They Will Kill You (2026)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 16 is “rich people doing evil shit” and I have various options here due to how much evil shit rich people do. Ha ha.

But for something new, I already watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come in the cinema but not this:

16.

They Will Kill You (2026)

Trailer (red band with blood and swears and stuff)

Someone is trapped in a secure location with a bunch of rich Satanic cultists not very successfully trying to catch her as a human sacrifice in a funnily over-the-top violent way. Comparisons to Ready Or Not are unavoidable, not helped by release timing meaning I saw the trailer ahead of Here I Come, but the setup and style are different enough to stand out. Here Zazie Beetz as Asia Reaves is a Big Damn Hero waiting to happen rather than having to become one, less like the bride from Ready Or Not and more like The Bride from Kill Bill.

And there’s a twist the trailer didn’t let on.

YouTube has rearranged its page layout, presumably to annoy me.

Getting there.

Carrie (2026)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 15 is “Telekinesis” and I feel like it might be there because one of the big streaming releases for spooky season 2026 is...

15.

Carrie (2026)

Trailer

First episode free on YouTube

“This episode contains scenes involving bullying and a school shooting drill. Viewer discretion is advised.”

Mike Flanagan moves to Prime and takes Stephen King’s number with him, modernising Carrie as a miniseries. One of the main texts for high school horror, this version plays up the added horrors of social media, school shooting drills and more, and updates the isolated religious weirdness of Carrie’s family as doomsday preppers.

It’s generally well done if the subject matter isn’t an immediate nope. Until...

Those Who Wish Me Dead

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 14 is “Trashy Thriller” and this isn’t particularly trashy, and about as much action as thriller, but as noted before I didn’t want to go out of my way to find something bad:

14.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

Trailer with more Johnny Cash than the film (boo)

Put in a fire watch tower after a traumatising job gone wrong, the equivalent of a desk job for a smokejumper, Hannah (Angelina Jolie) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when...

... this run of personal connections seems unnecessarily complicated but here we go...

Her ex, Deputy Ethan’s (Jon Bernthal) brother-in-law tries to bring his son there for safety after his job puts them in danger from a criminal conspiracy.

Okay, that bit is kinda trashy.

The conspiracy sends a pair of assassins (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) after them, following a related assassination far enough away that he gets to hear about it. The assassins not unfairly observe that the conspiracy should have sent two teams for strikes at the same time, which isn’t enough to put me on their side as they casually kill innocent people but is an example of them being entertaining villains to follow. As this is somewhat like Die Hard In A Forest Fire that goes a long way.

And the connections beyond physical proximity and an existing level of trust that could have been fellow emergency response workers don’t really matter as, after the killers take out the father, the son flees into the woods and Hannah just happens to find him.

So now we have several sympathetic characters in different degrees of immediate danger as the killers try to find the boy through his uncle as well as tracking him. And start a forest fire to distract emergency services. Which gets real big real fast.

There are various smart moves and observations in among some over-the-top threats and twists - the assassins spotting a warning phrase right away, Bernthal getting a great “go on and kill me” type rant knowing he’s seen too much and trying to goad them into taking him out - in among some much sillier stuff like at one point somebody gets struck by lightning and that seems like the kind of thing that should matter in a story.

It’s all a bit off topic for spooky month, but does have some brutal violence, enough sympathetic characters that we’re not sure everybody will make it, a shortish very tense sequence involving a particularly sympathetic character in particularly high danger, and a huge natural threat building throughout.

The medium: Prime

Gameability: Survival horror/thrills out in the woods, being hunted and in various kinds of danger due to the environment. And as an aside, smokejumpers have that International Rescue swagger of modern heroes going into danger to help others.

A L I E N - RUN RABBIT RUN 1,02

Dean made her first Panic roll of the game on finding an animal testing subject in the vents.

VisionQuest

VisionQuest opens with a flashback explanation and then a massive location caption saying EDINBURGH.

So off to a good start.

Winnie-the-Pooh at 100

Like the acres in the wood!

Hell House LLC II and III (and Origins)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

13 is “hotel horror” and Shudder has the Hell House LLC series, of which I previously saw the first but Evan at Rocklin Graves says the fourth is good, so... kind of trudged through the second and third parts to get there.

13.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018)

Trailer

Hell House LLC III: Lake Of Fire (2019)

Trailer

Hell House LLC (2015) is a pretty basic found footage horror with the format twist that the poor fools going into the scary place are there to use it as the location for a haunted attraction. So is the creepy stuff we glimpse really creepy or pretend creepy in-setting?

