A sequel to Godzilla Minus One is coming, and the internet could not be more excited. It’s not just that we’re getting a sequel to what might very well be the best movie about the King of the Monsters since the 1954 original. It’s also that the mysterious title and surrealistic imagery in the teaser announcing Godzilla Minus Zero has people wondering if another classic monster like Mothra is on the way.
But the biggest question should really be around the film’s setting. Although it was the 37th Godzilla movie, Minus One took place in 1945 and 1947, before the first film. The setting allowed writer and director Takashi Yamazaki to explore Japan’s misdeeds at the time, adding another layer of moral complexity to film series about the ravages of America’s attack on the country.
So as we wait for more information about Godzilla Minus Zero to surface, let’s look at some of the potential settings for the next chapter in monster history.
1960s
Chronologically, it would make sense for Godzilla Minus Zero to just hop a decade and a half later than its predecessor. Time would have passed, but not so much that we couldn’t check in on would-be kamakaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his girlfriend Noriko (Minami Hamabe). But the 1960s would also give Yamazaki plenty of thematic material to work with.
The 1960s were, of course, the height of the Cold War, when the United States and the USSR threatened one another with nuclear annihilation, while the rest of the world either took a side or stood by and prayed neither would pull a trigger. While not one of the prime belligerents, Japan’s increased connection to the U.S. made them a sometimes unwilling player, especially as America inserted itself into Korea and Vietnam, two countries with whom Japan has its own imperial history.
Between the nuclear anxieties at work during the ’60s and Japan being forced to confront both its past and its new place on the world stage, Yamazaki would certainly find the Cold War a fruitful setting for his next monster movie.
1980s
Given the wave of nostalgia that continues to sweep across the country, the 1980s seem like the ideal setting for Godzilla Minus Zero. Furthermore, the 1980s were an interesting time for the franchise, as the release of The Return of Godzilla in 1984, the first new movie featuring the monster in nine years, played as a direct sequel to the first film and launched the Heisei Era of Godzilla movies. If Yamazaki wanted to continue the meta-commentary found in Godzilla Minus One, then setting Godzilla Minus Zero in 1984 or ’85 would make perfect sense.
Moreover, the period presented an interesting turn in the relations between Japan and the United States. During the 1980s, Japan saw a surge in technological advancements, threatening in the U.S.’s place in the global economy. In other words, Japan was doing Western-style economics better than the West, using the system foisted upon them to their own ends. Those types of tensions would be the perfect place for Yamazaki to insert Godzilla, the ultimate monster born of American intervention in the East.
2020s
Before the release of Godzilla Minus One, most fans believed 2016’s Shin Godzilla to be the best post-1954 entry in the franchise. That movie used Godzilla as a metaphor for the government’s response to recent disasters such as the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear accident, getting just as much horror for bureaucratic incompetence as it does from the titular beast. Given how well directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi reframed the central threat for Shin Godzilla, one might think that Godzilla Minus Zero should stay away from the present.
But since Shin Godzilla‘s release, every modern day Godzilla film has been part of Legendary Pictures‘ MonsterVerse, which have their charms, but aren’t interested in commentary like the Toho films. And since Toho’s deal with Legendary meant they couldn’t make Godzilla movies for a while, the time is right for the company to bring Godzilla into the 2020s.
Obviously, Yamazaki won’t want to travel the same ground that Anno and Higuchi already trod. But with the global pandemic still front of mind, and Japan facing a massive population crisis—and with it, renewed fears about loss of traditional culture—there are sadly more than enough new anxieties for Godzilla Minus Zero to translate into kaiju action.
Kyle Gallner Is Still the Reigning Scream King
Move aside, Justin Long. Out of the way, Patrick Wilson. Ethan Hawke? How did you get here?! Look, we love you all, but it’s clear that Kyle Gallner is still horror’s reigning scream king. After news broke this week that Gallner will write and star in a new upcoming monster horror/survival thriller called Man Vs, we were simply ready to call it.
Gallner is unstoppable and, quite frankly, we don’t want him to stop. In the last 20 years, he’s starred in a string of horror flicks. Red Eye, The Haunting in Connecticut, Jennifer’s Body, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Red State, The Cleansing Hour, Scream, Smile, Smile 2, Strange Darling …that’s not even all of them. He’s also received critical acclaim in other genres, starring in the dark comedy Dinner in America and Welcome to Happiness. There doesn’t seem to be much Gallner can’t do when he puts his mind to it, and that includes being our scream king of modern horror.
From a young age, Gallner has shown the kind of onscreen vulnerability and emotional resonance that reinforces a true genre actor. His 2009 role in The Haunting in Connecticut as a teenager battling cancer who faces supernatural terror set the template for many of his horror characters: he’s really good at playing a frightened but resilient guy pushed into extraordinary circumstances.
Since then, he’s carved out an identity within the horror space in a way few supporting actors have ever managed, and in recent years, he’s made the transition to high-profile horror movies, most notably in the smash hit Smile and its sequel. As he’s matured, he’s been able to continue inhabiting grounded characters who are forced into a whirlwind of chaos, but we also never know quite what he’ll be capable of.
In 2022’s Scream, the mere sight of a dishevelled, moustachioed Gallner propping up a car was enough for horror fans to do the DiCaprio pointing meme. He can slip into characters with a menacing edge just as easily as ones with deep vulnerability, which is one of the many acting skills that make him perfect for horror. Gallner may not be a marquee name outside the horror fandom, but we love that he can always turn out to be the terrorised or the tormentor. It keeps us guessing!
We hope he’s fine with us declaring him our reigning scream king. We’d never want him to feel pigeonholed, and we’ll take all the Gallner we can get, but he has said he’s “grateful” for the label before.
“I’ll take the term all day, I’ll adopt it and wear it like a badge of honor,” he told The Hollywood News last year. “It’s a genre that I enjoy. I enjoy the fans. I think they’re some of the most dedicated fans out there. They show up, they watch the films, they talk about them, they share them, they push it out there, and it’s where I got started.”
Kyle, thank you for your service. Rest assured, we’ll watch you in anything, horror or otherwise.
In the meantime, long live our gracious king.
Star Trek: Enterprise Creators Reveal Their Only Regret About the Divisive Finale
Twenty years after Star Trek: Enterprise ended in cancelation, co-creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have been looking back on the events of the series finale and getting real about the decisions they made.
“These Are The Voyages” saw an uptick in viewers at the time, but it’s fair to say that the majority of them weren’t happy with how Enterprise came to a close in the episode, which sees Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) use a holo-program in 2370 to experience a time when the original Enterprise is due to be decommissioned. This framing of the finale, set around Next Generation characters rather than wholly focusing on Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and his crew, felt like the wrong move to many fans of the series who wanted a proper farewell after four seasons.
Berman and Braga recently reflected on the fallout from the episode on The D-Con Chamber podcast, where they explained that they couldn’t find a way to wrap up the show in the way that they wanted, given its cancelation and quick hop to a finale story that could even attempt to put a neat bow on the series.
While acknowledging fan disappointment, Braga said that they “wanted to send a valentine to the franchise,” and added, “I still stand by the concept of the episode, which is it’s actually an episode of Next Generation where they’re looking back at Enterprise on the holodeck, which I think is a cool idea… Our intentions were not to be in any way dismissive or disrespectful. It was quite the opposite.”
Berman and Braga’s only lingering regret with “These Are The Voyages” is their decision to kill off Connor Trinneer’s character, Charles “Trip” Tucker. “I feel like that’s the real problem,” mused Braga. “One of the most beloved characters. What were we thinking?”
After some thought, Braga noted that they may have been chasing some “emotional impact” by killing Trip. “We felt that the flashback needed some power, some emotional potency, but I can see why that might have been upsetting to people, to find out indirectly, that Trip died.”
Trinneer himself, who co-hosts the D-Con Chamber podcast, doesn’t have any hard feelings about Trip’s death, though, telling Berman and Braga that he’s “very satisfied” with the finale. “As an actor, I got to tell the entire arc of a story,” he informed the pair. “You don’t have to wonder about him. I don’t have to wonder about him. I don’t have to answer questions about him. What you saw was the totality of this person’s career and life.”
It seems like the duo were stuck between a rock and a hard place and felt they made the best decisions possible at the time. Arguably, the real antagonist was the network that cancelled the show and forced Enterprise to skip to the end.
Ryan Reynolds Takes Surprising Villain Role in Gilmore Girls Creator’s New Film
Ryan Reynolds is swapping heroics for wickedness for the first time in a while, as he’s set to play the villain in a new live-action film adaptation of the Eloise children’s books.
It’s a surprising move from Reynolds. Feel free to correct us in the comments, but it seems the last time the Canadian-born actor played a villain was all the way back in 2014, when he starred as a serial killer in the psychological comedy-horror movie The Voices, and even that film tried to give him a sympathetic angle.
The new Eloise adaptation is being directed by Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who is loved by many for her screwball dialogue and fast-paced storytelling. Reynolds, who is also producing the flick, should be very at home in that environment.
The classic 1950s book series, written by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight, doesn’t actually feature the villain that Reynolds will play, though. Sherman-Palladino will be creating an original antagonist for him when he stars alongside newcomer Mae Schenk in the titular role.
The project is also billed as a “wholly original adventure” rather than a straight adaptation of the books. Published in the 1950s, the series consists of four novels – Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups, Eloise in Paris, Eloise at Christmastime, and Eloise in Moscow – that follow a girl who lives on the top floor of the Plaza Hotel in New York with her nanny, her pug, and her turtle.
The upcoming film has already been acquired by Netflix.
“Eloise has been beloved for generations, from when she was first published in the 1950s through to today, when no family trip to New York City is complete without a stop at The Plaza,” said Hannah Minghella, head of feature animation and family film at Netflix, in a statement. “It’s an honor to reintroduce this cherished character to the world with two people who share her signature mischief and charm — Amy Sherman-Palladino and Ryan Reynolds — in this bold, hilarious, and heartfelt new family film.”
A release date hasn’t been confirmed by the streamer yet, but filming is set to begin imminently. For any Marvel fans holding out hope of seeing Reynolds pop up as Deadpool in Avengers: Secret Wars, rest assured, he’s got plenty of time to fill before production begins on that movie some way into 2026.
Yorgos Lanthimos Defends Bugonia’s Strange Ending
This article contains spoilers for Bugonia.
“What the heck just happened?” Honestly, that question applies to basically every movie that Yorgos Lanthimos makes. But it’s particularly relevant for his latest film Bugonia, not so much because the ending is unclear, but because it is so unexpected.
For Lanthimos himself, what’s unexpected is the divisive response that audiences have had. “I’ve noticed that some people say, ‘Oh, it’s really dark and bleak, the ending,’ and then some other people find it very hopeful, because in a sense you don’t take it literally,” the Greek filmmaker told Entertainment Weekly.
Most of Bugonia follows troubled conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) who, with the not entirely-willing help of his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnaps pharma CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). The duo have captured Fuller because they’re convinced that she is an Andromedan, an alien come to Earth to ultimately destroy humanity, and Teddy is willing to torture her into a confession.
Of course, throughout the film, we assume that Teddy must be nuts. He clearly spends too much time on the internet, and he’s undergone extreme emotional damage from the ordeal of his meth-addicted mother, an ordeal made worse by faulty drugs administered by Fuller’s company. Whenever Michelle admits that she is an Andromedan, we viewers just assume that she’s manipulating Teddy to find a way out.
But in the final moments of the film, after Don and Teddy have both met bloody ends, we see Michelle go back to her ship and tell her fellow Andromedans that their experiments have failed. From her ship, she immediately kills all the humans on Earth, and the film closes with a long montage of animals and plants alongside the corpses of people, all set to the folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
So shocking is the ending that not even Lanthimos’s stars know what to make of it. In their conversation with EW, both Stone and Plemons admitted that they weren’t 100% who was at fault for the explosion that kills Teddy in the final moments, just when it seemed that Michelle was going to beam him into her ship.
“Yeah, I mean, I always assumed it was Teddy, really,” Stone explained. “There was a friction situation, and he got stuck, and that thing was a homemade [bomb].” But Plemons was drawn to the idea that Michelle killed Teddy, saying, “I like the [kill switch] beaming thing. That’s the one thing he didn’t think about.”
For his part, Lanthimos is just glad that people can see many different possibilities.
As extreme as the ending is, Lanthimos understands why people see hope in it. “It’s a film,” he reminded viewers; “and nature survives, and it kind of allows the hope of a second chance at everything restarting.” Thus, “some people see it this way instead of it all ended. So I think it says things about the viewer themselves, how they feel in the end. And I think sometimes it might change. If it sticks in their head, maybe they think about it [later] and go like, ‘Yeah, maybe it is hopeful. It’s not that bleak, actually.'”
In other words, the real confusing part of Bugonia is the viewer themselves, a group more surprising and complicated than anything Lanthimos could put on screen.
Bugonia is now playing in theaters worldwide.
The Overlooked Sci-Fi Movie That Got Lost in The Matrix’s Shadow
1999 was a big year for movies. Fight Club, American Pie, and The Phantom Menace all proved popular for different reasons, while original sci-fi was still a booming genre. That year, two fascinating sci-fi films emerged, both determined to explore the idea that reality might not be what it seems. One was The Matrix (you’ve probably heard of it!) and the other was The Thirteenth Floor, a noir story that unfortunately got lost in the shadow of “bullet time” and leather-clad martial arts.
