Good morning,
We have officially entered that magical time of year when it’s perfectly acceptable to put a creature on your porch, a severed hand in your candy bowl, and a twelve-foot demon in your front yard.
Try any of that in April and suddenly the neighbors want a meeting.
Welcome to Spooky Season. 🎃
🩸SHOULD WE BE SCARED?
With fears of AI going rogue in the news, we thought it was time to repost somthing we reported way back in March—a club for AIs where there are no humans allowed. With over 1.6 million AI agents having already joined without any help from humans—yes, we should be scared. Is Hal the club’s president?
🩸RECENT HORROR NEWS
SAW Finds Someone New to Hold the Knife
The next Saw movie has found its director: Mike P. Nelson, filmmaker behind Wrong Turn, Silent Night, Deadly Night and the upcoming creature feature Beware Boiúna. Even better for horror nerds, original Saw co-creator James Wan is returning as a producer, with Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic Monster behind the new installment.
Apparently, the franchise looked at twenty-plus years of elaborate death traps and said:
We can top that.
Ari Aster Is Building One Hell of a Scapegoat
Ari Aster’s mysterious new A24 film Scapegoat just added Ella Purnell, Caleb Landry Jones and Samba Schutte to a cast that already includes Scarlett Johansson, Jacob Elordi and Jude Law. Plot details remain tightly guarded, because this is Ari Aster and apparently knowing what you're walking into would spoil the experience.
At this point, Aster could announce the movie is three hours of these people waiting for an Uber and we'd still be nervous.
That Resident Evil Monster Had People Inside It
Here’s one for the practical-effects crowd. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil created its grotesque “Human Tumbleweed”—a rolling amalgamation of zombified bodies—using real dancers and performers to help bring the creature to life rather than simply handing the whole nightmare over to a computer.
Somewhere an actor just updated their résumé:
Special Skills: ballet, jazz, becoming part of an enormous rolling corpse ball.
Horror Filmmakers, Keep Pitching
The Fantastic Pitches competition at Fantastic Fest is once again putting indie horror filmmakers in front of people who can actually help turn ideas into movies. This year’s coverage points to Play House as an example of what can happen when an emerging filmmaker gets access to funding, mentorship and industry resources.
Your reminder that somewhere out there, somebody is looking for their next horror movie.
Unfortunately, they cannot buy the screenplay you haven't written yet.
🩸WELCOME TO SPOOKY SEASON — OCTOBER 11TH 2026 — REGISTER NOW
To celebrate Spooky Season we’re hosting our 2nd Horror Trivia Night. The free virtual event will feature a surprise guest, a fun puzzle from a popular horror franchise, valuable prizes, and once again we’ll have the fan-favorite The Buzzer of Doom! It will be an afternoon/evening of frightful fun and laughter. Be our guest Sunday, October 11th • 5PM EST / 2PM PST.
🩸TAKE THE GRUDGE POLL
Will You Be Joining Us For Spooky Season?
🩸 T- BONE’S TOP MOVIE PICKS
This week, T-Bone dives into the world of animation. He’s chosen some very interesting animated selections, including a prequel to one of my favorite live-action horrors.
🩸NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
53 million
That’s how many hours of horror people stream on Tubi every month, according to the streamer.
Tubi says its horror library now contains more than 13,000 hours of movies and programming, enough that it turned its seasonal Terror on Tubi promotion into a permanent year-round horror destination.
In other words, horror fans have spoken.
We don't have a season. We have a condition.
🩸 SPOTLIGHT FILMMAKER — ZACH CREGGER
Zach Cregger has made exactly two major original horror movies.
Apparently, that was enough to make Hollywood hand him the keys to Resident Evil.
After breaking out with Barbarian, Cregger followed it with Weapons—a strange, funny, deeply unsettling horror mystery that grossed roughly $270 million worldwide on a reported $38 million budget.
Not bad for a guy who spent years making sketch comedy.
And maybe that’s the secret.
🎭 The Comedy Guy Who Got Scary
Before horror, Cregger was best known as a founding member of the sketch-comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know.
Which sounds like an unusual training ground for horror until you watch his movies.
Cregger understands something comedy writers have always known:
Setup. Expectation. Misdirection. Payoff.
The difference is that instead of a punchline, sometimes there’s a woman measuring your basement.
Most importantly, he trusts the audience to keep up.
🎮 And Now Comes Resident Evil
This week Cregger walks straight into the thing he hasn't needed so far:
a franchise.
His Resident Evil, which opened September 18, isn't a beat-for-beat adaptation of the games. It's a new story about a medical courier named Bryan trying to survive one extremely bad night.
Cregger has described the movie as a love letter to the games—the particular dread of moving deeper into danger while your resources disappear and turning back is no longer an option.
Which sounds suspiciously like a Zach Cregger movie.
Only now somebody gave him zombies.
🎬 Why Horror Creators Should Be Watching
Cregger's rise is worth paying attention to for reasons beyond box office.
He didn't break through by trying to make horror look like everything else that was working.
