All in Event
A psychologist is brought into a secret government facility to perform an evaluation. The subject is a nine year old girl tied to a chair with a straight jacket and kept in a locked room. Her appearance belies a genius intellect and a sadistic streak that led her to kill her own mother with no remorse. The psychologist has one day to prove that the young girl is not an emotionless sociopath before the government facility is forced to take more extreme measures.
Behaviour Interactive, the developers behind asymmetrical 4v1 survival horror game Dead by Daylight, are consistently making good on a series of promises they made half a year ago. Once they made an agreement to buy back full rights to their own game, they promised to roll out regular updates to improve and change the game throughout the year. Essentially, we’re supposed to get four new chapters—DLC updates featuring a new killer, a new survivor, and a new map—and four mid-chapter patches over the next year. So far, we’ve seen the introduction of the Clown, Kate Denson, the Spirit, Adam Francis, a cosmetics shop, and a total revamp of in-game currency.
Tales of Halloween is an anthology horror film with 10 segments all set in the same town on Halloween night. To say the concept is ambitious is an understatement. The framing device is a radio broadcast (performed by Adrienne Barbeau, a wonderful piece of casting) describing all the dangers of Halloween in this town. The segments, each with its own director and writer, are all their own unique horror shorts in various styles and tones. The connecting threads are Halloween, the town, and a few characters popping up in multiple stories.
Scream sent the American horror industry in a very different direction upon its release. Forget about the resurgence of teen slashers in its wake or the stunt casting of a bigger name for the sole purpose of a shocking murder scene. The lasting influence still felt over 20 years later is self-referential horror. Scream is not the first horror film to mention other horror films, but it is the first that hinges on a knowledge of horror films and the most successful to do so. If you want to dive deep into self-referential horror now, you need to do something brand new with it.
Sometimes, a film makes so many mistakes, it’s actually impressive that it managed to be finished at all. Malevolent is one of the most misguided, unfocused, and just plain poorly planned horror films I’ve encountered in a long time.
