

The show’s title has nothing to do with John Wick. It refers to the mythical Slavic crone, Baba Yaga, who either gives heroes a boon or lures wayward children to a forest hut that moves around on bird legs. Playwright Kat Chandler’s interpretation leaves open the question of whether our impressions of its witch are unwarranted or dead right, further muddling our judgment with the introduction of Carrie-Anne Moss’ university professor, Katherine Hargrove.

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Katherine announces herself by cozying up to Rapp over the manuscript for her new book titled “Sexy Bones,” thrilling him with her mature lady erotic energy. As she flirts with and antagonizes the private dick, along with other townies, it grows increasingly baffling as whether she’s friend or foe. Much like our titular enchantress.

This adaptation of Chandler’s play looks like a cop drama tangled with witchy murder, but from a longer TV perspective it’s really a haunting by the ghosts of erotic TV shows past. Remember “Red Shoe Diaries” and its moaning sax riffs? Like that anthology once did, “Yaga” banks on the power of smut to compel you. It’s a cheap indulgence, but what Halloween candy isn’t?

“Yaga” is streaming in the U.S. on AMC+.

 

 

The post It’s scary how watchable these stories are appeared first on Salon.com.

In the opening sequence of “Other Mommy,” Ursula (Jessica Chastain) is making lunch for her daughter, Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), when she asks if the girl would like to “come into her heart.”

It’s an odd request, but that’s because this version of Ursula is not actually Ursula. She is an entity that Bela calls Other Mommy — who looks exactly like her real mother, except that Other Mommy can contort her body into freaky spider-like shapes that scare the hell out of Bela and her stay-at-home father, Russ (Jay Duplass). Also, Other Mommy seems to want to kill or otherwise possess Bela, which is not exactly maternal. Other Mommy promises to nurture Bela, but clearly she represents the worst type of matriarch imaginable: one who is frightening, controlling and dangerous.

The scary mommy has been an archetype in storytelling for as long as stories have existed. We’ve seen it in fairy tales, animated films produced by studios ranging from Disney to Laika (in a way, “Other Mommy” is just “Coraline” in live-action form), multiple seasons of Ryan Murphy shows, and, of course, everywhere in the horror genre, from “Psycho” to  “Hereditary.” But the scary mommy is really having a moment this spooky season.

In addition to “Other Mommy,” Hulu is streaming a new series called “Phony” that has a similar premise: a kid — this time a teenage boy played by Sam Nivola — believes his mother (Connie Britton) has been replaced by an imposter who looks like the real thing but has sinister intentions. Two other streaming series, “Crystal Lake” on Peacock and “Carrie” on Prime Video, place two of the horror genre’s most famous scary mothers in new contexts. Even real life has given us a scary mommy for the ages: Donna Arthur. The estranged mother of Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton remained married to Cledith Arthur, who was charged with raping Acton as a child. Donna Arthur later criticized her daughter in a recent attack ad produced by Acton’s Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy. It should be no surprise that there has been intense backlash to that ad. Society and pop culture, not to mention basic decency, have taught us, over and over, to be horrified by a vicious mother.  

What’s notable about the latest batch of scary mommy releases is that, for the most part, they offer more nuance in their depictions of motherhood than previous examples of the trope often allow. The moms in these movies and shows are, generally, not entirely demonized even if they sometimes do monstrous things.

“Other Mommy” comes closest to outright blaming its central maternal figure for all the bad things that happen in her home. (Spoilers ahead.) The powers held by the bad version of Ursula seem to grow the more that Bela feels neglected by real-life Ursula, who works constantly and often gets home late. While she loves her daughter, Ursula ultimately admits that she hadn’t initially wanted kids. “I’m sorry for not being the kind of mother that you deserve,” she tells Bela in one of the film’s key moments.

