Horror Film Review: Other Mommy (dir. Rob Savage)

Posted on October 15, 2026 by Arleigh

“Sometimes I think about when you and I were one person, and it makes me so happy, I cry. Do you remember that?” — Other Mommy

Jessica Chastain is the only reason Other Mommy works at all, and even she cannot quite save a horror movie that turns a genuinely strong premise into something silly through its own adaptation. Rob Savage’s 2026 film is based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, and the source material’s central idea—a young girl discovers that the entity haunting her house looks exactly like her mother—is legitimately creepy and emotionally rich. The novel understands that a child’s fear of losing her mother, and a mother’s fear of being replaced, can carry an entire horror story. The movie takes that same foundation and rushes through it, leans into chaotic scares, and never finds a consistent tone, until the premise starts to feel ridiculous rather than frightening. What keeps it from being a total loss is Chastain’s double performance as both the struggling mother Ursula and the grotesque creature impersonating her. Without her, this would be an easy movie to forget. With her, it becomes a frustrating watch—good enough to keep you interested, bad enough to make you wish it had been better.

The story follows Bela, an eight-year-old girl played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who lives with her parents Ursula and Russ, played by Chastain and Jay Duplass. Their home is already unstable. The marriage is strained, the parents are distracted, and Bela is left to make sense of it all on her own. Into that environment comes Other Mommy, an entity that emerges from the closet wearing Ursula’s face. She does not simply attack Bela. Instead, she asks to be let into her heart, promising love and closeness while making it clear that refusal will have consequences. In Malerman’s novel, that setup works because the book takes its time exploring the psychological weight of it: a child caught between a mother who cannot fully show up for her and a monster who will happily pretend to. The film has the same ingredients but treats them more like a starting point for increasingly ridiculous scares than something it actually wants to sit with, and that is where the adaptation starts to lose the plot.

Chastain is the reason any of it works at all. Playing Ursula and Other Mommy gives her a chance to show two very different sides of the same face, and she makes the contrast convincing. As Ursula, she is tired, brittle, and emotionally unavailable in a way that feels believable even when the plot around her falls apart. She loves her daughter, but she is too overwhelmed and angry to show it consistently, and Chastain plays that failure without turning Ursula into a villain. As Other Mommy, she gets to go full nightmare fuel. The creature performs motherhood like someone who has studied it from the outside, smiling too widely, speaking in a warm but slightly off register, and moving with an unnatural confidence that makes every interaction feel wrong. Chastain understands that the scariest version of the monster is not the one that growls or lunges, but the one that almost gets the role right. She knows the words. She does not understand the feeling behind them.

That performance is what gives the film its few genuinely effective moments. When Other Mommy pleads with Bela to accept her, the scene works because the creature is both terrifying and pitiful. She wants to be loved, believed, and chosen, and she cannot comprehend why Bela would resist. There is something sad about that, and Chastain finds it without softening the character’s menace. She makes the entity feel like a desperate, needy thing wearing a mother’s face, and that is a much more interesting horror idea than the movie’s actual plot delivery system. If the film had leaned harder into that emotional contradiction and given it room to breathe, it might have come closer to capturing what makes the novel’s premise so effective. Instead, it keeps rushing past the interesting parts to get to the next loud, chaotic set piece.

That pacing is one of the movie’s biggest problems. At 93 minutes, Other Mommy moves fast, and not in a good way. It introduces the family’s problems, brings in the monster, and starts escalating the scares before the audience has had much time to connect with anyone. We understand that Ursula and Russ are unhappy, but we do not feel the specific weight of that unhappiness. We know Bela is lonely, but the film does not give her enough quiet moments to show what that loneliness looks like day to day. The result is a movie full of confrontations with the entity but very little emotional buildup between them. The family feels more like pieces in a horror machine than people whose survival actually matters, and that makes it hard to care when things go wrong. The novel earns its scares by making you care about the people first; the film skips that step and wonders why the scares do not hit as hard.

Savage’s direction does not help. He clearly likes big visual ideas, sudden movements, and scares that come out of nowhere, but the execution often feels more frantic than frightening. The creature design has some inventive moments—Other Mommy can stretch, contort, and squeeze herself into spaces no human body should fit—but the film rarely trusts quiet dread. It piles on noise, fast editing, and chaotic CGI effects until the tension flattens out. A scare that might have landed with a little patience becomes one more startle in a long line of startles. When the entity lingers at the edge of the frame, half-seen through a doorway or reflected somewhere she should not be, the movie creates real unease. Those moments are too rare. Most of the time, the film would rather show you everything immediately and hope volume substitutes for atmosphere, which is exactly the kind of choice that turns a creepy premise into a silly one.

The tonal swings make things worse. Other Mommy wants to be sad, scary, funny, and ridiculous all at once, and it does not know when to switch gears. There are sequences where the creature’s behavior becomes so exaggerated that it tips into camp, including a ball-pit scene that pushes the film into full-on absurdity. That campiness might work in a movie that fully embraces it, but this one keeps trying to have it both ways. It wants you to laugh at the monster’s physical comedy one minute and feel genuine dread the next, and the shifts are jarring rather than effective. The result is a film that never settles into a consistent identity. It is too silly to be truly scary and too serious to be fun camp, and that in-between space is where it lost me—and where it drifts furthest from the novel’s more controlled, unsettling tone.

The supporting cast does not do much to help. Duplass gives Russ a believable sense of helplessness, but the character is thinly written and mostly reactive. Karen Allen, Arian Moayed, and Dichen Lachman show up in roles that serve the plot rather than add dimension. Clark is better than the material deserves, bringing a real vulnerability to Bela that makes her more than just a screaming kid. She holds her own opposite Chastain, which is no small feat given how much the older actress is doing in every scene. But even a good child performance cannot fix a screenplay that does not know what it wants to say about the family at the center of the story.

In the end, Other Mommy is a movie with one great performance and an adaptation that takes a strong, genuinely unsettling premise and makes it feel silly through rushed pacing, chaotic direction, and tonal confusion. The idea of a mother-shaped entity trying to replace a child’s real mother is not the problem—Malerman’s novel proves it can be genuinely frightening. The problem is that Savage’s film does not know how to translate that idea to the screen without turning it into a series of loud, inconsistent set pieces. Chastain plays both sides of the dynamic with total commitment, and she is the only reason the movie stays watchable. It is not the worst horror movie of the year, but it is a disappointing one, because you can see the better version of this story trying to get out. If you watch it, watch it for her. Just do not expect the movie around her to hold up the way the book’s premise deserves.

