Here’s the second installment of my list of the twenty-five greatest horror films from the past quarter century, starting from the bottom of the list and gradually heading to the top by the end of this year. Here’s a link if you missed the first installment. I’ll try to stay as spoiler-free as possible for…

Expectations in seeing a movie can make a lot of difference. When I saw the trailer for Bone Lake, I thought it was going to be yet another “young people in the woods meet the sharp side of a machete” flick, but when I actually saw the film, I was pleasantly surprised by its intelligence,…

A quarter of the twenty-first century is almost over, and there has been no lack of quality horror, filmic or otherwise, during that time. It seems like an appropriate time to take stock and being that this is a column about horror movies, I decided that a list of twenty-five films for 2025 seemed appropriate….

After a lifetime watching horror movies, I’ve come up with a few rules based on my observations. The first and most important one is: Nothing good ever happens in a basement. A subset to that rule is: Not as emphatic, but also skip the attic. I’d include a sub-subset, but I’ll let people figure out…

When writer/director Zach Cregger’s film Barbarian was released in 2022, horror fans recognized that rare thing – an original voice, with the talent to back it up. That combination doesn’t come around that often. Frequently one sees visual stylists working from scripts teeming with cliched tropes, or perhaps a small character study with decent atmosphere…

For some reason, Hollywood doesn’t seem to be making as many romantic comedies or dramas anymore. The reasons behind this are debatable, but the era in which Pretty Woman and When Harry Met Sally roamed the earth seems distant. Have no fear, however, because real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco have arrived to…

Last September I wrote a short review of writer/director Damian Mc Carthy’s (he prefers his last name spelled with a space between the “Mc” and “Carthy”) 2024 film, Oddity (here’s a link). I praised his distinctive and off-kilter sensibility and wrote that he was a welcome new talent to the horror field. That’s all true,…

Although 28 Days Later isn’t technically a zombie movie (the monsters aren’t revivified corpses, but people infected with the “Rage Virus”), it’s safe to say that after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series, it’s likely the second most influential zombie movie. Purists decried it for the inclusion of “fast zombies,” but overall, the…

As anyone who loves horror films already knows, one of the beauties of the genre is its breadth of styles and subject matter. Any genre that can handily include movies as diverse as The Haunting, Evil Dead II and Martyrs is impressively flexible. An examination of or focus upon death ties all horror together, and…

Back in 2000, a potential story for an episode of The X-Files was changed into a feature script and became the film Final Destination. That movie was a hit and became a franchise, spawning four sequels until the series paused in 2011. Fourteen years later and the death-defying series is back with Final Destination Bloodlines,…

Ten years ago in 2015, a video game called Until Dawn was released to general acclaim, which attempted to place the player inside a horror film to try and attempt to survive a deadly night. The goal of the game was to try to save yourself and your friends by making split-second decisions that would…

Locked is an English language remake of the 2019 Argentinean film 4×4, and although it came and went on local screens without making much noise, it’s worthy of a watch for several reasons. Eddie (Bill Skarsgård) has fallen on hard times and doesn’t have enough money to repair his car to pick up his daughter…

Who rules? That’s often the question in life, isn’t it? Whether it’s concerning a job, a religion or a government, the important thing to know is who’s actually running things. Is that person moral with good intentions or are they a narcissistic sociopath content to watch everything burn? It’s useful to know these things, because…

I’m a fan of writer/director Osgood Perkins. I think he’s one of the best filmmakers in the horror genre today, a distinctive stylist in a town in which originality is often not valued. His film, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, is a near masterpiece, and his surprise hit from last summer, Longlegs, was also excellent. I wrote…

Appropriately enough for a columnist writing for trailersfromhell.com, I’ve always loved movie trailers. I enjoyed the bombast of the classic ones (THE GREATEST ADVENTURE EVER PUT ON FILM!) and the way they skillfully promoted the films without ruining any of the plots. Alas, that time has long passed. Trailers today deliberately show you the entirety…

I am a fan of writer/director Leigh Whannell. It gets somewhat lost now under the weight of the attenuated franchise, but Whannell’s first feature (he co-wrote and co-starred), Saw, was a brutally clever low-budget surprise hit that announced new talents had arrived on the genre film scene. 2010’s Insidious breathed fresh life into the supernatural…

The Ten Best Horror Films of 2024 2024 has been many things, pro and con, but one of those things was a strong year for horror cinema. There were so many good options that my top ten list may not even include any of the other films on some other critic’s list of favorites. In…

There are plenty of winter-set horror films, and that’s for good reason: if you’re looking to put a chill in the audience, a dark, cold atmosphere has already done half the work for you. Films such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter or John Carpenter’s The Thing make it clear that even if there was no demon…

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving began as one of the parody trailers in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 film, Grindhouse. Epitomizing the “grindhouse” vibe, the trailer looked and sounded low-budget and tasteless, all sex and garish kills, with a closing shot so shocking that it was literally only visible for seconds. In other words, it was…

Regarding Hugh Grant’s first horror film in thirty-six years (following Ken Russell’s groovily psychedelic The Lair of the White Worm), perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan put it best – “Whereas heretofore Hugh Grant has been a hail-fellow-well-met-ical, his ventures into horror fare just barely parenthetical, one wonders on reflection if he sees this as regrettable, so…

Late October, when the weather portends the oncoming chill of winter, the night rises earlier and the day grows shorter, when the veil between this world and the next grows thin and the spirits of the dead are welcome to revisit and the most terrifying aspects of our reality are celebrated by figures in dread…

Lesser-Known Halloween Horror Film Suggestions Every year around this time media of all sorts try to get into the Halloween spirit and either posts lists of films to watch or programs a slate of scary fare. This is all well and good – the more Halloween stuff the better – but in general these lists…

There’s been somewhat of a vogue for dialogue-free genre films in the past decade, including titles such as John Woo’s Silent Night, No One Will Save You, Boy Kills World and, of course, A Quiet Place. These movies eschew language to focus on pure visual cinema, hearkening back to silent film and the primacy of…

The Substance There’s a certain kind of film fan that reacts positively when they hear that an upcoming movie is “outrageous” or “over-the-top.” The idea that something “goes too far” does not dissuade; there is no ‘too far.” The boundaries exist to be pushed, please show us something new. I am one of those film…

ODDITY – Writer/director Damian McCarthy’s film is a more straightforward entertainment than his previous movie, Caveat, but they both share his own distinctive, off-kilter style. One night, while alone in the country house she and her husband Ted are renovating, Dani is murdered. One of Ted’s psychiatric patients is blamed for it and is later…

Writer/director Christopher Smith’s 2009 film Triangle hurts my head with the complexity of its plot, but I love it anyway. I’ve seen it three or four times in the past fifteen years, and it never fails to impress me with its combination of intellectual gamesmanship and emotional impact. Thus the fact that it seems relatively…