And the opening moment, news reports and a customer YouTube video showing the crowd going through turning into a stampede to get out works really well.

Apparently the director’s cut adds more trilogy-related context but the original cut is less on the nose so I rewatched it. And then II and III are pretty damn on the nose.

II would have been enough to get me to stop without the promise of a better future instalment. A much more normal “go and look at the place we know is meant to be scary” found footage, that ends with a big theatrical villain monologue which explains lore best left vague. It also shows just how much the found footage format relies on acting as a couple of the performances let it down badly.

III swings back to the “use scary place for haunted attraction” setup of the original, with an immersive theatre show instead of a straight haunt, run by an eccentric genius who is also apparently one of the richest people in the world (this does not reflect my experience of the finances of immersive theatre companies) and carries along until an ending that certainly surprised me. It mostly struck me as funny and left me with some questions, both mythological and practical (does it apply to the victims in II who don’t get much of a mention?) but points for trying.

Will I watch the fourth after all this? Later, I guess.

The medium: Shudder

Gameability: Like a lot of found footage filming, haunted attractions and especially immersive theatre, this could easily become a LARP, and at times really feels like watching a recording of one.

Edit 27/10:

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023)

Trailer

Although the first has the best opening it’s my favourite of the four I’ve seen - a small likeable cast of not-all-on-board investigators in a less visually confusing location - but I’d still call it okay. And it would have worked better without the connections. Seriously, Immobile The Clown is NOT THAT SCARY. Even if you then break the rule like the Weeping Angels and have him move. And neither are a couple guys in robes.

There’s a fifth. I’m good.

Ten Thirteen

Happy 65th birthday to Fox Mulder, and happy series order announcement for the new take on The X Files from Ryan Coogler.

Vampire: Empire 2026 2

Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition

Empire

2. Release

Daisy, Toreador jazz singer and club owner

Silas, Ventrue enforcer

Jesse, Tremere phlebotomist and Circulatory System supplier

Emmet, Hecata researcher

Echo, Malkavian fortune teller

Jesse manages to extract some blood from Marcel, the vampire in frenzy since he ingested the drug through a victim. Echo is able to get a scent of the chemicals involved, and would be able to sniff out users.

Jesse brings the blood to his lab, analysis will take some time.

They confirm Echo can scent users with a visit to the Rooftop, the club on the Rack where Marcel hunted. They’re able to find a dealer, and Daisy charms him into arranging a meeting with his source, “the Professor”, the following evening.

Jesse compares the blood sample to the drug - it’s designed to excite and agitate human users... and one of its ingredients is a trace of Kindred vitae.

Meeting the Professor at one of the coffee shops in Grand Central Station the following evening, they talk their way into seeing the factory.

Daisy and Silas meet the Professor’s bodyguard at a long-closed video store. Echo, Emmet and Jesse observe outside, close enough for a signal.

Colette calls Silas’s phone as they approach to warn Daisy that this is where she meets Dane, and that they have to help “the woman in the chair”.

The Professor leads them in, and down to a basement.

Inside, strapped to something like a dentist’s chair, is what looks like a young woman totally drained of blood - but still moving.

“You wanted to know our secret ingredient.” The Professor locks them in.

The old edition is dying, and the new edition struggles to be born: now is the time of grognards.

Undertone

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

11 is “previously on the podcast” and I rarely listen to the podcast but there’s an obvious recent choice:

11.

Undertone (2026)

Trailer

Fake website with nice episode descriptions rather than audio but does have a creepy interactive Can You Hear Me bit

A creepy mystery podcaster listens to something she shouldn’t. In fact, nobody should.

Undertone started as an audio drama, and the emphasis on sound makes this clear, with the camera lingering and hints that you might see something off to one side being the main visuals. Since it’s mostly one actor (Nina Kiri) moving around her mother’s house (actually writer and director Ian Tuason’s childhood home) and talking to voices off it would also work as a play. As a film it’s a strong atmospheric buildup to an ending which is aiming for ambiguous but for me hits anticlimactic.

The medium: HBO Max

Gameability: The basic setup would work for a modern horror RPG, the occultist podcast could be a series premise. A few games have audio handouts, and games by video call can be voice only. But do you provide audio for the players to examine? And do you mess with it as they replay it...? Something like Alice Is Missing, where the players are around the table but communicate by text?

Resident Evil (2026)

31 Days Of Horror 2026

?

