Frightening Strikes

Before I Wake opens with a tense, unsettling scene that immediately establishes the stakes. A distraught man enters a child’s bedroom with a gun, seemingly moments away from shooting the sleeping boy, only to be interrupted at the last moment. It’s an arresting start that sets up the film’s blend of mystery and emotional unease. Rebuilding Lives We then shift to Jess and Mark, a married couple dealing with unimaginable grief after the accidental death of their young son. Hoping to rebuild their lives, they decide to foster a child. Their first placement is Cody, an eight-year-old boy whose background is patchy at best: his mother died when he was three, and both of his previous foster placements ended with the unexplained disappearance of one or both guardians. Jess attends a support group n an effort to work through her grief, while Mark prefers to manage his privately, but the couple seem united in their desire to provide Cody with stability and regain a sense of normality for all o...

After waking up in the basement of an unfamiliar apartment building, Joni begins searching for her missing sister, Emily. Along the way, various tenants warn her that she isn’t supposed to be there, and she’s pursued by a menacing, shadowy figure. Her curious arrival — and the search that follows — takes her through the building floor by floor, with each level introducing a new tenant and a new horror. As she ascends, she’s exposed to the frailties, fears, and insecurities of its inhabitants . A Wraparound Journey Tenants is a horror anthology that uses Joni’s journey as a wraparound narrative, linking seven stories about people undone by their personal demons. The segments vary in tone, mixing emotional drama, dark comedy, and supernatural elements. Among them are “Acting Rash,” in which a struggling actress’s vanity takes a grotesque turn; “Hoarder,” centred on grief and self-imprisonment; “Do You Need Something,” a twisted, funny tale of domestic irritation between roommates tha...

Part mockumentary, part found footage, and part traditional horror, Shelby Oaks follows Mia, whose sister Riley went missing twelve years earlier while investigating an alleged haunting with her vlogging team. The film opens with clips from Riley’s YouTube channel, The Paranormal Paranoids, where she and her team explore derelict locations, including the now-infamous town of Shelby Oaks. When they vanish during one of their investigations, the footage sets off a disturbing and increasingly frantic search for the truth. A Shocking Event Mia has never stopped searching for her sister, and when she’s interviewed for a new documentary on the subject, the renewed attention reignites her determination to get to the root of the mystery once and for all. After a stranger arrives at her home, a shocking incident leads to the discovery of a Shelby Oaks tape, featuring the last recordings of the Paranormal Paranoids. Mia decides to withhold this from the police (plausibly, in my view) and starts...

Directed and co-written by real-life content creator Kris Collins (KallMeKris) and co-starring her frequent collaborator Celina Myers (CelinaSpookyBoo), House on Eden follows a group of paranormal vloggers chasing the next big scare — only to find themselves in the middle of one. Mixing humour, tension, and creeping dread, the film uses its found-footage format to explore that uneasy space between performance and genuine fear. An Unexpected Detour We meet the team en route to film new content at a cemetery. Unknown to Celina and Jay, Kris has discovered a supposedly haunted house nearby and, since she’s behind the wheel, they realise too late that she’s made a detour. The property’s allure lies in its obscurity — few have heard of it, let alone visited. A quick call to real-life paranormal investigators Sam and Colby confirms that even they don’t know the place, which seals the group’s decision to explore. When they arrive, the house is immaculate yet inexplicably unlocked. They begin...

Until Dawn (2025) brings the popular horror game to the big screen, and like most game-to-film adaptations, it arrives with plenty of expectations. The story follows a group of friends trapped in a remote mountain lodge, where bad decisions and buried secrets turn deadly. It’s a mix of slasher tension and supernatural chills that tries to recreate the sense of unease and consequence that made the original game so memorable. The question is whether it succeeds — or if something gets lost in translation along the way. A Promising Setup Clover and her four friends set off on a road trip to retrace the steps of Clover’s sister, Mel, who disappeared a year earlier. Along the way, they learn of a remote area where several people have gone missing over the years, and curiosity drives them to investigate. Caught in a brutal storm, they stumble upon an abandoned house and begin to explore. Evidence suggests Mel had been there before — and it’s not long before a masked killer strikes, murdering ...

’Tis the season for horror anthologies, and this year the long-running  V/H/S  franchise grabs the blood-drenched Halloween baton with relish and and sprints screaming toward the finish line. The wrap-around story centres on the testing of a sinister new soda, “Diet Phantasma,” which quickly sets a dangerous tone before we’re plunged into a selection of Halloween-themed shorts. From haunted houses and urban legends to trick-or-treating gone horribly wrong, the anthology blends grotesque imagery, gallows humour, and a particularly disturbing entry involving disappearing children.  Tape by Tape “Coochie Coochie Coo” follows two high-school girls who go trick-or-treating one last time and experience increasingly bizarre and grotesque horrors when lured into a house by a local urban-legend figure. “Ut Supra Sic Infra” delivers a Spanish take steeped in Iberian horror atmosphere, centring on the sole survivor of a massacre at a Halloween party in an abandoned mansion...