Horror Film Review: The Batman vs. Dracula (dir. by Michael Gougen)

Posted on October 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“We cast kindred shadows.” — Dracula

Few Batman stories sound as wonderfully absurd as The Batman vs. Dracula, a 2005 direct-to-video animated film that pits the Dark Knight against literature’s most famous vampire in a Gotham overrun by the undead. Spun off from The Batman television series, the movie could have been a disposable Halloween cash-in, but it turns out to be a stylish, energetic, and genuinely atmospheric monster movie. It draws inspiration from DC’s Elseworlds graphic novel Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, and while it is not as dark or graphic as that comic, it understands why Batman and Dracula make such a natural pairing.

The film immediately separates itself from the more famous Batman: The Animated Series. This is not Kevin Conroy’s Batman, Mark Hamill’s Joker, or the sleek, noir-influenced world associated with Bruce Timm and Paul Dini. Instead, it uses the visual language of The Batman, the 2004 series that presented a younger, more athletic, and more stylized version of the Dark Knight. Rino Romano voices Bruce Wayne and Batman, while the character designs are longer, sharper, and more angular than the classic animated-series versions. The animation has a strong early-2000s action-cartoon identity, with exaggerated movement, dramatic camera angles, bold colors, and a constant emphasis on kinetic action.

That art style can be divisive, especially for viewers who prefer the timeless look of the Timm-era shows. Yet The Batman vs. Dracula may be one of the best possible uses of it. The story is not trying to be grounded or realistic; it is a comic-book monster movie. Gotham becomes a place of foggy graveyards, moonlit rooftops, blood-red lighting, underground tunnels, and shadowy streets. The film embraces vampire-movie imagery with enthusiasm, and its action scenes have enough movement and visual flair to make Dracula feel like a legitimate threat rather than just another costumed villain.

The plot begins with Joker and Penguin escaping Arkham Asylum. Joker immediately returns to causing chaos, while Penguin heads to a cemetery in search of buried treasure. In classic comic-book fashion, Penguin accidentally awakens Dracula, who has been imprisoned for centuries. Once free, the Count begins feeding on Gotham’s citizens and transforming them into vampires. He also hopes to resurrect his lost bride, giving the story a more personal and gothic motivation than a simple plan for conquest. Batman must investigate the disappearances, protect Vicki Vale, and find a way to stop an enemy whose powers push him far beyond the limits of ordinary crime-fighting.

The influence of Batman & Dracula: Red Rain is one of the film’s most interesting aspects. That 1991 Elseworlds graphic novel, written by Doug Moench and illustrated by Kelley Jones, imagined an alternate Gotham threatened by Dracula and his vampire followers. The animated movie does not directly adapt the comic, but it borrows its central idea: Batman confronting a supernatural outbreak that cannot be solved with fists, gadgets, and a few well-timed detective deductions. The film softens the comic’s darker horror elements for a younger audience, but the connection gives the premise more comic-book credibility than a random crossover might otherwise have.

Dracula is the movie’s greatest asset. Peter Stormare gives him a cold, aristocratic voice that makes him feel ancient, arrogant, and genuinely menacing. He does not behave like a generic monster; he acts like a ruler who sees humanity as prey. The film wisely gives him several moments where he overpowers Batman, which keeps the conflict from feeling too easy. Batman cannot simply throw batarangs and win. Dracula’s speed, strength, hypnotic abilities, and growing vampire army force Bruce Wayne to research, adapt, and prepare.

That detective element gives the film more structure than expected. Batman spends much of the runtime investigating strange attacks and disappearances, gradually uncovering the source of the vampire outbreak. Because he spends so much of the story on the defensive, the eventual solution feels earned. The movie lets Batman be vulnerable and clever rather than turning him into an invincible action hero. It is a simple approach, but it works well for a film that runs only about 83 minutes.

The supporting cast adds plenty of personality. Penguin accidentally releasing Dracula is a fun setup, and Tom Kenny gives the character a greedy, nervous energy that fits this version of Oswald Cobblepot. Joker receives the more memorable arc, however. Voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, he eventually becomes a vampire, and the result is appropriately creepy. Vampire Joker is one of the movie’s best visual ideas, transforming a familiar Batman villain into something closer to pure horror. The design and voice work make him unsettling without pushing the film too far beyond its family-friendly boundaries.

Vicki Vale, voiced by Tara Strong, has a larger role than many viewers might expect. She serves partly as a love interest and partly as someone Batman must protect, but she is not entirely passive. The romance between Bruce and Vicki is fairly conventional, but it gives the story a small emotional anchor amid all the vampire chaos. Alastair Duncan’s Alfred provides the usual steady support, helping Bruce stay focused while Gotham descends into supernatural panic. The film keeps its cast and plot focused, which helps it avoid the padding that sometimes affects direct-to-video superhero movies.

The biggest weakness remains the visual style. The Batman was always a more divisive interpretation of the character, and its angular designs will not appeal to everyone. Compared with Batman: The Animated Series, this film can look less refined and less iconic. Some faces appear stiff, the proportions can seem strange, and the overall aesthetic is very much a product of its era. Still, the movie benefits from fully committing to its own look rather than trying to imitate the classic animated series. It feels like a one-off horror experiment, not a lesser attempt to recreate a beloved version of Batman.

At around 83 minutes, The Batman vs. Dracula moves quickly and never overstays its welcome. It has action, humor, mystery, horror imagery, and enough atmosphere to feel like a genuine seasonal movie rather than a random superhero crossover. It may not reach the artistic heights of the best DC animated films, but it does something those films rarely attempted: it places Batman in a full-blooded monster movie and lets him face one of horror’s most enduring icons.

For Batman fans, vampire-movie fans, or anyone seeking an easy Halloween watch, The Batman vs. Dracula is an easy recommendation. It is not essential Batman viewing, but it is far more stylish and entertaining than its title suggests. By borrowing the spirit of Batman & Dracula: Red Rain and pairing it with the distinctive look of The Batman, the film becomes a pulpy, gothic, early-2000s adventure that embraces its absurd premise and makes it work.

Horror Film Review: Carnival of Souls (dir. by Herk Harvey)

Posted on October 13, 2026 by Arleigh

“I don’t belong in the world—that’s what it is. Something separates me from other people.” — Mary Henry

There is something deeply unsettling about a horror movie where being ignored feels just as frightening as being followed. That tension runs through Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey’s 1962 psychological horror film about a woman who survives a car accident but cannot quite return to ordinary life. A pale stranger keeps appearing, an abandoned pavilion draws her attention, and everyday encounters become increasingly uncomfortable. Yet the movie’s strongest fear is not simply that something wants her. It is that the rest of the world might stop noticing her altogether. For all its rough edges, this is a film that knows how to turn loneliness into a nightmare.

