The Scariest Things

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

In Ghost Game, a trio of mischief-makers stakes out an old manor with a dark legend surrounding it. Their goal: stay in the house without the new residents discovering them. Internal relationship conflicts, a disturbed resident family, and the potential of a supernatural haunt upend their Ghost Game efforts. A solid cat-and-mouse thriller with fun haunted house tropes propels this film, which was the centerpiece of the Portland Horror Film Festival.

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸, with sexual assault trigger warnings.

DID I?, the winner of the Portland Horror Film Festival's Goule D'Or (Best Feature in Festival) Award, takes an honest approach to the cruelty and ramifications of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The psychological thriller invests its time with Genevieve, a bookish junior editor at a publishing company who struggles with her alter ego, Stevie, who is a bit of a wild child. Her traumas are buried deep, and it puts several new wrinkles into the good/evil dichotomy that films that used what used to be called multiple personality disorder under the microscope.

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for copious comic gore

The Invisible Raptor is a crowd-pleaser, plain and simple. This spoof of Jurassic Park flips the script on the behemoth tentpole franchise by not trying to do digital dinosaurs at all. Instead, The team behind The Invisible Raptor did the monster movie without the monster, and it worked brilliantly. This is a meta-movie for the Easter Egg enthusiasts, but be warned, there is so much blood and shit in this movie that it isn't for the squeamish or the kiddos! (Though the twelve-year-old me would LOVE this movie.)

It was a dark and stormy night! Prepare to enter the foggy moor with The Scariest Things as we discuss the genre's roots in Gothic Horror, the ornate and narratively complex origins of horror film.

It has become something of a Hollywood crutch. The cynical amongst us consider prequels, sequels, and reboots to be lazy storytelling. Franchise horror comes in all forms. When obvious profits are predicted, big-budget studio films and straight-to-streaming B-movies fall into the same formula. Rinse, repeat, and rinse again. We think we can do this a little better.

At the Overlook Film Festival, The Scariest Things caught up with up-and-coming director John Rosman, who was on hand to present his debut feature film New Life. This thriller was a sleeper surprise at the festival. A political thriller that morphs into a toe-curling body horror show halfway through. The film is in limited theatrical release and can be streamed online now!

April means going to New Orleans for one of the best genre film festivals in the world and one of our favorites: The Overlook Film Festival. This year was a challenge for the festival as the 2023 SGA and WGA strikes had a diminishing effect on studio releases, the fest managed to pull in some terrific foreign films, and the short films shined too.

Spooky Time Episode 27: The Wheel of Misfortune is back, and so are The Jersey Ghouls!

Here, there be dragons! The deep ocean conjures up deep-seated fears. They call that Thalassophobia. It's real, and it translates to the movies. The Scariest Things enters the life raft and examines ocean-born horror in Episode 182!

The Scariest Things Podcast sat down with Diane to talk about her new film, horror comedy, Glenn Danzig, and her future horror projects!