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STITCH HEAD aims straight for the spot where spooky meets sweet: a PG “horror” that plays with the Frankenstein myth from the kids’ table without talking down to them. High above a little town, a mad professor keeps churning out monsters and promptly forgets about them, leaving his first, smallest creation to hold the whole place together. A traveling showman shows up promising love and limelight, and our stitched-together caretaker is tempted to chase the attention instead of the community he’s already built. That arc—validation versus belonging—gives the film its pulse. It’s more of a comedy adventure with cobweb trim, closer in spirit to a storybook campfire tale than anything actually frightening.

There are horror films that aim to frighten, disturb, or repulse — and then there’s MARTYRS. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film doesn’t just cross the line; it redraws it entirely. Newly restored in 4K by Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema series, the film remains as devastating and divisive as it was at release. It’s the kind of experience that doesn’t feel like watching a movie so much as enduring one. But in that endurance lies its genius. Laugier created something few filmmakers attempt: a story where violence is not spectacle, but a form of spiritual confrontation. It’s horror as philosophy, and philosophy as punishment.

When horror uses reality as its foundation, the results can be devastatingly effective. LANDLORD leans on that principle—weaponizing the all-too-familiar power imbalance between tenant and property owner—and gives it literal teeth. Set in a sweltering, rundown apartment complex that feels like it's decaying in real time, the story centers on a bounty hunter who arrives to collect a stolen briefcase, only to find herself entangled in a far darker kind of transaction. Her unexpected ally is a young boy named Alex, orphaned when his mother falls victim to an attack from a “landlord”. A premise that practically bleeds irony, fusing folklore with financial predation.

RUNNING FOR THE MOUNTAINS begins with an image most Americans would recognize—a rolling Appalachian horizon that feels both eternal and endangered. The documentary quickly upends that serenity, revealing a region defined less by its natural beauty than by the industries exploiting it. Directed by Julie Eisenberg and Babette Hogan, the film is an unflinching look at how fossil fuel extraction and deregulation have turned West Virginia into a cautionary case study in environmental sacrifice and political rot.

Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 wastes no time showing what kind of story it wants to tell. The film drops us into a version of New York that feels dangerous even in the daylight—crowded, indifferent, and predatory. Within hours, Thana, a garment-district seamstress, is assaulted twice. What follows isn’t just another revenge narrative; it’s a stripped-down character study about how trauma hardens into purpose. Ferrara and Zoë Lund, who was only seventeen during filming, created something raw and unnerving from material that could have felt exploitative in lesser hands. Nuns, guns, and exploitation, but with surprising depth!

John Carpenter lays out a story about an insurance investigator chasing a missing horror author—and then Carpenter turns the narrative into a diagnosis. What begins as a story about corporate calculus and a publicity headache mutates into a portrait of a contagion that influences the audience, illustrating how ideas crawl under the skin and the terrifying possibility that authorship is less about who writes and more about who believes. If the earlier entries in Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ (THE THING and PRINCE OF DARKNESS) toy with impending doom, this one grins, hands you a paperback, and dares you to read it aloud.

Caiden (Caleb Alexander Smith) wants to get away, start fresh, be someone better (or at least someone). The city is Los Angeles, full of promise and rough edges. What he doesn’t expect is that the very thing that could elevate him to the next level — his face (and physique) — will drag him into a quagmire of fraud, danger, and identity erosion.

After nearly a decade of hauntings, possessions, and theories about the infamous Abaddon Hotel, Stephen Cognetti’s HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE arrives with the heavy task of tying it all together. What should have been a dark, satisfying sendoff to one of the more inventive found-footage franchises instead ends up as a muddled, exposition-heavy finale that leaves you asking the same question as its characters—why are we still here?

There’s a familiar chill to THE RITUAL HOUSE, one that stems not from originality but from the unease of watching people unravel inside a home that clearly doesn’t want them there. Directed by Crystal J. Huang, the film walks a narrow line between ghost story and low-budget supernatural mystery, managing to deliver a few eerie moments even when its script can’t quite sustain the weight of its own ideas. While not the disaster, it’s a rough, uneven entry into indie horror — the kind of film that works best late at night with the lights off and expectations low.

QUEENS OF THE DEAD is a battle staged on a dance floor, where identity, community, and performance are all turned up to eleven. Tina Romero positions the film inside a Brooklyn warehouse party, then detonates it with a zombie surge that scrambles drag rivalries, backstage politics, and romantic hang-ups into a makeshift survival crew. That hook alone would be enough to carry a standard horror-comedy, but the surprise is how much sincerity lives under the glitter. Even when jokes land wide and the gore is a bit laughable, the movie keeps circling back to what matters: chosen family and the work it takes to remain one when everything outside is trying to split you apart.

A classified Cold War experiment. A radio call from a father lost in time—a mom who decides to chase the impossible. PROJECT GENESIS doesn’t start small, and it refuses to play small once it gets moving. Writer/director Chookiat Sakveerakul swings for the fences with a genre cocktail that laces time-travel sci-fi with kaiju flourishes, prehistoric spectacle, dystopian futures, and a mother-daughter story sturdy enough to steady the camera when the movie’s imagination threatens to buckle it. Ambition is the point here—ambition of scope, of timeline, of texture—and the film largely earns the right to be big by keeping its human center in focus.

SCHOOL IN THE CROSSHAIRS works because it takes a simple idea—a teen girl discovers her telekinetic powers—and refuses to treat it as a party trick. Yuka (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is a kid who suddenly has a lever big enough to move her world, and director Nobuhiko Obayashi uses that lever to pry open everything around her: the pressure to conform, the seduction of authority, the way adults and institutions look at students and see raw material. Even when the film gets strange—cosmic intruders, pop-art—it stays grounded in the daily reality of school life: classrooms, clubs, elections, crushes. Ordinary rituals pushed slightly off-axis until they reveal what they were training you for all along.

ANNE RICE’S TALAMASCA: THE SECRET ORDER shows up with an unusual mission: to expand Rice’s Immortal Universe beyond its familiar bloodlines and covens, into the minds of those who’ve spent centuries watching from the shadows. It’s part gothic mystery, part supernatural espionage thriller — and against all odds, it mostly works. This six-episode series finds a balance between character-driven tension and world-expanding spectacle, creating something that feels both familiar and new around every corner.

TENEMENT starts with a moment: a Japanese-Cambodian manga artist flies to Phnom Penh after her mother’s death to reconnect with family and, hopefully, with a part of herself that distance turned abstract. She rents an apartment in a crumbling housing block once filled with memories her mother never fully shared. Relatives welcome her, neighbors are intrigued, and this old apartment seems eager to help the healing process along. Then the walls begin to talk—just not in a language that comfort understands.

SOMEONE DIES! is proof that lo-fi sci-fi can still feel fresh when it leads with personality. Set almost entirely inside a creaky Houston apartment, the film builds a butterfly-effect satire out of a desperate dad, an ominous letter, and a time-warping contraption that looks like it was assembled during a garage-sale speed run. It’s proudly rough around the edges by design, and that handmade quality becomes part of the joke. When characters insist the device is “teleportery, witchcrafty,” you believe them because the film’s world embraces the ridiculous without apology.