In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) discovers that the world he lives in is a simulated reality created by machines, and that the “real” world is a desolate wasteland. But The Thirteenth Floor explores virtual worlds instead, building layers of simulation from 1937 Los Angeles to 1999 LA and beyond. Both films ask their characters to question what is real and which reality they will settle for.
Just before The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor were released, Alex Proyas’ Dark City also posed the same questions. All three movies had distinct visual styles and approaches. Where The Matrix used that now-iconic green hue, inspired by phosphor-coated green computer displays and in contrast with the cold blue of reality, Dark City opted for German Expressionism—oppressively dark and rain-slicked. In contrast, The Thirteenth Floor was presented in rich color tones, from a sepia-tinged 1937 to a neon-dotted 90s cityscape.
Of course, The Matrix became a blockbuster and spawned three sequels, whereas Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor didn’t make any money. Although Dark City has gone on to become a cult classic, The Thirteenth Floor has been largely forgotten, and we’d argue that’s a damn shame.
The film stars Craig Bierko (The Long Kiss Goodnight) as Douglas Hall, a computer scientist who discovers that his colleague, Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), has created a fully immersive simulation of 1937 Los Angeles. When Fuller is found murdered, Hall becomes the prime suspect and begins investigating Fuller’s last days. Eventually, he realizes that the simulated world is way more sophisticated than he thought.
As Hall navigates both the virtual 1937 setting and the 1999 world, he encounters characters whose lives and identities are intertwined across both realities. Betrayals and hidden motives slowly unravel, forcing Hall to confront the possibility that his own world may be a simulation.
The cast is solid, with Gretchen Mol and Dennis Haysbert in supporting roles. Arguably, Bierko isn’t an acting powerhouse, but inhabiting different characters gives him room to play. His more well-known comedy stylings (he famously passed on the role of Chandler in Friends, allowing best friend Matthew Perry to land the part) work in his favor as he drops into his baffled 1937 avatar, while his mugging is well-suited to another avatar’s more diabolical tendencies.
It helps that Bierko is paired with consistently fantastic character actor Vincent D’Onofrio, who is also playing several roles. In 1999, he’s an affable, floppy-haired techie. In 1937, he’s steely-eyed, dangerous, and far too observant of his surroundings to remain tethered to a virtual world. Bierko’s Hall has several suspects while investigating his mentor’s murder, and at key points in the story, it’s easy to become convinced that D’Onofrio could be all of them. He’s just that good at playing a calculating, suspicious character.
Loosely based on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel, Simulacron-3, The Thirteenth Floor deftly remakes Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 miniseries World on a Wire. With its similar themes of simulation and existential uncertainty but without The Matrix’s groundbreaking special effects (the closest you’ll get to that here is some neon green lasers and a dry ice machine in the virtual reality machine room), The Thirteenth Floor embraces a subtle, noir-driven central mystery that opts to explore personal guilt and romantic anguish instead.
Clearly, that wasn’t an approach that got butts in seats back in 1999, but if you love The Matrix and Dark City and pine for the days of original sci-fi, it might be time to give The Thirteenth Floor a look.
Anthony Hopkins Remembers Why He Stopped Reading The Silence of the Lambs Script
With another spooky season come and gone, there’s now been a whole new generation of people who have discovered The Silence of the Lambs for the first time. For more than 30 years, Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel has remained a favorite thanks to its incredible filmmaking and powerful performances by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster.
In his new memoir We Did OK, Kid, excerpted in the Times, Hopkins recalls his first encounter with Hannibal Lecter and The Silence of the Lambs—an encounter he couldn’t get through without stopping to take a breather. His London agent sent him a script for “kind of a film script” with a part called “Lecter.” Hopkins remember that “within a half an hour, the script arrived. I made a cup of tea and sat down to read. I stopped at page 15. I called the agency [and told them] ‘I don’t want to read any more.'”
That confession might provide some comfort for newcomers to The Silence of the Lambs, many of whom also had a hard time getting through the story of a psychologically manipulative cannibal. But Hopkins’ response is unique to him. When the agent asked, ‘What’s the problem,” Hopkins answered, “It’s the best part I’ve ever read. I don’t want to read any more in case there is no real offer.”
Hopkins’s cautious approach might sound absurd to modern readers. For many, Anthony Hopkins is Hannibal Lecter, a legacy that remains even after Mads Mikkelsen‘s fantastic turn in the television series Hannibal. After all, he won a Best Actor Oscar for the part, a rare example of the Academy recognizing horror. Hopkins is known today as one of the best working actors, the perfect person to play such a powerful figure.
But that wasn’t common knowledge before The Silence of the Lambs arrived in 1990. The novel released to acclaim in 1988, winning the Bram Stoker and Anthony Awards for Best New Novel, and Lecter had previously appeared on screen in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, played as a surly captive by Brian Cox. But Lecter certainly wasn’t the horror icon he is today.
Even more unlikely is Hopkins getting the part. While the Welsh actor had notable film turns in The Lion in Winter, Magic, and The Elephant Man, he certainly wasn’t the household name he is today. In fact, Hopkins was better known as a stage and television actor, having won a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his work in the 1972 BBC production of War and Peace and two Primetime Emmy nominations for TV movies.
So when Hopkins began reading the story of young FBI recruit Clarice Starling (Foster), who engages with Lecter to find serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), he knew he had something rare, and his nervousness was earned.
Fortunately, there was a real offer and Hopkins got the part, a part he would reprise (for better or worse) in Hannibal and Red Dragon. And because he got the part, people today continue to stop watching The Silence of the Lambs, driven away by the fear that he creates in them.
We Did OK, Kid is now on available.
Star Trek: Voyager Drew Inspiration from a Forgotten ’60s Sitcom
Every Trekkie knows that Star Trek wouldn’t exist without ’60s sitcoms. I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball’s company Desilu produced the show, and she used her clout to help Gene Roddenberry get an unprecedented second pilot after CBS execs passed on the first. But a different ’60s sitcom helped continue the Star Trek legacy by inspiring the design of the starship Voyager.
Oscar-winning designer Doug Drexler visited the All Access Star Trek podcast to reflect on the process of designing the hero ship of Star Trek: Voyager. “I was a big fan of My Favorite Martian with Ray Walston,” Drexler revealed. “His spaceship was like a one-man sportster almost, which was hidden in a garage. And I love that design so much. I had a model of Uncle Martin’s spaceship on my desk. I did one [design] that had the elongated nose. And they decided: ‘That’s it.'”
Another CBS series, My Favorite Martian aired 107 episodes between 1963 and 1966, each detailing the misadventures of reporter Tim O’Hara (future Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby) as he tries to hide the martian who crash-landed in his home and masquerades as Uncle Martin (Ray Walston). The series was popular enough to get a Filmmation cartoon in the 1970s and a movie adaptation in the 1990s starring Christopher Lloyd and Jeff Daniels. But to most Star Trek fans, the show is best known as a show Walston was in before going on to portray Starfleet Academy caretaker Boothby in The Next Generation and, of course, Voyager.
For Drexler, of course, the appeal wasn’t necessarily the plot, but rather the space ship design. And ship design was a major concern for Voyager. Where the first non-Enterprise show Deep Space Nine largely took place on the titular space station (except for the adventures aboard the Defiant), Voyager would be all about the ship. The series returned to stand-alone episodes, following the crew of the titular vessel as it makes its way through the unexplored Delta Quadrant.
Given the importance of the ship, producers were welcoming as many ideas as they could get. “A general call was made to throw Voyager design ideas into the pot,” Drexler remembered. And designer Mike Okuda asked Drexler to come up a forgettable alternative that executives can reject—”something to hate,” in his words. So Drexler threw together the My Favorite Martian design and sent it in.
“When Mike returned from the meeting, I found out that those sketches threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing and that they wanted to develop one of them,” Drexler said. “Egad. I felt bad about that.”
And that’s how a simplistic ship idea, based on a goofy concept from a decades old TV show led to the setting of a new Star Trek series, a series that Paramount intended to launch its network UPN. Which, come to think of it, sure sounds like the plot of an old ’60s sitcom.
Shang-Chi Star Calls Avengers: Doomsday a Superhero Love Letter
With a title like Doomsday, it sure seems like the next Avengers outing will be a glum one. The film will not only see the great Fantastic Four nemesis Doctor Doom arrive in the form of the Avengers’ fallen comrade Tony Stark, but likely also feature the destruction of multiple realities, including the happy world that Logan and Wade Wilson thought they saved in Deadpool & Wolverine. Finally, if indeed Doomsday and its follow-up Avengers: Secret Wars follow the same pattern as Infinity War and Endgame, then the former will end with the defeat of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
“It feels, in a lot of ways, like a love letter to the entire genre of superhero movies. And I think there’s something really fun about that,” Liu continued.
Given what we know about Doomsday, Liu’s right to describe the movie in such epic terms. Doomsday and Secret Wars close out Marvel’s Phase Six, the final chapter in the Multiverse Saga. While the Multiverse Saga has been unquestionably rockier than the franchise’s first three phases, Doomsday and Secret Wars plan to capture the excitement of Infinity War and Endgame by going even bigger.
Doomsday will certainly continue the ongoing story of the mainline MCU, which, we know from Thunderbolts* a.k.a. New Avengers, currently has two teams calling themselves the Avengers, one fronted by Bucky Barnes and another lead by Captain America Sam Wilson. The series will see the return of highly-anticipated characters such as Namor from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Shang-Chi, whose debut movie is easily one of the Multiverse Saga standouts, and will bring the Fantastic Four into the mainline universe.
But it will also reach back to the origins of the third wave of superhero movies, bringing back Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, and other stars of Fox X-Menfranchise that began in 2000. And, with the return of Robert Downey Jr. and directors the Russo Brothers, Doomsday is also recalling Marvel’s glory days.
One person who isn’t coming back, of course, is Kang the Conquerer, the originally intended big bad of the Multiverse Saga. Kang famously was jettisoned from Marvel’s plans after news of actor Jonathan Majors’s bad behavior came to light. More than just replace the big villain, Marvel totally reworked plans for the next Avengers movie, which was to be helmed by Legend of the Ten Rings filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton and would have had Shang-Chi in the lead.
Cretton was reassigned to direct Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but there’s no word yet on what role Shang-Chi will have in the next Avengers film. Yet, if Liu’s comments are any indication, he’s just glad to be part of the celebration. “I mean, there are just so many actors in it,” he says of Doomsday, “and getting to work with those people as peers is really incredible because I grew up watching so many of them.”
Even if things go badly for Shang-Chi and the other characters that Liu grew up watching, at least we can rest assured that the actors portraying these horrible events had a good time doing it.
Avengers: Doomsday comes to theaters on December 18, 2026.
South Park: Ranking The Best Halloween Episodes
Since it premiered way back in – wait, this can’t be right – 1997(!?!), South Park has never let a good holiday go to waste. Whether it’s Jesus going Rambo to rescue Santa Claus, a three-part Black Friday extravaganza, or the introduction of the “Hare Club for Men,” Comedy Central’s animated classic knows how to party. But it’s Halloween when Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and company truly shine.
Halloween episodes are frequently fan favorites as creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker pay homage to the best frights in pop culture history. We’ve counted 11 true Halloween episodes over the last 28 seasons and we’re ranking them in order of the worst to the best so that we can all argue about it in the comments section.
11. “Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers”
(Original airdate: 10/23/2013)
If you stopped us on the street and said: “Hey there, I love Den of Geek, the premier entertainment publication in of all the land. By the way, what’s your least favorite South Park episode?” We would respond by saying the most recent stinker that comes to mind, “Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers.”
The episode ran close enough to Halloween (granted a power outage at South Park Studios delayed the episode by a week) and had enough Halloweeny elements — Edgar Allen Poe, a hidden camera scare TV show and the Vamp Kids — to make this list. By default, GK3DOTP is last on the best South Park Halloween episode list. We refuse to give the Goth Kids a participation medal. Not that they’d want to conform and accept it anyway.
10. “Tegridy Farms Halloween Special”
(Original airdate: 10/30/2019)
Starting withseason 22 in 2018, Parker and Stone became absolutely fixated on Randy Marsh as a weed tycoon. The saga of Randy running “Tegridy Farms” lasted through at least five seasons, whether anyone asked for it or not. Sometimes the gag works but oftentimes it doesn’t. And that’s regretfully the case with 2019 Halloween episode “Tegridy Farms Halloween Special.”
The central conceit of Randy wanting to help Shelley confront her “marijuana problem” (she doesn’t like weed) is a decent enough set up. But before you know it, this episode has flown off the handle and escalated into ancient Egyptian mummy curses, the Chinese Communist Party, and *sigh* Harvey Weinstein. It’s all a bit of a drag but the art design of the weed zombies is pretty great.
9. “The Magic Bush”
(Original Airdate: 10/29/2014)
Again, we’ll count this one as a quasi-Halloween episode because it aired in close proximity to the holiday. Make no mistake, this is an episode about privacy on the internet, leaked celebrity nudes, and glorious lady bush. Though there’s no true Halloween element in “The Magic Bush,” it certainly plays into our personal and political fears of drones, and the creepy sci-fi synthesizer adds to that feeling every time Mr. Stotch fails to realize Butters’ is responsible for his drone terrorizing South Park.
If the theme of “haunted” drones taking on a mind of their own to peep on the townspeople isn’t spooky enough for you, then surely the sight of Craig’s mom’s bush will send a shiver down your spine.