The opening gets things moving with a reckless car race that sends a vehicle carrying three women off a bridge and into a river. Mary Henry, played by Candace Hilligoss, eventually emerges from the water, apparently the only survivor. Rather than stay and work through the experience, she leaves for Utah to take a position as a church organist. Her determination to move on is understandable, but the film makes that transition feel strangely incomplete. Mary has escaped the immediate disaster without finding any real sense of safety. A new job and a different town cannot restore the connection to everyday life that seems to have slipped away.

Mary is a compelling lead partly because the movie does not insist on making her easy company. She is guarded, impatient with intrusive questions, and uninterested in giving people the warmth they expect. Her work at the church is a professional arrangement, not an expression of religious devotion. That reserve complicates the story in a useful way. Mary wants independence, but independence becomes frightening when it starts to resemble exclusion. There is a difference between choosing to keep people at a distance and discovering that you cannot reach them at all. Much of the film’s emotional force comes from watching that distinction gradually collapse.

Hilligoss handles this tension best through her expressions and physical presence. Her dialogue delivery can be stiff, particularly when the script asks Mary to describe feelings that are already obvious from her behavior. But her watchfulness is effective. She looks like someone constantly checking the room for a sign that everything is still functioning normally. Her fear often emerges through hesitation, irritation, or a sudden break in composure rather than a sustained display of panic. That gives Mary’s distress an appealingly uncomfortable texture. She is not merely waiting for another scare; she is trying to get through the day while her confidence in reality keeps eroding.

The boarding-house scenes bring that discomfort into an unpleasantly ordinary setting. John Linden, the man renting a room nearby, sees Mary as someone to pursue rather than someone to understand. His pushiness makes companionship feel less like an answer to her isolation than another problem she has to manage. These exchanges are not always smoothly written or performed, but they serve an important purpose. Mary cannot count on human attention being reassuring. Sometimes the person who notices you is the last person you want around. The film traps her between unwanted interest and terrifying indifference, leaving very little room for genuine comfort.

Harvey gives that predicament a visual counterpart by making familiar spaces feel subtly unwelcoming. Streets, shops, rented rooms, and the church remain recognizable, but the black-and-white photography drains them of easy warmth. A window can become a point of intrusion rather than protection. A public place can feel more isolating than an empty room. The film does not need to invent an entirely separate supernatural world because the ordinary one is already becoming unstable. Some of its most effective moments come from that simple reversal: places where Mary should be able to orient herself instead leave her feeling exposed and uncertain.

The abandoned lakeside pavilion takes this idea further. It is a building associated with crowds and entertainment, now stripped of the people who gave it purpose. Its emptiness has a peculiar pull, and Mary’s attraction to it feels both understandable and deeply wrong. Harvey gets a tremendous amount from the contrast between what the place was built for and what it has become. A setting intended to bring people together now seems to promise a much darker kind of gathering. It is not frightening merely because it is deserted. It is frightening because its silence never feels permanent, and whatever might fill it again seems unlikely to offer welcome.

The pale man who haunts Mary provides the other side of the film’s central tension. Played by Harvey himself, he notices her with a persistence she cannot escape. His appearance is theatrical rather than realistic, but the simplicity works in the movie’s favor. He has the unsettling clarity of a face remembered from a bad dream. The horror comes from where he appears and how little explanation accompanies him. While ordinary people become increasingly difficult for Mary to reach, this stranger seems to have no trouble finding her. His attention feels inevitable, making the world’s indifference even more disturbing.

Sound helps hold these ideas together. The organ music fits Mary’s profession while giving the film a mournful, almost funereal atmosphere. At times it presses the mood a little too hard, but it remains a major part of the movie’s identity. More striking are the sequences in which Mary loses contact with the activity around her and people fail to acknowledge her presence. The absence of a response becomes the scare. These passages do not need much explanation because the basic experience is so immediate: she is there, she is trying to communicate, and nobody seems able to confirm either fact.

The film’s weaknesses are real. Some dialogue states what the atmosphere has already made clear, the supporting performances can be broad, and a few scenes repeat Mary’s distress without developing it. Not every awkward pause deserves to be praised as dream logic. Still, the strongest passages make those limitations feel secondary. As the mystery moves toward its conclusion, Carnival of Souls leaves its deepest impression through Mary’s increasingly fragile place in the world. Harvey turns the need to be recognized into something frightening, then makes recognition itself feel dangerous. The result is a haunting little movie in which neither company nor solitude offers much protection.

Horror Film Review: Lord of Illusions (dir. by Clive Barker)

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Arleigh

“I was born to murder the world.” — William Nix

There’s a version of Lord of Illusions that exists only in Clive Barker’s head, and it’s probably a masterpiece. The version that actually made it to theaters in 1995 is something else entirely: a fascinating, frustrating, occasionally brilliant mess of a movie that tries to fuse film noir with cosmic horror and only partially succeeds. Barker wrote and directed the film based on his own 1985 short story The Last Illusion, and while he clearly understands the material better than anyone else could, his direction is surprisingly by the numbers, playing it safe when the source material practically begs for supernatural insanity.

The plot, such as it is, kicks off with a prologue in 1982 at a Mojave Desert cult compound run by a genuinely terrifying figure named William Nix, played with unsettling intensity by Daniel Von Bargen. Nix calls himself “The Puritan,” which is a nice bit of irony given that he’s basically Charles Manson with actual supernatural powers, and he’s about to sacrifice a young girl when a group of his own followers, led by a man named Philip Swann, stage a violent coup. They shoot Nix, screw an iron mask onto his face, and bury him in the desert, assuming that’s the end of it. It’s a strong opening, full of the kind of visceral, apocalyptic imagery that Barker does better than almost anyone, and it sets up a genuinely intriguing mystery about what happened to this cult and why its members turned on their leader.

Thirteen years later, we meet Harry D’Amour, a New York private detective played by Scott Bakula, who has a habit of stumbling into the supernatural the way other noir detectives stumble into dames with secrets. Harry gets pulled into a case in Los Angeles that leads him to Swann, now a world-famous illusionist, and his wife Dorothea, played by Famke Janssen, who seems to know more about the danger lurking around her husband than she’s letting on. When Swann dies on stage in a spectacularly grisly accident involving suspended swords, Harry finds himself drawn deeper into a world where the line between stage magic and genuine sorcery has been blurred past the point of no return. The investigation takes him through a strange subculture of professional magicians, each with their own secrets and rivalries, and gradually reveals that Swann’s death was not an accident but the opening move in a larger, darker game.

