2026-11-01 15:04:05
Earlier this year, the people behind the Dead Meat channel announced a project called Fresh Meat, an anthology of short horror films from up-and-coming filmmakers. The collection would get a theatrical and home streaming release, exposure from being promoted on the channel, and a cut of the revenue.
I’ve been one of the channel’s many fans for a couple of years now, and I think this is a fantastic project. The creators of Dead Meat, James A Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca, are former film students who decided to ditch the pretentiousness I associate with film students (I’m allowed to say that since I was one briefly) and go all-in on embracing a genre that they love, without much caring whether it’s considered “low-brow.” Their earnest enthusiasm for the process of making movies comes through in their videos and podcasts, and they’ve got a bullshit-free positivity that carries through everything. You can tell that this is a heartfelt project designed to use their platform to give new filmmakers a boost.
I’d reserved a ticket to see it at my local AMC theater for its one night of theatrical screenings, but couldn’t make it. So I was happy to see it come to Apple TV, so I could buy a copy to throw at least a little bit of money at the project.
Even with that enthusiasm, though, I didn’t have the highest of expectations. Anthologies are inherently hit-or-miss, and adding the horror genre and an open call for unknown filmmakers into the mix seems like it’d be practically asking for stuff that was unwatchable with only a few solid attempts. They put up a list of finalists with a trailer for each of their movies and gave the internet a chance to vote for their favorites, and there were only a couple that immediately grabbed me.
So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it. They’re not all 100% to my taste, but that’s to be expected of any anthology. In fact, it’s a testament to the curation that went into this one, that there’s such a wide variety of styles and tones. There’s an animated one, a few primarily comedic ones, one that feels like an acting exercise turned into horror, a couple that are new takes on familiar urban legends, and only a couple that feel like the pretentious film student projects I’d expected.
Most surprising is that there’s not really a dud in the bunch. Even my least favorites had some appealing aspect to them, and I’ve seen several reviews on Letterboxd that called those out as their favorites. There seems to be something for all types of horror fans, and the entries are all short enough (I believe they’re all under 10 minutes?) that if you’re not vibing with one, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
As somebody who’s only started really getting into horror over the past five or six years, I’ve been a little surprised and happy to see the kind of community that’s grown up around it. The vibe seems to have gotten more mature and more inclusive since I first became aware of horror fandom as a thing; it seems to be less about being an edgelord now, and more about being a nice person who can still nerd out over inventively visceral filmmaking.
I think projects like this would deserve support anyway, and it’s just a nice bonus that it’s actually pretty entertaining!
2026-11-01 06:04:47
A recurring, and inadvertent, theme has started to develop from the movies I’ve enjoyed the most this year, and that is: “I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate this if I’d seen it on release.” I’ve seen a lot of stuff that forces me to imagine myself in the 80s or early 90s, with my still-developing understanding of movies, and art in general for that matter, and wondering whether that version of me would have been able to understand how it works.
I’m certain, however, that I would not have been able to understand Deadly Friend as a teenager. Because I’m not sure I understand it as an adult.
The movie stars Matthew Labyorteaux as a teen (?) genius who’s an expert in robotics and AI, and who’s built a robot friend named BB. He and his mom have moved to a suburban house in a new town, because he’s gotten a full scholarship to a university to study (and occasionally, teach) brain surgery, a subject he’s also an expert in, somehow. He’s made discoveries that even his sponsors were incapable of.
His new next-door neighbor is Sam, played by Kristy Swanson, a friendly teenager living alone with her abusive, alcoholic father. Paul, Sam, BB, and their other friend Tom the newspaper delivery boy love to hang out and do teen stuff together, like shooting hoops, doing pranks on Halloween, and antagonizing the paranoid old woman across the street. But when Sam is killed in what her abusive father claims is an accident, Paul hatches a plan to save her by implanting BB’s electronic brain into her body.
Going in, I knew three things about this movie: the premise, that it’s by horror master Wes Craven, and there’s a scene involving a basketball that is a highlight. All of those things are true. And yet, the movie that exists is so different from the one that I’d been imagining that it feels like something that couldn’t exist even now, much less in 1986. A bafflingly unique new genre that consists solely of itself.