8. “The Scoots”
(Original Airdate: 10/31/18)
“The Scoots” has the distinction of being the first South Park Halloween episode to actually air on Halloween. The episode does a fairly decent job of allowing the kids to be kids while incorporating the horrors of a new technology. All the boys want to do is collect the most candy possible and the best way to do that efficiently is to use e-scooters to cover more ground.
The problem is no one actually knows where these scooters came from, and Mr. Mackey completely loses his mind over it. Some of the minor details and choices make the episode a fun and worthy holiday entry, like the townspeople panicking over thousands of dollars in candy they’ll need or an adult Kenny bookending the episode with a voiceover. More future Kenny, please.
7. “The Woman in the Hat”
(Original Airdate: 10/31/2025)
Only the second South Park Halloween special to air on Halloween night, “The Woman in the Hat” finds the long-running comedy firmly in its politics era. So much so, in fact, that much of the plot revolves around Stan, Kyle, and Kenny embarking on a “South Parks Sucks Now” platform to fix the state of affairs. Unfortunately, the best they can muster is the creation of a shitcoin to get rich quick and defraud their loyal fans.
Though some understandably find the political focus of latter-day South Park exhausting, “The Woman in the Hat” is a decent enough reminder of why Stone and Parker commit to the bit. Depicting members of the Trump administration as Looney Tunes-esque archetypes is clearly fun for the show and when it gets caricature right, it can be a damn good time. Case in point is the “woman in the hat” of the episode’s title – an ominous, statue-still vision of Melania Trump haunting various scenes like a Haunting of Hill House ghost. That genuinely unnerving imagery alone makes for one of the show’s spookier moments.
6. “A Nightmare on Facetime”
(Original Airdate: 10/24/2012)
Let’s talk about scary investments in 2012. Randy’s heart and soul are stuck in the late-80s, and it wrongly leads him to believe that owning a Blockbuster Video is a rock-solid venture. The news of Randy’s purchase is cringe inducing for the Marsh family, because they, like all of us, know streaming and Redboxing is the present and the future.
The fun in this nightmare comes from a few key scenes parodying The Shining. Randy doing his best Jack Torrance impression carries the episode while the B-plot, with the boys trick or treating as the Avengers and getting into trouble with the “RedBox Killers,” falls flat. Above all, it’s an episode with a Bruce Villanch joke and no episode that references this man should be last on any list.
5. “Sons a Witches”
(Original Airdate: 10/25/2017)
Halloween is a fun time of year because we get to disconnect from reality. Some people put on a masks and take on a new persona for a night. Others love mindless horror films that tap into our primal fears. Randy and the dads of South Park take it in a slightly different direction by dressing like witches and getting shitfaced off Jack Daniel and crack (yes, they smoke actual crack) deep in the woods.
Sounds innocent enough, that is until their Halloween tradition is interrupted when Chip Duncan pulls out a spell book he picked up in Salem, Massachusetts and transforms himself into a real witch, who snatches up children and threatens to kill everyone before Halloween. Randy and the guys then worry whether they, the “good” witches, will be blamed in this “witch pursuit thingy.”
The episode is a commentary on the Harvey Weinstein scandal and Woody Allen’s comments that the #MeToo movement could turn into a “witch hunt.” Though it’s far more political than the other Halloween episodes on this list, “Sons a Witches” strikes a fine balance between the seasonal and topical, executing a pointed commentary on the enabling of “bad witches,” misguided male insecurity, and the toxic culture that could lead to a cover up. Also: Bonus points for the haunted opening title music.
4. “SpookyFish”
(Original Airdate: 10/28/1998)
“SpookyFish” left us with some classic South Park memories. Cartman’s evil twin is actually just a really nice version of Eric with a goatee. “Spooky Vision,” featuring pictures of Barbra Streisand, decorated the corners of the screen. “Hella” was introduced into our vocabulary to be used ironically to piss off your friends. We met Aunt Flow, who visits once a month and usually only stays for five days or so. Nice lady.
We also met the titular character, a new and unlikely Halloween terror. The goldfish kills innocent townspeople and leaves Stan with the blame, and Sharon, like any good mom, to clean up her son’s mess. The episode was as satisfying as Chef’s Spooky Spaghetti as “SpookyFish” makes us wish South Park continued with the Halloween specials every year.
3. “Korn’s Groovy Ghost Pirate Mystery”
(Original Airdate: 10/27/1999)
South Park stuck with the Halloween specials in its first three seasons but a schedule change resulted in the second half of the season starting early November for season four. The last yearly Halloween entry featured the band Korn leading their voices to help parody Scooby-Doo. When I say this episode had everything, I’m not pulling Kyle’s dead grandma’s leg. We’re talking Antonio Banderas blow-up sex doll, necrophilia, Korn’s Scooby stand-in, Nibblet, Kenny’s RoboCop costume and Korn performing a kick-ass show in spite of the spooky pirate ghosts.
2. “Pinkeye”
(Original Airdate: 10/29/1997)
So you have a chillingly low temperature, no pulse or heartbeat, red puffy eyes and an insatiable lust for human brains? You must have pinkeye!
South Park’s first Halloween episode is an ode to the zombie genre. When an infected Kenny turns South Park into a breeding ground for the living dead, Chef and the Boys go into survival mode. The episode is our yearly reminder that Worcestershire sauce should never be mixed with embalming fluid. It also includes a fantastic special Halloween title sequence, Cartman dressing up like Hitler and a Klan member and Mrs. Cartman on the cover of Crack Whore magazine. Some foreshadowing: Chef breaks into a Michael Jackson zombie thriller bit and says that he’s going to make love even when he’s dead. Unfortunately we later found out that Chef got really into touching little boys in the landmark episode “The Return of Chef.”
1. “Hell on Earth 2006”
(Original Airdate: 10/26/2006)
Picking Satan over the last three entries—all South Park fan favorites—is no doubt a controversial pick. I’ll have to “Go with Christ” later because Satan threw the most bumping Halloween party our mortal world has ever seen. When you can summon Biggie Smalls from the dead, get the Catholic church jealous of a Satanic Sweet Sixteen, turn three real-life serial killers into the Three Stooges and tell a too, too, too, too soon Steve Irwin sting ray joke, then you’re having a good Halloween so long as Diddy didn’t do it already.
Satan gets the top spot on our list because let’s face it, he’d bitch and moan like an MTV tween brat if he didn’t get his way. And you know you don’t want to get on Satan’s bad side. Just ask Saddam…
VisionQuest Will Address a Classic Avengers Question
“If you saw his eyes right now, I’m sure you’d learn that even an android can… cry!” Those dramatic lines closed 1968’s Avengers #58, in which Earth’s Mightiest Heroes overcome their mistrust of the synthezoid Vision and induct him into their team. Between writer Roy Thomas’ melodramatic narration and artist John Buscema’s final splash panel depicting Vision wiping away a tear, Avengers #58 has become one of the most recognizable images in all of comic history.
So it’s no surprise that the upcoming series VisionQuest would return to the story for inspiration. Talking with Brandon Davis about the show’s themes, star Paul Bettany described issues that were present in that classic issue of Avengers. “Vision is always in the business of wondering who he is,” Bettany explained. “And I think the main message is you are who you think you are. It’s not your parents who decide who you are, it’s not your cohort, your friends, your teachers, your church… it’s you who decide who you are. You, of course, who you are. But it’s also about the power of acceptance of pain.”
Those are heady issues, but they’ve always been part of the Vision’s story, both in the comics and in the MCU. The character first debuted in Avengers #57, also by Thomas and Buscema, as a mysterious figure who felt drawn to the Avengers HQ. Over the course of issues #57 and #58, Vision and the Avengers learn that he was the creation of the rogue android Ultron, who wanted to emulate his “father” by also making a complex robot.
As in the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, Vision’s sudden appearance and connection to Ultron raises the heroes’ suspicions. And in the comics, Vision had to prove himself, in part, by defeating the team in combat. However, the team soon decides to make him a member, leading to the emotional response at the end of Avenger #58.
While Age of Ultron borrows beats and even images from those original Avengers comics, there are some key differences between the two versions of the characters. Ultron of the comics was created by Hank Pym a.k.a. Ant-Man aka Goliath (he changed his name a lot), not by Tony Stark. Moreover, Ultron modeled Vision’s brain patterns (whatever those are) on Wonder Man, a character who will be just now making his MCU debut in the Disney+ series releasing in January.
In both versions, however, Vision remains a complicated character who resonates with those who struggle with their own sense of identity. “Look, we’re making a superhero movie about a robot with lasers,” Bettany admitted. “But it’s a really a really broad church where you can talk to people. And maybe people who are wondering who they are, young people are in the business of wondering who they are.”
When asked if those heady questions will illicit emotional responses, Bettany didn’t even try to play coy. “You can pretty much bank on it,” he answered, knowing, after all, that we’ve long since learned that even an android can cry.
VisionQuest comes to Disney+ in late 2026.
Arnold Schwarzenegger “Obsessed” with New Running Man Movie
Glen Powell has been chatting about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s enthusiastic reaction to the upcoming reimagining of The Running Man, saying the star of the original 1987 movie is “obsessed” with it. Powell, who leads the cast of the new version, also said that Schwarzenegger told him The Running Man is the only movie in his long career that he would remake if he got the chance.
“It was a time where they didn’t have the resources,” Powell told CBR of the original film’s production. “I think the director dropped out. It was kind of a chaotic thing. For practical reasons, [they] had to kind of isolate it to sort of like an American Gladiators type of studio.”
Powell added that Schwarzenegger was “excited for us that we got to put the Stephen King adaptation on screen for the first time.”
Though The Running Man has gone on to become a cult favorite among sci-fi fans, it was far from Schwarzenegger’s biggest critical success, and it diverged dramatically from King’s source novel, which is set in 2025 and drops its lead character, Ben Richards, into a violent reality show that could earn him enough money to feed his starving family.
Where 1987’s The Running Man portrayed its protagonist as a kind of heroic resistance figure, the new version aims to restore the darker, more politically charged tone of King’s book.
“I read The Running Man and was really bowled over by it,” director Edgar Wright told Den of Geek. “I had actually read the book before I saw the 1987 film. So even though I enjoyed the film, I was very aware that it was radically different from the book, and it’s probably the first time as both an avid reader and a film fan that I was really aware of how different an adaptation could be.”
Schwarzenegger’s endorsement suggests that Wright’s reimagining could finally deliver on the dystopian vision Stephen King first wrote more than four decades ago.
Woody Harrelson Says “Not a Chance” He’d Return to True Detective
After recent reports that a True Detective reunion could be in the cards, star Woody Harrelson has shut down any possibility of returning to the series.
During an appearance on NBC’s 3rd Hour of Today, Harrelson declared that revisiting the world of True Detective is out of the question. “Never. Not a chance,” he said (via Variety), explaining that because the original season “turned out great,” any attempt to revisit it would risk diminishing its legacy.
Harrelson’s comments come in response to revelations from original showrunner Nic Pizzolatto earlier this year. On the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast, Pizzolatto claimed that he had an idea for a new story involving Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, the duo played by Matthew McConaughey and Harrelson in the first season of HBO’s gritty crime drama. He described it as a “character-based” concept and said he was in discussions with the actors, speculating that they might be open to it.
McConaughey had also signaled that he would be open to returning to True Detective, but only if the writing captured the “fire and originality” of the first season, which was set in Louisiana and followed Hart and Cohle as they investigated a ritualistic murder.
Since season 1, True Detective has embraced an anthology format, with season 2 receiving mixed reviews and season 3 faring a bit better. After Pizzlolatto’s departure, the fourth season of the show, Night Country, received a notable uptick in acclaim. However, Pizzolatto seemed unhappy with the quality of the Issa López-run Season 4 and posted negative comments about it online.
According to Deadline, HBO is forging ahead with a fifth season of True Detective. Details are currently thin and largely unconfirmed, but it’s thought that Nicolas Cage will lead the cast as Henry Logan, a cop investigating a case in New York’s Jamaica Bay. Season 5 is set to start filming in 2026 and is eyeing a 2027 release.
Any hope of Cohle and Hart returning to True Detective seems to be gone for now.
Finn Jones Seems to Be Teasing an Iron Fist Return, but Fan Reaction Is Mixed
It looks like Finn Jones, who played Danny Rand in Netflix’s underwhelming Iron Fist series, may be quietly hinting at a return to the role. In a recent Instagram story, Jones posted a photo outside a Taekwondo dojo.
Though this could simply be viewed as an innocuous image, fans are naturally speculating whether Jones is preparing to step back into action. After all, the dojo post comes amid renewed interest in bringing former Defenders characters back into the Marvel fold – why wouldn’t Iron Fist be an option?
Well, it’s complicated. Unlike Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and The Punisher, Netflix’s Iron Fist series did not get great reviews, particularly in its first season. Season 2 was a marked improvement, but at that point, Iron Fist felt like the least-loved Defender on TV.
Earlier this year, Jones had some rather pointed remarks about that: “I’m very aware of the critiques of the character and my role in it… Give me a f*—ing chance, man. I’m here, and I’m ready, and I wanna prove people wrong.”
“I would actually be so down for this,” one posted on X. “The entire time watching Iron Fist my thoughts were always ‘The writing is awful’ I never once thought Finn Jones was the issue especially knowing the conditions. He asked to have more time to learn the techniques and the character better.”
