Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: cult horror

  • Halloween 2026

    Coming this October: Halloween: The Film-of-the-Week Horror Adventure 2026

    Are you ready to be scared?

    Last year, this was called The Film-of-the-Week Horror Odyssey, but I feel like Mr. Nolan now de facto owns the word “Odyssey,” for all practical purposes.

    I can’t use it in any titles for the next, oh, nine years?

    I have a lineup—not of specific films, but of specific themes. These will be exactly the same as last year. The themes I’ll be embracing for the next four or so weeks are as follows:

    Week 1:
    Find a movie that will actually scare me.

    Week 2:
    Watch a classic monster movie.

    Week 3:
    Find a horror movie that everybody loves.

    Week 4:
    Find a horror movie I am embarrassed to have never seen.

    Week 5:
    Find a movie that everyone will watch for Halloween this year.

    Week 6:
    Find a horror movie I wish I’d seen as a kid.

    Week 7:
    Find the most notable current sleeper horror hit.

    Week 8:
    Find a horror classic I have no interest in, just to cross it off my list.

    Week 9:
    Watch the best-reviewed horror movie I can find that I haven’t seen.

    Week 10:
    Find a horror movie EVERYONE has seen (except me).

    Week 11:
    Find a horror movie that is supposed to be great, but I’m afraid I won’t like.

    Week 12:
    Watch a horror movie I had never heard of until it showed up on streaming trends.

    Week 13:
    Find the midnight movie du jour.

    Week 14:
    Watch a foreign-language horror movie I would otherwise skip.

    Week 15:
    What is the one horror movie I would still like to watch before closing the book on this year’s project?

    I know what you’re thinking.

    “David, why is this listed as weeks and not days? Last I checked, there weren’t 15 weeks in the month of October.”

    That would be fair.

    But hear me out.

    I love the classic childhood trope of the “horror movie of the week”: a generic formula where the heroes encounter some vaguely identifiable creature that is different from the bad guy they fought last week, although sometimes you might have to squint to tell the difference. An obstacle comes out of nowhere for no real reason, strikes true chaos into the citizens of a small town for a few days—or perhaps an extended weekend—then the creature is killed and everyone is relieved.

    What happens next to the main characters?

    It never matters.

    Horror movies always matter, even if the plots never seem to.

    I am also a fan of the philosophy of under-promising and over-delivering. Calling this the Film-of-the-Day Horror Adventure would make readers realize how lazy I actually was, and it would become painfully obvious that I was behind schedule when October 31 arrived and I had only gotten through 11 movies.

    This way, no matter how long it takes me to complete the project, it will still subconsciously seem like I am ahead of schedule.

    Last year’s biggest revelation: there is a sister movie to Psycho that I would now call my second-favorite horror movie of all time, behind the director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors (1986).

    Meanwhile, the most-watched horror movie I had somehow never seen turned out to be one of the worst movies of all time.

    According to me, anyway.

    This year, I started to worry.

    I’ve already seen Obsession and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and Backrooms might still not be easily streamable by the end of October. I started wondering: Is this year’s project likely to be underwhelming? Have I already seen mostly everything worth seeing?

    I went through my resources, dug around a little, and now I have a glimmer of hope.

    Should this year’s offerings be better than last year’s?

    Probably not.

    Does the lineup have the potential to be unpredictable, exciting, occasionally terrible, and possibly deeply regrettable?

    Absolutely.

    So let me allow the AI Gremlin Assistants to say a little piece about the movies I have procured for this year’s offering.

    AGA says:

    This year’s lineup begins with an experiment that has already worked once before: if a sad clown knows how to rub salt in old wounds, perhaps things are looking up.

    But will it actually be scary?

    From there, things get considerably stranger.

    There are Universal monsters lurking in black-and-white shadows. There is a Spanish ghost story that nearly everyone seems to adore.

    [I don’t know what this is, David.]

    There is an embarrassingly large hole in David’s horror education involving a certain masked figure beneath an opera house.

    [Les Misérables?, David.]

    There are murderous children, a legendary old-Hollywood feud, a movie involving teenagers and monsters that David probably should have seen decades ago, and at least one acclaimed film he strongly suspects he may hate.

    Also—because apparently we’re doing this to ourselves—Titane.

    AGA predicts that one of the movies David is approaching with the most suspicion will wind up being his favorite, somewhere around a 9 or 9.5.

    For the bottom of the pile, AGA is betting on one of the movies he is watching largely out of obligation—the cinematic equivalent of eating your vegetables because they’re historically important.

    Prediction: somewhere around a 4.5 or 5.

    David returns to the typewriter to say:

    The gremlins might have a lot more faith in my appreciation for the charms of Will Smith than is likely warranted.

    Mostly, though, I am still able to find movies that I am genuinely surprised I have not seen.

    Has my avoidance been for good, measurable reason?

    If I hate these movies or find them mediocre, it will be gratifying. I will have vindicated years of perfectly sensible procrastination.