Incidentally: if you haven’t seen it, do not look through the images on imdb or online, since people just straight-up spoil all of the best moments.
What makes it so unique is that it is, undeniably, a horror comedy, but I can’t think of any other movie I’ve seen that commits so thoroughly to the bit. It plays like an opportunistic take on the Amblin Entertainment-style teen adventures that were so common in the 1980s, with every scene, every camera angle, every bit of background music, every performance, and every light-hearted gag a pitch-perfect approximation of that. But they all feel as if they’ve been filtered through the mind of a mad genius.
I have to wonder whether my “this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before” reaction is due to my age, my general inability to understand kayfabe like the younger generations do, my still-incomplete experience with horror movies, or a combination of the three. Does this read as nothing more than obvious comedy horror to people who didn’t grow up in the same popular entertainment environment as I did, and who may not appreciate that all the cheesy and corny stuff in Deadly Friend was just the way movies were back in the 1980s?
BB the robot1 is voiced — a lot — by Charles Fleischer, doing the kinds of “cute” gurgles and muttering that he and Frank Welker built entire careers out of. BB’s artificial intelligence is so advanced that he doesn’t need to be programmed; he can just teach himself things like picking locks and grabbing the genitals of bullies. There is the requisite scene of our hero and his friends getting accosted by a gang of motorcycle-riding bad seeds, and you can tell that the head bully is bad news because he wears a dangling earring, and it’s one of the fundamentals of 80s Teen Movies when we see the bully get his comeuppance at the claws of a cute and plucky robot. The movie is full of scenes that play out like lighthearted “comedy” familiar to anyone who’d seen literally any piece of media made between 1980 and 1990.
But while the familiar Teen Whiz Kid story is playing out, we get gruesome close-ups of brain surgery like it’s a horror movie, and the dark story of Sam’s abuse that’s presented like a Very Special Episode of a sitcom or made-for-TV movie. While Paul and his friend Tom are rushing to the hospital to execute their dark plan to reanimate their dead friend, Tom is freaking out over Paul’s driving, and Paul dutifully hits every single trash can. Breakfast with Paul’s mom has the teens up to their wacky hijinx of figuring out how to slip a sedative into her coffee, and whew! her reaction on tasting it is just to say “I make a good cup of coffee!” Later, there’s a hilarious moment of misunderstanding when our teen hero thinks he’s accidentally used too strong a dose and killed his mother! Oh, Paul!
It did such a good job of transporting me back to the early 80s that I was almost immediately back in the mindset of my adolescent crush on Labyorteaux (and his brother Patrick), which was somehow more confusing and inexplicable to me than my crushes on Buck Rogers and Starbuck, because Little House on the Prairie wasn’t set in space. Shouldn’t I have been crushing on Kristy Swanson instead? Watching it now, it was odd seeing Labyorteaux, who was clearly an adult (he was 20 when this was released), playing a character that I assumed must be a teenager around 15. The movie seemed to be putting him in long-sleeve shirts to hide how hairy his arms were for an adolescent, until it eventually just gives up and shows him in his underwear.
To quote MST3K: “Really old teenagers from outer space!”
My own psychosexual confusion aside, Deadly Friend is confounding because it always feels like a jarring mismatch of tones, light and dark clumsily and shamelessly slammed together, but at the same time, it always feels exactly tonally appropriate for a movie from whatever bizarre alternate reality it comes from. In lesser hands, this could have turned into something like Zapped! or Weird Science, but with the comedy replaced with horror. Instead, it feels like someone making a completely straight-faced version of this story in the style of a light-hearted teen adventure, totally unaware of how dark and weird it is. And without even the slightest bit of concern over whether anyone in the audience knows that the filmmakers are in on the joke.
Or in fact, whether it’s even supposed to be a joke. The only hint of awareness I could pick up on was after Paul tells Tom about his plan, the camera cuts to the outside of the house and we hear Tom in voiceover yell “Are you out of your fucking mind?!” (And also, I guess, the basketball scene).
So when zombie Sam (you can tell she’s a zombie on account of all the eye makeup) and her new robot brain (you can tell she’s got a robot brain because she always holds her hands like BB’s pincers) go on a revenge murder spree, it doesn’t feel to me like comedy horror, because it doesn’t feel at all self aware. It just seems like this is what a perfectly normal movie would be like in some alternate bizarro-reality.
