Occult

Marrowbone (2017)

I very much recommend Marrowbone, a visually splendid example of gothic storytelling, and I want everyone to see it.

Then you can tell me what happens at the end! Send your theories to horrificflicks@gmail.com.

Written and directed by Sergio Sanchez, it’s a tragic romance, a ghost story, and a murder mystery centered around the reclusive Marrowbone siblings, who live with their ailing mother on her family’s tumbledown estate in Maine.

The family has fled England, leaving behind their father Simon, a prodigious murderer, and all-around evil bastard, to rot in prison while the remains of the family strike out for the New World.

Jack (George MacKay) is the eldest son, tasked with keeping the family together at all costs, as instructed by his bedridden mother Rose (Nicola Harrison), shortly before she shuffles off her mortal coil.

Fearing that the Marrowbones will be divided up, Jack, Billy (Charlie Heaton), sister Jane (Mia Goth), and youngest brother Sam (Matthew Stagg), continue to insist that Rose is alive to any interested parties.

The most interested party is Tom Porter (Kyle Soller), a nosy lawyer handling the transfer of the estate over to the now deceased Rose, necessitating Jack and Jane to forge documents and lay claim to ill-gotten family funds.

Tom proves to be a recurring problem, because he’s also got a thing for Jack’s beautiful neighbor Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Which is too bad, because Jack saw her first!

As if that crisis wasn’t enough, their notorious daddy escapes from prison and soon tracks down his absent kinfolk!

Marrowbone is a gorgeous movie to watch, like Terrence Malick’s classic Days Of Heaven. Sergio Sanchez photographs the dilapidated mansion with natural light making it into both a living place filled with new opportunities, and a sepia-toned memory in Jack’s mind.

The cast really brings it, with Mia Goth standing out as the sensitive sister with her own tragic backstory, and Anya Taylor-Joy exudes unwavering love and support for the troubled Marrowbone clan.

Allie’s devotion is one of many questions that will occur to wide-awake viewers, and to the best of my knowledge, Sanchez offers only hazy clues leading to dark possibilities. The lack of concrete answers might sink a lesser film, but Marrowbone is worth puzzling over on a number of fronts.

If it was merely a well-made gothic ghost story, then that would be the end of the discussion. However, that there continues to be Reddit debate as to what actually takes place onscreen, nine years after its release, is evidence of a movie with genuine staying power.

Join the discussion and get back to me, please.

Bring Her Back (2025)

There is a bottomless well of sorrow in Bring Her Back. It belongs to Laura (Sally Hawkins from The Shape of Water), a foster mom with an occult agenda that requires real sacrifice.

This soon becomes apparent to her latest charges, Piper (Sora Wong) and her step-brother Andy (Billy Barratt), after their Pops cracks his coconut in a tragic shower fall.

Laura lives on a decaying MCM estate in rural Australia, with her stuffed dog, Pom Pom, a cat named Junkman, and her mute son, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). While she clearly adores Piper, a legally blind girl, Laura doesn’t care for her protective older brother, who wants full guardianship when he turns 18 in a few months.

But a few months is ample time for Laura’s deeply demented strategy derived from browsing some quality Russian Dark Web videos on the subject of resurrection.

Fresh off the success of their debut Talk To Me (2022), Aussie siblings Danny and Michael Philippou have landed another emotional whopper. In both films, the meticulous character development is every bit as important as the rising menace. It’s a simple equation: Better written parts result in more audience buy-in.

Piper and Andy squabble adorably, but their loyalty to each other is sorely tested by Laura, a master manipulator, and by the frighteningly feral Oliver. Philips will surely win Best Performance By a Creepy Kid in a Horror or Drama feature.

He sinks his teeth into the role and never let’s go!

Yet it’s Sally Hawkins’ harrowing madness that fuels Bring Her Back. Laura is terrifying in her fanaticism, and also somehow sympathetic, because her sense of loss is demonstrated so profoundly over the film’s running time.

These are unhappy campers. Laura’s grief has defined and ruined her, turning a mother into a monster willing to inflict harm on children, just so she can have another shot with her own deceased daughter—currently residing in a freezer.

The intricacies of Laura’s ritual and the growing discomfort of Piper and Andy is a tough pill that might need a gallon or two of water to get down. Bring Her Back is a gripping piece of cinema, but the human devastation depicted will likely not inspire multiple viewings.

Buckle up, there’s no escaping this trip to the trauma dump.

Strange Harvest (2024)

What happens when all the clues point to the stars?

Cleverly disguised as a true-crime documentary, Strange Harvest unfolds around a pair of Inland Empire detectives on the trail of an extremely fiendish serial killer known to the fearful public as Mr Shiny.