Trick ’r Treat is a 2007 Halloween horror anthology that interlinks four ghoulish tales, each carrying the same moral at its heart: never disrespect the rules of Halloween . Didn’t know there were any? You will by the time the credits roll. On Halloween night, young couple Emma and Henry return home from the festivities. Emma, clearly not a fan of the season, can’t wait to pack it all away. Ignoring her husband’s half-hearted warning, she extinguishes the jack-o’-lantern and starts dismantling their decorations. Unbeknownst to them, someone—or something—is watching. Emma soon learns that cutting Halloween short comes with dire consequences. The Warren Valley Carnival The action then switches to earlier that evening, during the Warren Valley Halloween carnival, following the town’s residents as their stories intertwine. There’s the local school principal whose lesson in gluttony takes a nasty, darkly comic turn; a surly neighbour whose disdain for Halloween doesn’t go unpunished...

Night of the Reaper is an ’80s-style slasher from director Brandon Christensen that pays homage to the horror staples of that decade, lovingly recreating the era’s look and feel. The retro-styled opening titles only heighten the anticipation but does it work? The Unsolved Murder The film opens in familiar territory: Emily Golding, a babysitter on Halloween night, is alone in the house, being increasingly threatened by an unseen intruder. At first, she assumes it’s the kids playing around, until the tension goes through the gears and the game turns deadly. It's an eerie, unsettling opener that delivers genuine menace. A few years later, Emily's murder remains unsolved, casting a pall over the town. The house where the killing occurred stands empty and unsellable. Rodney Arnold is the local sheriff who is still grieving the loss of his wife in a car crash and struggling to raise his young son, Max — consumed by guilt and obsession with finding the killer. Deena Comes Home Enter...

Having seen no small measure of praise for Personal Shopper, I went in not sure what to expect in the way of a relationship between haute couture and the afterlife. In any event, I was expecting more than I found - there's slow burn with simmering tension and then there's just slow - and this was the latter. An American in Paris We meet Maureen (Kristen Stewart), a young American living in Paris and working as a personal shopper for Kyra, a demanding supermodel, in a job she clearly hates. She’s grieving for her twin brother, Lewis and her boyfriend is away in Oman, leaving her in sorrowful isolation. Maureen is also a psychic medium who visits her childhood home in the hope of contacting Lewis and fulfilling the pledge they made to each other - that when one dies, they will try to contact the other from beyond. This mission doubles as a job: she’s tasked with determining if the house has a “presence” by the potential buyers, though the rationale for why she was asked to undert...

The Monkey sets out its stall early with a memorable opening. Petey Shelburn is desperate to offload a strange clockwork monkey in a junk shop, realising too late that this isn’t the harmless toy he thought it was. His attempt to be rid of it ends badly, establishing both the power and intent of the monkey right from the outset. A Turn of The Key Fast forward a few years and Petey is now absent from the lives of his twin sons, Hal and Bill. Trying to gain some sense of the man he was, the boys rummage through their father’s belongings and stumble upon the sinister wind-up monkey. In spite of cryptic warnings on the box, natural curiosity gets the better of them, and with a single turn of the key they soon discover that outlandish death follows after the monkey plays its drum. Having unleashed a chain of calamitous events, the twins band together and attempt to prevent further destruction but find that the monkey won't be sidelined that easily. The film is narrated by Hal, whose ...

The Woman in the Yard  is a psychological horror film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra ( House of Wax, Orphan ) that explores grief, guilt, and PTSD in the wake of sudden loss, reminding us that the deepest horror often lies within. Ramona is left physically and emotionally shattered after a car accident that killed her husband. The couple had recently started a new life on a farm, but now she’s alone - trying to care for her two children, 13-year-old Taylor and six-year-old Annie, while struggling to keep the household running. From the opening scenes, Ramona’s grief is palpable. She spends her mornings unable to get out of bed, while Taylor scrapes together breakfast for the family and their dog, Charlie. Bills pile up, the power fails, and Ramona’s injuries make even walking a challenge. The children do their best to pull her out of this spiral of despair, though the effort is a strain on them all. The Woman Arrives One morning, their routine is broken when Taylor spots a mysterio...

