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Like anything in Hollywood, the found footage genre needs to constantly evolve or risk feeling stale. Ever since The Blair Witch Project both tricked and terrified audiences with its innovative marketing campaign, the next generation of independent filmmakers have attempted to replicate the film's success with varying degrees of triumph. On one hand, movies like Josh Trank's Chronicle have excelled by combining found footage's gritty realism with the CGI-saturated superhero genre, while Cloverfield expanded on The Blair Witch Project's horror by combining its intimate perspective with the dispassionate destruction of a sci-fi monster film. However, fans searching for a more subversive installment in the underrated sub-genre should check out 2018's Butterfly Kisses, a largely overlooked horror film guaranteed to make you blink.

Directed by the late Erik Kristopher Myers, the film combines the supernatural elements of The Blair Witch Project with the documentary format of found-footage classics like Lake Mungo and the more recent Horror in the High Desert, delivering plenty of terror and thought-provoking fright throughout its 91-minute runtime. Although the lack of a broad theatrical release meant Butterfly Kisses didn't initially reach a wide audience, the film's premiere on streamers nonetheless garnered a small group of extremely positive reviews and a 100% Critics' Score on Rotten Tomatoes, solidifying Myers' movie as a hidden gem which deserves more attention...

Ewwwww, this list is going to be gross. Like, looking under a rock in your backyard and looking at all the creepy crawlies beneath, except that rock is actually your ribcage and the creepy crawlies are your freaky guts, gross. Having a body is terrifying! Let the 10 best body horror movies of all time prove it...

• Crimes of the Future (2022)
• I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
• The Exorcist (1973)
• Raw (2016)
• Alien (1979)
• The Thing (1982)
• Annihilation (2018)
• The Substance (2024)
• Videodrome (1983)
• The Fly (1986)

The new micro-budget indie movie Falling Stars is billed as folk horror, and the premise makes it clear why: It’s a story about three brothers who take a trip into the desert to disinter a witch’s corpse, and end up unleashing something frightening. But the film — produced, directed, written, edited, and shot by Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki — taps into a very different species of spookiness than you might expect from that description.

Falling Stars feels more like a UFO or alien-abduction story. The movie doesn’t deal in the creepiness of the dark woods, the muddy hamlet, or the haunted manor: Instead, it taps into a wide-eyed fear of the open sky at night. While watching it, I was often reminded of another low-budget production from a few years ago, Andrew Patterson’s excellent 1950s-style UFO throwback The Vast of Night. That’s a much better-made movie than this one, but Karpala and Bienczycki have found such a unique blend of genre flavors in Falling Stars — witchy folklore with starlit, they-came-from-above terror — that it’s worth checking out...

After a hard day's editing articles about three Disco Elysium spiritual successors - each more politically outspoken than the last, in a kind of Sophisticated Pooh collage of escalating Marxism - I like to kick back with a nice chill game about Lovecraftian space monsters.

That game is Konafa Game's Starless Abyss - a roguelite tactical deckbuilder published by Descenders and Yes, Your Grace outfit No More Robots. It puts you in command of a fleet of upgradeable spaceships, who must chase away invading Eldritch aliens hex by hex... and also, hex by hex. This is both hex-based and a game in which you can cast hexes, you see. Oh, don't look at me like that. I had to distil several manifestos into an article half-an-hour ago. I need this.

In Starless Abyss you play a Proxima, the possibly-human agent of a motley crew of scientists and occultists called Counter Horror. There are five Proximas in all, each with different skills and attributes. There are over 160 cards to discover, divided between six faction groupings, and each campaign run spans three acts with several randomly selected bosses. Visually, it's a writhing pixelart buffet of toothy tentacles and flying eyeballs and spacetime rifts, set to menacing chipset. Here's a trailer...

Scream TV, the free new horror channel launching on Oct. 13, just announced a spooky programming run for its launch.

Per a press release, “Halloween is finally on the horizon and Scream TV’s Oct. 13 launch is just around the corner. The brand new, free-to-air and free-to-stream (or scream!) TV channel dedicated to horror will be bringing viewers the very finest in horror entertainment from around the globe as well as celebrating the golden years of genre cinema. So get ready for the dark ride of your life, and don’t forget it’s all free to view.”