What works best about Lord of Illusions is its atmosphere. Barker has always had an eye for the grotesque and the baroque, and here he leans hard into the noir trappings to ground the supernatural stuff in something that feels almost noir-ish in its fatalism. Harry D’Amour is a classic archetype, a rumpled, world-weary guy who’s seen too much but keeps going anyway, and Bakula plays him with a likable, low-key charm that keeps the film from drowning in its own self-seriousness. The Los Angeles setting is used well, too, with the stark contrast between the sun-drenched surface and the darkness lurking beneath feeling very much in line with classic noir like Chinatown or The Long Goodbye. The film’s visual palette is appropriately moody, all shadows and neon and rain-slicked streets, and there are moments where it genuinely feels like it could be a lost noir from the 1940s, just with more blood and occult symbolism.

The thing is, though, Barker’s directing here is quite by the numbers. He knows the material inside and out, obviously, since he wrote the short story and the screenplay, but as a director he plays it safe instead of leaning into the supernatural insanity of the source material. There’s nothing wrong with the film on a technical level, but there’s also nothing that really grabs you by the throat the way Barker’s best work does. It’s competent, it’s professional, and it’s ultimately a little bit forgettable in a way that a Clive Barker movie really shouldn’t be. For a filmmaker whose whole reputation is built on pushing boundaries and going places other horror directors won’t, Lord of Illusions feels oddly restrained, like Barker was holding something back.

And that’s what makes the film so bewildering. Barker definitely knows how to direct a film that matches the over-the-top imagery and narrative of his source material. If his work on Hellraiser is any indication, he’s more than capable of translating his own literary excesses to the screen with style and confidence. Hellraiser is a film that fully commits to its own weirdness, that doesn’t apologize for its cenobites or its flesh-and-blood aesthetics or its genuinely transgressive themes. It’s a movie that knows exactly what it is and leans into it with everything it’s got. So why does Lord of Illusions, which comes from a story that’s every bit as strange and ambitious as The Hellbound Heart, feel so much more pedestrian? It’s not a question of budget or resources, because Lord of Illusions actually had a bigger budget than Hellraiser. It’s not a question of experience, because Barker had already directed one genuinely great film by this point. It’s a question of nerve, and for whatever reason, Barker just doesn’t seem to have the same nerve here that he did with Hellraiser.

Would leaning harder into the weirdness have made the film better? Maybe, maybe not. But here’s the thing: like most of Barker’s stories, Lord of Illusions works best when it goes over the top. Barker’s whole deal as an artist is excess. His best work, whether it’s The Hellbound Heart or Weaveworld or The Great and Secret Show, is unapologetically maximalist, throwing ideas at the wall with reckless abandon and trusting that the sheer force of imagination will carry the reader through. The short story The Last Illusion is no exception. It’s a wild, hallucinatory piece of work, full of reality-bending weirdness that feels like it could have been a genuinely unhinged horror film in the right hands. The movie version sands off a lot of those rough edges in favor of something more conventional, and while that makes the film more accessible, it also makes it less memorable.

The film’s biggest problem, and it’s a substantial one, is its pacing and structure. Barker has always been a writer with more ideas than he knows what to do with, and Lord of Illusions is stuffed to the gills with concepts and imagery that never quite cohere. The theatrical cut, which runs about 109 minutes, is notoriously choppy, jumping from scene to scene with a kind of frantic energy that leaves the audience scrambling to keep up. Characters appear and disappear without much explanation, plot threads are introduced and abandoned, and the whole thing has a rushed, unfinished quality that makes it feel like a much longer film that was hacked down in the editing room. There’s a director’s cut that runs about 121 minutes and restores a lot of the character development and thematic material, and while it doesn’t magically turn the film into a masterpiece, it does make it feel considerably more coherent. If you’re going to watch Lord of Illusions, do yourself a favor and track down the director’s cut. It won’t fix all the film’s problems, but it at least gives you a better sense of what Barker was going for.

The performances are a mixed bag in a way that’s almost charming. Bakula is genuinely good as Harry, bringing a kind of earnest decency to a role that could easily have been a Bogart impression. He’s not the most hard-boiled guy in the world, but that’s part of the point; Harry D’Amour is a detective who keeps finding himself in supernatural situations not because he’s special but because he’s unlucky, and Bakula sells that beautifully. He’s the kind of guy you’d want on your side in a crisis, even if he’s not entirely sure what he’s doing half the time, and that makes him a surprisingly effective audience surrogate for a film this strange.

Famke Janssen, in one of her earliest major roles, is somewhat underused as Dorothea, but she has a presence that makes you wish the film had given her more to do. She’s got the kind of old-Hollywood glamour that fits the noir aesthetic perfectly, and there are hints of a much more interesting character buried in there somewhere. Kevin J. O’Connor as Swann is the weak link; he’s supposed to be a charismatic showman hiding a dark secret, but he mostly comes across as twitchy and unfocused, which undercuts the tragedy of his character. The real standout among the supporting cast is Barry Del Sherman as Butterfield, one of Nix’s acolytes, who brings a genuinely unsettling energy to every scene he’s in. He’s the kind of henchman who seems like he’s enjoying himself a little too much, and that makes him far more memorable than the film’s actual villain.

Then there’s Nix himself. Barker has said that he deliberately made Nix uncharismatic, wanting to subvert the expectation of the magnetic cult leader by making him genuinely pathetic and repellent. The intention, clearly, was to evoke the real-world evil of figures like Jim Jones and Charles Manson, those charismatic monsters whose power came from their ability to bend other people’s wills to their own. It’s an interesting idea in theory, a deliberate rejection of the idea that evil has to be seductive to be dangerous.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really work. Nix is meant to be a Jim Jones or Charlie Manson type of evil, a man whose sheer force of personality could convince people to hand over their lives and their sanity, but he comes off as uninspired instead. Von Bargen is a fine actor and he does what he can with the role, but the character as written lacks the magnetic pull that made those real-life figures so terrifying. He’s not a seducer, he’s not a manipulator, he’s just a guy in a mask shouting about being a god. The film tells us he had followers, tells us he was dangerous, but it never really shows us why anyone would have followed him in the first place. And that’s a problem, because if you’re going to build a horror movie around a cult leader, the one thing you absolutely have to nail is the cult leader’s charisma. Nix should be the kind of villain who makes your skin crawl because you can almost understand why people fell under his spell. Instead, he’s just a snarling figurehead.