Director Rob Savage and screenwriter Nathan Elston do not solely blame Ursula for the problems within her family unit. Her husband is a bit of a slacker who gets high in the middle of the day, and the Other Mommy, a shapeshifter, assumes other forms aside from that of Ursula, including Bela’s babysitter. But the movie strongly suggests that Other Mommy would not have shown up at all if Ursula had simply given her daughter more attention, which is more of a tradwife-adjacent take than I expected walking into the theater. Oddly enough, “Verity,” released in theaters a week before “Other Mommy,” has a lot more fun slyly toying with and ultimately negating the idea that a professionally successful mother (Anne Hathaway’s best-selling author Verity Crawford) must secretly resent her children.

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The three aforementioned scary mommy streaming series go much farther out of their way to depict their respective parents as flawed individuals who do care about their kids. In much of the first season of “Phony,” Connie Britton’s Ellen comes across as a totally caring and attentive mom to her boy Sonny. His suspicions about her arise after he’s injured in a car accident and becomes convinced that she looks slightly different post-crash. (CGI alters Britton’s features just enough to make her appear noticeably off.) But she has a very close relationship with him and, even after her supposed heel turn, makes a sincere effort to get him treatment when he begins to struggle emotionally. Her biggest sin is perhaps being too protective of him and overly involved in his life. The only reason she is scary is that Sonny thinks she might be and we’re not sure whether to believe him.

“Crystal Lake” and “Carrie” have the unenviable task of taking scary mommies we already know and helping us understand their motivations in new contexts. “Crystal Lake,” an eight-episode prequel to the original “Friday the 13th,” delves into much — perhaps too much? — more detail about how and why Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini in this version) descended into grief and homicidal madness following the drowning death of her son, Jason, at Camp Crystal Lake. In the 1980 “Friday the 13th” the identity of the murderer of all those horny young counselors isn’t revealed until late in the movie, when we realize Pamela, bitter that the camp has reopened, is the perpetrator. Reminder: the homicidal, goalie-masked version of Jason Voorhees doesn’t appear onscreen until “Friday the 13th Part III.” So even though we all think of Jason as the villain of the franchise, one could reasonably argue that the OG baddie is Pamela, the person responsible for most of the kills in the first film and, arguably, for influencing Jason to keep on killing. Jason Voorhees is, according to previous lore, a literal son of a bit*h.

In “Crystal Lake,” the Linda Cardellini version of Pamela Voorhees still slaughters numerous people, but she’s more than just a one-dimensional crazy bit*h. She’s complicated and more capable of selflessness than the first movie takes the time to suggest when it’s not busy knifing poor Kevin Bacon in the chest. The series, by contrast, invites us to feel empathy toward her, or at least acknowledge the suffering she endured in her life even before losing her son.

“Carrie,” developed by Mike Flanagan, the streaming world’s master of horror, attempts something similar but even more extreme. It moves the familiar story about a bullied, sheltered teenage girl to the present. The plot points that are key in Stephen King’s novel and its subsequent adaptations remain. Carrie (Summer H. Howell) is still taunted in the girls’ locker room after she panics over getting her period, and she still loses it in a way that turns the senior prom into a massive, telekinetically-generated disaster. But all of this happens in a world where social media exists, and some of the mean girls at Carrie’s high school wield it like a bucket of pig’s blood that can be dropped on anyone, at any time. The bullying is both more insidious and more soberingly recognizable.

As in the original, Carrie’s mother, Margaret, is a conservative Christian who wants to shelter her daughter from the outside world as much as possible. But unlike the most well-known version of that character, portrayed by Piper Laurie in Brian DePalma’s 1976 adaptation, Margaret is not a melodramatic, over-the-top, completely irrational zealot. 

As portrayed by an excellent Samantha Sloyan, Margaret still punishes Carrie by frequently shoving her into a prayer closet, but she’s also more grounded in her humanity. She’s conservative in a more modern sense: she’s driven by conspiracy theories, overly protective of her daughter, mistrustful of the government, and deeply Christian even though she does not always act like it. There are also times when Margaret’s opinions are actually correct, as in the first episode when Carrie starts going to public school and must participate in a shooter drill for the first time. Margaret confronts the principal and tells him that Carrie was rattled by the drill and that the whole exercise is traumatizing to students. I never thought I would watch any adaptation of “Carrie” and say to myself, “You know, Margaret White makes a good point.” But there I was, saying exactly that.