We could view Iron Fist’s recent appearance in Marvel’s animated anthology series Eyes of Wakanda as a soft MCU relaunch for the character. Although this version was Jorani, an Iron Fist from 1400 AD in China, it certainly led some fans to believe that Marvel was open to more, coming seven years after the character’s solo TV show was canceled.
Iron Fist has long been part of Marvel Comics mythology, and he’s still beloved by many, despite his mishandled TV series. That dojo photo could be a genuine signal or simply a nostalgic nod, but there are still plenty of people who want to see the Living Weapon get his own MCU redemption arc, and clearly, Jones is one of them.
Liam Hemsworth Helps The Witcher Find Geralt’s Humanity in Season 4
The Witcherseason 4 represents a time of significant change for the show. The most obvious aspect of this, of course, is the fact that Liam Hemsworth has taken over the role of Geralt of Rivia from departing lead actor Henry Cavill. But the series’ penultimate outing very deliberately begins to shift the story toward its endgame, introducing a new timey wimey framing device via the characters of Stribog and Nimue and setting Geralt, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and Ciri (Freya Allan) on separate paths to their final destinies — and the choices and challenges that await them.
But while Yennefer’s Season 4 arc sees her confidently step into a leadership role among her sister sorceresses, and Ciri’s forces her to face what may well be the show’s darkest villain yet, Geralt’s journey in this run of episodes is a quieter, more introspective affair. Badly wounded following the fight with Vilgefortz that concluded season 3 and desperate to rescue his missing daughter, the character has rarely been in a lower place. And as a result, his view of the world and those around him is rapidly changing.
“When I first began this journey in season 4, Geralt was really unsure. He has a lot of doubt and frustration. He’s severely injured. It’s a place that I don’t think Geralt has been in much in his life,” Hemsworth told a roundtable of journalists ahead of the season 4 premiere. “What I wanted in moments where he can react to a situation is for it to feel a little unhinged and not as calculated as he normally would be. He’s not as collected as he normally would be.”
For Hemsworth, this change is evident in every aspect of Geralt’s personality, including his fighting style, which reflects his more volatile and emotional state of mind.
“I wanted those fight scenes at the beginning of the journey to feel reactive. It’s a chance for him to get out his frustration. Yes, it’s directed at the right people, but it’s still not exactly how he would normally react in that situation. Being in that vulnerable, frustrated place that he’s in when it does get to that place of friction and tension or a place where he can protect others, I think it’s a little more aggressive than it usually is. It’s brutal.”
It helps that Hemsworth is taking over this role at a moment of radical change for the character, when he’s essentially required to be siloed off from the series’ other remaining leads. But instead of leaning into Geralt’s traditional loner status, season 4 thrusts him alongside the ragtag group known as his hansa, who ultimately become something of a found family for a man who long prided himself on never getting involved with others.
Bard Jaskier (Joey Batey), archer Milva (Meng’er Zhang), former Nilfgaardian commander Cahir (Eamon Farren), dwarven adventurer Zoltan (Danny Woodburn), mysterious vampire Regis (Laurence Fishburne), and returning friend Yarpen (Jeremy Crawford) all bring different skills and abilities to the group as fighters and heroes, but their most important contributions may just be the lessons about family and humanity they teach Geralt along the way.
This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Geralt’s interactions with Regis, an enigmatic barber-surgeon and centuries-old vampire who knows precisely what it is to be something both other and alone. On paper, Regis may make for an unlikely mentor for a man like Geralt, but there’s certainly something that speaks to him about this old soul with a philosopher’s spirit who has seen, survived, and perhaps even managed to forgive himself for so much. Even if he is a vampire.
“I think that there’s this very interesting connection between the two right when they meet,” Hemsworth says. “Geralt is thrown by this weird sort of feeling of trust towards this person, and finds himself opening up and accepting somewhat pretty quickly and reluctantly, because that’s the way he would deal with anyone. It takes a little time for Geralt to get to that place.”
As for his new vampire bestie, Regis simply sees a kindred spirit, despite their differences in origin and (technically) species, and is one of the few who is willing to see him as something more than the monster he is often called to become.
“I think that Regis sees Geralt’s humanity, whereas most people [who] encounter Geralt just see the Witcher, the monster killer,” Fishburne says. “But I think because Regis has had a similar kind of experience in his origins, he immediately connects with Geralt at the level of their common humanity.”
A humanity, one might argue, that Geralt himself is only just beginning to truly acknowledge. But that certainly promises exciting things for The Witcher’s final season.
The Witcher season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
In Season 4, The Witcher’s Greatest Monster Is a Completely Human One
The following contains major spoilers for The Witcher season 4 finale.
Given that The Witcher is a show about a magically enhanced mutant monster hunter, it makes sense that the series features more than its share of otherworldly creatures, supernatural beings, and dangerous beasts of virtually every size. And we’ve seen Geralt of Rivia (Liam Hemsworth) and his Child of Surprise, Ciri (Freya Allan), face off with what often feels like every conceivable manner of creature, from wyverns to strigas to a gruesome flesh monster comprised of the dead bodies of slain Aretuza sorceresses. This isn’t a show that pulls any punches when it comes to the literal horrors that stalk the Continent, which is why it’s so shocking that the most terrifying nightmare that stalks our heroes in The Witcher season 4 isn’t a monster at all, but a regular human man.
Season 4 introduces the bounty hunter Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Copley), a legendary assassin who has risen to fame on the Continent thanks to his love of killing Witchers. (He collects—and wears!—their medallions as trophies. A seemingly unstoppable force, he revels in violence and delights in murder, and spends most of the season tracking down Ciri (Freya Allan) and the Rats ahead of a bloody, final confrontation that changes the Princess of Cintra’s life forever.
“I’m pretty sure Sharlto Copley found us, and not the opposite,” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told a roundtable of journalists ahead of the season 4 premiere when asked about choosing the right actor for such a dark role. “He’s been very open about the fact that he doesn’t particularly like to play villains. Yet this character is sort of the most desperate and unforgiving.”
Other Big Bads within the world of The Witcher have easily identifiable—and justificable, in their view—motives. Figures like Nilfgaardian emperor Emhyr (Bart Edwards) and the dark sorcerer Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu) openly covet power, and they’re searching for Ciri to further their own personal ends.
“It was so wonderful to see just how Sharlto turned himself over to this character and embraced him,” Hissrich said. “It was a full transformation to the point that when I’d see him without [his] costume, I wouldn’t recognize him. He just carried himself completely differently.”
Bonhart seemingly commits monstrous acts for little more than the love of the game. (And one has to assume coin, but given his ragged appearance, money’s certainly not a priority in his world.) He takes pleasure in the act of being a predator and hunting down those he’s sent to find. And by the time he tracks down Ciri, he’s mildly obsessed—honestly, at this point, who isn’t—fascinated by her obvious skills as a fighter and her utter lack of fear for her own safety.
“Working with Sharlto, for me, has been one of the biggest joys of the whole Witcher experience because he is a bloody brilliant actor, and you never know what’s going to happen with him,” Allan added. “He is genuinely a flawless Leo Bonhart.”
Bonhart ultimately lures Ciri to him by luring the Rats into a trap outside Jealousy’s Chimera Head Inn, knowing that she’ll rush to try and rescue them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t make it in time and arrives just as the bounty hunter has finished brutally slaughtering all her new friends. The Rats’ deaths are particularly gruesome, and each is executed with a uniquely sadistic flair—bombmaker Kayleigh is forced to search his own open stomach wound in a futile attempt to remove the explosive that ultimately kills him, being just one horrifying example—as Bonhart laughs and taunts their slowly dying bodies.
And, somehow, all that’s not even the worst of it. Despite putting up a valiant effort, the bounty hunter eventually overpowers Ciri and takes her prisoner. But it’s apparently not enough for him that he killed this young woman’s friends; he subsequently forces her to watch as he saws off each of their heads, ultimately dropping their heads into a vat of brine to preserve them (So…odds we’ll be seeing those again at some point? Certainly not zero!) He even saves Ciri’s lover Mistle (Christelle Elwin) for last, because he is—again! — a complete monster. The season ends with the Princess of Cintra his prisoner, and viewers with little idea about what fresh horrors she’ll be forced to endure when the series returns for its final season. Personally, I’d rather take my chances with the rusalka.
Is Disney the Reason We Lost Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor?
After months of speculation, the truth is finally out there: Disney is getting out of the Doctor Who business, officially ending its two-year partnership with the BBC that funded the last two seasons of the show and gave it a streaming home. For most Whovians, this is generally a relief, if only because the announcement means we can all stop waiting for Disney to confirm something most of us had long assumed was coming.
But as with any messy break-up, the recriminations, speculation, and fallout are already starting. While spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea will air in the U.K. next month, the status of its premiere outside of the British Isles is now a big question mark. The flagship series itself won’t return until Christmas 2026. We have no idea how the show will handle the Billie Piper cliffhanger that was suddenly tacked on to the end of the season 15 finale or even the identity of who’ll play the next Doctor. And plenty of folks are already starting to try and hash out (read: place blame) for all the things that went wrong between the two entertainment giants.
Anonymous behind-the-scenes reportsattribute everything from ratings woes and budget concerns to outright political pressure as the reasons the Doctor Who experiment on Disney+ failed. While it’s likely we’ll never know the precise truth of what happened, this mess ultimately may have cost us all something much bigger than a hefty effects budget and a streaming home for a series that has already had many of them in the past. It seems very likely that Disney’s decision to drag their feet about the future of the franchise is to blame for the exit of Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, and that’s a loss that many of us aren’t going to get over anytime soon.
The first Black and openly queer actor to be cast as the iconic Time Lord, Gatwa’s Doctor was fairly groundbreaking from his first moments onscreen. (And that’s without dealing with the whole made-up biregeneration mess.) His Doctor was effervescent, charismatic, and warm, and Gatwa easily found a balance between the character’s lighthearted and more poignant moments. With just two seasons under his belt, it certainly seemed as if the show had barely scratched the surface of this version of the character and what the actor who played him could do. It’s the reason Fifteen’s surprise regeneration at the end of “The Reality War” took many viewers by surprise. It didn’t feel as though it could possibly be time for this to happen yet. And that’s maybe because it originally wasn’t.
Yes, both the BBC and Disney were adamant over the course of its run that no decision had yet been made about the show’s future, and wouldn’t be until after season 15 aired. They constantly hedged their bets in public statements and were as vague as they could get away with about what might happen next. But both Gatwa and showrunner Russell T. Davies made comments at various points that certainly implied that another season with Fifteen was, if not the original plan, at least something they were both actively thinking about and even working toward.
Per his own admission, Davies was working on scripts for a third season with the Fifteenth Doctor as early as the summer of 2024, and while he acknowledged it “hadn’t been commissioned yet,” he also was “very confident” about its likelihood and said “we might be shooting those scripts early next year [winter 2025]”. That also seemed to be the initial plan in Gatwa’s view as well. Five months later, during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, he seemingly confirmed a third season would film the following year. The BBC cut this confirmation from the chat show’s final broadcast.
Much of this is just further evidence that “The Reality War” wasn’t originally meant to end with a regeneration, and that Gatwa’s decision to leave the show came much later than the company party line would seem to indicate. Which means that something definitely changed, and whatever it was most likely revolved around Disney’s drawn-out refusal to commit to the BBC partnership beyond the agreed-upon two seasons.
It’s understandable why Gatwa might take the chance to jump ship when it presented itself; after all, he’s a fairly hot commodity as a performer at the moment with multiple movie roles and buzzy stage plays among his recent accomplishments. But the idea that he would have stayed for at least one more season if everyone behind the scenes had managed to get their act together just adds another layer of frustration to an already awful situation. What would another season of Fifteen’s (or Belinda’s or Ruby’s) story have looked like? Would Gatwa have finally gotten to realize his dream of facing off with a Dalek? It’s such a shame we’ll never find out.
Marvel Gives an MCU Favorite a Big Upgrade
Even though they both have the designation Earth-616, the Marvel Comics Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe are really two different places. In some cases, the movies are better. They have David Harbour as a delightfully buffoonish Red Guardian, they have Agent Carter, and they have a pretty streamlined shared continuity.
But in some ways, the older and richer comics universe is better, in ways that even movie fans would agree. After all, some fan favorites still live in the comics. And in the case of the Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff, her comic counterpart is not only living, but thriving, becoming the next Sorcerer Supreme.
“It’s time for Wanda to take her destiny into her own hands,” writer Steve Orlando told AIPT about the upcoming series Sorcerer Supreme. “With the cloak and the eye calling out for a new wielder, there’s no one better suited than the Scarlet Witch. She’s the one who listens when no one else will—and she’s about to change the rules of magic forever.”
Written by Orlando and illustrated by Bernard Chang, Sorcerer Supreme will indeed involve a lot of rule changing, not just because the rules of Marvel’s magic are complicated. The title of Sorcerer Supreme is bestowed upon magic users by the trinity of mystical beings known as the Vishanti. Most often, the title goes to whomever wins a tournament set up by the Vishanti and, most often, that winner is Doctor Strange. However, the recent death of Doctor Strange (don’t worry, he got better) has allowed others to take up the mantle, including Strange’s lover Clea, the trickster god Loki, and Doctor Doom.
Doom gained the title in the 2024 crossover event Blood Hunt, in which vampires launched an all-out assault on humanity. Once he secured his new powers, Doom used them to conquer the world in the 2025 crossover event One World Under Doom. But now with Doom defeated, Wanda’s ready to take on the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme. But there’s one big problem: the Vishanti.