It’s a reality where of course a computer chip is enough to give a teen girl super-human strength, and where an overt parody of 80s movies like, say, Wet Hot American Summer seems even more desperate than it does in our reality to make certain the audience knows this is supposed to be funny.
Even the slyness of something like M3GAN feels more clumsy and overt. Deadly Friend has no trace of that movie’s satirical intent — I don’t think there’s any point behind it other than to be bafflingly awesome — but it does feel way ahead of its time in comparison. Neither BB nor Sam ever breaks into a heartfelt song, but you’ll also never catch anyone involved in this movie winking at the camera.
I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that Deadly Friend should be required viewing for anyone interested in cinema studies, if not quite making it an essential piece of the western canon of film history. Especially if you grew up during a period where the style of movie and TV storytelling this movie approximates is the only thing you ever had access to. I genuinely believe it’s the best Wes Craven movie I’ve seen, re-contextualizing the way that genre movies work in a way that makes Scream feel blunt and old-fashioned.
2026-11-01 04:28:11
When Apple’s Vision Pro headset was having its moment in the public consciousness, there was a ton of pushback that was way overblown and hyperbolic. Apart from its exorbitant price (which is undeniable), there were comments that made it sound like wearing it was like wearing some medieval torture device, and that it was a symbol of a bleak dystopian future where we’re all shut-ins, jacked into the dark solitude of cyberspace, completely cut off from our loved ones, pets, and the wonders of nature.
In practice as an early adopter, the only thing I’ve found isolating about it is that when I do see something genuinely cool on it, I know that there’s going to be a limited audience who’s even capable of seeing it. Mostly because of that exorbitant price.
A perfect example of that is Remnants, a 30-minute horror movie written and directed by Ti West for the Apple Immersive platform.
So far, I haven’t been blown away by any of the Apple Immersive projects, because while they’re all well-done, the ones I’ve seen have felt mostly like novelties. You do get the queasy feeling of vertigo from watching a woman walk a tight rope across an impossibly deep chasm. It is neat seeing the streets and rooftops of Paris as a bunch of parkour experts leap across the architecture. And I imagine it’d be neat to be close enough to Metallica to see every pore, bead of sweat, and hair on the faces of the artists, but I’m not into Metallica enough to want to find out. There’s one fiction project that I know of, about people in a submarine, and I’m sure that the format will get across the tension and claustrophobia in a way that traditional movies can’t, but I’ve never been particularly compelled to check it out.
But a ghost story: that I can get into. Remnants is set in England sometime during the Edwardian period, I’m guessing, and it stars Lucy Boynton as the representative of a bank assigned to assess the remnants of the estate of a recently-deceased noble woman. She’s there on behalf of her husband, who’s suffering from some sort of consumptive disease that causes him to have sudden episodes of extreme close-up jump scares. At the start, she’s trying to convince the estate’s caretaker, played by Ralph Ineson, to guide her through the old mansion. When he refuses, she decides she’ll just go by herself.
What’s so remarkable about Remnants is that it simply wouldn’t be as effective in any other medium. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that the story is very straightforward and old-school, and it’s filled with every haunted house movie trick in the book. But it’s a simple story executed to the absolute fullest extent. The production design is flawless, the performances are perfect, the visual effects are (mostly) seamless, and every single shot works to establish atmosphere and tension.
It starts with Boynton and Ineson’s characters at a table in a dark pub in front of a fireplace, and it’s both the perfect introduction to an old-fashioned ghost story, and an ingenious way to ease the viewer into an immersive-format short film.1 You’re placed into the room as a silent observer, aware of the other patrons in your periphery, instinctively wanting to look around and explore your space, but also your attention is drawn to the speakers. There’s a vague sense that those other patrons aren’t just background extras; you’re one of them. Like in a traditional movie, a private conversation has been presented exclusively to you as an omnipresent observer; but at the same time, you’ve been cast as someone in a pub who’s eavesdropping on a heated conversation at a nearby table.