Writer-director Stuart Ortiz has an infallible sense for the trappings of true crime television, designing a mockumentary that clears every hurdle of credibility.

From the sad parade of victim friends/relatives grieving for an off-camera journalist, to police body cam footage that gets mighty hairy, Ortiz gets all the familiar elements exactly right, further blurring the reality line.

Most significantly, the soul weariness of the cops (played by Peter Rizzo and Terri Apple) is entirely convincing as they painfully recall every harrowing step of their pursuit of Mr Shiny (Jessee Clarkson), a phantom butcher whose murderous motives and penchant for occult ritual defy ordinary reason.

Borrowing a page from the Zodiac Killer’s stylebook, Mr Shiny, aka Leslie Sykes, taunts the police with lunatic letters, signed with a mysterious tripod symbol that also shows up at the disturbing crime scenes.

Any reader of Lovecraft will recognize the red flags that pop up during the course of the investigation (Shambler from the Stars? Mysteries of the Worm?), leading inevitably to a showdown during a cosmic event that only happens every 800 years.

And wouldn’t you know it? The sacrifice of an infant is required. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait till the stars are aligned to reap this Strange Harvest. It’s on Hulu and it’s a lulu.

Bad Fish (2024)

If Shadow Over Innsmouth was adapted as a Grade-Z horror film, it might play out something like Bad Fish, written and directed by West Coast indie filmmaker Brad Douglas.

Filmed for measly money over a two-year period in locations near Brookings, Oregon and Crescent City, California, Bad Fish follows alcoholic marine biologist John Burton (Jonny Lee) on a quest for clues in a remote coastal community where fishermen’s body parts keep washing ashore.

After confabbing with Sheriff Porter (Mark Schneider), Burton examines a mangled torso and concludes that this was no boating accident. But it wasn’t a shark either, he decides.

Giant squid? Not known to inhabit these water. And what’s driving away all the salmon?

Turns out it’s all the work of Abby (Abby Wathen), the beguiling bartender at the local boozer, who comes with a whopper of a backstory. Seems when she isn’t mixing martinis, Abby is the leader of a nasty deep-water cult in search of fresh blood (and other fluids).

Despite a few too many talky scenes enacted by amateur thespians, Bad Fish is an admirable, atmospheric, small-town mystery that concludes with Burton getting left without a leg to stand on in a very bad domestic situation.

Not to worry, Douglas has Bad Fish II in the works, so maybe someone will throw the poor sap a lifeline.

Just don’t buy him socks for Christmas.

Weapons (2025)

And now, the rest of the story.

If we examine Weapons alongside Zach Cregger’s previous oddball odyssey, Barbarian, what we’re seeing is the emergence of a different school of narrative filmmaking, in which a mystery morphs into a profound horror.

Both movies feature people disappearing under outré circumstances, and the subsequent investigation, told Pulp Fiction-like in chapters from assorted points of view, reveals the “monster” lurking at the center.

In Weapons, an entire classroom of children awaken in their beds at 2:17 am, leave their homes, and go missing. Only their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), and a single student, Alex (Cary Christopher), were unaffected by this strange occurrence.

Justine bears the brunt of her community’s rage, but the real story unfolds quietly around Alex, and the coincidental arrival of his eccentric Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) into the family home.

Recounting plot details diminishes the wonderful WTF factor at work in Weapons. Letting the story open up and swallow you is the correct path forward, as the interested parties play their parts in nonlinear fashion, leading to another shit-crazy finale full of strange shots and unhinged images you aren’t likely to forget, such as a pack of possessed children pursuing Aunt Gladys through an entire neighborhood of homes and their stunned denizens.

As for Madigan’s very specific portrayal of the uniquely wicked Aunt Gladys, it’s the stuff of nightmares, a thermometer-shattering motherlode of malevolence. Small wonder that Creggar is busy working on a prequel based on Gladys’ origin story.

The horror that lives beneath the surface in Weapons, has to do with influence, and the impossibility of truly knowing one’s neighbors and what they’re up to. Anyone can wake up weaponized.

So basically, no one is safe, not even in their own home with Mom and Dad.

Creggar’s roundabout approach to the genre trumps traditional terror tropes at every turn. And that’s reason enough to to see Weapons, post-haste.

Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project (2025)

Layers upon layers upon layers.

Writer-director Max Tzannes opens Pandora’s Box in Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project, and what emerges is a very entertaining hot mess.

As we’ll see, there are no other outcomes possible.

