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Beast (2022)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Feline Fright

Okay, doing this prompt straight up.

Having already had a killer magic kitty on day two, I go more mundane - and bigger.

5.

Beast (2022)

Trailer

The one where Idris Elba fights a lion.

A recently widowed father brings his kids on a family bonding photo safari with an old friend and it goes wrong because there’s a rogue lion on the loose. First they find he’s wiped out a village, the group get separated, having to use the butt of a tranq rifle when the rogue gets too close breaks it, there are poachers, only short-range walkie-talkies work...

A lot of it is done in big long tracking shots, some edited together expertly from smaller pieces, to give the sense of movement and that the rogue could be anywhere. And it mixes the wide open landscape with being stuck in the ATV from an inside POV.

And we get a normal lion pride to contrast the rogue with, which is a nice touch.

It’s generally really well done, with one major issue - the lion looks fake a lot of the time. Which kinda kills it.

The medium: Prime

Gameability: A one-shot with an unprepared group up against just one monster?

Vampire LARP one-shot systems

A request for help with a first Vampire LARP reminded me that, as an observer from a safe distance beyond one-shots, I actually know a bit. Published LARPs, variant systems and the like. Might as well put my links here.

By Night Studios have resources (enough to run a V20-era LARP with a tablet) as well as a quickstart and Storyteller advice.

Published adventures, not many but mostly available on DriveThruRPG

Some free unofficial ones, among other genres

The really really system as used in End Of The Line and Enlightenment In Blood, nice and simple.

Vampire: Empire 2026 1

Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition

Empire

1. In The Blood

Daisy, Toreador jazz singer and club owner

Silas, Ventrue enforcer

Jesse, Tremere phlebotomist and Circulatory System supplier

Emmet, Hecata researcher

(Echo, Malkavian fortune teller)

New York City.

The equinox, the end of summer, and Kindred in good standing are invited to the ballroom of the Delancey Hotel for an open court with the Prince.

Daisy and Silas hunt in or near her club - Daisy so impresses her victim that he might be a problem later.

Jesse and Emmet deliver blood to a non-Camarilla vampire called Franklin. He seems on edge, but then that’s normal for the trade... right?

The court is busy, maybe thirty vampires and various in-the-know mortals. One notable absence is Ella, head of the System.

The Prince has a warning, and a request for assistance with a hint of a possible favour in return. A new drug has hit the club scene, and Kindred who drink from its users find themselves agitated, tense - reportedly some are overcome by their violent instincts.

Daisy offers to help and... shall we say encourages the others.

Saint, Host of the Rack, confirms there was an incident in one of its clubs, and Thea, host of Paradise Lost, advises them to check with the Anarchs.

Before they can leave, the Malkavian Harpy Colette approaches, clearly shaken by a premonition that Daisy might be another victim soon, three nights from now. Something involving a vampire called Dane that none of them know, and someone else that she can’t see.

Jesse knows the best place to contact Anarch leader Stirling. He arrives soon after being contacted, like he was expecting someone to visit, and takes the group to a lockup nearby.

In a locker bolted to the floor, a vampire lost in a berserker rage...

The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

The fourth prompt is “A-lister’s early horror role” and yes I’m going to slightly cheat again, going for an early short from a writer and director who is still in the fold.

4.

The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)

Official site

A short film by Robert Eggers, seven years before The VVitch, and he’s already very recognisably himself. An adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, almost a silent film most of the way through, some scenes warmed by candle and firelight but otherwise nearly black and white. The most early-work-is-different is the old man being a puppet, which doesn’t work for me at all but I do admire the can-do spirit.

Also not the strangest adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart I’ve seen thanks to the sorta-animated short narrated by James Mason.

The medium: Vimeo

Gameability: low.

Tales Of The Lost Shepherd

The space opera part of the Pod Universe moves from imaginary movie to imaginary TV series. And due to the request for predictions, fame at last!

AfrAId

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Day three is Tech Terror, and hey, I have something relevant I hadn’t gotten around to watching:

3.

AFRAID (2024)

Trailer which shows a big escalation more than halfway in

John Cho (who already starred in the online nightmare Searching) and Katherine Waterston play a couple given a test drive of a new AI home assistant for them and their kids, and it’s everything an actual AI assistant could be for good and ill as you can guess by it being in the horror watchlist.

Smart houses running amok has been a fear since before smart houses were even a thing - like the 1947 cartoon about mice trying to move into a Home Of Tomorrow and having to escape various automated defences and appliances - but this is when they’re starting to become a real thing.

And AIA learned about humanity from the internet like Ultron and so has some opinions about us as a result. (The credits montage features melty early genAI people and looking up subjects like history leading to a Hitler jumpscare.)

At under an hour and a half it feels like an episode of Black Mirror that isn’t quite cynical enough about human nature. And some of these concerns have panned out, but some are so notably lacking as to make this film from two years ago feel quaint.