I don’t want to get too hyperbolic with it, but I did keep getting that energizing feeling of what it must have felt like as cinema first departed from recording stage productions, and started experimenting with what the camera could do that made it unique to the new medium. Partly because I was immediately engaged in the story — this doesn’t feel like a novelty or a tech demo — I got the feeling of a team breaking cinematic storytelling down to first principles. It’s not like traditional movies, since you’re there in the room, but it’s also not like immersive theater, since the filmmakers can command your focus and put you in any position they want. Even, or especially in this case, places you would not have chosen to go on your own.
As somebody who’s spent decades engaging with video game storytelling, and years seeing how much of that does or doesn’t translate naturally to VR, I noticed how many of the “fundamental rules” are broken in Remnants. The camera abruptly cuts between setups. Some of the camera positions are slightly tilted, enough to be disorienting without being nauseating. And the camera will often do a slow pan or a push through a space, which I’ve always assumed would be forbidden, to avoid motion sickness. I was surprised by how well it all works.
The movie isn’t made with 360-degree cameras, but instead an angle more like 180 degrees. If you look behind you, you’ll just see the scene dissolve into blackness. But there’s always something just outside your range of peripheral vision. Meaning that you naturally watch what the camera is currently focused on, but you’re also constantly looking around for anything that might be lurking in the shadows. Which is, of course, perfect for a story about a haunted house. It’s not a story told in the first person, but instead often feels like you might be one of the ghosts.
And I’ve got to praise how the movie’s paced, which is a huge but subtle part of how that effect works. Shots go on for much longer than they would in a traditional movie, often with several seconds passing before our protagonist enters the frame. It’s essential to let us get our bearings, but also imbues a sense of anticipation throughout the movie, as we’re always wondering exactly why the camera is holding on this shot, scanning the periphery to find out exactly what it might be showing us. I can’t imagine this would feel anything other than dull and padded in a traditional movie, even a 3D one.
But Remants is thoroughly, and unapologetically, a horror movie, meaning that the building sense of dread comes from anticipating the moments that you’ll see something horrific in your periphery, which will inevitably jump out and getcha. The movie is absolutely not above throwing in old-school 3D jump scares. But they are all hell of effective.
It’s not even like the VR horror games I’ve tried2, largely because you’re ceding any sense of control. You’re not the protagonist, you have no agency in this story apart from watching what happens, but you’re not an impartial viewer, either. You’re right there in the room. And the camera can cut at any moment to show you exactly what the protagonist is seeing. There are plenty of times I’ve had an effective jump scare in a traditional movie. None of them have ever given me the full-body electric tingling jolt that the ones in Remants do.
Those moments are closer to a haunted house attraction than a movie or video game, but even when I’ve been in those and had an actual person inches away from my real-world face trying to scare the shit out of me, it’s never been the same level of biological flight-response terror. Again, it felt like taking things back to the fundamentals of cinema, and enjoying the simple fact that the camera can be anywhere and do anything.
Which all goes back to my opening paragraph. It’s impossible for me to watch this and not be excited about the potential of an entirely new medium. Not the future of entertainment, obviously, but a future, instead of just being the novelty branch I’d kind of dismissed it as being. This is the first thing I’ve seen in a long time that felt like an entirely new art form — not just from its content, but from its execution. All the money and talent and imagination went into this project, and it shows.
And it’s a drag to realize that its audience is inherently limited, because the tech (and budget) that makes it possible is still out of reach for most people.
2026-10-31 01:00:00
The poster for the American release of Black Sabbath shows a headless man barreling through the countryside carrying the decapitated head of one of his victims, while four young women bare their ample cleavage in horror. You can’t quite call it false advertising, but it definitely takes liberties with the kind of thrills that are contained in this movie.
The movie contains three horror comic-style stories: “The Telephone” is about a woman receiving threatening phone calls from a man who wants to kill her and can see everything she does. “The Wurdulak” is about a family dreading the return of their father, who went to the mountains to kill a vampire-like creature that craves the blood of the people it loved most in life. And “A Drop of Water” is about a nurse called in to help prepare the body of an old woman who died while conducting a séance.
Boris Karloff appears as the father in the second story, and he also delivers a charming segment as himself, as an introduction and an epilogue to the movie. In the first, he appears against a blue backdrop that’s a little reminiscent of Fantasia, and I won’t spoil the second except to say that it’s a repeat of what might be the most memorable image of the movie.