The film’s climax, where Nix is resurrected and goes on a rampage, is where the movie loses a lot of its goodwill. The special effects, which were probably decent for 1995, have not aged well, and the sequence where Nix buries his followers in the desert via a torrential downpour is more silly than scary. The famous “Origami Man” chase sequence, where Harry is pursued by a creature made of folding paper and a dog made of fire, is similarly unconvincing, looking more like a mid-90s CD-ROM cutscene than anything genuinely threatening. It’s the kind of scene that probably looked great on paper but just doesn’t work in execution, and it ends up undermining the film’s attempts at genuine dread.

And yet, despite all its flaws, I can’t bring myself to dismiss Lord of Illusions. There’s something genuinely compelling about a film that tries this hard to be something different, to blend genres in a way that studio horror almost never does. Barker’s vision, even when it’s undercut by dated effects or its own uneven execution, is always interesting. The film’s central idea, that the difference between a magician and a sorcerer is the difference between someone who entertains and someone who actually traffics with dark forces, is a genuinely good one, and the way it plays out through Swann’s character arc is the film’s strongest thematic thread. Swann, who possesses real power but chooses to use it for fame and fortune, is a more interesting figure than the film sometimes knows what to do with. His decision to hide his abilities behind the veneer of stage magic feels like a commentary on something, maybe on the compromises artists make, maybe on the way we all hide the parts of ourselves that are too dangerous or too strange for polite society.

The first two-thirds of the film, with Harry navigating the strange world of professional magicians and slowly uncovering the truth about Swann and Dorothea’s past, is genuinely engaging. It’s when the film shifts into full-on horror mode that it loses its footing, trading atmosphere for spectacle in a way that feels like a concession to the genre’s demands rather than a natural progression of the story. That’s a shame, because the noir elements are what make Lord of Illusions feel unique. There are plenty of horror films about cults and demons and dark magic, but there aren’t many that approach those subjects through the lens of a hard-boiled detective story, and the tension between those two modes is what gives the film its distinctive flavor.

In the end, Lord of Illusions is entertaining enough for what it is, but it’s hindered by a filmmaker well-known for swinging for the fences who, for some reason, holds himself back here when the source material, one he himself wrote, pretty much begs for it. This isn’t a movie that swings and misses; it’s one that never really swings at all, settling for competent when it could have been fearless.

Horror Guilty Pleasure No. 133: Convent of Sinners (dir. by Joe D’Amato)

Posted on October 11, 2026 by Arleigh

Convent of Sinners (1986) wants to expose the corruption behind convent walls, but Joe D’Amato keeps getting distracted by what he can undress inside them. That tension defines this erotic nunsploitation horror film, an atmospheric guilty pleasure with enough religious hypocrisy and malicious intrigue to suggest a sharper movie buried beneath the sleaze. D’Amato recognizes the dramatic possibilities of an institution where frustrated desire disguises itself as moral authority. He also leans so heavily on sexual titillation that his criticism struggles to compete with his exploitation instincts. The result is entertainingly disreputable, occasionally disturbing, and considerably less insightful than its premise promises.

Susanna, played by Eva Grimaldi, enters the convent after suffering sexual abuse at home, only to discover that her supposed sanctuary contains another collection of people determined to control her. The Mother Superior develops an attachment to her, a priest offers forbidden affection, and Sister Teresa resents the attention she receives. Loosely adapted from Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse, the story follows a vulnerable woman whose needs remain secondary to the desires of those claiming to protect her. Susanna becomes the object of affection, suspicion, and punishment without gaining much say in any of it. Escape from one abusive environment simply delivers her into another.

There is a strong foundation here for a bitter examination of institutional corruption. The convent’s inhabitants cannot acknowledge their feelings honestly, so attraction becomes favoritism, jealousy becomes accusation, and cruelty becomes spiritual correction. Susanna exposes tensions that already exist, but blaming her allows everyone else to avoid examining themselves. Religious authority gives ordinary resentment extraordinary reach. Someone who merely dislikes you can make life unpleasant; someone who claims your suffering serves God can make resistance look like further evidence against you. The film understands that distinction, even if it does not consistently develop it beyond another opportunity for humiliation.

Its place within the nunsploitation tradition makes that limitation especially noticeable. Ken Russell’s The Devils combines sexual obsession, religious hysteria, and institutional violence with a larger examination of political power. D’Amato uses related ingredients without approaching Russell’s ambition or furious visual imagination. Convent of Sinners concentrates on private jealousies and forbidden attachments, which could have supported a more intimate account of how authority becomes abusive. Instead, its serious implications repeatedly compete with scenes designed primarily to provoke or titillate. The comparison is useful because it demonstrates that lurid material and meaningful criticism can coexist, provided the filmmaking gives both a purpose.

Bruno Mattei’s The Other Hell offers the trashier comparison, turning a convent into a breeding ground for sinister secrets, violence, and supernatural horror. Both films exploit the reversal of sacred refuge into dangerous confinement, but Mattei foregrounds the horror-show possibilities while D’Amato emphasizes erotic melodrama. Convent of Sinners builds on this established genre territory through its mixture of religious imagery, repressed appetites, and punitive authority. Yet its reliance on sexual spectacle makes the corruption feel less like something being investigated than something supplying the next scandalous situation. The convent is an effective setting, but D’Amato does not always look beyond its exploitation value.

Karin Well’s Sister Teresa gives the persecution a concrete emotional motive. She resents the Mother Superior’s interest in Susanna, and her wounded pride feeds her vindictiveness. Underneath the religious vocabulary is someone furious about losing influence. The institution lets her disguise retaliation as moral responsibility, making her more dangerous than an openly spiteful rival. These dynamics provide some of the film’s strongest material because they reveal how easily a hierarchy can accommodate personal grudges. Teresa does not need to confess her jealousy when she can insist that Susanna is the problem. Her authority supplies the explanation her conscience ought to question.

Grimaldi gives Susanna a sympathetic presence, but the screenplay is far more interested in what happens to her than in who she is. Her longing for tenderness is understandable, and apparent affection offers a believable temptation in such an oppressive environment. Unfortunately, every refuge becomes another trap, and the repeated victimization eventually starts to flatten her character. D’Amato leans way too heavily on the sexual titillation and lurid exploitation of Susanna, weighing down whatever commentary he is attempting about religious hypocrisy and institutional corruption. Her suffering becomes an attraction in itself. The film wants us to condemn those treating her as an object while rarely resisting that temptation itself.

