Mass Effect: Universe trailer

This may be all we ever get of Mass Effect: Universe. Of course there’s a change.org petition.

BioWare

I would consider throwing private equity people out to be self defence.

Skating Polly

Hell yeah

My thoughts on the Vampires And Slayers miniatures

Crooked Dice, makers of the 7TV miniatures lines of absolutely not geek TV and film characters, having spent years in the 60s and especially the 70s and then advanced to the 80s with a couple of waves are now onto the late 90s after just one early 90s release. (I assume the 2000s will get one wave and the 2010s will be announced before they all come out.)

This new wave, Kickstarting soon, is Vampires And Slayers.

I was expecting something like this for a while now.

CD have a few designers with different styles. Some I really like, most of them leaning towards “true scale” with realistic proportions. (Like the official Buffy miniatures for the Unmatched skirmish game.) But others are in more traditional “heroic scale”, big heads and hands and dumpy bodies. These are “heroic scale”.

To the extent that they look like they're being viewed through a fisheye lens.

They probably look okay in actual barely an inch high size but, urgh, disappointed.

I wonder if you could edit the STL files to make them look more people-shaped.

Oh well. Saves me some money.

Violetta post-game thought

Since the Hunter: The Reckoning game was a miniseries we all went fairly broad with the characters. Connecting the idea of a spooky medium to the Hecata from Vampire: The Masquerade and Wednesday, playing her super deadpan and way too in-the-know, was a lot of fun but for an ongoing character I’d either:

A) Play it straight, fewer connections and jokes

or

B) Lean in even more, going with the Giovanni family name and an unedited appearance for reference

Depends on the game.

Weapons (2025)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 18 is Least Favourite Franchise and I’m not doing that to myself. Then Favourite Franchise which wouldn’t give me something new, then four days about different social groups. I could do these but, eh, time for things that don’t fit just because I want to watch them.

18.

Weapons (2025)

Trailer

Content warning for kids in danger

The second film by writer and director Zach Cregger opens with seventeen children leaving their houses at the same time in the dead of night and disappearing into the dark.

That trailer and the accompanying media campaign made the children disappearing look like the most ominous mystery, I was sort of expecting something like aliens. The title (and one image in a dream) suggests the subtext of school shootings as well.

But the film itself plays it as the start of an odd little fairytale, accompanied by a sweetly soothing George Harrison song.

The first bit of proper horror comes after, with the kids parents and the rest of the town demanding answers from their home room teacher.

Then it shifts perspective to one of the parents, and again to someone else, and again every twenty minutes or so, with chapter labels so it’s faster and more clearly noted than the forty-five-minute swing in Barbarian.

And due to stylistic choices and humour throughout, when we find out what’s going on it’s chilling for one sympathetic character but overall darkly funny.

The medium: HBO Max

Gameability: When we get to the unlikely teamup to investigate it swings that way.

Hunter: The Reckoning Portlandia session two

A cornered ghoul tries to talk his way out saying we should let him walk away and he won’t tell his masters:

“I’m sorry, just to be clear, are you threatening us?”

Visual references for the us being threatened:

Jenna Ortega as Wednesday

 

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as John Winchester in Supernatural

--

Freeing the trapped spirits of vampire victims, cleaned up after session version:

“The chain is broken! Those who wish to depart in peace are free to do so. Those who wish to act... are free to do so.”

Imagine a bass drop on the ellipsis, like when Lestat calls Claudia a very, very naughty little girl.

Big week

Three for three on weekly RPG sessions this week, and two for two on less than weekly ones, including the alternate Tuesday game being moved to the other alternate Tuesday for one night only. Now a bit socialisinged out, but in a good way.

Witchboard (1986)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 17 is “death by board game” and:

17.

Witchboard (1986)

Trailer

Having seen the remake on day 2, I spotted the original was available and so here we are.

Tawny Kitaen, mostly known to my generation as The Woman In The Whitesnake Videos, stars as a woman with a boyfriend and ex who used to be friends and the ex is really into Ouija boards. Though not into them enough to remember to take his home after a housewarming party. So she tries it alone which is a bad idea and various sorta-poltergeist-y sorta-possession-y problems ensue.

Unusually heavy on daytime horror scenes. though this may have been to save on lighting, the leads are fine if underwritten and the guys’ quarrel feels more high school than postgrad adult (but don’t quote Han Solo if you’re this much less cool than Han Solo) and the fun characters (Kathleen Wilhoite as a Cyndi Lauper styled medium and Burke Barnes as a detective who loves magic tricks as his Columbo shtick) only get a couple scenes each.

Seeing it after the remake explains a couple of the scenes there, but they largely worked in the remake as-is. The overheated shower works better here though!.

I will give it credit for a great evil joke fakeout which I loved when Buffy The Vampire Slayer did it thirteen years later, and I’m sure someone there saw it here.

The medium: Shudder

Gameability: Investigating a weird occult thing, colourful side characters, fairly straightforward answer, yesh. Maybe don’t use an actual Ouija board as a prop for reasons of taste.

They Will Kill You

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. 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 Whites 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 follow 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 spitting 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

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 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.

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

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 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 hits anticlimactic.

The medium: HBO Max

Gameability: A few games have audio handouts, and games by video call can be voice only.

Resident Evil (2026)

Resident Evil (2026) 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:

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.)

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...

Cyberpunk 2077 film coming?

News via Empire

Frag you Shadowrun

ALIEN GEAS 1.01

I managed to use a Joseph Conrad reference for the ship that’s already been used by a computer game and the latest RPG set. Doy.

Bit of Method play, ate microwave pasta on the way over.

Malignant

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

“Not so imaginary friend” and someone else checking the list on Bluesky reminded me of this:

6.

Malignant (2021)

Trailer

First ten minutes

James Wan broke out with Saw but is best known for mostly grounded gloomy-house jumpscare-y horrors like The Conjuring (boo) and Insidious, and with its ominous (but in this case actually relevant!) single-word title this seemed like it might be more of the same. But after some Fast & Furiousees and between the Aquaman films he felt like something a little different. Did it work?

That opening scene is a clear indicator of the tone he’s going for - the hospital that looks like the one from House On Haunted Hill 1999, the melodramatic straight-to-camera delivery of “It’s time to cut out the cancer!” He’s trying for something more Sam Raimi or Joe Dante. But then the second scene introducing our hero Madison (Annabelle Wallis, again demonstrating she would have been a great lynchpin of the Dark Universe if it had gotten past The Mummy 2017) establishes a familiar gloomy old house and a grimly realistic starting setup for her. So are we in for a fun ride or not?

And the film pretty much stays like this. The villain Gabriel is purposely absurd but when he’s not in action things stop being heightened enough to fit, and the result is just... odd.

The medium: Prime

Gameability: The setup of someone seeing murders as they happen and trying to deal with that is a great hook. Just choose a tone.

D&D MTG Union

The D&D and Magic teams join United Wizards Of The Coast.

Sign the petition to have Wizards recognise the union.

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.

Hunter: The Reckoning Portlandia session one

During a matter-of-fact discussion of vampires:

Mark, college student trying to understand monsters rationally:

“I’m sorry, I must have missed the ghosts and goblins class at school.”

Violetta, spirit medium from a family connected to a clan of vampires:

“You must not have gone to Catholic school.”

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