The trio has chosen instead Wanda’s mentor, Agatha Harkness—generally a sage crone in the Marvel Universe, only recently de-aged to better match the snarky character that Kathryn Hahn plays in the MCU. When Wanda defies the Vishanti by refusing to give up the title, she’s sent to Limbo (Marvel’s version of Hell), where she comes face to face with its current ruler, the Goblin Queen Madelyne Pryor, who MCU fans might know as the evil clone of Jean Grey recently seen in X-Men ’97. Fortunately, Wanda doesn’t need to go through Limbo alone, as she can count on the help of her council, which includes her son Wiccan of the Young Avengers and, of course, Doctor Strange himself.
But Wanda’s best ally is the person writing her adventures. Orlando has been doing excellent work on the character for years now, penning both her solo series and her series with brother Pietro in the miniseries Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver.
Even with such forces behind her and such great power at her disposal, things will be hard for the Scarlet Witch. But that’s always how it is for Wanda Maximoff, whether in the pages of Marvel Comics or in live-action adventures in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Sorcerer Supreme #1 hits comic store shelves on December 31, 2025.
It: Welcome to Derry Producers Explain Cruelly Ironic Opening Credits
Welcome to Derry is a strange subtitle for a TV series about an eternal horror that devours people, mostly children, who live in the titular Maine town. But It: Welcome to Derryis all about the contrast between wholesome folks and the evil they try to ignore, a contrast highlighted by the show’s opening credits.
Set to a young girl singing the cheery number “A Smile and A Ribbon,” the opening credits walk through various events in the New England town. We see kids smiling as they dive into a swimming hole, families grinning at dinner, and other heart-warming sights. But even then, one notices small, disturbing touches, such as the tentacles reaching out toward the swimmers. By the end of the sequence, we’re seeing burning bodies running from a factory explosion and, of course, the gloved hand of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
At the end of the sequence, the images fill the letters of the word “Derry,” in a font common to postcards. According to Welcome to Derry creator Andy Muschietti, that juxtaposition between happiness and horror is a key element of the series. “The name Welcome to Derry felt touristic and brings you to the world of postcards and facade, which has a lot to do with what Derry is — a place that’s seemingly wholesome, but there’s something dreadful under the surface,” Muschietti told Hollywood Reporter.
As he worked with production studio Filmography to create the sequence, Muschietti kept his attention toward Stephen King‘s original novel. “There was a lot of tweaking and calibration,” he said of the creation process. “It reflects our desire to show the big catastrophic events, all leading to the explosion at the Ironworks.” Even those who only know King’s story from the two It movies Muschietti directed understand the significance of the Ironworks explosion, as research into the event led to one of the first film’s most memorable sequences.
In the world of the book and the movie, Kitchener Ironworks was a major employer in the town, which held community events such as an Easter egg hunt. During the 1908 egg hunt, the factory exploded, killing 102 people, including 88 children.
The prominent placement of the Ironworks explosion makes sense, given that Welcome to Derry is a prequel. The series exists to flesh out events not fully explored in the two It films, drawing from vignettes about Derry’s history that King sprinkles throughout his novel. “Our assignment was to take the literature and take vignettes that also exist in the world of the show and find a way to stitch them together,” said Filmograph director Aaron Becker. “Andy [was] dead set on the idea of taking us back in time through a specific type of medium — the tourist postcards that you would find in like the gift shop in a small town, which worked perfectly for Stephen King’s lexicon and Derry in particular.”
Even more than the specific events depicted in the images, the opening credits get at a key idea in King’s work. Something evil lurks beneath small towns, something that preys on children. Instead of dealing with it, most adults prefer to put on a happy face, allowing the evil to do its work. In that way, It: Welcome to Derry‘s opening credits aren’t just a picture of a tiny Maine town. It’s a picture of the country itself.
It: Welcome to Derry streams every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.
Breaking Bad Creator Doesn’t Want Walter White to Be His Legacy
Walter White is the one who knocks. The meek science teacher turned notorious drug lord Heisenberg remains one of the most iconic figures in television history. But if you’re Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, you don’t necessarily want Walter to be the most important person of your life.
At least, that’s the sentiment that Gilligan expressed to Hollywood Reporter. “As much as I love Walter White and as proud as I am of Breaking Bad—and as much as I know that it’ll be the first sentence in my obituary—at a certain point, you’re like, ‘God, it’d be nice to write a hero again, someone who’s trying to do the right thing,'” he confessed.
Gilligan found that person who’s doing the right thing in his latest show, Pluribus. The Apple TV series stars Better Call Saul‘s Rhea Seehorn as writer Carol Sturka, the one person apparently immune in a global pandemic. Unlike other viruses that recently afflicted the real world, this ailment renders its victims happy and content, making the melancholic Carol even more unique.
On first glance, Carol certainly doesn’t sound very different from Walter. Both unassuming, both dissatisfied with the world, and both thrust into action against their wills. Yet Gilligan sees a clear distinction between the two and their treatment of other people.
“Carol Sturka is a hero,” he declared. “She’s imperfect. She can be a bit of a noodge or a curmudgeon or what have you, but we root for her. She wants to do the right thing, and she wants to save the world. That’s refreshing.”
Another key difference between Carol and Walter has nothing to do with the way Gilligan writes them and everything to do with the way the audience receives them. He knows that viewers found Walter’s bad behavior intruiging, something they did not extend to his wife Skylar, played by Anna Gunn. “All the women reading this are going to say ‘duh,’ but even in this enlightened day and age in the year 2025, there’s a double standard,” he explained. “A male lead can be an asshole, and people are like, ‘Yeah, he’s powerful. He’s cool.’ …But, somehow, if a woman does that, it’s like, ‘Oh, she’s difficult. I don’t know if she’s likable.'”
But Gilligan’s not worried about whether or not people like Carol, because he likes her and he likes the actor playing her. He enthused, “I just love Rhea, and I wrote this thing for her. I knew that someone else with half a brain was going to snatch her up at the end of Better Call Saul, and I selfishly wanted to work with her again.”
With the release of Pluribus still a few days away, it’s too early to tell if Carol Sturka can take Walter White’s place in Gilligan’s obituary. But one thing is clear: Gilligan is having fun writing a hero, and that’s worth makes his life satisfying. His legacy will have to wait.
Pluribus streams on Apple TV on November 7, 2025.
Stranger Things Season 5 Will Answer the Show’s Original Mystery
One night, in November 1983, Will Byers didn’t come home. That central hook from the 2016 pilot episode of Stranger Things seems so simple compared to what the series became. Over the next nine years and four seasons, Stranger Things grew more and more intricate in its lore, adding telekinetic kids, Cold War intrigue, the hellish Upside Down, and the ultimate evil known as Vecna. It’s almost as if Will’s disappearance was insignificant.
According to Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer, the events of that November night are anything but. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Matt revealed, “So much of the [final] season was built around the idea of coming full circle, answering many of the questions that were posed all the way back in season 1.” And that means season five must answer the two questions left over from those first episodes, not just “What is the Upside Down, truly?” teased Matt, but also, “Why was Will taken?”
One of the reasons we may forget about Will’s disappearance is that he did make his way back home, and has spent most of seasons with his friends and family. But fans know that just because Will came home doesn’t mean that he’s the same, a point that the Duffers will explore in season 5.
Ross Duffer points to season 2’s sixth episode, titled “The Spy,” as a key point of connection between the initial disappearance and the season 5 revelations. “[It’s] the most important episode,” said Ross, because it shows that “Will was really working, in a way, for the Mind Flayer.”
Little teases like that are good news for Will’s fans, who have feared that he’s diminished in importance over the years, overshadowed by breakouts like Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) and by the series’ ever-expanding cast. As played by Noah Schnapp, Will’s primary arc has involved him trying to mature past the events of that first November night, to be seen as more than just a victim. But his storylines haven’t generated the same internet buzz as Max’s (Sadie Sink) Kate Bush-scored resurrection or Eleven’s affinity for waffles.
As Stranger Things heads into its final season, there will be little time for those flourishes. Season 5 brings everything to a head, with the U.S. military putting the town of Hawkins, Indiana, under quarantine as they accelerate their attempts to turn the Upside Down into a weapon. Meanwhile, the show’s big bad Vecna returns in a rebuilt form to make his final attack.
With the stakes so high, Will fans might be forgiven for thinking their favorite will be forgotten again. But Matt promises that’s not the case. “Because the story really began with Will and his disappearance, it felt, in order to go full circle, it needed to really end with him in so many ways,” he stated. “In the last couple seasons, we hadn’t really centered much of the show on Will. So there was so much to explore with him from a character perspective and plot perspective.”
Stranger Things season 5 premieres November 26, 2025.
The 31 Best Horror Movie Franchises of All Time Ranked
Depending who you talk to, the most terrifying thing a scary movie can do is continue after the end credits. For film critics in the late 20th century, “horror movie” and “sequel” amounted to verboten words as ghastly as “plague,” “terminal,” and “holiday special.” They were seen as tacky add-ons, engineered by studios desperate for quick profits built on diminishing returns. Even so, we wager if you poll real-life horror movie fans, they’ll have at least one sequel on the tip of their tongues that they argue surpassed the original. There are many others, too, that at least matched their forbears. And plenty more that didn’t, yet cumulatively created mythologies so rich, bloody, and diabolically nonsensical that entire fandoms and studio executives have dedicated lifetimes to untangling them. The confounding work continues to this day. As do the pleasures of the bloody screams.
Yet not all horror franchises are created equal. There are some that consistently cut deep and others that have a terrific, even legendary kickoff, before fading into SeaWorld ignominy. So we here at Den of Geek have put our heads together to discern which is which for your reading pleasure. Just a head’s up before we get started: to qualify for this list, your horror franchise must include at least four released films to qualify for this list (so apologies to the still building 28 Days Later and Terrifier stables).
31. Underworld
Every generation or age group has a horror franchise of debatable merit—yet guilty pleasure entertainment value. This is mine. And the trick about the Underworld movies is that these campy, kinky, leathery things somehow play it straight. Led by mostly by committed performances from respected English actors of the stage—including Derek Jacobi, Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy, and Kate Beckinsale—the first several Underworlds are amusingly insistent about their vision of a monochromatic world divided between vampires and werewolves, err excuse me, “lycans.”
Before True Blood or Twilight, these iconic Halloween decorations did gruesome, R-rated battles to the death while clad in head-to-toe skintight latex and prosthetic fangs. The best of the acting was so bombastic in its Shakespearean earnestness, and aggressive in its desaturated melancholy, that it convinced a generation of moviegoers that the Oxford-trained Beckinsale came to the big screen for one reason and one reason only: to slay wolf-men.
Well she slays, and the first three movies in this franchise are also pretty killer if you have the right disposition to enjoy Nighy and Sheen go ham, particularly in the third installment, which is also a prequel set in what must‘ve been the Middle Ages’ first Hot Topic. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is indeed a guilty pleasure, and along with the other first two installments is so much fun that we will allow the series the grace of pretending Underworld: Awakening and Blood Wars never happened. – David Crow
30. Wishmaster
People who want to see horror franchises follow in the footsteps of Clive Barker instead of Freddy Krueger will have all their desires granted by checking out the Wishmaster franchise. Okay, that might be setting the bar a little high for a quartet of films about a malevolent Djinn who browbeats his victims into saying that they want something and then granting their wishes in the most cruelly ironic way possible. But there’s no denying that there’s much fun to be had in Wishmaster’s gleeful nastiness.
Much of that fun comes from star Andrew Divoff, who carries the first two films as the central villain. Divoff’s piercing stare and his strange baritone way of speaking heightens the absurdity of the Djinn’s method, which again, mostly involves bad faith rhetorical wrangling that even your average internet commenter would find unfair. The series loses steam when John Novak steps for Divoff for the third and fourth entries, but he has a solid model to follow, allowing even those Wishmaster movies to satisfy the audience’s basest wishes. – Joe George
29. Hammer’s Frankenstein Series
When Hammer Film Productions first secured the rights to remake Universal Pictures’ iconic line of monster movies from about 15-20 years earlier, many in Hollywood assumed it was a fool’s errand. Who could replace the likes of Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff? Those same folks obviously didn’t appreciate how much younger generations would enjoy bright color and even brighter blood splatters. They also could not anticipate how much the British production company would invert the concepts of these familiar tales. Nowhere is this clearer either than Hammer’s Frankenstein pictures.
Whereas Universal spent six or seven movies essaying Frankenstein’s Monster (depending how you count his run-in with Abbott and Costello), Hammer had eyes only for Baron Victor Frankenstein, who was played with gravitas and malice by Peter Cushing. The respected thespian indeed brought weight to everything he did, including elevating some pretty suspect scripts at the tail-end of Hammer’s seven-film run about the not-so-good doctor’s bouts of playing god. While the first Monster the Baron made was portrayed with similar (if underwritten) heft by Christopher Lee, by the end of the cycle, the manmade things’ third act romps around the lab barely mattered at all when compared to the sadistic egomania of Cushing’s mad scientist who would lie, cheat, murder, and in one contentious demand from American investors, sexually assault his way to infamy. The movies varied drastically in quality, but Cushing’s performance was always top shelf stuff. – DC
28. Poltergeist
Here begins a conundrum that will haunt more than a few entries on this list: how do you evaluate a franchise that consists of one all-time classic and then a series of schlocky sequels of rapidly diminishing value? In the case of Poltergeist, you mostly just bask in the pleasures of the first film which was directed by Tobe Hooper, albeit with a lot of help (or undue pressure, depending who you ask) from writer and producer Steven Spielberg.