Not every element in these films and shows works, nor do any of them completely whitewash their characters’ more deplorable tendencies. But as a collective, they signal that it’s important to look beyond our culture’s tendency to demonize mothers and women in general. Simply being a good mom or a terrible one (within, you know, non-murderous reason) is not the only thing that defines a woman. Weirdly, this fact is also made clear in the most talked-about film of the moment, “You Can See Everything,” in which Elizabeth Holmes, who genuinely seems to love her children, also uses them as a shield in the documentary.

In the very first scene, we see and hear her partner, Billy Evans, talking on the phone about his hopes that directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim will show a more relatable, likable side of Holmes and prove she is not a monster. As the camera pans out, we eventually see that Holmes is sitting in the room with him. She is holding a baby, the youngest of her two kids, and gently snuggling with the child.

“Look at this nice mom taking care of an infant; surely she’s a nice lady who would never defraud anyone or even tell a single, small lie,” the image desperately wants to tell us. But in the end, even being a good mom isn’t enough, on its own, to persuade most rational viewers that Elizabeth Holmes is completely innocent of everything of which she’s been accused. Because just as a scary mommy may have some valid reasons that explain some of her behavior, a seemingly caring mommy can also be kind of scary.

The post Scary mommies are everywhere, but this time with more nuance appeared first on Salon.com.

Last night, my boyfriend and I were working our way through Season 1 of the science-fiction horror show From when I had a confusing realization: Despite being one of the most anxious individuals on this planet, I somehow love horror shows and films.

Of course, that thought only further disturbed me, because how could I possibly get enjoyment from watching such a morbid series? I mean, most horror films involve torturous scenes and horrific traumas for the characters. Certainly, if I witnessed these scenarios in real life, I’d be running to the bathroom to puke, not snacking on Sour Patch Kids in bed, loading the next episode or movie.

Why, then, do so many of us get such an addictive rush from consuming such content? To better understand myself and the common love of horror, I decided to explore the psychology behind it. Here’s why some people love scary movies and shows.

1. They Can Maintain a Sense of Control

According to Vinay Saranga, MD, child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist and founder of Saranga Comprehensive Psychiatry, scary movies allow us to experience fear in a controlled environment.

“In other words, when we watch a scary movie, we still get the adrenaline rush and that feeling of being on the edge of our seats, yet deep down we know that despite the feelings we are really safe sitting in a movie theater or at home on the couch,” he continues. 

That’s much different from experiencing fear something in our own lives that could potentially manifest in our reality.

2. They’re Drawn to Suspense

For some scary movie lovers, it’s more about the suspense than the actual horror of it all.

“I think the other thing that is intriguing for people about scary movies is the suspense, trying to figure out what comes next and if there will be some big twist that no one saw coming,” Saranga says.

That edge-of-your-seat feeling, while in the comfort of your own home next to your partner or loved ones, can add a healthy dose of entertaintment and even excitement to your otherwise mundane routine.

3. They Enjoy the Adrenaline Rush

According to Saranga, some horror film connoisseurs are drawn to the adrenaline of it all. You know the rush you get when you’re on a rollercoaster or—for a more extreme example—skydiving? Many people experience that same rush while watching a scary movie.

“They enjoy the sensations that come when stress hormones are released, and they feel alert or full of energy,” Saranga says.

4. It’s Simply Human Nature

Instead of judging yourself for your horror film addiction, understand that it often boils down to human wiring.

“People have a sense of curiosity and are drawn to the unknown, the unusual, mysterious things, anything that is potentially threatening or even dangerous,” Saranga adds.

5. It Allows Them to Explore the Dark Sides of Human Behavior

According to Saranga, horror and fear let us explore the darkness that lurks in many humans—but is often repressed and controlled, of course.