Those charming segments did a lot to nudge me over the precipice into liking this movie, since for the most part, it’s extraordinarily dull. The first segment has just enough tension to be engaging, the second feels like a fifteen minute story padded to twice that length, and the third is mostly memorable for an extremely creepy old woman whose face is locked in a rictus grimace.
It’s fun to see how much Mario Bava and his crew were experimenting with light and color. I’m pretty certain that the ruined cloister set that was used for Black Sunday also appears here, and it was honestly a lot more striking in black and white. Black Sabbath’s scenes work a lot better in tight, confined spaces, with colored light coming from out of a window, or a light unnaturally focused on Karloff’s menacing face as he’s riding on horseback. It’s never as dramatic as anything in Suspiria or even Vertigo, but you can really tell that a lot of attention was paid to getting the light and the color exactly right.
I suspect that Kino Lorber also put a lot of effort into making sure that the Italian version was the one released on physical media and streaming, because both Kanopy and Plex have the original title along with the Italian soundtrack and English subtitles. It’s one of those rare cases where I would’ve preferred a dubbed version, since it was simply distracting seeing Karloff speaking Italian. (The changes for the American release described in the Wikipedia entry sound pretty dreadful all around, so I guess I should be thankful).
It all feels pretty tame and old-school even by the standards of 1963, seemingly going more for suspense than for shocking horror. You can’t deny the artistry behind much of it, but it undeniably feels like a collection of the “filler” episodes of a lost anthology TV series.
2026-10-30 02:38:35
Because I’m still most annoyed that V/H/S Halloween felt like a waste of time, I’ll respect yours and get right to the point: The last segment, “Home Haunt,” is very good, nails the right tone, and strikes the right balance between gory and fun. The second segment, “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” is clever and has a good punchline, but there’s not a whole lot to it. The rest are in the “don’t bother unless you’re bored” category, except for one called “Kidprint” that is pure garbage.
I’ve never seen any of the V/H/S found footage movies, but I’ve always been mildly curious about them. Horror anthologies are fantastic in concept, but in practice, they tend to have a very low hit rate. Maybe that’s a helpful reminder to all of us forced to live in the “AI era” that ideas aren’t worth anything without thoughtful execution of all the details bringing them about.
Even the “institutions” of horror anthology, like Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt, are hit-and-miss. And at least based on the marketing, V/H/S seemed to be aiming even lower, an anthology series for edgelords with a limited budget. But I’ve got the Shudder subscription anyway, and it’s Halloween week, so this seemed like the perfect place for me to start giving it a chance. Unfortunately, V/H/S Halloween didn’t do much to convince me otherwise.
A bit about the segments, in order from best to worst, using info borrowed from Wikipedia:
So my first exposure to the V/H/S definitely wasn’t a success. There’s one solid entry and another that’s pretty good, but the low points don’t feel as much like “this didn’t land for me, but you can’t win ’em all!” as “this series clearly has no quality control in place.”
It’s a shame, because I’m entirely on board with the concept, and anything that gives filmmakers the opportunity to get a wider audience, and established names the chance to make something in a freer and looser environment. I might give the series a couple more chances, because it has attracted some talent that I generally like. V/H/S/Beyond has a short by Kate Siegel and Mike Flanagan, and another by Justin Long. And V/H/S 99 has an entry from Vanessa Winter and Joseph Winter, who made one of my favorite horror movies, Deadstream, along with Melanie Stone, who was absolutely terrific in that movie.
I just won’t feel any obligation to sit through the parts that aren’t working, and instead feel free to skip to the parts I’m interested in.
2026-10-28 15:01:22
The Cycle is a 2026 horror movie running on the Shudder channel, starring Deborah Ann Woll as a forensic scientist with an exceptional skill at deducing what happened to a dead body from a minimum of information. Jeffrey Donovan and Will Hochman play cops who ask for her help investigating a strange case: the body of a dead man was found near the bodies of two other people torn apart by some sort of animal, but all signs say that the man had been dead for much longer.
And get this twist: that man is her biological father, who left the family when she was four years old!
For a lot of the runtime of The Cycle, it plays like a modern police procedural, albeit more of a basic cable than Prestige TV production. Everything is polished and grim and atmospheric, and the performances are genuinely good, but it’s just a little bit off. For instance, every character has a Key Point Of Backstory That Defines Them, and they are all primed to deliver it in a monologue at the drop of a hat. The monologues are all well-performed, but they feel crammed into the wrong context.