That mixture also connects it to The Convent of Hell, the erotic graphic novel written by Ricardo Barreiro and illustrated by Ignacio Noé. Its forbidden appetites, convent confinement, cruelty, and supernatural grotesquerie belong to the same imaginative tradition. Whether or not its creators would acknowledge these particular predecessors, the family resemblance to The Devils, The Other Hell, and Convent of Sinners is persuasive. This is a critical reading of their shared sensibility rather than a documented claim of direct influence from every film. Still, the progression makes sense: sacred imagery becomes a framework for escalating erotic excess, sometimes overshadowing whatever criticism accompanies it.

Ultimately, Convent of Sinners works better as an uneven guilty pleasure than as a convincing indictment of religious abuse. Its period atmosphere and enclosed setting lend weight to the melodrama, while its malicious characters keep the intrigue moving even when the pacing sags. There is enough solemn hypocrisy and shameless sleaze to satisfy a taste for Italian exploitation, but Susanna’s treatment grows repetitive and uncomfortable. D’Amato has found a subject with genuine dramatic bite; he simply keeps sacrificing that bite to another dose of titillation. The film peers behind the convent’s respectable façade, then becomes so absorbed in the scandal that it neglects the corruption it originally promised to expose.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Horror Film Review: The Other Hell (dir. by Bruno Mattei)

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Arleigh

“The genitals are the door to evil!” — Mother Vincenza

The convent in Bruno Mattei’s The Other Hell feels less like a refuge from the world than a place where all its worst impulses have been locked inside. This ragged slice of Italian horror turns a religious sanctuary into a pressure cooker of Catholic guilt, supernatural menace, and institutional cruelty. It is messy, frequently ridiculous, and occasionally more confusing than frightening, but there is something appealing about its complete lack of restraint. Mattei throws so much sinister religious imagery at the screen that even the quieter scenes feel contaminated. This is not elegant Gothic horror. It is nunsploitation with dirty fingernails, steeped in the lurid sensibility of the Italian horror scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The story centers on an isolated convent where disturbing incidents and violent deaths suggest that something evil has taken up residence. A priest arrives to investigate, but getting answers proves difficult when the Mother Superior treats every question like an attack on her authority. The convent’s inhabitants seem caught between fear, obedience, and knowledge they would rather keep buried. That gives the film a decent mystery beneath all the supernatural theatrics. Is the danger coming from an outside force, or has it grown out of the cruelty already hiding behind these walls? Mattei is not particularly careful about developing that question, but it gives the surrounding madness something to hang onto.

As a prime example of nunsploitation, The Other Hell understands the appeal of turning a supposedly sacred environment into a breeding ground for corruption. Religious devotion and institutional repression become difficult to separate, while images normally associated with comfort acquire an ugly edge. Habits, crucifixes, candles, and chapel interiors stop suggesting refuge and start looking like accessories in a nightmare. The film belongs comfortably to that late-’70s and early-’80s Italian exploitation tradition of borrowing familiar horror ingredients and making them nastier. Possession-movie hysteria, murder-mystery mechanics, and Gothic atmosphere all get thrown together, with coherence sometimes sacrificed for the next outrageous image.

Despite its place in the genre, this is not primarily an excuse for erotic convent shenanigans. Its strongest interest is in religious horror, bloody spectacle, and the suggestion that holiness can serve as camouflage for something rotten. That makes it feel closer to a supernatural shocker wearing a nun’s habit than an erotic melodrama with horror decorations. The violence interrupts stretches of investigation and ominous conversation with a bluntness that can be genuinely unpleasant. Sometimes those jolts feel earned; sometimes they seem dropped in because the movie has gone too long without doing something appalling. Either way, Mattei rarely lets good taste interfere.

Atmosphere is the film’s biggest asset. The convent feels cramped, shadowy, and emotionally airless, as though nobody has opened a window in decades. Dark corridors and severe religious imagery create an environment where even ordinary movement looks suspicious. At its best, the movie makes the building seem like an extension of its inhabitants’ damaged lives. Every room appears to conceal a secret, and every silence feels enforced rather than peaceful. The priest’s investigation becomes less a straightforward search for evidence than an attempt to navigate a place whose entire identity depends on keeping certain truths inaccessible. That is a stronger source of dread than some of the more obvious supernatural business.

The Goblin music helps considerably, lending the proceedings a sense of menace and grandeur that the filmmaking cannot always sustain on its own. There is something wonderfully excessive about hearing that ominous musical energy attached to such a scrappy production. A hallway suddenly feels more threatening; a strange encounter acquires the weight of an approaching catastrophe. Occasionally the score seems to be doing the heavy lifting, but that is hardly a fatal problem in a movie like this. Its unsettling sound fits a world where everything feels slightly disconnected from ordinary reality, and it gives the film an identity beyond its budgetary limitations.

The performances work best when they lean into the material’s severity rather than trying to make it naturalistic. The Mother Superior is particularly important because she gives the convent’s oppressive atmosphere a human face. Her authority feels defensive and punitive, making the institution itself seem hostile before any demonic explanation is necessary. Elsewhere, stiff dialogue and broad reactions can undercut the tension. These are not richly developed characters so much as people assigned positions within a nightmare: investigator, victim, authority figure, keeper of secrets. Still, their lack of warmth contributes to the sense that this place has drained everyone inside it.

Unfortunately, mood cannot solve every problem. The pacing drags, the investigation becomes repetitive, and the plot occasionally behaves as though connective tissue is an optional luxury. Scenes that should deepen the mystery can instead leave it feeling muddier. The film also wavers between disturbing imagery and outright absurdity without always controlling the transition. For some viewers, those weaknesses will make the experience exhausting. For others, they are part of its grubby appeal. Mattei’s willingness to follow a lurid idea wherever it leads produces both the film’s memorable moments and its least convincing ones. You rarely mistake it for disciplined filmmaking, but you also rarely mistake it for anything respectable.

There is an intriguing resemblance to The Convent of Hell, the graphic erotica novel written by Ricardo Barreiro and illustrated by Ignacio Noé, which appeared roughly two decades later. Its convent setting, infernal intrusion, forbidden spaces, and collision of religious repression with transgression make Mattei’s film seem like a possible precursor. That resemblance should not be confused with documented influence, but the shared territory is striking. Barreiro and Noé take the material much further into explicit erotic grotesquerie, whereas The Other Hell concentrates on supernatural violence and oppressive atmosphere. Both turn the convent’s promise of spiritual shelter inside out, exposing a world where secrecy and authority leave plenty of room for hell.

