This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible, and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Oct 28, 2017
15 horror movies to stream this Halloween weekend
Focus WorldIt’s Halloween weekend and you’re tired of being outside in whatever thing you made out of tulle and duct tape. The CVS candy sales haven’t even hit yet. What are you supposed to do with yourself until nighttime, when, if you are an adult, you’re allowed to go inside a bar with spooky decor and drink hot cider with rum or something in it?
Read Article >How should you spend the hours until the costume party starts and you have to tape the tulle back on and stick your face in a bucket of water? Is there absolutely anything to do right now, other than search for scary playlists and curl up in a ball and cry and cry and gnaw on a caramel apple until your teeth start to come unstuck from your gums a little bit?
Oct 26, 2017
My Friend Dahmer will be an odd footnote on a Disney Channel star’s Wikipedia page
FilmRiseThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >It’s no fun to enter a movie-viewing experience asking, “Does this movie need to exist?” and I would never prescribe it as a habit. But once in a while, there comes a film that raises the question so forcefully, it’s impossible to ignore. My Friend Dahmer, an adaptation of the 2012 graphic novel by Derf Backderf (a nickname, but it’s in the film credits, so my hands are tied here), is one of these. It tells the story of Jeffrey Dahmer’s adolescence, from suburban mall humiliation to prom-night disappointment. Off-screen, Dahmer raped, killed, and dismembered 17 young men between 1978 and 1991, and was sentenced to 16 life terms in the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
Oct 25, 2017
The Book of Birdie imagines religious horror with glitter, gold, and open wounds
Image: Melancholy StarThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >Culturally, we don’t think enough about morbid girls. There aren’t very many of them in our movies, beyond the silent, violent ones Emily Yoshida described for Vulture earlier this year, writing about Logan, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones: “Their age and increasing silence has become a handy crutch for writers who might otherwise have a harder time bringing female leads to life.” Young women in movies tend to be just as confused as young men are, but with way less room to be super weird about it.
Oct 24, 2017
In American Satan, a rock band makes a deal with the devil, who also claims he founded Apple
Image: Sumerian RecordsThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >The trailer for American Satan was emailed to me in a typo-riddled press release promising a starring turn for Game of Thrones’ John Bradley, who plays Samwell Tarly. His character is named Ricky Rollins. If that was not already more than enough to sell me, American Satan is billed as a supernatural thriller about a rock band called Relentless, which makes a deal with the devil for fame, fortune, and to save Denise Richards from breast cancer. All they have to do is murder a rude competitor played by Nickelodeon’s Drake Bell, most recently in the news for sparring with Josh Peck about a wedding invitation snub, and endorsing Donald Trump.
Oct 19, 2017
Tragedy Girls is a lazy attempt at horror satire, redeemed only by how weird it is
Image: Gunpowder & SkyThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >Sadie and McKayla do everything together: homework, prom, cheerleading practice, after-school smoothies, dissing ex-boyfriends, murdering some people to get more followers on their joint Twitter account, etc. They tweet together from the handle @tragedygirls, posing as sweet and innocent — but simultaneously knowledgable and calm — bystanders of the gore plaguing their hometown.
Oct 16, 2017
Game of Death is a bloody horror flick with at least 24 murders
Image: Game of DeathThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >The horny teenagers gather in a big house in the woods, unchaperoned. The horny teenagers wear bikinis. The horny teenagers drink beer. The horny teenagers die. This is the plot of Sebastien Landry and Laurence Morais-Lagace’s Game of Death, which follows in the grand tradition of pubescent fornication slasher movies. It opens with a scene of a boy masturbating, and ends with a scene of extreme bloodshed. This time around, the killer isn’t a walking nightmare or a drowned camper in a face mask, but a board game. It’s like Jumanji, but much more likely to decapitate you.
Oct 11, 2017
Happy Death Day is a cynical, stupid-fun 13 Going on 30, but with murder
Image: Universal PicturesThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >What do you want from a horror movie? Is it horror? Genuine horror? If so, I don’t know, just look at the world around you instead. Because today, we’re here to discuss a horror movie that’s secretly about joy.
Oct 9, 2017
Super Dark Times is super dark, and the most honest teen movie of 2017
Image: The OrchardThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >Fall is a mood, obviously. The mood is a blaze of glory before a slow march toward death. Locations can also be moods, and the best horror movies I have seen understand this. Super Dark Times, the debut feature from director Kevin Phillips, takes its from a semi-anonymous suburb in upstate New York, which happens to be the same general setting that my adolescence took its mood from. It’s a place where glaciers carved out dramatic landscapes and dozens of lakes, and the dominant accessory for those landscapes is many hundred-year-old trees that turn briefly scarlet and then into skeletons. You couldn’t ask for a prettier horror movie mood, in my biased opinion.
Oct 3, 2017
Better Watch Out is a surprising, strange Christmas horror-comedy about idiotic boys
Image: Well Go USA EntertainmentThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >Christmas is scary. You’re waltzing toward credit-card debt and decorating your home with dried-out dead plants covered in electric accessories. You’re singing songs about infanticide and 400-pound animals that can fly. You’re expected to feel nothing but joy, but sometimes you feel sad or angry because the people around you aren’t behaving the way you want them to. Maybe you swallow that sadness alongside half a pound of fudge, or maybe you start acting like a total freak.
Sep 21, 2017
Friend Request is the goofiest internet horror story I’ve ever seen
Image: Entertainment StudiosThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >The most interesting thing about any teen movie is what it assumes about the world teenagers live in. Friend Request, a new horror film from German director Simon Verhoeven, assumes that they use Facebook.
Sep 5, 2017
Kill Me Please is a dazzling teen nightmare, and the first great horror film of fall
Image: Bananeira FilmesThis fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible, and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
Read Article >On its surface, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s debut film Kill Me Please is a serial killer movie. It follows a string of murders happening along the highways and in the vacant lots outside Rio de Janeiro. It includes the standard neighborhood paranoia of curfews, chaperones, radio hosts who bring up Ted Bundy, and candlelight vigils attended by neighbors and weirdos alike.