“Violence and death are disturbing and uncomfortable subjects, but there is often a bit of curiosity around them,” Saranga says. “This is a way to learn more about these topics without actually experiencing them for ourselves.”

The post 5 Reasons Why Watching Horror Movies Feels So Good (Even When You’re Terrified) appeared first on VICE.

There was a time when the internet was cool. One could be forgiven if memories of the cool-internet era have grown fuzzier over the years, now that the web has become a self-regulating machine in an indomitable surveillance system and all. But I know it was true, because I was there. “Information superhighway” was a fitting nickname for a system that could blast the average user through a vast network of art and intelligence. (“Blast” being a relative description of how fast dial-up and early WiFi felt at the time.) 

Most of my adult music taste can be traced back to those early days, watching hyper-pixelated videos of the “Numa Numa” guy dancing to Romanian boy-band hits, or animated aliens piloting their spaceship to the thumping Europop of Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” Archaic video hosting sites were a cultural gateway. Laggy Adobe Flash games commandeered afternoons. It was heaven, until it wasn’t. 

But paradise can’t be lost if it was never really paradise to begin with. The internet’s dark underbelly was always there, lurking slightly out of frame behind the firewall. If something that once seemed magical could be turned into something so corrupt in a comparably short time, its malevolent potential was a feature from the beginning, not a bug.

Few people navigate the internet’s light-to-dark spectrum as well as writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, whose films play like dispatches beamed out from the depths of online black holes. Their work remixes the thrill of early internet exploration into colorful abstraction, cracking open an esoteric feeling to analyze its contents and origin — to varying effect. Schoenbrun’s three feature films, 2021’s “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” 2024’s “I Saw the TV Glow” and last summer’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” are as unwieldy as their verbose titles suggest. It’s impossible to watch one, let alone all three, without realizing that Schoenbrun has a lot on their mind, sometimes too much for a single film to bear. Schoenbrun’s talent for image-making, however, ends up shouldering much of that weight, letting intricate ideas about identity and personal relationships to digital media sit gracefully atop beautifully rendered cinematography. 

But what happens when someone so known for their visual flair abandons alluring imagery altogether and lets their writing do all the work? 

In Schoenbrun’s debut novel, “Public Access Afterworld,” the filmmaker takes a sizable risk, stripping away the meticulously crafted onscreen worlds to assert the dexterity of their prose. At 592 pages, this book could easily feel like a smug kiss-off to all those — present company included — who have criticized Schoenbrun’s reluctance to pare down their concepts into less dense works. But while the novel is imposing from sheer size alone, the shift in medium lends their elaborate, occasionally exhausting storytelling a curious new potency.

Schoenbrun confidently guides readers down winding, interconnected roads, bouncing between online cults and peculiar digital ephemera to weave a gripping search for truth in a time when the internet has made everything fiction. “Public Access Afterworld” is less of an artistic pivot than a confirmation that Schoenbrun’s worldbuilding skill is well beyond their peers, cinematic or literary. 

Like the rest of their work, Schoenbrun’s novel is deeply concerned with the internet and its seedy electronic underbelly, using traditional media as a portal to the web’s sleaziest, scariest parts. “Public Access Afterworld” is divided into episodes, not chapters — although each episode has eight individual components, like a TV show divided by ad blocks. This unique structure serves the story, following the zealots of the titular analog realm that lurks beyond the television static through the action. 

We begin in 2009, just after television signals convert to digital transmission, when high school best friends David Sawyer and Erin Morrison see something strange in the fuzzy image filling their old cathode-ray television screen: a broadcast from an unknown entity called Public Access Afterworld. Their lives soon become consumed by the quest to find the source, turning to proto-internet message boards and video hosting sites in their search. Before long, dead ends give way to a digital abyss, pulling them both into something that will alter their perception of reality and the lives of hundreds of others called to follow them. 

This audacious mystery makes an ideal premise for a novel, where Schoenbrun can toy with reader expectations without the added task of ensuring that the final image reflects their objective. As it turns out, Schoenbrun’s writing is stronger when it’s devoid of visual images. Description and style can take hold without restraint. And while their prose is sometimes redundant, even the excess flows without struggle. 