Horror Film Review: The Legend of Hell House (dir. by John Hough)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Arleigh

“Hell House doesn’t mind a guest or two. What it doesn’t like is people who come snooping around.” — Benjamin Franklin Fischer

There is something deeply unpleasant about The Legend of Hell House, and that is exactly what makes it so effective. Directed by John Hough and adapted by Richard Matheson from his own 1971 novel Hell House, the film takes a fairly simple haunted-mansion premise and turns it into something mean, claustrophobic, and surprisingly adult. It is not the most visually elaborate ghost story ever made, nor the most frightening in a conventional jump-scare sense, but it has a cold, nasty atmosphere that lingers. This is a haunted-house movie where the house does not just contain evil; it seems designed to degrade everyone who steps inside.

The setup is strong because it puts several opposing viewpoints under the same roof. A wealthy man hires physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett, played by Clive Revill, to investigate the notorious Belasco House and settle the question of whether life after death exists. Barrett brings along his wife Ann, played by Gayle Hunnicutt, and the couple joins two people with far more personal connections to the place: Florence Tanner, a deeply spiritual medium played by Pamela Franklin, and Benjamin Franklin Fischer, played by Roddy McDowall, the sole survivor of an earlier investigation. The job has a deadline, a large payday, and an obvious catch: every previous expedition into the house ended in death, insanity, or both.

It is the kind of premise that could have easily become an old-fashioned “wait for the next victim” thriller, but Matheson’s script gives it more bite than that. Every character arrives with a different theory of the supernatural, and those theories become personal weapons. Barrett is the hard-line rationalist, convinced that any haunting can be explained through physical energy. Florence believes in trapped souls and approaches the house with a nearly religious determination. Fischer knows better than anyone that Belasco House does not care what people believe, while Ann becomes the emotional pressure point between all those men and their supposedly superior ideas. The ghost story works because the haunting pushes directly on each character’s vulnerabilities instead of merely making lights flicker and doors slam.

Clive Revill makes Barrett an interesting kind of horror-movie skeptic. He is not simply smug or foolish, although he can be both. He has the conviction of a man who thinks he is on the verge of solving the biggest mystery in human history with engineering equipment and enough confidence. That makes him a perfect target. Revill plays the character with a blunt, almost comically forceful seriousness that fits the film’s style. Barrett is a man who keeps insisting that the house is a machine, even as it starts treating him like a piece of disposable machinery.

Roddy McDowall is arguably the film’s secret weapon. Fischer could have been a standard nervous survivor whose only job is to warn the newcomers not to go into the basement. Instead, McDowall gives him a sly, guarded, intermittently hostile energy. He knows the house, he has seen what it does, and he has built a personality around refusing to be emotionally open about any of it. His sunglasses, dry delivery, and generally strange behavior make Fischer seem a little ridiculous at first, but that awkwardness becomes part of the performance’s appeal. By the time the film gets into the mystery of Emeric Belasco, the wealthy sadist who once ruled the estate, Fischer’s trauma feels like the one thing in the movie that cannot be explained away by a machine.

Pamela Franklin is also excellent as Florence Tanner, particularly because the film lets her be forceful rather than purely fragile. Florence is sympathetic, but she is not passive. She believes in her gifts enough to challenge Barrett head-on, and her desire to help the lost spirits of Hell House gives the story some genuine emotional stakes. The movie can be pretty ruthless with her, especially in the way it explores sexual humiliation, possession, and psychic assault, but Franklin never plays Florence as merely victimized. Her scenes with McDowall have an uneasy charge because they represent two different forms of faith: Florence sees the dead as people worth saving, while Fischer treats the dead as weapons that must be avoided.

That unpleasant streak is really what separates The Legend of Hell House from a lot of cleaner, more comforting haunted-house films. The Belasco House is not merely spooky; it is aggressively cruel, with a history rooted in sexual degradation, murder, and the grotesque whims of its former owner. Matheson’s novel was more explicit than the movie, and the screenplay softens some of its more graphic sexual and violent material. Even so, the film remains unusually frank for a mainstream early-1970s supernatural thriller. Its horror is not just that ghosts exist. It is that a dead man’s perversions can keep poisoning the living decades later.

John Hough handles all this with a remarkably physical visual style. The camera prowls through corridors, peers around corners, tilts at unnerving angles, and uses wide lenses to make the mansion feel warped and hostile. The movie’s low, wide-angle shots give the characters an exposed, trapped quality, as if the building is staring down at them. The direction is not subtle in the same manner as Robert Wise’s The Haunting, but that is not a flaw. Hough makes Hell House feel less like an unknowable mystery and more like a spiritual pressure cooker.

The film does have limitations. Its effects are sometimes modest, and a few of its shock moments are more abrupt than scary. The climax gives the haunting a concrete answer, which makes the story’s blend of supernatural Gothic horror and strange pseudo-scientific logic feel even more pulpy and distinctive. It may not carry the elusive ambiguity of The Haunting, but The Legend of Hell House is not trying to be that kind of ghost story. It wants the audience to feel trapped in a hostile space with people whose certainty, fear, and private weaknesses are being exposed one ugly piece at a time. Even when its mechanics are a little dated, that sense of contamination remains powerful.

It also benefits from being lean. At around 90 minutes, The Legend of Hell House wastes little time building out the haunted-house situation, escalating the attacks, and forcing its investigators to choose between their competing explanations. That economy makes it feel more vicious than many later possession or paranormal movies that inflate a similar premise into two-hour lore marathons. There is no elaborate mythology to memorize. There is a bad house, a horrible dead man, four damaged people, and a deadline. That is enough.

As for influence, the film has clear roots in The Haunting and Henry James-style psychological ghost stories, but it also left traces of its own. Its combination of paranormal investigation, supposedly scientific equipment, skeptical experts, psychic mediums, and a house that manipulates people’s sexuality and emotional weaknesses can be felt in many later haunted-house stories. The direct influence is most explicitly documented in Edgar Wright’s fake trailer Don’t, made for Grindhouse: Wright and Simon Pegg riffed on Hell House’s fog-shrouded mansion imagery and echoed Roddy McDowall’s distinctive 1970s look. It also features one of the earlier cinematic depictions of sexual assault by an unseen supernatural force, a disturbing concept later revisited much more brutally in The Entity.

It would be a stretch to claim that every modern “ghost hunters enter a cursed house” movie comes directly from The Legend of Hell House, but its DNA is easy to spot. The procedural side of paranormal investigation, the conflict between technical explanation and spiritual belief, and the sense that a house preserves human evil like an infection all became familiar horror tools. Its visual atmosphere has also invited comparisons to The Shining, especially in its use of ominous spatial compositions and its fixation on the house’s ability to reshape the mental state of its occupants. The connection should not be overstated—Stanley Kubrick’s film is its own colossal thing—but they are clearly kindred haunted-house nightmares.