AIA can manipulate people casually but only the children love it, for one thing. It has to force adults to serve it instead of having the actual cultists it likely would. (This seems like a particular oversight as that was a plot point in the likes of Person Of Interest already.) Maybe writer and director Chris Weitz just ain’t cynical enough, despite how this ends.

So seeing this now it exaggerates plenty of things a real AI could do that our present slop can’t while missing threats we have already.

(And at no point do we hear about its power consumption.)

So it’s an interesting window into a future people were scared of a while ago that isn’t as bad as we actually have.

Oof.

The medium: Netflix

Gameability: One of the early TOON adventures is based on that home of the future cartoon. Outside of that though, a GM could present an all-setting threat really easily - indeed it can be tricky for players and GMs not to act on information their characters don’t know - so an NPC who can sense everything the PCs do and feel would be no trouble at all, the issue being deciding what, if anything, they can’t act on.

V5 Empire references

Some from New York By Night and other official sources, some old friends

Camarilla

Outsiders

The living

Strangers

Small tweak, use Rebecca Ferguson as Hellene

Hail to the Prince

Witchboard (2024)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Day two is Bad Remake. And I’m not planning to watch a bad remake on purpose. So I noticed this is free on YouTube and heard the originals aren’t great (with a reminder on the RPGnet thread) and remembered the trailer looked like goofy fun so...

2.

Witchboard (2024)

Trailer

Film

Is it a good remake? Couldn’t tell you. Is it good on its own merits? No. Is it fun? At times very much so.

Director and co-writer Chuck Russell previously made the 1988 remake of The Blob, which is really good but eclipsed by the classic original, and which worked because it was focused. This is... not.

A pendulum board (not a Ouija board - the film spends some time establishing that this is Serious Business and Ouija boards aren’t, after the original was about a Ouija board but they now have their own official movies) made by a 17th century witch is stolen from a New Orleans museum on the orders of an occultist wannabe supervillain, gets lost and finds its way to our heroine after she follows a cat in the woods. After her boyfriend’s fortunately well-informed ex explains it, she tries it at the pre-opening party for the boyfriend’s restaurant and it’s interrupted by a burning crow coming down the chimney.

This is not enough to put her off testing it, and the next thing it does kills one of their friends. The cat returns and steals his severed hand. This cat is horrible, he’s great, no notes.

Various other bad things happen, starting as low-rent Final Destination ish coincidences and segueing into nightmares and the like. And then our heroine starts being sorta evil herself, which at least leads to the cat killing her former drug dealer. (Seriously, love this cat.)

So the ex suggests consulting an occult expert and oops it’s the supervillain. This goes badly, in a way that’s normally the final twist of a movie but here hits an hour in, which I really liked.

It avoids my pet hate of having witch hunts be justified by actual evil superpowered witches by making the witch take a turn to superpowered evil after being hunted and persecuted, then later has the ex assure the boyfriend that Wicca is cool and the supervillain’s friends are good witches, which the audiience already know they’re not. The fact that his minions look like a Vampire LARP could qualify as a hint.

So the board does a whole slew of supernatural bad stuff without picking a lane, Madison Iseman as the heroine (who should know better than to mess with magic boardgames after the Jumanji sequels) and Antonia Desplat as the villainess both get to show acting range and Jamie Campbell Bower as the villain gets to show off his lack of same.

The effects people are very busy, this would make a good film to put on the background of a Halloween party except that guests would sometimes pause to go “what the fuck” at some of the images. At one point a hallucination looks like the Pitch Meeting video essay thumbnails, which makes me wonder if this was an attempt to get one made. And there’s a related moment which is a reminder that Russell also directed The Mask.

It’s an absolute mess full of half-baked ideas that could have worked. Recommended if you feel like being perplexed and occasionally amused, sometimes deliberately.

The medium: YouTube

Gameability: This already feels like a horror game that went totally off the rails. I could grab several of its barely-used setups for something World Of Darkness and some get accidentally Buffy-ish.

I also liked the villain’s backup plan for dealing with the heroine’s boyfriend:

It! The Terror From Beyond Space

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Okay, going to use the Nightmare On Film Street 31 Days list as a springboard to avoid a total blank page but not adhere entirely to it, as it’s more for picking old favourites than going into the unknown, and indeed I’ll start by flipping #1 upside down for something I haven’t seen before.

1.

It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958)

Trailer with black on grey near subliminal titles

Nobody appears to have claimed that $50,000, presumably because going to Mars would cost more than that anyway.

The “Rad Remake” prompt suggests a remake you already know is good and I wanted to start on something new to me. And I just rewatched Alien last week because I'm getting a chance to play the RPG so I thought reverse it and watch one of the things it's half a remake of, along with Planet Of The Vampires which I got to see last year as well as two A. E Van Vogt stories as well as the work of people who were actually involved.