“Public Access Afterworld” is a page-turner in the tradition of supermarket paperbacks from Stephen King and Clive Barker, both of whom know cinema well. But Schoenbrun’s innate familiarity with the internet — its legendary Creepypasta stories and disconcerting YouTube videos that seem to spring from the void — sets their story apart from the classics. This is a contemporary novel through and through, and Schoenbrun writes with practiced conviction, subtly differentiating the different characters’ perspectives without dropping the pace.

Having three movies under their belt helps there, too. A screenplay may be a different monster from a novel, but both depend on a writer’s foresight. An image has to exist in the mind before it makes it onto the page. But whether that image translates to the viewer in its final context is another matter. In their filmmaking, Schoenbrun sometimes struggles to apply broader themes within a minute-to-minute narrative, creating pacing issues that reveal a dissonance between intention and execution. 

For example, there’s a sizable gap between the one-shot montage sequences in “TV Glow” and “Camp Miasma.” The former brilliantly evokes wistful teenage dreaming as a character walks through their high school, adorned by a yearning Caroline Polachek song and light-pink diary scribblings. It’s a clever riff on teenage social politics and the hormone-ridden adolescence that so often define both our identities and our future. The “Camp Miasma” montage, on the other hand, toils under three layers of metafiction, as an ’80s slasher-film murderer stalks and kills at summer camp set to a Counting Crows tune, haphazardly interrogating the viewer’s relationship to nostalgia. With Schoenbrun, I often find it’s hit or miss.

But in the current media landscape, consistency is overrated. I’m always more drawn to big ideas that have the potential for colossal failure. There are certain things you can draw from a Schoenbrun film that you could never get from, say, a Martin Scorsese movie, no matter how hard you try — and I’m not just talking about the trans subtext in all of Schoenbrun’s work. For an artist as formidable as Scorsese, a flop means nothing. But for someone like Schoenbrun, defeat defines their future. Every decision is a risk. And art without risk is just a product.

While I’m hesitant to claim that Schoenbrun’s primary strength is as a novelist rather than a filmmaker,  “Public Access Afterworld” goes some distance toward making that case. It’s not that Schoenbrun is bad at making movies, but their mind seems to operate like a story map, with hundreds of red strings pinned between plot points. Too many overlapping yarns in a movie make for a convoluted final product, a big clump of colorful material that’s too dense to pry apart to see the substance lurking below. But at least in this novel, the yarns overlap without tangling. A clear view suits Schoenbrun’s cerebral nature. We can admire the blue sky before the clouds cover the sun.

The post “Public Access Afterworld” is a novel for the terminally online appeared first on Salon.com.

If you need a lot of fake blood for Halloween this year, this is the video for you. It's a tutorial that shows you how to make realistic fake blood.

It starts with a base of corn syrup plus red food coloring. — Read the rest

The post How to make realistic fake blood for Halloween appeared first on Boing Boing.

Horror movies have never gotten much love at the Academy Awards. And even when they do get some attention, it’s rarely in the Best Picture category. To date, only nine films in the genre have been nominated for the highly coveted award: The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, Get Out, The Substance, the 2025 version of Frankenstein, and Sinners. To make matters worse, just one of those actually went home with the Oscar.

The lone winner in question was The Silence of the Lambs, which pulled off another extremely rare feat at the 1992 Academy Awards: it swept the so-called “Big Five” categories. For the record, that includes Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. That evening, the Jodie Foster-Anthony Hopkins classic became the third film in history to accomplish that. It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had done so previously (in 1935 and 1976, respectively).

The Oscars Have Snubbed Horror for Decades, but One Movie Broke the Curse

But while the members of the Motion Picture Academy have shown a significant lack of interest in horror over the years, it isn’t the most snubbed genre there is, believe it or not. For instance, no animated or comic book film has ever won Best Picture, though three movies of each kind have received nods. And as far as disaster films go, Titanic remains the single, solitary Best Picture winner. That’s more than we can say for documentaries, which haven’t even been given the opportunity to walk away with the sought-after trophy.