For launch month, Scream TV is running some titles as seen on Variety‘s recently-published 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time list, including “Halloween” and “Freaks,” classics like “White Zombie” and “The Last House on the Left,” essential cult titles like “Motel Hell” and “Demons 2” and more recent fare like “Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire” and “Restitution.”//

Additionally, there are multiple themed blocks during the week, including:

• Weekdays: Classics
• Mondays: Chris Alexander’s Sinister Cinema
• Wednesdays: Elvira‘s Movie Macabre
• Fridays: Fright Premiere, Late Night
• Saturdays: Frightfest Saturday Scares with Alan Jones
• Hammer Sunday

Through the years, the horror genre has evolved into various outlets and formats, giving its fans a plethora of options to choose from when they want that occasional ghost story or entertaining scare. Television has taken the genre by storm with countless series, including anthology horror series which reign as some of the spookiest and scariest contributions to the iconic genre.

While the serialized series is always enjoyable, the beauty of the anthology formula is the consistent unpredictability and guaranteed variety that keeps audiences hooked. There are some notable series, such as Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Netflix's Black Mirror that occasionally toe the line of horror, but both series, as excellent as they are, fall more into the science-fiction category compared to others like Tales from the Crypt and American Horror Story. Both series are phenomenal sci-fi anthology series, but when it comes to more horror-filled television series, there are some that simply stand out with their level of chills and thrills...

• 'Goosebumps' (1995-1998)
• 'Are You Afraid of the Dark?' (1992-2000)
• 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' (1955-1962)
• 'Creepshow' (2019-2023)
• 'Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities' (2022-)
• 'Masters of Horror' (2005-2007)
• 'Tales from the Crypt' (1989-1996)
• 'Channel Zero' (2016-2018)
• 'Night Gallery' (1969-1973)
• 'American Horror Story' (2011-)

THE RESURGENCE OF FOLK HORROR—an ancient subgenre of horror that concerns itself with nature and the attendant superstitions that mankind has connected to it—in recent years has been largely cinematic in nature. Examples include Robert Eggers’s tremendous film The Witch (2015), or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), the latter of which owes an immense debt to one of the towering folk horror films, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973). This is a welcome change in the horror film landscape, though in my experience, in horror literature folk horror has never really fallen out of style. It’s always been there, though it’s been a while since it could be considered part of horror’s mainstream. One of the most recent folk horror novels to enjoy widespread success is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and that came out in 1983.

This hasn’t stopped serious horror writers from taking their own swings at it. One of the best and most prominent folk horror writers working today is the English writer Andrew Michael Hurley. Before turning to novels, Hurley published two collections of short stories, neither of which are easily acquired (I simply can’t find them, affordably priced or not). But since 2014, Hurley has written three novels, all of them folk horror: The Loney, Devil’s Day, and, most recently, Starve Acre (a film adaptation of which has been playing festivals overseas, to positive reviews). I’ve read all three, and I recommend each without reservation. Today, I want to focus exclusively on his second, Devil’s Day (2017), which I believe in some key ways is one of the purest, and most interesting, examples of folk horror that I’ve encountered in some time...

A British academic believes he has stumbled on the most world-changing piece of news in recorded history.

Professor Simon Holland, who has produced documentaries for NASA-funded projects including a project pinpointing Earth-threatening asteroids, says that two rival groups of astronomers are in a race to publish the first confirmed evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation.

He told The Mirror: “We have found a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and people don't know about it.” Simon explains that he has been given information by a contact within Mark Zuckerbeg's Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded initiative aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth.

And the news may come within the next month to coincide with the US election, he believes. He claims that astronomers within the Oxford-based project have identified clear evidence of transmissions from another world...

Team Firestorm is thrilled to announce that the narrative-driven gothic murder mystery Blood on the Thames will officially launch on October 24, with a demo being available to play during Steam NextFest, starting October 14. Releasing just in time for Halloween, the game invites players to solve perplexing puzzles, interrogate suspects, and piece together cryptic clues to uncover a chilling conspiracy. Steeped in Lovecraftian horror, Blood on the Thames tells an atmospheric tale of supernatural forces and a woman's relentless search for answers in a city gripped by terror...