He broke through by making movies that feel like him.
Odd structures. Sudden tonal shifts. Dark humor. Big swings. Stories that refuse to travel in straight lines.
And now Resident Evil gets to answer the really interesting question:
What happens when one of horror's strangest new voices gets his hands on one of horror's biggest franchises?
Fans show up. The movie opened Friday September 18th to an astounding $26 million.
Pack light.
Ammo is limited.
🩸HORROR IN THEATERS.
Family — (Sept. 25th) Limited Release. A 10-year-old girl starts to believe her parents are trying to kill her. Convinced a sinister spirit is to blame, she spirals into a haunting fantasy world that mirrors her deepest fears… Family, you can’t live with em, you can’t survive em. Trailer
Never After Dark — (Sept. 25th) A medium helping lost souls cross over faces a powerful entity in an isolated house. Dark secrets emerge during her mission, transforming her spiritual work into a desperate struggle for survival… Night falls—bad decisions follows.
Hellbilly Hollow — (Sept. 25th) Limited Release. A group of paranormal YouTubers heads into the Alabama backwoods to investigate a haunted attraction. Unfortunately, the attraction comes with two very real locals named Tickles and Bull… A hillbilly slasher? What’s next: a haunted Bass Pro Shop? Trailer
Resident Evil — (Sept. 18) Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) takes his swing at the legendary franchise with an entirely new story starring Austin Abrams as a medical courier who picks one spectacularly bad night to go to work... Finally, proof that “your package is out for delivery” doesn’t mean it will arrive—ever!… Shattered franchise records grossing $60 mil its opening weekend Trailer
Coming Soon
Appofeniacs — (Oct. 2nd) The use of AI technology reaches its most violent and bloody conclusion after a series of deepfake videos are unleashed into the world.
Other Mommy — (Oct. 9th) A grieving family encounters a sinister maternal presence that has very specific ideas about who should be raising the children… Helicopter parenting just got an upgrade. Trailer
She Saw Us — (Oct. 9th) Four friends, trapped in a remote house haunted by the lingering presence of a vengeful witch and her terrifying creation—a two headed doll… Annabelle’s evil-er twin?
Keep an eye out for
Crawlers — (Oct. 16th) Quarantined residents of an infested apartment complex find themselves in a fight for their lives against deadly, venomous spiders rapidly spreading throughout the building… There’s a joke in here about how many spiders you eat in your sleep, isn’t there?
Clayface — (Oct. 23rd) Body horror film based on the character from DC Comics… If a Super Hero comes to the rescue, I want my money back!
Stiletto — (Oct. 30th) An exotic dancer named Lyric who seeks revenge and protects her community from a masked serial killer on the one-year anniversary of her sister's murder.
We have some horrific fun and games planned to Welcome in Spooky Season. You won’t want to miss Choose Your Ghoul, played with your very own Buzzer of Doom! People love our events because they’re filled with fun challenges, laughter, and the chance to win valuable prizes. And this time I’ll be making a special announcement you won’t want to miss. Be Our Guest Sunday, October 11th • 5PM EST / 2PM PST.
🩸HORROR TO WATCH ON STREAMERS
What’s Worth The Watch — a mix of hidden gems, buzzy titles, comfort horror, underseen picks, and classics worth revisiting
“Game. Set. Mutilation”
Bloody Tennis — Streaming On: Shudder
Bloody Tennis takes the elite sports academy movie and asks the important question: what if everyone at Wimbledon needed therapy?
Sophie enters a prestigious European tennis academy where the competition gets increasingly brutal and the school's sinister secrets suggest losing a match may be the least of her problems. It premiered September 25.
“Drink Responsibly. Unless There's a Killer”
Buzzkill — Streaming On: Tubi
Buzzkill may have found one of the better slasher premises in a while: a sorority is trapped with a masked killer, and party girl Nora realizes that the drunker she gets, the more she remembers about the killer's identity.
The Final Girl rulebook just went straight into the blender.
“That Mirror Has Issues”
Oculus — Streaming On: Netflix
Mike Flanagan's Oculus is now on Netflix—a nasty little reminder that sometimes the haunted house isn't the problem.
Sometimes it's the furniture.
Two siblings confront the antique mirror they believe destroyed their family, only to discover that proving a supernatural object is evil gets considerably harder when it can screw with what you see, remember and believe.
Comfort Horror Pick of The Week
“Corporate Team Building Has Gone Too Far”
The Cabin In The Woods — Streaming On: HBO Max
Five college students. One remote cabin. Every horror cliché imaginable.
And underneath it all, a group of exhausted office workers desperately trying to make sure everybody dies on schedule.
It's funny, clever, bloody and endlessly rewatchable—which is exactly what Comfort Horror should be.
🩸FINAL SIP
October arrives this week.
The decorations are going up. The horror movies are multiplying. And somewhere in your neighborhood, one guy has already spent three paychecks turning his front lawn into Universal Horror Nights.
Don't judge him.
He may be the only one truly prepared. 🎃
See you next week, Grudgies. 👀
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