See if you can follow this. Chase Bradner (Brennan Keel Cook), a low-budget filmmaker, makes commercials for used furniture salesman Frank (Dean Cameron).

Chase and Frank decide to make a found footage horror film about Bigfoot that somehow attracts the attention of a French documentary crew that tags along for the ride.

Funding for the movie comes from a $20,000 loan from Frank’s dotty client Betsey (Suzanne Ford), under the condition that her favorite actor, Alan Rickman, will play the lead. This becomes especially difficult when they figure out the actor passed away eight years before.

Chase and Frank are under the impression that they have secured the talents of Daniel Radcliffe to act in their feature, but he turns out to be a chick named Danielle (Rachel Alig).

The location, a remote time-share cabin belonging to the parents of Chase’s girlfriend and producer Natalie (Erika Vetter) appears to be inhabited by a demon from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead universe.

Add to that a conundrum straight out of Waiting For Guffman, when it proves too dangerous to have anyone running about in the meticulously made Bigfoot costume after the first actor is shot by a hunter.

It’s to his credit that Tzannes manages to keep most of his subplot balls in the air. We actually care about Natalie’s growing frustration with Chase and her budding romance with his best friend Mitchell (Chen Tang), despite the silly chaos erupting all over the place.

Natalie gets respect points by being the only adult on the set capable of seeing the big picture, but her boyfriend is too preoccupied with his vanity project to pay attention.

And it all builds to what is called the Grand Jubilee, a surprisingly downbeat WTF ending, that explains why no bodies were ever found.

Yep. You should watch it.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

Camping and looking after someone else’s kids? There’s a pair of concepts I find extremely disturbing!

Director Roxanne Benjamin and writers T.J. Cimfel and David White definitely know how to create the potential for a scary experience as they put two couples into a paranormal powder keg and hand a book of matches to some thoroughly corrupted moppets .

In There’s Something Wrong with the Children, Ben (Zach Guilford) and Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) are cabin camping with longtime friends Ellie (Amanda Crew) and Thomas (Carlos Santos), and their two kids Lucy (Briella Guiza) and Spencer (David Mattle).

While exploring some industrial ruins nearby, Lucy and Spencer become fascinated with a mysterious well found on the abandoned property. And by fascinated, I mean hypnotized and enslaved by a malevolent entity, who soon has the little rug rats doing the devil’s business, which primarily consists of driving Ben loony.

Not that they had to drive very far.

The most rightfully horrifying element at play here, are the malicious kids. Lucy gads about in a red devil hoody, evil-eyeing everyone in sight, and her younger brother shows genuine promise as a budding psycho killer.

There is much subtext given over to the topic of Breeding versus Not Breeding, and the latter wins by a country mile. As evidenced here by a reasonable body count, expanding your brood beyond the number two is like inviting Evil to share your campfire and sharpening them up a weenie stick.

Margaret becomes the de facto Final Girl and she’s not a very good one. But by the end of the movie it’s apparent that she has finally resolved any conflicts she may have had about family planning.

It’s a middling effort, let’s give it a C (see).

Frailty (2001)

The late Bill Paxton (1955–2017) will always be remembered for his distinguished genre credentials. As the not-so-brave Private Hudson in Aliens (1986), he got all the best lines, including “Game over, man!”

A year later he was part of a kick-ass vampire gang in the criminally underrated Near Dark, reunited with his Aliens costars, Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein.

Still not impressed? How about this action? Paxton is the only actor to play a character killed by a Predator (Predator 2, 1990), a Xenomorph (Aliens) and a Terminator (The Terminator, 1984).

Serious respect!

In Frailty, Paxton directs and stars as a mild-mannered mechanic who becomes a divinely inspired killer after a visitation from an angel.

Rather than keep this to himself, he awakens his two young sons Fenton (Matt O’Leary) and Adam (Jeremy Sumpter), informing them that they will be helping Dad destroy demons in human form.

Adam, the younger son, is gung-ho to please his avenging father, while older brother Fenton doesn’t like the idea one bit.

Too bad the Lord’s will must be served.

The brothers’ upbringing is recounted years later by a grown-up Fenton (Matthew McConnaughy) to incredulous FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), who reluctantly gets reeled into a twisted tale of a family under the dominion of a terribly unbalanced man.

As a director, Paxton imbues Frailty with a naturalistic, small-town feel that makes the episodic violence particularly jarring. As an actor, he delivers a nuanced, but emotionally reserved performance that evokes a little sympathy and a whole lot of terror.

Anyone expecting the unhinged Hudson, or perhaps the belligerent bully Chet from Weird Science will see nothing of the sort here.