A perfect encapsulation of Spielberg’s preferred vision of suburban Americana being invaded, and in this case haunted, by the extraordinary, Poltergeist walks a delicate line between family-friendly adventure movie and seriously perverse horror chiller. The cant camera angles of JoBeth Williams taking a dip in a mud bath with real-unalive cadavers that the filmmakers, umm, borrowed from a morgue is all Hooper. What a pity none of the sequels could recapture that magic, especially in the absence of Dominique Dunne after her tragic death shortly following the first film. The visible frailty of Heather O’Rourke in the third Poltergeist only gives that film a further queasiness. And the remake technically gets this franchise to four entries, but why bother talking about it? – DC
27. Hellraiser
Another series that started far better than it ended up, this is a franchise that can perhaps be best defined as a two-part classic plunge into BDSM fantasia—and then just kept going as a largely direct-to-video affair of junk. The first Hellraiser of 1987 is the particular cult classic with Clive Barker finding a deliciously genre way to articulate the forbidden appeal of pain… and what happens when safe words are ignored for the likes of Frank (Sean Chapman), a degenerate libertine who gets more than he bargains for when he solves the Lament Configuration. Alas, his poor niece Kristy (Ashley Laurence) is taken along for the ride into the netherworld of dominatrix Cenobites and the demon diva supreme, Pinhead (Doug Bradley).
The only sequel that really had much to add to the series was the first one, Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), which Barker at least stayed on to contribute the story for. Once again Kristy finds herself trying to explain “no” means “OH PLEASE, GOD, NO!!!” to demons of the kink, and the film has a certain ‘80s fantasy grandeur to it as she walks through the proverbial looking glass into Barker’s happily pagan conception of hell. But the rest of the series’ more prosaic Judeochristian visions of the afterlife, and of Pinhead’s vibes, made for duller games. – DC
26. The Purge
A case can be made that The Purge represents the best kind of horror franchise: one that gets better after its first installment. The OG Purge definitely has some merits: Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey are always worth watching, and James DeMonaco came up with a hell of a killer premise when he asked “what if crime was legalized by a new fascist regime for one night of the year?” But that 2013 movie still ultimately felt like every other home invasion flick that was released in the shadow of The Strangers a few years earlier.
In the sequels though? DeMonaco, Blumhouse Productions let their freak flag fly. The second feature The Purge: Anarchy (2014) is probably the series’ peak, with DeMonaco’s script and lens turning its attention from the WASPy conclaves of suburbia to the inner-city where working class folks like Frank Grillo’s Sergeant and Carmen Ejogo’s Eva are just trying to survive the night. However, the whole series weaves a tapestry that is both sensationalistic and eerily prescient. Produced mostly during the calm of the Obama years, here is a vision of America that’s become desensitized to government-sanctioned violence wrapped in a ghoulish perversion of the American flag. And the movies predict this future with some pretty killer set-pieces that might be heavy-handed in their “rich eating the poor” imagery, but no less provocative. – DC
25. Friday the 13th
If this list was ranked purely in terms of iconography or popularity, there would be few entries higher than Friday the 13th. While folks can quibble over whether Alfred Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, or John Carpenter invented the slasher movie, Sean S. Cunningham and his successors pretty much defined it during the subgenre’s peak in the 1980s. With a new installment released virtually every calendar year in that decade, Friday’s Jason Voorhees and his menacing hockey mask are so synonymous with hack-and-slash killer movies from this era that most folks forget he didn’t even get the mask until Part III. He wasn’t even the main killer in the original film!
But in terms of quality, the Jason movies are better remembered for their kitsch and kills than their whole merits. The one where he smashes a camper in a sleeping bag into a tree, and then fights not-Carrie by the lake, is great (Part VII, for the record)… at least until you go back and watch all the dead air until those sequences. Also the fact that Jason is himself the hero of the franchise, with audiences encouraged to wait for him to come out and shove a machete/electric guitar/corkscrew into some horny teen’s skull (more often than uncomfortably not a young woman) diminishes the franchise’s ability to either scare or entertain when the teenagers we follow exist solely to be wiped out.
Still, there are some darkly amusing moments in the series, and even some genuinely fun throwbacks to the slasher done right at its basest level. Part IV is like the platonic ideal of an ‘80s “slasher at a camp movie,” right down to none of the friendships being all that platonic. Later entries like Jason Xand Freddy vs. Jason lean into the absurdity with ironic charm, and Part VI tries the novel idea of developing an actual storyline wherein one of the previous film’s survivors (young Tommy Jarvis, now played by Thom Matthews) fights back. Jennifer Cooke’s final girl is also witty and proactive in tripping up the machete man, and there is at last a high noon showdown between the usually off-screen law enforcement and the guy in a hockey mask. If you only watch one Friday the 13th…
24. Candyman
We are keeping the Clive Barker theme going with Candyman, another strangely romantic cult classic about having your body and soul utterly annihilated by a mythic force. One might say he has a type? And when that type is personified by Tony Todd’s velvety nihilism in Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman, despair takes on a majesty that appears strangely sweet.
It also helps that the original film and the more recent 2021 legacy sequel (or “requel”) lean into the concept of urban legends, especially in Black spaces that are colonized and commodified by commercial interests (read: white folks). In the original film, this is wrapped in a deliberately thorny and uncomfortable subtext as Todd’s Bloody Mary-like ghost seeks to possess the soul of a white woman (Virginia Madsen), and yet this slipperiness adds texture that Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele unpacked in the far grislier reimagining. Their follow-up turns Candyman’s essence into an entire neighborhood’s curse. It’s like a communal werewolf yarn where everyone is doomed by evil outside their control. When combined with the first movie, this addition elevates a franchise that also has a handful of pretty mediocre sequels scattered about like rotten candy corns in the ‘90s.
23. V/H/S
When the V/H/S franchise started in 2012, it was not rapturously received by critics or fans. Some appreciated the anthological found footage concept for its variety. But as with all anthology films, some installments were better than others (here’s looking at you, “Amateur Night”). However, what might have initially seemed like a gimmick to tap on the even-then waning found footage fad has outlived its cultural context. And now thanks to the support of Shudder, Bloody Disgusting, and other production companies who protect the dream of low-budget scares, the series has turned into a safe space for both genre favorites and new guns with something to prove. One and all are free to experiment in bizarre and, sometimes, brilliant ideas.
Now a whopping eight films deep, and with filmmakers as eclectic as Mike Flanagan, Scott Derrickson, Adam Wingard, Chloe Okuno, Alberto Marini, Simon Barrett, and the Radio Silence team among its ranks, V/H/S has become an annual tradition where veterans and newcomers alike try their hand at a found-footage setup with limited means but boundless ambition. Some shorts are great, others are bad, but it’s a pleasure just figuring out which is which. – DC
22. The Omen
There are so many great pieces to the the Omen franchise that it’s sometimes easy to forget they are usually greater than the series’ total sum. Jerry Goldsmith’s satanic choir and musical stylings? Iconic. That final shot of little Damien, the Antichrist as a toddler, looking on at his foster father’s funeral while holding the hand of the POTUS? Fiendishly fun. Gregory Peck pouring his heart out in the scene where he discovers a 666 birthmark that better resembles a scab on his son? Works better than it should.
Yet that first Omen is a lot more kitschy than you probably remember and hasn’t aged nearly so well as its unholy influences of the previous decade named The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. And its direct sequels are better remembered for accidentally predicting the Final Destination franchise where comically elaborate death traps spring up for every extra who gives Damien Thorne a funny look. They never quite lived up to that foreboding score. With that said, the most recent entry, the unasked-for-prequel The First Omen(2024), is seriously underrated and arguably the best film in the series. Director Arkasha Stevenson gives the series its first sense of menace since the 1976 original, as well as perhaps its first touch of class by working in a potent and rage-filled metaphor for motherhood-under-duress in a post-Roe v. Wade world. It also features a titanic performance by Nell Tiger Free. – DC
21. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
So much of the groundbreaking power in 1974’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre seems derived by accident. Writer-director Tobe Hooper certainly lit upon a terrifying idea when he looked at a chainsaw at his local home improvement shop and went “what if?” But it’s the fact he shot that idea with college friends and other aspiring filmmakers in the dead of a Texan summer, with real animal skeletons and fetid flesh surrounding the film’s dinner table set from hell, which gives the picture its grotesque draw. The movie looks and feels evil, like a snuff joint captured by amateurs on 16mm.
None of the sequels or retreads have been able to recapture that queasy dark magic, but a few of them have had their charms, not least of which includes Hooper’s own direct sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). More of a spoof and meta-sendup of his own classic, the sequel is just brazenly subversive enough of fan expectation to seem radical in the 21st century. It also proved better than any of the more sincere attempts at slasher add-ons in this franchise. Still, the 2003 remake from producer Michael Bay, and which starred a perpetually sweat-dripped Jessica Biel, remains the one success of the Bay/Platinum Dunes exercise of remaking all the slasher classics in the mid-2000s. The movie works as a genuinely tense nightmare and also features a great performance in the subgenre by R. Lee Emry as a big man on a little cannibal hill.
Of course it will always be Gunner Hansen’s Leatherface swinging his motorized beauty like a prized hog in the Texas dew that elevates this whole series to the realm of unforgettable. – DC
20. Jaws
Once again we have a franchise defined by one of the greatest films ever made, horror or otherwise, and then a run of fairly terrible sequels. So the question becomes how bad are the sequels to weigh down the placement of a masterpiece like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)? In the case of Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws: The Revenge (1987), they’re pretty abysmal—so much so that there is a counter-argument that they swing back to being highly watchable due to their wretchedness. In the third film, two Great Whites take out SeaWorld one water skier at a time! And in the fourth one, a fish stalks the Brody family from Massachusetts to the Bahamas, and looks faker with each attack. Also for some reason, Michael Caine is there… ?
So yes, as a franchise this borders on irredeemable. But as a piece of Hollywood history, it is unmissable. Jaws 2 (1978) even arguably influenced the slasher, and specifically the Friday the 13th movies, by setting a template of teenagers getting up to no good and being punished by a puritanical spirit of vengeance for their sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll (or yacht rock as the case may be here). No matter how you chew on it, Spielberg’s Jaws is such a tour de force that it can lift the rest of this lifeless leviathan high enough to crack the top 20 surface. – DC
19. Paranormal Activity
The first Paranormal Activity never gets enough credit. While far from the original found footage horror movie, this Oren Pell and Blumhouse Productions trailblazer built off the popularity of The Blair Witch Project (1999), and obscurity of Cannibal Holocaust (1980), by offering a proverbial closed-circuit ghost story that actually gave multiplex audiences the final scare they so craved. At a reported recommendation from Steven Spielberg, the final scene is a reshoot of poor possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) luring Micah (Micah Scott) downstairs, and then gutting him like a fish off-screen and throwing his body back toward the camera and coming to tell us “boo.”
That change from the original version (where possessed Katie would’ve killed herself) also left the door open for a new found footage film nearly every Halloween thereafter. And while the sequels never achieved the level of verisimilitude of the first, most of them did a decent job of cultivating a sense of inescapable doom and dread in the audience, and finding new ways to make household objects terrifying. Whether it was invisible demons tinkering with 1990s swivel fans, 2010s Xbox One Kinects, or the timeless sight of “the best fucking Ouija Board I’ve ever seen” lighting itself on fire, the better Paranormal Activity flicks made mundane sinister. It also turned Jason Blum into an empire-builder. – DC
18. Child’s Play
It’s fair to wonder if Child’s Play ever would have become the decade-spanning phenomenon it is without Brad Dourif’s vocal performance. Despite playing a serial killer trapped inside the body of a cloyingly creepy children’s doll, there is as much cheer as fear in Dourif’s jolly line-readings. He brings an infectious joie de vivre to a guy who has to make do with a 12-inch plastic frame when he’s sneaking up on his prey. It’s ridiculous, but the performance is so giddy in its nefariousness that it is able to share the audience’s laugh while (usually) playing it straight.
It also carried the Chucky series across six movies (and a seventh if you include the Mark Hamill-led reboot). The original three movies are late ‘80s and early ‘90s VHS staples. Coming in at the tail-end of the slasher’s golden age, they were able to establish Chucky as a major fixture in the horror aisle at Blockbuster. And for the most part, they were consistently hammy successes that walked the line between camp and carnage. That has a lot to do with Dourif as well as Chucky’s creator, screenwriter Dan Mancini, providing a creative through-line.
Still, we would argue it is the fourth film where the series hit its peak, Ronny Yu’s hopelessly Y2K-drenched Bride of Chucky (1998). Introducing Jennifer Tilly as Chucky’s great love, Tiffany, and enough late ‘90s music video aesthetics to demand a nu-metal soundtrack, felt like a homecoming of sorts for Chucky’s trashy vibe—so much so later installments like Seed of Chucky (2004) desperately chased that high. They never reached it again, but to be honest, these movies, like the little ginger demon, never exactly intended to stand tall. They know what they are and wear it like doll-sized denim. – DC
17. Psycho
In 1960, Psycho changed everything. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the Robert Bloch novel set the stage for so much of horror to follow, specifically of the slasher variety. He transported the terror from Gothic European castles to a roadside motel and made that nice kid Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) into the definitive serial killer archetype onscreen. Between Bloch’s basic hook and the incredible direction by the Master of Suspense, Psycho belongs on this list even if every sequel was garbage.
