Author: Kathleen J McCluskey
Some of horror’s most frightening creatures are not killers, madmen or ordinary monsters with extraordinary appetites. They are things that exist beyond the boundaries of human understanding, forces that do not share our values, recognize our importance or even acknowledge that humans matter. They cannot be reasoned with in any meaningful sense because their motives, if they have any, belong to a world we were never meant to understand. Horror has always drawn on the darkness within human nature but some of its most enduring nightmares emerge when that darkness is replaced by something truly alien. These are the stories…
Long before vampires haunted cinema screens, they stalked the pages of literature. In 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker published Dracula, a gothic horror novel that would become one of the most influential works in the history of the vampire. His Count Dracula was an aristocratic predator who concealed his monstrous nature beneath an appearance of sophistication and charm. Stoker did not invent the vampire, ancient folklore did that but his novel helped establish many of the conventions that would help shape the creature’s portrayal for generations, both in literature and film. Twenty-five years later, German filmmaker F.W. Murnau brought the…
We tend to think we know what angels look like. White robes, golden light, enormous wings and a beautiful, impossibly serene face. Angels appear in paintings, Christmas decorations and countless movies as comforting beings, guardians who descend from Heaven when humanity needs help. Even when they possess incredible power, that power is reassuring. They are the good guys. They belong to Heaven and that place is supposed to be safe. Horror has a much more interesting way of looking at them. The angels described in some of the oldest religious texts are not nearly as comforting as the figures that…
Horror has always had a complicated relationship with the calendar. Halloween may be its most obvious holiday but the genre has never really belonged to October. Ghost stories have been told by fires, monsters have stalked snowy landscapes and some of the darkest tales ever written have arrived wrapped in Christmas imagery. This year, that relationship feels particularly apparent. The upcoming horror slate isn’t simply offering another collection of films designed to fill theaters Halloween weekend. Instead the genre seems to be stretching onward, bringing together body horror, gothic nightmares, ancient folklore, supernatural horror and some decidedly dark takes on…
With Robert Eggers’ Werwulf coming to theaters this Christmas, the werewolf is once again stepping out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Set for release on December 25, 2026, Eggers’ latest horror films promises a brutal and dark take on the creature. The story is centered on devotion, damnation and the devil within. Starring Aaron Taylor Johnson, Lily Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe, Werwulf takes place in medieval England, returning the werewolf to a time long before Hollywood had settled on all the rules associated with the beast. The werewolf has never really gone away. For more than…
There are few things more unsettling than realizing something enormous is moving toward you and knowing there was nowhere to hide. A strange shape appears on the horizon, rising above the trees and buildings and at first the mind struggles to understand what it is seeing. Then the shape moves and the truth becomes impossible to ignore. It is alive, impossibly large and whatever stands between it and its destination may not survive the encounter. This is the basic fear at the heart of Kaiju horror, a genre built around creatures so enormous that humanity’s usual defenses suddenly seem very…
Horror movies are supposed to make us afraid. The killer is coming. The monster is on the loose. Something horrible is waiting in the dark. But sometimes, the character we want to see most suffer is not the one holding the knife. It’s the person who has been driving us crazy for the last hour. Every horror fan has encountered them: the whiner, the bully, the fanatic, the manipulator or the person determined to make a bad situation even worse. They aren’t always villains and they aren’t always bad people. Sometimes they are simply so irritating that when the…
High school is supposed to be about finding yourself. Horror movies, however, have spent decades suggesting that the real trick is surviving everyone else while you do it. That might be why high school and horror go so well together. You already have cliques, bullies, humiliations, gossip, impossible expectations and the constant pressure to try and figure out where you belong. Add a monster, a murderer or something crawling around in the basement and you’ve barely changed the atmosphere. The best high school horror doesn’t always need a haunted locker room or a demon hiding in the gymnasium. Sometimes the…
If you watched the Insidious movies as they were released, you didn’t exactly watch the story in the order that it happened. That isn’t a criticism. In fact, it’s one of the things that makes the Insidious franchise so much fun to unravel. The first movie hit theaters in 2011, followed by Insidious: Chapter 2 in 2013. Then the series jumped backward for Chapter 3 in 2015 and The Last Key in 2018 before jumping forward again with The Red Door in 2023. Now, Insidious: Out Of The Further arriving in 2026, it’s time to put those pieces in the…
The most frightening of stories are not always about what is lurking in the shadows. Sometimes the true terror comes from watching someone lose their grip on reality. A person who can no longer trust their own thoughts, memories or perceptions can be far more unsettling than any creature or masked killer. Madness is terrifying because it turns the familiar into something dangerous. The best psychological films don’t simply show a character going insane, they take the audience along for the journey. As the protagonist’s world begins to fracture, viewers are forced to question what is real and what is…
Every few years, Hollywood gives us another Dracula, another haunted doll, another werewolf, another demonic possession. While some of these films are fantastic, horror often returns to the same familiar monsters instead of exploring the rich folklore that has terrified cultures for centuries. Across Europe, Asia and beyond, folklore is packed with creatures so disturbing they make modern movie monsters look tame. They aren’t misunderstood antiheroes or tragic villains. They’re embodiments of famine, disease, nightmares and humanity’s oldest fears. Yet for some reasons that are hard to explain, most have never received the big screen treatment they deserve.…
Every generation of horror fans has its icons. Dracula stalks the dark castle. Freddy Krueger invades our dreams. Jason lurks at Camp Crystal Lake and Michael Myers silently awaits in the shadows. Yet before horror gave us unforgettable villains, it gave us something far more terrifying – the natural world. Long before the first horror novel was ever written, people feared the earth beneath them, the water surrounding them, the fire that could consume them and the air they depended on to breathe. Ancient civilizations viewed these four classical elements as the building blocks of existence. They created life but…
In horror, the most dangerous thing you can give someone is not your life. It’s your trust. Horror movies have taught us that love can be many things: passionate, obsessive, eternal and occasionally something that ends with a body count. While monsters hiding under beds or killers wearing masks get the most attention, some of the most terrifying figures in horror are the people who start out saying the right things. They bring flowers. They whisper promises. They tell you they love you. Then they betray you, manipulate you, murder your friends or turn your relationship into a nightmare you…
“Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.” Wes Craven Horror has always been a genre where the rules are different. In almost every other type of film, a lack of money, questionable special effects and an absurd premise are considered weaknesses. In horror, those things become part of its charm. A movie with a massive budget and a team of hundreds of artists can also become part of the charm. Those films sit on the same shelf as a low budget creature feature with a ridiculous idea and a dream with both finding an audience. That is because…
Few figures in horror have a history as old, and as complicated, as the witch. Long before they appeared in movies, witches haunted folklore, religious beliefs and the fears of ordinary people. They were blamed for sickness, failed harvests, deaths and misfortunes that had no other explanation. Whether they were viewed as servants of dark forces, practitioners of forbidden knowledge or simply outsiders feared by the community, witches became symbols of humanity’s fear of what could not be understood. The fears surrounding the witch were not limited to stories. Throughout history, accusations of witchcraft led to imprisonment, torture and…
Wrapped in brittle linen and hidden behind centuries of decay, the mummy has haunted our imaginations for generations. Unlike many horror monsters, it doesn’t stalk the living out of hunger or bloodlust. It rises because something sacred has been disturbed. That simple idea has made the mummy one of horror’s most enduring figures, reminding us that some things were buried for a reason. Ironically, real mummies of ancient Egypt were never meant to inspire fear. Mummification was an act of devotion, carefully preserving the body so the soul could journey to the afterlife. Tombs were built to protect the dead,…