Howdy, horror nerds! Yes, it is I, your humble host, still very much alive and kicking despite a months-long hiatus. What can I say? I'm a busy man. But as we head into the spooky season – where you know I'll have content galore for you – I thought we should recap all the movies from the summer that we didn’t get to talk about.

28 Years Later has been out for a week or so now, and to say that reactions have been mixed would be a colossal understatement. And while some criticism of the film has been aimed as its more inherent, structural elements - the pacing, the plot, the visuals - the vast majority seem to be solely targeting one aspect alone: The film’s ending.

In the past decade or so, legacy sequels have steadily been on the rise. No longer content with letting long-dormant franchises rest, studios have now decided to mine every profitable IP that they own down to the last marketable drop. Predictably, this has led to a dearth of abysmal, cash-grab nostalgia-bait films designed to entice audiences with recognizable titles and nothing else of substance beyond.

In this age of increasingly IP-centric filmmaking, I truly feel for writers tasked with adapting other media into film. Source material has to be a terrible burden in some respects: Stay too close to the original version, and you may as well not have done anything at all. But stray too far away, and you may as well have done something completely original to begin with.

For a film nerd like myself, there’s no greater feeling in the world than sitting down in a theater to watch a new release, and slowly coming to the realization as it progresses that what you’re seeing is something truly special. Not just something that’s fun and entertaining, or even something that’s good; No, I mean something radical. Something…

Horror and comedy intrinsically go hand-in-hand; This isn’t out of any real deliberate choice on behalf of horror filmmakers, but rather a natural, hard-coded necessity for the genre to function as entertainment. I’ve talked at length about this before, but the key lies in the balance between the two elements: Too much in one direction, and a film becomes too farcical to be effectively scary in any real, meaningful way.

Man, I am so glad I avoided the trailers for this one. Oftentimes, I feel like I’ve got a filmmaker pretty pegged. Once you’ve seen enough of a director’s filmography, it’s easy to think that you’ve got a bead on their unique style; This is doubly true when said director is adapting a work from another creator of whom you are intimately familiar with.

Howdy, folks! Boy, 2024 was a busy year for horror movies. From horny monster romances like Lisa Frankenstein and Nosferatu and big-budget prequel romps like The First Omen and A Quiet Place: Day One to gory bloodbaths like Terifier 3 and long-awaited franchise returns with Alien: Romulus, it seemed like there was something out there in the release schedule for every interest and subgenre under the sun.

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