gytrash

It’s October. Some of your neighbors will spend this, the official first weekend of spooky season, going all-out with inflatable yard skeletons and ghosts. They will embark upon the annual attempt to make candy corn, aka high-fructose ear wax, a thing. They’ll adorn their front porches with those cotton spider webs that look nothing like real spider webs and instead just make it look like they went and ritually murdered a white sweater so they could hang its dismembered corpse across their doorway as a grisly warning to all other knitwear.

For me, it’s a more simple, elemental formula: Hot cider, cider donuts, folk horror...

Rescue teams are searching for survivors after flash floods and landslides hit parts of Bosnia, killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more.

Construction machines worked to remove piles of rocks and debris covering the central town of Jablanica after the rainstorm early on Friday.

Huge volumes of rain fell in the area around Jablanica and nearby Konjic, causing sudden flooding that inundated people’s homes as they were sleeping...

... Human-caused climate change increases the intensity of rainfall because warm air holds more moisture. This summer, the Balkans were also hit by long-lasting record temperatures, causing a drought. Scientists said the dried-out land had hampered the absorption of flood waters.

Flooding was also reported in Croatia and Montenegro in the previous days but caused less damage and no fatalities.

Human remains have been found under the patio of a sheltered housing site.

Hertfordshire Police was called to St Mary's House, Hemel Hempstead, on Thursday after the remains were discovered by builders digging up the patio.

The force said officers were making inquiries as to why the remains, which they said were "very old", were at the site.

It’s 1933. The Oklahoma Panhandle is ravaged by dust storms and droughts so insidious that its occupants are forced to shelter inside, leaving them alone with nothing but a steady, seeping film of particulate matter and their thoughts.

This tension defines the crux of “Hold Your Breath,” a psychological thriller, and the feature debut from Karrie Crouse and Will Joines. Helmed by a lead performance from the reigning scream queen and "American Horror Story" alumn, Sarah Paulson, the film, which premieres on Hulu on October 3, is perfectly positioned to offer a novel take on gothic horror, down to its muted palette and stifling, isolated atmosphere...

Say this for The Platform 2: it gets right to it. Without so much of a recap of its predecessor – a sci-fi horror parable that became a Netflix hit a few years back – characters are debating philosophies of law and economics inside of 10 minutes. By the 40-minute mark, a major character has already committed self-immolation. It’s remarkably fast-paced for a movie set in a series of unadorned rooms that make up an enormous vertical prison...

Since it's the beginning of October, I thought it would be helpful to share what people believe to be some of the scariest movies ever created, just in case you're looking to have a frightful night in this month...

Kate Siegel is happy to get very real about extraterrestrial life very quickly. When asked if she believes in aliens, she offers a specific and chilling response.

“I’m a huge sci-fi reader…Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors of all time,” she says. “In the world right now there’s a lot of discourse about aliens being real. The needle is turning towards, ‘Yes, aliens exist.’ It’s a matter of when and where we will contact them, and not if they exist. I imagine that aliens are here on this planet and we’ll end up realizing it’s something obvious, like an octopus or a fungi structure is actually an alien that had been here forever. I think the most terrifying realization would be that they were under our noses all the time.”

This analysis makes Siegel the perfect contributor to “V/H/S/Beyond,” the seventh chapter in the horror anthology series, and the first solely devoted to sci-fi tales...

What started out as a woman thinking her house was haunted has now sparked a police investigation.

Katie Santry from Columbus, Ohio, took to TikTok earlier this week when she noticed her home office, including her laptop screen, was wrecked. Later, while attempting to put up a fence in her backyard, she and her boyfriend Brandon found a rolled-up carpet buried in the ground. Now, her videos have received millions of views on TikTok, as both Santry and the internet try to decipher her mysterious findings.

“Is there a dead body in that rug? Or is it the ghost of the rug’s past?” she questioned in one of her videos, adding: “My next-door neighbor also died in her house the day we bought this house last October.”

“That house started getting boarded up the same day this happened. So it was just a series of weird, coincidental events that, with a creative mind, could be construed as ghostly.”

Santry had enlisted help to dig up the rug in her backyard, but she later realized it was too long and received comments from TikTokers encouraging her to call law enforcement.

When the Columbus Police Department arrived at her home, they looked at the area and decided it was worth calling in an excavator to dig up the rug. However, after notifying the chief of police, it was decided that the officers could not deploy resources. It would be up to Santry to dig up the carpet herself and call them back if anything was found...

Absolution is the surprise fourth volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, which began with Annihilation and continued with Authority and Acceptance. The original trilogy was published in rapid succession ten years ago, all three volumes appearing in 2014, the same year that Adrian Collins founded Grimdark Magazine. It is thus a special treat to review this fourth volume of VanderMeer’s erstwhile trilogy in our tenth anniversary issue of Grimdark Magazine.

For the uninitiated, the Southern Reach series is a sci-fi horror centered on a mysterious coastal region known as Area X, where biological evolution has been accelerated in unexpected and terrifying ways, presumably due to extraterrestrial interference. Annihilation introduces us to an all-female team of scientists investigating Area X known only by their occupation: a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor. These four women comprise the twelfth expedition into Area X after the successive failures of all the previous missions. The second novel, Authority, turns its attention away from Area X to focus on the Southern Reach, the shady entity responsible for organizing these expeditions into the horrific unknown. The third book, Acceptance, has a broader scope, shifting among several different perspectives and timelines to provide deeper character studies, including that of the mercurial Lowry, sole survivor of the original expedition into Area X.

Jeff VanderMeer makes a welcome return to Area X with Absolution. This fourth volume of the series is divided into three parts, each leaning heavily into the cosmic horror aspects of the story...

There are some incredible monster movies that everybody will recognise, such as Alien, Predator, The Thing, and Frankenstein. Should you delve a little deeper, films like Pumpkinhead, Mimic, or Dog Soldiers may spring to mind.

The casual crowd may not have heard of those second batch of films, though any horror veteran worth their salt should be familiar with these classics. Such creature features failed to make a splash at the box office, but have since been elevated to cult status. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it's easier than ever to spread the word on an underrated monster flick to ensure it receives the love it's owed.

And yet, there are plenty of shudder-inducing features involving aliens, zombies, or even alien zombies that remain mostly forgotten. Despite boasting astounding visuals, nightmarish gore, and scares that are bound to last a lifetime, the entries on this list never broke into the mainstream.

However, it's never too late for a movie to develop a cult following. These beast-filled films may not be universally known, but they are overflowing with so much creativity and innovation, it's only a matter of time before they become iconic...

• Cub
• Late Phases
• Tales From The Darkside: The Movie
• Waxwork
• Grabbers
• Silver Bullet
• The Wretched
• Demons
• His House
• Tumbbad

Play as one of Empress Eleanor’s Five Knights investigating reports of a rebellious faction and a missing royal. Will you manage to ward off the Fog? Into the Fray is a fast action-shooter in the vein of Doom and Dark Messiah. The focus is on fast, bloody combat with satisfying feedback and environmental reactivity in a dark Lovecraftian story of civil strife. Into the Fray is part of the Skautfold Series and follows Usurper and Shrouded in Sanity but can be played on its own...

Social media platforms must restrict the use of personal data for targeted advertising, to comply with the bloc's regulatory law, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on Friday. The ruling comes as a blow to social media giant Meta.

Meta collects digital data of users of its social media platform Facebook when they visit other websites and use third-party apps, which allows Meta to personalize advertising.

But under theEU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies are obliged to adhere to the principle of "data minimization," restricting the amount and duration of data used for advertising purposes...