In the thrilling future on 1973, a mission to Mars ended in disaster and now a second mission has come to retrieve the sole survivor for court martial, accused of murdering the rest of the crew. Which is a great hook but also a very expensive dedication to giving him a fair hearing when pretty much everybody believes he’s guilty.

What actually happened is that “It” killed the crew, and snuck on board the new ship. Possibly a survivor from an ancient Martian civilisation (so not from beyond space, but never mind) It now craves moisture. They figure this out reasonably quickly and spend the rest of the film trying to get rid of It. It’s pretty tough - resistant to bullets, grenades and the radiation from the ship’s engine. (Good thing the ship is tough too - at no point do any of the compartments depressurise.)

There's a lot of The Thing From Another World here, with the lumbering take on the monster, the difficulty of killing It and some distrust among the crew.

It itself is pretty disappointing. The look is fine, especially when initially in shadow, but Ray “Crash” Corrigan plays It much like he often played gorillas, making It too expressive to seem really threatening. At one point It puts a claw to its chin to show it’s thinking, which is kind of adorable.

The gender politics have not aged well, two of the crew are women and one of them is medical officer but they both serve dinner and coffee for the men, but at least the alternate poster showing It carrying one of them doesn’t actually happen - It carries off quite a few of the men instead. (The Thing From Another World was better about this seven years earlier so that’s no excuse.)

Favourite bit that didn’t get into Alien - one of the crew is cornered but has a flamethrower, so he’s stuck there fending It off for quite a while, getting increasingly cranky over the radio as he waits for rescue.

I also liked the lack of sound in space, though the electronic music cue gets really repetitive - and it didn’t help that Sam Raimi used something very like it in Evil Dead II when Ash is alone in the cabin and dealing with the empty rocking chair, and my mind will take any excuse to think about Evil Dead II.

So not a huge fan, but it has some nice moments of its own as well as the bits Alien reused, and the quickly discarded initial setup is great too.

Gameability: small group of people in an enclosed space trying to get rid of a monster, yes that's gameable.

31 Days Of Horror 2026

Here and on RPGnet for more discussion

So far I have no plan beyond catching up with some 2026 releases.

Maybe stealing this will help...

Thanks to Aaron de Orive for putting it up.

RED LIGHT

Parks newly updated with bat-friendly red lights. I approve of course, but the effect is... I don’t want to say “hellish” but...

At first glance it seems like maybe it's a fault.

But no.

RED

You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
designed and directed
by his red right hand

ALIEN PLAYER CHARACTER

Player character number 1 anyway

Dean

Officer

Attributes

Strength 2

Agility 3

Wits 4

Empathy 5

Skills

Heavy Machinery, Stamina, Close Combat

Mobility 1, Ranged Combat 1, Piloting 1

Observation 1, Comtech 1, Survival

Command 3, Manipulation 2, Medical Aid

Talents

Frontline Leader

You get +2 dice to COMMAND rolls to rally a broken character

Equipment

IIC Flight Officer Licence

IRC MK.50 compression suit

Seegson P-DAT

Personal Agenda

Bring the crew back safe. No mistakes.

A L I E N W A T C H L I S T

Okay, have now rewatched Alien and Aliens, Outland, the cutscene movie of Alien Isolation, watched the cutscene movie of Alien: Rogue Incursion and videos about how ALIEN Evolved Edition plays, reread Dark Horse Aliens v1 and 2. That’s probably enough homework to play.

The Tyrant Philosophers RPG playtest

The Tyrant Philosophers RPG playtest signups are now open for the Handiwork Games adaptation of the novels by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Mage: The Ascension mic drop

Snooty member of the Akashayana, Cara’s Mage Tradition of martial artists from 1883: “Let us see what our Tradition learns in the next century. That they let someone like you claim their name.”

Cara: “Well, I don’t wanna brag. So I’ll just kick your ass and you can draw your own conclusions.”

Hell yes proud of that one.

Star Wars Episode X

Director Jon Watts directed Skeleton Crew, writer Simon Kinberg co-created Rebels. Which are the most useful good credits.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Empire 2026

Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition

Empire

When I am through with you
There won't be anything left

We have...

A Toreador jazz singer turned club owner looking for the soul in music

A Ventrue former labourer looking to move up in the world

A Malkavian seer looking to make a buck with their gift

A Tremere phlebotomist looking for independence from the blood trade

A Hecata scientist looking to challenge death itself

I’ll have to be sure to connect the first three and last two so this doesn’t feel like two games at one table. (Still better than five one-player games!)

Looking to be a less scruffy bottom rung of the ladder game than usual. I’m sure there will be plenty of ways to get them in trouble though, just starting in nicer scenery.

(Stopping myself putting the previous post to the tune of Leaving On A Jet Plane.)

T minus 24 hours

The character sheets are printed, the rulebook and dice are in the bag.

Now we wait.

Idea still nebulous, as “I’ll run this because nobody else is” ideas always are.

After last year, might go more episodic in case of player churn.

Very aware that I could readily do like three other games. But, eh, only one Sunday slot this year.