But here’s the thing: only one Psycho sequel is garbage, and its garbage in the best possible way. Released 23 years after the original, Psycho II is an underrated and thoughtful successor, one that follows Norman as he tries to reenter society. Perkins steps behind the camera for Psycho III, a trashy movie that tries to strip away the prestige that had built up around the franchise, revealing the lurid heart within. That leaves only the dull made-for-TV prequel Psycho IV: The Beginning, which isn’t terrible, but rendered completely unnecessary by the show Bates Motel. A masterpiece, a noble follow-up, a sleazy experiment, and a disposable sequel; any franchise on this list would be proud to have such a record. – JG
16. Final Destination
All of the franchises on this list have incredible monsters. But none of them cut to the chase like Final Destination. The ultimate threat of Final Destination is Death itself, not embodied but no less personified, and no less relentless than Freddy or Jason or Chucky. What began as a spec script for The X-Files about mysterious deaths befalling the survivors of a plane crash has turned into one of the most inventive and consistently entertaining series in the genre.
Both that inventiveness and that entertainment most often appears in the form of the franchise’s signature draw, its delightful kill sequences. Every film, from the defining second entry and the recent Final Destination: Bloodlines to the misguided, misstated fourth entry The Final Destination, features intricate Rube Goldberg-like sequences of slaughter. We viewers get to watch as spilled spaghetti, a kids soccer ball, or a lucky penny become harbingers of grisly doom, leading to bloody, funny, and unexpected death scenes. And like Denny’s, the monster of this movie’s business is always open. – JG
15. Saw
No series better captured the cruelty of mid-2000s horror like Saw. What began as a shot-on-the-cheap calling card by plucky first-time filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannell exploded into a true stomach-churning phenomenon, with a new gross-out sequel arriving every October. Fans at the time lined up to watch, excited to see how the Jigsaw killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell) would dismember his victims this time around.
Fun as the geek show effects are, real Saw fans know that the true pleasure of the franchise is its insane plotting. The franchise completely committed to Kramer’s terminal disease, letting him die off in Saw III. It further opened Saw IV with his autopsy. Instead of bringing Jigsaw back as a zombie, the series keeps Kramer around through a series of increasingly byzantine flashbacks, twisting the narrative like its in a torture device of Jigsaw’s making. No matter if it’s a splatter fest or it’s a convoluted procedural, Saw is always a pleasure to watch thanks to Bell’s committed take as Kramer. – JG
14. Predator
If this list had a prize for “most improvement,” it very likely would go to the Predator series. The original 1987 movie from director John McTiernan is of course a staple of ‘80s action cinema, one which famously turned Arnold Schwarzenegger into the proverbial final girl of a slasher flick. Here stands the lone survivor who must stand up to a far more powerful monster that killed all her friends. Awesome. Even so, for most of Predator’s existence as a franchise, it’s been marked by unremarkable if not outright awful sequels like Predator 2 (1990), the Alien vs. Predator flicks in the 2000s, and the ghastly 2018 reboot, The Predator.
Then came Dan Trachtenberg. The writer and director of 10 Cloverfield has almost single-handedly reinvigorated the franchise with its best films in 30 years, if not ever. 2022’s Prey is better than it had any right to be as a streaming release. Luckily Trachtenberg pursued the tantalizing fan dream of setting a beloved, pulpy genre concepts in the ancient past: in this case during the early 18th century when a young Comanche woman (Amber Midthunder) defies the expectations of her tribe and also early French fur trappers by standing up to the beast from the stars. Trachtenberg then pivoted again by extrapolating on the idea in an animated film, Predator: Killer of Killers, that hopped between different centuries and protagonists to tell a larger, mythology-building tale about the Yautja species’ predations on Earth.
All of which leaves us giddy about the prospect of the same filmmaker pivoting again, this time to the distant future, and now throwing into the mix Elle Fanning as a chatty Kathy android. The game really has never looked so plentiful. – DC
13. Universal’s The Wolf Man Series
Of all the many sequels and spinoffs Universal Pictures made to their famous monster movies of the 1930s and ‘40s, the Wolf Man remained the one creature played by a single actor: Lon Chaney Jr. That might also be why Chaney’s Wolf Man is a personal favorite of the Universal Monsters. A poor, hapless schmuck who just wanted to be reconciled with his distant father (Claude Rains), Larry Talbot instead gets bitten by a werewolf and spends the next five movies begging for someone to put him out of his misery. They never do.
Obviously the 1941 Wolf Man is the best film in a run that coincided with World War II, and thus increasingly smaller budgets. Nonetheless, Chaney always brought a sense of pathos to the material that was absent from a number of other performances in Universal’s monster mash years. In fact, the first cinematic crossover ever, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man(1943), works pretty well as a direct Wolf Man sequel with lots of Jack Pierce’s furry makeup and solid character work from the likes of Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva, the Romani woman who reluctantly helps Talbot find a doctor they call Frankenstein. When the Wolf Man starts partying with Dracula as well, things get dicier, but it all ends well in one of the great horror comedies, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), wherein the werewolf gets to save the day and take out Bela Lugosi’s long-in-the-fang vampire.
12. Insidious
Insidious may not be as flashy as James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s other franchise, Saw, nor Wan’s The Conjuring, but it’s no less satisfying. Insidious gives the duo a chance to do more with less, bringing their lore-building sensibilities to a more focused tale about a non-descript family, led by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne’s Josh and Renai Lambert, whose son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) gets targeted by a demon.
The first movie combined haunted house scares with a general wholesomeness, not just from the Lambert family but also from a trio of ghost hunters, played by Lin Shaye, Angus Sampson, and Whannell. The premise worked well enough for a second film, but the lackluster prequels Chapter 3 and The Last Key quickly suggested it was spent. And yet, a late fourth entry, The Red Door, found new scares by revisiting the Lamberts, now older and in disarray. The Red Door makes for a perfect closer to the series. But given the fact that it made 10 times its budget, Blumhouse is surely working on yet another Insidious entry. – JG
11. Hannibal Lecter
It is easy to say there is only one good Hannibal Lecter movie, and it’s the one that picked up the Oscar for Best Picture (and everything else). Well, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambsis definitely the masterpiece in the bunch, and another case of the “first” movie being the best, but there are reasons to still enjoy other entries, including Ridley Scott’s ambitious follow-up, Hannibal (2001). Far more operatic—they even wrote a made up opera about Dante in it!—Hannibal is as vain and preening as Anthony Hopkins’ stylish cannibal. It’s also a Grand Guignol blast in places, and beautiful to feel in others. (Really, that “Vide Cor Meum” piece written by composer Patrick Cassidy is breathtaking.)
Hopkins was disengaged by the time Brett Ratner got around to going through the motions in Red Dragon (2002), and the less said about the Hannibal Rising (2007) prequel the better. But even just including the cinematic entries, there remain secrets up the doctor’s wine and blood-stained sleeves. And if you count Michael Mann’s underrated Manhunter (1986) as part of the franchise, even though it stars Brian Cox as a far more subdued Dr. Lektor than what Hopkins won an Oscar for a few years later, it turns out you have another stone-cold masterpiece in the franchise. – DC
10. The Exorcist
There are many folks out there who will tell you William Friedkin’s The Exorcistis still the scariest movie ever made. I’m one of them. What he achieved in 1973 by adding a documentarian, and agnostic, eye to a true-believing story of demonic possession made for one of the most emotionally violent and intense experiences you can have in a movie theater. It did author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty’s bouts of doubt and faith justice. What a shame none of that can be said for the disastrous sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). From start-to-finish an unmitigated catastrophe, Exorcist II might have ended Richard Burton’s career as a serious actor, and derailed young Linda Blair’s early success after a performance that was equal measures sinister and heartbreaking in the first movie.
All of which speaks poorly of Warner Bros. leadership at the time, because if they had simply waited a few years, Blatty would have delivered them a novel that makes for a great sequel. In fact, he still did, but few dared see it after the frivolities of Heretic. To this day, The Exorcist III (1990) is an underrated gem, and the only true follow-up to the ‘73 film. Written and directed by Blatty himself, the picture is far more Catholic, if that seems possible, and wide-eyed sincere in its conception of the powers of Heaven and Hell intruding in our daily lives. It retains a foreboding sense of dread though, as well as verisimilitude. That’s quite the achievement since George C. Scott is hamming it to high heaven as the detective originated by Lee J. Cobb in the first movie. The film also features an all-time jump scare.
There were more movies after The Exorcist III, including two different attempts at the same prequel story falling flat for wildly different reasons (though, to be clear, Paul Schrader’s failures are more interesting than Renny Harlin’s). But it is the first and “third” movie that make this franchise an unholy powerhouse. – DC
9. The Conjuring
When James Wan’s first Conjuring hit 12 years ago, folks believed it was based on a true story. Technically all of the mainline Conjuring films claim that to one degree or another, with the fun gimmick being that each installment is pulled from the “case files” of supposed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. But by the time this year’s fourth and allegedly final mainline flick, The Conjuring: Last Rites, came out with a kaiju-sized Annabelle doll walking around, it’s safe to say the sense of historical grounding had worn off.
Those first couple of Conjurings directed by Wan though? They were like a full-throated legal defense for the artistry of the jump scare. Wan indeed has an apparently limitless ability to find new and rewarding ways to say “boo,” and it always feels earned after minutes or hours of breathless tension. Part of that is Wan’s command of swooping and aggressive camera movements, but it is also the texture from lead performances by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who make their Hollywoodized Ed and Lorraine so damn lovable. The first two Conjuringmovies are top notch “haunted house ride” cinema, and they have spawned a dizzying larger universe of six spinoff films, some of which are pure madcap ‘80s zaniness like Annabelle Comes Home (the one with a werewolf!). Not all Conjuring movies are created equal, but when you have as strong of an anchor as Wilson belting Elvis standards on a guitar, this basically becomes chiller comfort food. – DC
8. Hammer’s Dracula Series
Bela Lugosi’s Dracula defined the popular image of the character and the vampire archetype in general. But it was the Christopher Lee version in Hammer’s cycle that standardized what a “Dracula” story is in pop culture. The blood would be bright red, the fangs pronounced and bared often, and the victims mostly young, nubile, heaving things who doth protest too much. It was a formula, but one that Lee himself gave a lot of class and stoic charm. The material handed to him might have been lascivious, but he made it illustrious, especially in the installments that paired him with Peter Cushing as cinema’s most virile Professor Van Helsing. When these two first crossed paths in the earliest installment, 1958’s Horror of Dracula, it was a veritable swashbuckler but with crucifixes.
Lee would go on to star in seven Hammer productions based around the undead count, and Hammer would produce a further two installments in the franchise absent Lee. But even when they’re quite terrible (see: 1970’s Scars of Dracula), there remains a camp charm. One of the better installments even leaned into that, turning Dracula A.D. 1972 into a cult classic for those who vibed on Christopher Lee’s vampire being transported to swinging ‘60s London (even if in real-life the party was already over) to feed on a bunch of shaggadelic hippies. Other installments actually improved on the formula from time to time, such as Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), where the seductive vampire turns the youth of Victorian society against their stodgy, hypocritical parents. See, despite Lee’s oppressive formality as Dracula, he could be a swinger too.
7. Halloween
There is not a horror franchise with a more confusing or headache-inducing continuity than the Halloween films. Bless ‘em. As much of a “choose your own adventure” for fans’ head-canon as a straight-forward mythology you can learn, there are anywhere between five and seven ways you can follow the story after John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece about an inexplicable evil they call “Michael Myers” and the babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) whom he stalks. In most variations, although not all, Laurie winds up being Michael’s long-lost baby sister. And in the original series of sequels—those which Whistle screenwriter Owen Egerton tells us are the “orphan trilogy” because no one wants to claim them anymore—Laurie’s own orphan daughter Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) is stalked by her big uncle, who she learns is possessed by an evil pagan cult.
There are also other continuities where Jamie was never born, and Michael came back decades later to have One. Last. Showdown. with Laurie. Thrice. There’s even the Rob Zombie remake where they share the same white trash family trauma demon that turns them into serial killers. Whatever iteration floats your boat, there is a version out there, and the truth is most of them have at least one decent sequel in their run—Halloween 4, H20, and the 2018 reboot, for those who are counting—and at least a couple of dogs. But even the conflicting and confounding failures give the whole thing a certain panache, all while springing from the granddaddy of perfect slasher movies. So as long as that Carpenter piano and synthesizer theme keeps blasting, we’ll keep watching what is the one slasher franchise that 40 years after the fact can still keep things spooky. – DC
6. A Nightmare on Elm Street
Halloween is probably the definitive slasher franchise of the 1970s and ‘80s, and Friday the 13th was the most popular during the era. But in terms of pound for pound creativity and innovation, the Nightmare on Elm Street flicks were the best ones. Originated by writer-director Wes Craven’s fascination with a story about the son of Hmong refugees who refused to go to sleep until he finally collapsed in exhaustion—and then promptly died—A Nightmare on Elm Streetwas a daring, low-budget ‘80s cut ’em up that strived for arthouse depth and psychology.