By the time he locks Fenton in the basement for a week (no food, one glass of water per day) in an effort to drive out any demonic influences, the horror has gotten uncomfortably real, as Paxton dons the face of unblinking fundamental fanaticism, reminiscent in tone of Kevin Smith’s Red State.

Bill Paxton’s ability to goose the tension as a filmmaker in Frailty, is more than matched by his extraordinary performance as an ordinary man called upon to serve God by fighting evil.

But it’s not easy. Just ask Abraham.

Sinners (2025)

Enthusiastically recommended and watch out at awards time!

Sinners is the fifth collaboration between writer-director Ryan Coogler (Creed, Black Panther, Fruitvale Station) and star Michael B. Jordan, and it’s an epic whopper of a movie with a blistering blues soundtrack and a depth of soul not typically found in an era of easily disgested entertainment options.

Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Jordan) return to Clarksdale, Mississippi—after working for Al Capone’s mob in Chicago for seven years—determined to open a juke joint, a place where hard-working sharecroppers and field hands can be free to eat, drink, and dance the night away.

The brothers have contrasting demeanors, but their ambition, to own something free and clear that’s designed to serve the black community, is helped greatly by the large amounts of cash they’ve brought back from the Windy City.

Smoke recruits his former lover Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a New Orleans hoodoo practitioner, to cook catfish for the crowd, while Stack hustles hooch and henchmen in an effort to keep the peace in their new joint.

On opening night, the club is jammed with folks stomping away to spirited music provided by guitar prodigy Sammy Moore (Miles Caton) and blues elder statesmen Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo).

Coogler is in absolute artistic control of the frenetic proceedings, and the verve and excitement he is able to capture during the dance sequences is unreal. We’re talking mesmeric scenes flowing so organically they’re worthy of repeated watches on their own.

While patrons shake and shimmy, Coogler enlarges the cultural lens to include a heartfelt vision of artists—past and future—caught in the dervish rhythms of the juke joint, and the effect is breathtaking.

“Blues weren’t forced on us like that religion,” Slim tells Sammy. “We brought this with us from home.”

Just when we’re having a peak cultural moment, a trio of vampires disguised as itinerant Irish folk musicians, crash the party and a bloodbath ensues.

There is no reason to believe, as some grumpy critics have implied, that Sinners unexpectedly goes off the rails at this point. Coogler doesn’t bring in the undead as a deux machina or as a concession to a larger, edgier demographic.

The taking of blood and the quick assimilation (exploitation) of blacks into a “protective” white society is a historical hot-button issue at play in Sinners, but it’s far from the only one.

There’s subtext and pointed references worth investigating everywhere, including a mysterious connection between the Choctaw Tribe and Irish immigrants. It’s all intentional on Coogler’s part, as he dares us to consider alternative histories to the ones we’ve been spoon fed.

Visually, musically, and dramatically, Sinners kicks more ass than a 1000 superhero flicks. Add yours to the queue.

Ouija: Origin Of Evil (2016)

Prolific genre dynamo Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, Oculus, Dr. Sleep) created this prequel to Ouija (2014), and consensus opinion holds that Ouija: Origin of Evil, is far superior to its predecessor, though that may have more to do with the “meh” quality of the original material, rather than an auteur’s magic wand.

We travel back to the year 1967, where widowed mother Alice (Elizabeth Reaser) makes a modest living as a phony fortune teller, aided in her deceptive practices by daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson).

Alice and eldest daughter Lina consider adding a Ouija board to their seance shtick, but all too quickly this occult stepping stone gets a grip on Doris, the youngest, resulting in a once-innocent child playing host to a number of spiritual entities, good and bad, including her late father (good) and a fiendish Nazi doctor (bad).

Flanagan and cowriter Jeff Howard weave together enough plot points for seven sweaters, but don’t sweat the details. Ouija: Origin of Evil is trademark Flanagan territory, as a fractured family faces a perilous paranormal presence coming from inside the house.

The technicians Flanagan puts to work on his projects are first-rate, intuitively establishing the tone, time, and terroir in which his particular domestic terror can take hold of hearts and spines.

Here, art director Alberto Gonzalez-Reyna and cinematographer Michael Fimognari mute the sunny ’60s California scenery in dark shades of green and gold, so wardrobe colors appear especially vivid and blooming—a keen counterpoint to the carnage being carried on behind closed doors at the local fortune teller’s house!

Despite being a minor entry in Mike Flanagan’s filmography, Ouija: Origin of Evil is a compelling and highly watchable film in its own right, and needn’t be seen in the company of any other Ouija entries in the hopes of additional illumination.