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 on 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.

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.

Cyberpunk 2077 film coming?

News via Empire

Frag you Shadowrun

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

(Assigned: Service pistol)

Personal Agenda

Bring the crew back safe. No mistakes.

Her second mission in charge of a crew beyond an atmospheric run... worrying this might be why they sent her.

Sophie Thatcher in The Boogeyman

Sophie Thatcher in Prospect

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.

Star Wars Episode X

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

Jim Henson at 90

And still baffling studio people.

Adapting a property that may not adapt

The Pod Universe and the creators’ predecessor Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe? look at cinematic universes, constructing settings for lots of stories, so the same kinda thing as an RPG setting and series / campaign planning.

And as we know some settings make better big settings than others.

Have you ever considered a setting and decided it really wasn’t viable?

Have you ever decided to go all in on that?

This week, a guest pitch for the Eraserhead Cinematic Universe.

Labelled The Worst Idea We Could Come Up With

With a chapter heading Why Eraserhead? Dear God, why?

“We are gonna try and do our best job with this terrible idea.”

Kinda makes me wanna...

Mission: Impossible at 60

Mission: Impossible first aired September 17 1966. A straightforward idea for a show even if the episodes often weren’t, the setup making a rotating cast for isolated episodes a key and advertised part of the design, full of charming gimmicks like the masks and “This message will self-destruct in five seconds” and an absolute all-timer of a theme and credits sequence. I’ve often said that the Tom Cruise movies are an adaptation of the credits more than the show.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark 4K

Raiders Of The Lost Ark was great in the new restoration on the big screen.

Of course it was also great the time I saw a thirty-year-old original print that had gone kinda sepia-toned. It fit really.

Coyote Vs. ACME AMA

Wile E. Coyote Reddit AMA

Hugo Awards 2026

Hugo Awards 2026 news at Reactor

As is traditional I am most invested in the Dramatic Presentation awards, have seen all the Long Form, a strong field and HELL YEAH SINNERS WON