Why Oscars are so elusive for certain genres is unclear. Circling back around to scary movies, it seems like a huge oversight that films like Psycho and The Shining weren’t major winners—in fact, The Shining was nominated for a whopping zero Academy Awards. At the end of the day, very few horror movies have won Oscars since the ceremony began in 1929—some of the more notable examples being Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and Alien. However, this past year Frankenstein, Sinners, and Weapons were all surprisingly victorious, so maybe things are finally starting to change.

The post This Is the Only Horror Movie to Ever Win Best Picture at the Academy Awards appeared first on vice.

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One of my favorite publishers of beautiful books, Beehive Books, has a Kickstarter for Death Is a Room: Illustrated Gothic Tales by Women Writers.

It has nine Gothic horror stories by women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Susan Glaspell. — Read the rest

The post A book of Gothic horror stories designed as a nine-room boarding house appeared first on Boing Boing.

Granted, I'm not the world's biggest Resident Evil fan. The only one I've played in full was Resident Evil 7, a grimy Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired ordeal that's about as close to disconnected from the series' convoluted overarching plot as it gets. — Read the rest

The post Resident Evil fan film is just as spooky as the games appeared first on Boing Boing.

I can’t remember the last time a catch-up phone call with a confidante didn’t include one of us marveling that we haven’t caught an assault charge. If any law enforcement happens to be reading this, I want to make it clear that will never happen.

Well, let’s call it a non-zero chance. At the end of the day, I am a realist; anything can flip a person’s switch from off to blackout rage. However, I have decades of practice holding back my inner She-Hulk. So do most women.

Every day, we wake up in a nation controlled by a convicted felon accused of multiple sexual assaults, while a college student seeking justice after alleging she was gang-raped at a fraternity party is doxxed and swatted. We are not taken seriously in politics or at work. The manosphere has poisoned our water coolers and social media feeds.

Women have had it, including with each other. Aspiring tradwives and “Live, Laugh, Love” Karens selling out everyone else to keep up their manicures are legion. They threaten to run you down in crosswalks and refuse to bow out gracefully when told, for instance, that a pretty mechanical bird mounted on a boutique’s wall isn’t for sale.

Ladies, look to your left. Now look to your right. One of you is dying to knife somebody. Only Pamela Voorhees, brought to life by Linda Cardellini in “Crystal Lake,” has the guts to act on that impulse. Her bloodlust coats her skin in the crappy opening scene of this “Friday the 13th” prequel, after she’s dispensed with two goons who make the fatal blunder of invading her home and taunting her. One goes down with a swift nick to the jugular. The other loses half his face to the Voorhees family’s machete.

(©2025 Peacock TV LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

The thing is, by the time we’re assaulted by all that, we understand that Pamela has had it, too. She lost her gentle son, a boy born with hydrocephalus, a birth defect in the brain, who is endlessly bullied until he drowns at camp. The town moves from pitying her to whispering that she’s crazy, leaving her rutted in the anger stage of the grieving process. As she chops away at the men who attack her, I found myself muttering, “Yes. Get him. Again. Again!”

Don’t confuse this for an endorsement. Please don’t. “Crystal Lake” is a barely watchable gorefest, with a plot riddled with more seeping holes than Pamela’s victims. (Of course, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am not, I guess that counts as a recommendation.) What passes for story amounts to little more than a two-dimensional cartoon rendered in human-flesh puppetry, courtesy of actors capable of much better, Cardellini included.

Even so, it’s kind of great to watch one of TV’s most enjoyable performers massacre a gaggle of sex-crazed hippies, or knock an abusive parent into a deep fryer for stress relief.  Few of us can claim to have never daydreamed about, say, an anvil dropping from the clouds to erase some menace from our lives, whether it’s an entitled relative or an idiot comedian. Jason Voorhees’ mom simply prefers a hands-on approach.