Resident Evil (2026)

Red band teaser

from co-writer and director Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) gives us as regular-person a view of a zombie apocalypse as Shaun Of The Dead, as medical courier and mostly good person Bryan (Austin Abrams) tries to get something important to a city being taken over by a mutagenic virus. He notably lacks the not-SWAT training of the original game heroes or the super-soldier-y of the previous film series hero Alice, so he makes mostly understandable decisions, humane as well as sensible ones, and gets into all sorts of the trouble as a result.

It escalates rather than taking swings with twists like Cregger’s previous films, stays close to Bryan’s perspective and sometimes his direct POV, and the first zombie is a great reminder of just how scary one zombie can be, especially when you don’t have the relevant context.

It mostly lifts monsters from the game rather than gameplay, though there is a (quite reasonable) search for ammo and a recurring gag about padlocks.

Heavy on the splatstick and other humour, I had a lot of fun with it, and I can see why people are saying Cregger would make a good non-serious Evil Dead movie, even without the bit where Bryan’s in a rustic cabin and the camera swings around for a closeup of a shotgun.

Only two really horrific moments, involving children, and those both land on a gag as well.

And I can include this in 31 Days Of Horror, somewhere.

The medium: The cinema!

Gameability: Yes.

Send Help (2026)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 10 is “Trouble In Paradise” which could be about relationship difficulties but is a bit much three days after Bloody Bride, or considering horror could also be about a war in Heaven. Or, hey, bad things happening (and interpersonal issues) on a remote tropical island:

10.

Send Help (2026)

Trailer

Brilliant but slovenly company cog Linda is passed up for a promised promotion by the former CEO by his son and heir, he reluctantly brings her on a business trip because she’s actually useful unlike the frat brother he gave her job to, and then the plane crashes...

Sam Raimi comes home to horror and yes we get some running POV shots, some Extreme Close-ups, some eye-gouging and quite a bit of unpleasant stuff getting flung in various character’s faces. But this is mostly about two characters getting along very badly. Sympathies shift along the way - if you want someone to really root for this not your show. But I laughed quite a bit, including a genuine roar at one point.

The medium: Disney+

Gameability: Generally this strong a PC v PC agenda base is reserved for one-shots.

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

We concluded the Victorian Age time travel miniseries and normal service may resume shortly.

It was touch and go but Cara managed to avoid having to become Queen of California.

The New Mutants

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Film 7 but entry 9, “PG-13” - wow, I have a lot of recent options, but have seen most of them. Mostly 15s here, some 12s.

(I will get to 7 and 8 with streaming trials.)

9.

The New Mutants (2018-20)

Trailer

An X-Men movie-verse spinoff with no recurring characters, mixing its superheroic zapping with a horror-tinged story taken from the comic.

Some newly-empowered mutants who all have tragic backstories are being trained / imprisoned in a dingy old hospital, and now having mostly backstory-related nightmares that start to affect them physically. In the meantime they have some understandable YA issues, do some The Breakfast Club stuff unsurprisingly, and make existing fans wonder why Illyana has Kitty Pryde’s sidekick dragon as a hand puppet and is being so racist.

An outright horror with superhuman characters in danger is an interesting take, but does the tone mix work? Not really, no.

Not helped by some choices like the TV showing Buffy, where this does work, including an episode which draws immediate comparison to a much less scary monster design used here.

The medium: Disney+

Gameability: The trick would be balancing the horror stuff and the heroic stuff so it takes a while to get to the big zappy final battle.

Jac Schaeffer's Stargate?

Amazon looking at Stargate again, this time with an outside group headed by Jac Schaffer of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. Which I like a great deal, as you may know. And she can certainly do a small cast going through portals to unfamiliar places and having adventures and snarking at each other.

Star Wars D&D and a campaign book

From New York Comic-Con, news of a Star Wars D&D rulebook and the preview of the campaign book Tyro Squadron Adventures

Yes you’re playing Rebels.

First thought: Darth Vader’s right there. Ever seen an RPG cover with a bunch of characters doing heroic poses and thought “They’re all gonna die next round” because of who they’re up against?

Oh well, at least it isn’t the FFG system.

Possession (1981)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 8 is Sam Neill. He was in a lot of genre stuff through his career. And I’ve seen almost all of them! But this is one that always sounded like not my kind of thing. So here goes.

8.

Possession (1981)

Trailer which shows the big reveal but with a lack of context

Neill plays Mark, who has been away from his Berlin-based family a bit too long for work, an assignment of some kind of espionage - this isn’t important until it becomes so again at the end. His wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has been seeing someone else while he was away. Mark spirals, considers cutting all ties with Anna and their son Bob, then sees she’s neglecting Bob and tries to sort things out, meets the supposed lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) and learns that she moved on from him. He has a detective follow her, and finds she has another apartment. And inside is...