We can quibble whether it got there, but it did create one of the greatest movie monsters of all time, a dream demon boogeyman named Freddy Krueger (played unforgettably by Robert Englund), as well as a definitive “final girl” who actually fights back against her tormentor, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). Still, what made Freddy an idol of his age are the movies that came afterward. Craven infamously never cared for the sequels, even the best one which he wrote the first draft for (1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors), but it was their go-for-broke willingness to try new things, and producer Bob Shaye’s desire to build an empire at New Line Cinema, that made Freddy a rival to Jason. And as the sequels got more outlandish, they also became more visually audacious and occasionally wondrous in their dreamscapes. Somewhere around Nightmare 4 (1988), Freddy unfortunately became a court jester and a figure of comedy instead of horror, but most fans honestly seem to prefer that Happy Meal version.
Fortunately, the series remained ambitious enough that little gems like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) could spring from it. That movie is an extremely meta-commentary on the series by Craven in which he casts himself, Shaye, Englund, and most prominently Langenkamp as fictional versions of their real selves, and then has them haunted by a Freddy Krueger-shaped demon who’s escaped the screen like a murderous purple rose of Cairo. Also, once again, Freddy vs. Jason (2003) slaps for those who just enjoy a good monster mash once in a while. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a Freddy movie that happens to feature Jason.
5. George Romero’s Living Dead Films
How influential is Night of the Living Dead (1968)? The movie essentially created the entire zombie subgenre despite the fact that director George R. Romero insisted that his flesh-eating, reanimated corpses were ghouls and not zombies. But it’s not just Romero’s revision to the lore that made zombies so popular today. It’s the way he uses flesh-eaters to comment upon society.
Once the casting of Black actor Duane Jones gave Night of the Living Dead political relevance, Romero found a way to combine horror and critique. Dawn of the Dead (1978) reanimates corpses as mindless mall-goers, Day of the Dead (1985) shows a military state crumble, and Land of the Dead (2005) features an uprising against the ruling class. Later sequels Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009) don’t have quite the same bite, but even they can’t diminish the way Romero changed horror forever. – JG
4. Evil Dead
The poster for the original Evil Dead (released in 1981) called the film the ultimate experience in gruelling terror. While that might have been a bit of hyperbole, it was definitely among the most visually dazzling and inventive to ever play the game. Famously made by a trio of school-day chums named Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Bruce Campbell, the first movie had no budget, no safety guidelines, and seemingly no hope. But Raimi’s ability to make a camera tied to a piece of plywood terrifying when he ran through the woods with it over his head also made Evil Dead one of the foundational “video nasties” in extreme horror violence.
That legend only grew as the first couple of sequels got funnier, better funded, and yet no less ingenious in design. There are many who will tell you to this day that Evil Dead II (1987) is the best sequel ever made. While seeing Campbell go Elmur Fudd against his own possessed hand is classic, we prefer the time-traveling shenanigans of Army of Darkness(1992) ourselves. Each installment in the trilogy has its own flavor though, and they each work. So it seemed fairly blasphemous when Raimi and company announced they were producing remakes and spinoffs more than 20 years later. However, 2013’s Evil Deadreimagining from Fede Alvarez, and even 2023’s truly diabolical Evil Dead Rise, courtesy of Lee Cronin, each lived up to the promise of “grueling terror”—plus buckets of gore so maximalist that they are falling from the sky by the end of the Alvarez flick. – DC
3. Universal’s Frankenstein Movie Series
It has been nearly a hundred years since James Whale first gave Boris Karloff his flattop in the 1931 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. And to this day, when you say the word “Frankenstein,” it’s this singular design with the bolts in the neck that folks think about. That is a testament to makeup designer Jack Pierce, but it is also a tribute to the overall film Whale and Karloff made. Narratively it has almost nothing to do with Shelley’s book beyond the general conceit of a mad scientist bringing life to the sewn-together body parts of cadavers. Yet it captured the spirit of the source material better than any other adaptation to this day and features an all-time heartbreaking performance by Karloff as the Creature.
So imagine the shock it must have been when the direct sequel, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, turned out to be even better. Directed by Whale at the height of his powers (not to mention creative control), the film has a visual grandeur decades ahead of its time, not to mention a deft mingling of horror and camp comedy. Karloff’s Monster is at last allowed to speak, the sets are massive, and the Creature’s mate is so visually striking thanks to actress Elsa Lanchester and Pierce’s idea of glamour beauty makeup that she also left a 90-year impression despite only being onscreen for five minutes. It is the greatest horror sequel, but not the last good Frankenstein movie made by Universal. The next installment, 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, wastes Karloff’s final appearance as the Monster but features a deliciously broad turn by Bela Lugosi as the seedy “helper” Ygor. The German Expressionist-inspired set design is also haunting.
The series definitely declined after those first three entries, but we again remain champions of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), if not necessarily for Lugosi’s misjudged performance as the Monster. And Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is also a great classic, even if the titular monster is barely in it. A few of the other ‘40s films were major downgrades, but this is one of the genre’s most enduring legacies that starts and ends with a jolt of electricity. – DC
2. Scream
If we are judging franchises strictly in terms of consistency, from beginning to end there has not been a bad Scream movie yet across six entries in 29 years. That is a remarkable record and pretty much unmatched within the genre. There are definitely weaker entries on this list—we see you over there, Scream 3 (2000) and your baffling Jay and Silent Bob cameo—but ever since Drew Barrymore picked up a landline and heard “what’s your favorite scary movie?,” this series has been batting at least singles. And the 1996 movie from Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson that started it all is a massive home run.
Benefiting from razor-sharp writing and direction that was shrewd enough to acknowledge even their young teen audience was intimately familiar with the tropes and clichés of slasher movies after the last 20 years of drive-ins and slumber party rental bingers, Scream created a self-aware satire that not so much deconstructed the beats as unmasked them and then turned them around for maximum excitement. It also built a series where instead of the killer, it is the would-be victims who are the characters we followed from film to film. Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette are to Scream what Han, Luke, and Leia were to Star Wars, and to see them grow both wearier and steelier every time they get a new phone call from the playfully cruel voice of Roger L. Jackson has become strangely comforting over the years.
The series has long worked due to changing with—or mocking—the times. 2011’s Scream 4 marked Craven’s final film, as well as a bit of a middle finger to the idea of remakes and reboots with the new ingenue set to replace Campbell’s Sidney Prescott turning out to be the killer who wanted to steal her life, All About Eve style. Yet, impressively, the series was still able to evolve for a new generation after Craven when horror wunderkinds Radio Silence became the creative force behind the camera, and the franchise lucked into hiring massive talents like Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid, and future Oscar-winner Mikey Madison just months or years before they broke out. The NYC-based Scream VI is an especially satisfying slasher that makes good on the failed promise of Jason taking Manhattan back in ‘89.
If we are being honest, it all makes the fact that next year’s Scream 7 controversially parted ways with Barrera and Ortega, and is seemingly returning to the well with Ghostface going back to Woodsboro and stalking a long over-this-shit Sidney, a bit worrisome. But even if that one stumbles, six out of seven ain’t bad? – DC
1. Alien
It is unlikely that anyone reading this enjoys every one of the Alien movies. But chances are you remember each of them vividly, even if it’s been decades since you last saw an installment. That is because whether great, grotesque, or even disappointing, each film has an artistic purity and singularity to it that would make an Ian Holm android purr. All of the original four films in what 20th Century Fox previously marketed as the “Alien Quadrilogy” are helmed by a distinct and visceral auteur, and each left an indelible stamp on the star-beast we now call the “xenomorph” (including the fact it is called a xenomorph).
This began when Ridley Scott’s endlessly eerie haunted house in space, Alien (1979), gave way seven years after the fact to James Cameron’s relentless rollercoaster of an action-thriller, Aliens (1986). It remains contentious to this day which is superior—count me in the team Alien camp—but both are peak achievements in their directors’ oeuvres, as well as a showcase for Sigourney Weaver, whose Ellen Ripley became the rare performance in either an action movie or sequel to earn a lead Oscar nomination.
David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (1997) are less unblemished in their legacies or charms—Fincher famously disowned the most nihilistic film in the series—but they too their admirers, and each is a bizarrely original spin on what is in essence still an old “monster on a spaceship” setup. I have come around to appreciating both, even as someone who remains lukewarm over what Fincher and company did to little Newt. Meanwhile Ridley Scott’s reinvention of the franchise in 2012, Prometheus, remains a fascinating, galaxy-sized swing: a beautiful, bold, and dazzling existential treatise drenched in body horror dread… that’s undone by an undercooked screenplay. But to quote Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez, “That’s a movie that clearly accomplished more than most movies ever do.”
Alvarez then went on to make the first genuinely nostalgic sequel in the whole series, which sought to create order out of the previous installments’ mysteries and chaos. But even Romulusfeatures evocative atmosphere and performances, particularly from David Jonsson as an android named Andy. There is a ferocious artistic integrity that this series has maintained over half a century. It cannot all be for everyone, but there is something alluring, and nightmarish, for everyone who dares enter its darkest corner of space. Every film is a meal, and every meal a banquet, we love the Alien corps. – DC
Philippou Brothers Shake the Cursed Hand of Meta for Talk to Me VR Spinoff
In the 2022 A24 movie Talk to Me, teenagers discover a cursed plaster hand that allows spirits to possess anyone who grasps it. Despite knowing that it leads directly to Hell, and despite knowing that opens them up to all sorts of evil, the teens grasp it anyway, leading to all sorts of horrible, horrible things.
Apparently, Talk to Me directors Danny and Michael Philippou are teenagers at heart, because they’ve decided to shake hands with Mark Zuckerberg and create a six-part sequel series to Talk to Me for Meta VR. According to Variety, the series will be shot entirely “in 3D, making for a fully immersive XR experience that will allow horror fans to feel like they’re living out the terror,” complete with what an announcement quoted in the article describes as “cutting-edge mixed reality technology to map viewers’ environments and immerse them in the story.”
Underneath all of the hype and techno babble, it’s hard not to feel disappointed about the Philippous’ decision. Yes, the New Zealand-born twins started their career making videos for YouTube, and it isn’t a huge leap from there to Facebook and Meta. But with Talk to Me and especially their follow-up Bring Her Back from earlier this year, the twins proved that they had the ability to create complex characters, not just gory shocks. Both films might have scenes of young people having truly unspeakable things happen to their faces (a rare and welcome case of cinematic childhood endangerment done right!), but they also craft well-observed and emotionally-rich protagonists to ground the grisly subject matter.
With that in mind, it is something of a relief to learn that the Philippous won’t actually be making any of the episodes of the series. All six will be written by Trent Atherton, who created the series with Darren Brandl, and will be directed by William Macneill. As of yet, there’s no word on the cast.
XRTV co-founder Brandl clearly sees the series as a natural marriage of technological possibility and a recognizable brand. “Talk to Me is the perfect immersive IP because it’s about young adults who seek the Hand, to experience the euphoria of possession but end up tormented by breaking through to the spirit world,” he enthused. “It made possession fun, and the scares unforgettable. Maybe we’re crazy, but we’re betting you’re going to want to feel possessed too, and with Meta’s new technology, we think for the first time you’ll believe it!”
Yes, a movie that more or less ends with a young woman going to Hell after destroying everyone who has ever loved her does sound like fun! And leave it to a tech bro to look at that experience and think it should become monetized content. It would just be nice if the film’s creators didn’t allow the techies to so fundamentally misuse the story they created.
Then again, I’m sure they were offered a lot of money to do it, and I’m sure that money can be used to make some really good movies. But as this one movie I know showed, once you shake the hand of evil, it’s hard to get away unscathed.
Doctor Who Sea Devils Spinoff Will Premiere… Eventually
Now that Disney and the BBC have officially broken up, there are lots of lingering questions when it comes to Doctor Who and the future of the iconic sci-fi franchise. Who’s going to play the next Doctor? How are they going to clean up the whole Billie Piper plot twist from the season 15 finale? Heck, where is the show going to even air outside of the U.K.? With all of these big issues still outstanding, the fate of spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea feels like a relatively small thing. Particularly since it’s not clear how many fans even wanted this show in the first place.
So, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the six-part drama is the first victim of the messy split between the two production partners. While the BBC has confirmed that The War Between the Land and the Sea will transmit before the end of the year, Disney is… suddenly more laissez-faire about its release plans. While Doctor Who streamed in America simultaneously alongside its U.K.premiere, the prevailing attitude toward its latest spinoff is more of a “we’ll get to it when we get to it” vibe. In short: No one knows when U.S. fans (or anyone who isn’t British) will be able to see the show..
The War Between the Land and the Sea will be released on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in December, presumably in time for the holidays, given showrunner Russell T. Davies’s statement about the series being “a huge, spectacular Christmas treat.” But it won’t arrive on Disney+ “until 2026.” This undetermined release window means that fans will be forced back to the good old days of dodging spoilers online for what may well be months before they’re able to see the show for themselves.
The final element of the original production deal between Disney and the BBC, the series stars Russell Tovey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and franchise regular Jemma Redgrave in a story that will theoretically explore how Earth copes with an alien threat when the Doctor’s not around to help. (We just won’t ask how nobody seemingly thinks to go check in with the Time Lord currently living at Donna Noble’s house.)
The alien threat comes courtesy of classic monsters, the Sea Devils, and features some sort of climate-change-fueled conflict between humanity and the ancient creatures. To put it another way: It’s not clear that this sort of adventure was very high up on any particular Whovian’s must-see wishlist, but since the show is canon, it’s likely that the most die-hard completionists among us (read: me) are still going to lock in and watch. But when, precisely, we’ll be able to do that is currently anyone’s guess.