I really wasn’t sure what to make of the movie for at least 45 minutes to an hour. I didn’t dislike it; I just felt that it was trying so hard to be a movie that it wasn’t. I wondered why it was taking them so long to get to the place where it was obviously going.
Once it gets there, though, it lets loose. It really transforms, one might say, into the movie it wanted to be all along. And it gets pretty bonkers, with some impressive visual effects that sure seem practical, even if they’re CG-assisted. I got the sense that this stuff was the reason the entire movie existed, and it had been building up the character-based drama not as padding, but an attempt to ground its B-movie soul in something more aspirational.
The other non-spoiler thing I can say is that I think Deborah Ann Woll is great. I always get the sense that she’s thrown herself completely into whatever she’s doing, and she’s going to sell it, dammit. She’s not shy about making it clear what she nerds out about, and what kind of projects she’s interested in, and no matter what it is, you never get the slightest hint of self-awareness or that she’s not invested. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the decision to have her character playing with a vintage GameBoy was her idea.
Even though it’s pretty clear where the movie is going pretty early on, they still treat it as if it were a spoiler, so everything after this point is a big spoiler warning.
So even after The Cycle goes nuts and embraces its identity as a monster movie, I still wasn’t quite sold. It still felt like it was trying to be two different kinds of movie, and that was a shame because it was so clearly better at being an over-the-top monster movie than a drama.
But then there’s a scene with the werewolf doing a retinal scan to get into the locked room where our heroes have hidden themselves. And as soon as the voice said, “Retinal scan confirmed,” that was when I fell in love with The Cycle. Well, that’s overstating it; it’s more that I fell in liked-a-lot-more-than-I-probably-should.
Because like I said, it’s not hard to tell that this is going to be a werewolf movie, and it becomes apparent pretty early on. But I was doing my best to be a good movie watcher and play along, acting like they were building up to a big reveal and ready to act surprised so that nobody’s feelings would get hurt. And when we see the transformation and the attacks, it’s a satisfying payoff even if you saw it coming.
But it wasn’t until the retinal scan that the movie was kind of giving me permission to treat it as the over-the-top horror movie it had wanted to be all along. It doesn’t go so far as to become a comedy, but it does break you out of the “are we supposed to take this seriously?” spell and let you retroactively think about exactly what the premise is.
What could possibly be worse than a werewolf? A zombie werewolf!!!
It is a bit too long, slow to get started and then stretching out the last act for longer than it deserves. This would be a lot more solid at 90 minutes long.
And while everything is clearly set up and knocked down like a Screenwriting 101 assignment — this watch will be important, this character is obviously about to die, etc — there’s one thread that seemed to be building up to something that never arrived. Early on, Woll’s character makes a point of how they can 3D print a skull from even the tiniest fragment of bone, and later she asks her friend to do some kind of “age enhancement” on the corpse she’d autopsied. They show the printers churning away a few times, and we get the barest glimpse of what it prints out, but we never see the end result, and it’s never mentioned again.
I was all ready to have the technician check the print bed and find a full-on werewolf head sitting there. And I was robbed of my chance to make fun of the movie for not having the technician just look at the 3D model, before going through the time-consuming process of printing it out. But instead: nothing!
Also: since the werewolf seems to affect electrical fields around it, I was hoping they were going to go for ghost zombie werewolf! And since it gives characters visions, I was hoping for psychic ghost zombie werewolf! But that was left implied. Maybe the filmmakers were just big fans of Malignant?
In any case, it doesn’t let loose quite as much as I might’ve hoped, but I did appreciate how far it did go. The coroner’s kill was appropriately gruesome (albeit predictable), and the werewolf did dutifully jump through a window at exactly the right moment while watching a creepy video tape. So points for that, even if it, disappointingly, didn’t go so far as having Woll turn around in the last shot and look at the camera with werewolf eyes, like the Thriller video.
You might see The Cycle as a movie that flirts with campy horror but never fully commits, but I prefer to think of it as a movie that says, “Yes, of course we all love campy horror, but you don’t need to be shameless about it.”