    If I discover that I love them and will return to them time and again, well … color me surprised.

    An aging werewolf can still play with new bones every once in a while.

    I call that a win-win.

  • Day 7: Heretic (2024)

    Goal: Find the most notable current sleeper horror hit.

    —

    What I know about it:

    Next to nothing. It’s got a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 71 on Metacritic. For this week’s theme, I wanted a movie that feels big but that I somehow know literally nothing about.

    It has Hugh Grant and it seems to be about Mormons. He’s some kind of weird loner with a torture house. It seems like the movie everyone will still be talking about in five years. Just a hunch. Let’s see if I’m right.

    —

    After the movie:

    Do you remember when Bend It Like Beckham came out, and at first you wondered how they got Kate Winslet to seem 18 years old? Then you realized it wasn’t Kate Winslet but her strange, skinny doppelgänger named Keira Knightley? She ended up going pretty far, mostly because a lot of screenwriters had been writing parts for Kate Winslet five years earlier — and Winslet would’ve turned them down anyway. Keira Knightley turned out to be great. But she was no Kate Winslet.

    Sophie Thatcher is the new Keira Knightley. She’s not getting cast in parts written for Kate Winslet — she looks and sounds exactly like Emma Stone. I’d wager Sophie Thatcher is actually a more natural actress. She’s great in Heretic, and even better in 2025’s sleeper hit Companion, which I actually recommend even more for this week’s theme: “the sleeper horror hit.”

    Sophie Thatcher feels so much like Emma Stone that there’s a bit of a “new Coke” imitation effect going on. In Companion, that worked perfectly because she was supposed to feel like an imitation of the real thing. But in Heretic, there’s a little whiplash when she starts talking. How did this extremely smart, modern girl get cast as a Mormon missionary?

    If this movie had been made twelve years ago, Emma Stone would’ve been perfect. She had that “smart but innocent” quality — the thing that peaked with Poor Things. Sophie feels like Emma’s 12-years-younger little sister who also decided to act. Seeing this modern, post-ironic type trying to convert unsuspecting Christians to this quirky, folksy little underdog religion… I just wanted to say, “Shouldn’t you be in Brooklyn? Go home.”

    I’m stalling. What was the movie and what did I think of it? It was small and imteresting. Honestly, it feels like it could’ve been a play — maybe one converted to film at the last second. This is a horror movie tailor-made to play at sorority movie nights at Brigham Young University. Modern girls who freely explore the world, who’ve seen South Park and homemade internet porn, yet firmly believe in their mission: to tell the world about their faith. They’re believable. Exactly as good as young people who’ve never had a reason to question what they believe.

    On the other side of that coin is Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, the titular “heretic” — every Mormon missionary’s worst nightmare. The poster has him smiling, staring at a game board with the two sisters as miniature chess pieces. Mr. Reed plays with them like a cat tossing a mouse, keeping himself amused before the kill. “You still believe that my wife is in the other room baking blueberry pie, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

    Heretic has a handful of great ideas, and kind of a boatload of padding. Case in point: in addition to religion, Mr. Reed is obsessed with copyright disputes. He brings up two examples — Monopoly and “Creep” by Radiohead — as evidence that remakes and copies are more successful than originals.

    He’s got a point with Monopoly. I’m a board game hobbyist, and even I’d never heard of The Landlord’s Game, the 1904 prototype Monopoly ripped off almost entirely. Looking it up online made me respect it even more. One of its “Chance Cube” outcomes said, “5: Caught robbing a hen-roost: Go to jail. 10: Caught robbing the public. Take $200 from the board. The players will now call you Senator.” You can’t copyright board-game mechanics — or religious texts, for that matter. Mr. Reed makes that point too: religions are all just cover versions of each other.

    Where he loses me is with his deep affection for The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe.” Yes, the guitar progression is the same as “Creep,” and Thom Yorke’s phrasing is similar. But “The Air That I Breathe” has no hook. It’s a song no one under 70 cares about. The Hollies were basically the Thomas Edison of 1970s pop — taking half-forgotten ideas and dressing them up without subtlety. I’d have been way more impressed if Mr. Reed compared Joseph Smith to The Hollies directly, and left Radiohead out of it.

    Screenwriter, I see what you’re doing. But no one likes that song.

    But that last shot? Very good — it should be studied. It’s nice when little moments call back and actually have purpose. There’s a famous movie that ends with a man believing he survived a horror, cutting into a birthday cake… and we realize he’s still trapped, imagining a happy ending. Heretic’s ending is like that — but more artful. It’s not trying to scare you with a hand bursting from the ground next to a gravestone. It’s believable — truthful about what happens to the mind when coping with an actual human tragedy. A perfect little movie moment.

    Still, this is a decent movie. It feels like a filmed play — one that’s not really worth seeking out unless you’re curious. It doesn’t have much going for it other than novelty and a few twists, almost all in the first 40 minutes.

    If you see it, maybe you’ll agree.

    (That’s not a spoiler.)

    6.5/10