The Presence is a supernatural horror film that flips the haunted house genre on its head by telling the story from the ghost’s perspective. Shot in a style that flirts with found-footage , without the unruly camera-work, the film invites viewers into the world of the Payne family - up close, uncomfortable, and increasingly eerie. Simmering Tensions The Paynes have just moved into a new house, hopeful for a fresh start. But simmering tensions soon bubble to the surface. Rebecca, the driven matriarch and a high-powered legal professional, is facing undisclosed legal trouble. She seems closest to her golden-boy son Tyler, a cocky high school athlete, while her relationship with her daughter Chloe is more strained. Chloe, still grieving the mysterious death of her best friend Nadia, is fragile and isolated - further alienated by her brother’s bullying and her mother’s emotional distance. Meanwhile, Chris, the father, tries to both support the family and contain its worst excesses, juggl...

In Oculus , writer-director Mike Flanagan takes a familiar horror trope, the haunted mirror, and reframes it into something original. A supernatural psychological horror, Oculus is less concerned with jump scares and more interested in blurring the boundaries between perception and reality. It’s a chilling, mind-bending battle of wills between siblings and a malevolent force that doesn’t intend to go down without a fight. A Shattered Childhood The film opens with Tim Russell being released from a psychiatric facility into the care of his sister, Kayley, 11 years after the violent deaths of their parents in a tragedy that shattered their childhood and changed their lives forever. While Tim spent over a decade trying to piece his sanity back together, Kayley's been chasing a different truth, rooted in the antique mirror she believes was responsible for the family’s destruction. Unbeknown to Tim, Kaylie has tracked down the Lasser Glass (as the mirror is known) and orchestrated its r...

It Feeds is a possession horror with a twist. Rather than inhabiting and corrupting its host in the usual way, the demon attaches itself to victims, using them to feed on others for survival, and it has a voracious appetite. When paired with the protagonist’s unusual psychic ability, the film brings a fresh angle to familiar territory. An Extraordinary Secret Cynthia Winstone is a therapist with an extraordinary secret: she can enter people’s minds and delve into their deepest fears, helping them to overcome trauma from the inside out. It’s an ability she keeps hidden as a past tragedy, involving her husband’s death and the forced relocation of her family, has left scars that haven't quite healed. Now she works under the radar, aided by her daughter Jordan, who’s training to join the unconventional family business. Their quiet life is shattered when a panicked girl, Riley, barges into their home, begging for Cynthia's help. She's in a hurry as she has escaped her father an...

Fear Street: Prom Queen  is an add-on to the  Fear Street  universe and, aside from its Shadyside setting and R.L. Stine origins, it has little in common with the entertaining trilogy that preceded it. Rather than capturing the spirit of the original films, this standalone slasher opts for tired tropes, offering little in the way of tension or entertainment. Excitement Builds in Shadyside It opens with excitement building at Shadyside High as they prepare for the senior prom of 1988. Six girls are competing for the crown of Prom Queen and we are introduced to the characters as they battle it out for supremacy. It’s clear from the outset that Tiffany Falconer is the favourite, while outsider Lori Granger struggles to escape the shadow of a dark rumour - that her mother murdered her father at prom 18 years earlier. Lori is supported by her best friend Megan, a well-meaning “stoner and horror nerd” whose antics - including the use of fake blood and horror props - backfire an...

Late Night With the Devil did not turn out to be the tour de force I had hoped for. However, on many levels it won't disappoint especially if you are an aficionado of television in the 1970s. Set in 1977, the film centres around Jack Delroy, a popular but troubled talk show host. Delroy's beloved wife has passed away, leaving him shattered, and his career is on the slide. In a bid to revive the show, he decides to air a special live episode on Halloween night, featuring a series of guests connected to the occult: Christou, a medium; Carmichael, a bullish paranormal sceptic and Lily (accompanied by parapsychologist, Madeline Piper), a young girl who allegedly is the sole survivor of a Satanic cult and believed to be possessed. As the night progresses, what begins as a ratings-raising stunt descends into turmoil and terror as supernatural events unfold live on air.  Entertainment Turned Deadly As the episode continues, strange phenomena begin to occur as each guest demonstrates...

The Woods is a psychological thriller from first-time director, Sarah Lyons. It follows four friends - Kate, Amy, Sam, and Lucas - who, having just graduated from college, decide to commemorate their friendship by recreating a childhood camping trip. But what begins as a nostalgic reunion soon takes a darker turn. The Only Survivor Fast-forward several years and the film opens with Kate (the only one of the four who makes it back) recounting her version of events on a true crime podcast. Kate’s desire to set the record straight after a traumatic experience drives the story forward, challenged by sceptical questioning from the podcast host, and we sense she may be an unreliable narrator. The group’s journey starts brightly enough, but it’s clear early on that the trip is a passion project of Kate's rather than the joint venture that she insists it is during the interview. At a motel stop on the first night, the eerie tone is set when Amy is found sleepwalking and caught in the m...