I understand why the many chefs who mucked up the “Crystal Lake” cauldron, starting with Bryan Fuller, were compelled to fill in the blanks of Pamela’s origin story. The beauty of the character, once her truth was revealed in the original 1980 movie, is her relative mystery. Who would suspect a frumpy matron in a humble sweater could wreak such unhinged havoc? Other women, that’s who. We’ve always suppressed murderous desires. (See: “Dateline,” “Snapped” and rest of the Oxygen channel’s true crime lineup.) Only recently have we taken to saying that out loud.

Long before the medical and pharmaceutical industries made perimenopausal rage fashionable, Pamela Voorhees was a genre outlier, especially in a cultural climate that had already started retreating from a decade of legislative gains for women’s rights.

Now, in this post-Roe v. Wade world of ours, feminine wrath must be mansplained to be taken seriously. While women have produced excellent recent examinations, including “Furious” and “East of Eden,” the brutal truth is that the “Friday the 13th” movies are IP recognizable to hockey-masked trick-or-treaters too young to watch them.

So it falls to “Crystal Lake” to tell most of us why the mother of slasher cinema’s patron saint was driven to kill, kill and kill again in the first place. But it also helps us understand why a crumpled sock in the middle of the living room or dirty dishes on the kitchen counter makes the exhausted woman in your life crash out.

Let’s assume that if you’re reading this far, you already know the first movie’s big twist: the real killer wasn’t Jason Voorhees, but his mad mama. If not, I mean, what gives? Did you see that picture of Cardellini and wonder what cool-as-a-cuke Lindsay Weir from “Freaks and Geeks” has been up to? With regret, I present this as your answer.

But as any old-school porn hounds skilled in fast-forwarding through “the plot” will tell you, there’s merit in skipping straight to the action — meaning, Pamela destroying fools with something more cutting than wit.

Maybe Fuller, the guy who classed up “Hannibal,” could have done something brilliant with Pamela. But he exited the project early due to creative differences, leaving “It: Welcome to Derry” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane to expand the legend of a woman whose motives were fairly basic. I mean, if your kid died because two horny teen counselors shirked their lifeguard duties to bone in a shed, you might harbor a few homicidal compulsions too.

Alas, in these days of milking dormant franchises for every drop of ichor, a simple explanation isn’t enough. Therefore – and this will either save you the trouble of enduring all eight episodes or spoil them – Pamela Voorhees is revealed to be a victim of a patriarchal industrial plot.

(©2025 Peacock TV LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

The former professional singer gets knocked up by her lover, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who works for a company called Bellflower. When she nearly miscarries, he convinces her to marry him and move to his company’s sponsored enclave that’s popping with pregnant women like her. Once she’s settled in, her husband plies her with Bellflower-manufactured TV dinners and happy pills, occasionally shuttling her to the doctor to be pumped full of mystery muck. Truly a MAHA conspiracist’s nightmare.

Sometime later, Jason arrives and demonstrates a knack for reviving from naps the average human wouldn’t wake up from. So father secretly subjects son to all manner of mad science, including massive radiation exposure. Once Pamela discovers this, she rescues Jason, turning the skull of the man who gets in her way into soup, and they escape to Crystal Lake.

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Cardellini’s Pamela Voorhees is what happens when women drinking from a bottomless well of contempt and human carelessness hit their limit. The writers, in their clumsy way, cater to that idea by having her dispose of her first slaughter by slathering the bodies in a deconstructed tonnato sauce of canned fish and honey, and standing by as a massive bear lumbers up to feast.

Before the animal takes a bite, it sizes up Pamela, sniffs her tears, and leaves her be. You could view this as one predator recognizing another. To women of a certain mood, though, it confirms what we already know: that a bear is preferable company to thoughtless, dangerous people. Plus, it’ll help rid you of pesky evidence without asking questions, which only a true, understanding friend would do.

All episodes of “Crystal Lake” are streaming on Peacock.

 

The post Pamela Voorhees has a point, and Peacock’s “Crystal Lake” proves it appeared first on Salon.com.

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