... In the dark and dingy streets of Victorian London, Minerva Ernest has lived a peaceful life - that was until her husband's savaged body was found in the Thames River. Returning home after police questioning, Minerva discovers her maid collapsed in a pool of blood - sending the trajectory of her peaceful life into a terrifying spiral of death and destruction. As she digs deeper into these terrifying events, Minerva realizes that there is a sinister force at play, one that threatens the very beating heart of London itself.

As Minerva navigates the shadowy underworld of London, she must use her keen detective vision to spot crucial clues. However, it will be down to players to use their cunning and wit to understand how these strands might weave their way to the answers they seek.

A cast of captivating characters brings this world to life, but be warned that some don’t mind dirtying their hands to come out on top. You’ll have to build strong relationships to earn their trust and uncover new secrets. You’ll have to decide who has your back - or face the twisting, turning machinations of a cult whose goals are fixed on weaponizing an unknowable entity that could change the world forever...

Shudder has unveiled a new trailer for upcoming horror movie MadS – and it looks quite the drug-fueled nightmare...

The film, which was shot with just five takes captured over five days but unfolds in one uninterrupted shot, sees 18-year-old Romain (Milton Riche) pay a visit to his dealer in the hope of having a fun, trippy night. Things take a turn, though, when he picks up an injured woman on his drive home, an act that kickstarts a violent, surreal descent into bloodsoaked chaos. Watch the intense promo above.

"MadS is viciously bleak and yet, moments of sharp, wicked humor are embedded in the bloody momentum," writes RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico. "Horror fans always look for new ways to tell some of the most timeless stories, and I think they’ll flip for it. We've seen so many tales about the end of the world. We've never seen one quite like this"...

While there's nothing better than taking a trip to your local cinema to eagerly consume the latest in big-screen horror film - especially with the genre having served up so many great offerings in more recent years - there have been times when the small screen has played host to some truly terrifying horror pictures.

The term made-for-TV is one that may instantly scream low budget, low effort, and low quality to some, but that doesn't always have to be the case. For horror fans, the decades have seen the world of TV serve up plenty of fantastic movies - and that's what the focus is on here.

And for those wondering, Tommy Lee Wallace's 1990 take on It isn't included here. While that is a fantastic adaptation of Stephen King's source material, led by a magnetic, majestic, maniacal Tim Curry, Wallace's It is technically a two-part miniseries rather than an outright TV movie, per se.

So, with all of that in mind then, here are ten TV horror movies absolutely worth going out of your way to track down...

• Body Bags
• The Norliss Tapes
• Hotline
• The Curse Of The Blair Witch
• Psycho IV: The Beginning
• Ghostwatch
• Stalking Laura
• The Baby's Room
• Someone's Watching Me
• Ring (1995)

Horror movies have the ability to scare and exhilarate us in equal measure. Whether it’s a jump scare that leaves your heart pounding or the sight of something so disturbing it’ll give you sleepless nights, horror’s ability to present us with the most depraved aspects of humanity is what makes the genre so captivating.

However, no matter how traumatic the things we are seeing on screen, we can rest easy in the knowledge that no one in these movies is actually being harmed or in distress. Or so we’d like to think...

Throughout the history of cinema, filmmakers and actors have attempted to push themselves to the absolute limit in order to realise their vision. When it comes to horror, that can often mean raising the bar too far, leaving cast members emotionally devastated and struggling in their lives away from cameras.

Here are 16 horror movies so scary that even the actors in them were traumatised...

• Psycho (1960)
• Midsommar (2019)
• Halloween (1978)
• Possession (1981)
• The Birds (1963)
• Hereditary (2018)
• The Shining (1980)
• It Chapter Two (2019)
• The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
• The Blair Witch Project (1999)
• Alien (1979)
• Suspiria (2018)
• Martyrs (2008)
• Poltergeist (1982)
• The Amityville Horror (2005)