Ultimately, The Legend of Hell House is a rougher, nastier, more aggressively lurid cousin to The Haunting. It does not have that earlier film’s sublime ambiguity, but it has its own grimy personality: a mixture of British Gothic atmosphere, American genre bluntness, psychic melodrama, and just enough 1970s sleaze to make the mansion feel truly diseased. It is best approached not as a polished prestige classic, but as a smart, compact supernatural shocker with a nasty sense of humor and an unusually strong cast. Hell House may not be the most famous haunted mansion in horror, but once you have spent an hour and a half inside it, you can understand why nobody should want to go back.

Horror On The Lens: Robot Monster (dir by Phil Tucker)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I love this movie!

In this 1953 film, a gorilla wearing a diving helmet uses the Calcinator Death Ray to wipe out almost all human life on Earth. Only 8 people survive, among them a professor, his family, and Roy (future Eurospy star, George Nader). Ro-Man (George Barrows) is hounded by his superior to track down and destroy the survivors. Ro-Man does his best, though the humans prove to be …. well, they’re not really that resourceful. In fact, they’re pretty dumb. But Ro-Man is pretty dumb himself.

Regularly (and incorrectly) cited as being one of the worst films ever made, Robot Monster is an enjoyably absurd hybrid of horror and science fiction. Earth is destroyed through a combination of bad lighting effects and stock footage and the arguments between Ro-Man and his superior have to be heard to be believed. Robot Monster is actually a bit more self-aware than a lot of people realize. This is a low-budget Z-movie that realizes that it’s a low-budget Z-movie and which cheerfully embraces its identity. Robot Monster is a personal favorite and it’s a bit of Halloween tradition around these parts.

And now, enjoy Robot Monster in all of its black-and-white glory!

Horror Film Review: Army of Darkness (dir. by Sam Raimi)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Arleigh

“Well hello, Mister Fancypants. Well, I’ve got news for you, pal: you ain’t leadin’ but two things right now: Jack and shit… and Jack just left town.” — Ash Williams

Few cult movies embrace their own insanity as joyfully as Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness. Directed by Raimi and released in 1992, the third chapter in the Evil Dead series takes Ash Williams out of the isolated-cabin horror setting of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II and drops him into a sword-and-sorcery adventure full of skeleton armies, haunted forests, miniature doppelgängers, exploding Deadites, and more quotable one-liners than most action comedies manage in an entire franchise. It is still technically a horror movie, but calling it just a horror movie misses the point. This is a slapstick fantasy-action comedy with monsters, and its ridiculousness is exactly why it has endured as a cult favorite.

The story picks up almost immediately after the end of Evil Dead II, with Ash getting sucked through a portal and landing in medieval England. Rather than being welcomed as some prophesied savior, he is immediately treated like a suspicious outsider and thrown into a pit with a Deadite. That opening alone tells you what kind of movie this will be. Ash is no longer simply a terrified everyman trying to survive an impossible nightmare. He is now a chainsaw-handed loudmouth who shoots first, insults everyone around him, and somehow carries himself like the greatest warrior in history despite constantly making situations worse through his own arrogance.

Bruce Campbell is the entire engine of Army of Darkness. Ash has become a full-blown cartoon hero by this point, halfway between a B-movie John Wayne, a professional wrestler cutting a promo, and a smug department-store employee who has somehow convinced himself he is a legendary warrior. Campbell plays the role with total commitment, which is the key to why the comedy works. He never acts embarrassed by the dialogue or tries to make Ash seem cooler than he is. The character is funny because he is deeply incompetent beneath all the bravado. Ash talks like a conquering hero, but his victories usually involve panic, luck, explosives, and a lot of property damage.

The familiar “Groovy” attitude from Evil Dead II gets pushed even further here. Ash is not meant to be a noble fantasy protagonist. He is selfish, crude, lazy, and usually more interested in returning to modern life than helping the people trapped in a medieval war. That makes him a funny fit for the genre. In a normal fantasy film, the chosen hero would humbly accept his destiny, train with a sword, and unite the kingdoms. Ash complains about the inconvenience, makes demands, insults the locals, and uses his knowledge of basic mechanics to become a magical figure in their eyes. His improvised metal hand, shotgun, chainsaw, and homemade weapons make him look like a mad scientist dropped into an old Ray Harryhausen movie.

Raimi’s direction is as energetic as ever, even if Army of Darkness is noticeably cleaner and more studio-sized than the first two films. The early Evil Dead movies had a grimy, do-it-yourself quality that made their horror feel unusually mean and immediate. This one has a broader, more polished adventure-movie look. There are castles, battlefields, elaborate costumes, large-scale miniature work, and a full army of stop-motion skeletons. It is still cheap-looking in places, but that is part of its charm. The effects do not need to be seamless because the movie’s entire personality is built around heightened artifice. When skeletons leap around in exaggerated stop-motion or a tiny Ash attacks the full-sized Ash in a windmill, the film feels like a live-action cartoon with blood, dirt, and medieval armor.

The windmill sequence is probably the purest expression of what makes the movie special. Ash enters a windmill to escape danger and ends up trapped with miniature versions of himself, eventually swallowing one by accident. It has almost nothing to do with the larger plot in any serious sense, yet it is hilarious because Raimi keeps escalating the gag. Instead of treating the tiny Ash as a brief visual joke, the movie turns him into a recurring problem that literally grows into Evil Ash, Ash’s undead double and the leader of the titular army. That progression makes perfect cartoon logic: a small annoyance becomes a full-scale apocalypse because Ash was too careless to deal with it properly.

The horror elements are lighter than they were in the first two films, and that will probably be the biggest dividing line for viewers. Anyone expecting the nasty isolation, body horror, and relentless dread of The Evil Dead may be surprised by how openly silly this installment is. The Deadites are still grotesque enough to keep the supernatural threat alive, especially in the opening pit fight and the later siege, but they are no longer as frightening as they are funny. Raimi is much more interested in visual gags, wild camera movement, and action-movie momentum than scares.

That tonal change does not make Army of Darkness a lesser movie; it just makes it a very different one. In fact, it may be the most accessible entry in the original trilogy for people who do not normally enjoy horror. You can watch it without being especially invested in the mythology, because the plot is basically a delivery system for set pieces. Ash needs the Necronomicon to get home. He says the magic words wrong. Evil Ash rises. A skeleton army attacks. Ash helps defend the castle. The movie keeps moving, rarely pauses to explain itself, and never tries to make its fantasy world feel more serious than necessary.

The final battle is a great example of Raimi getting the maximum entertainment out of a relatively limited toolbox. Ash turns medieval villagers into a makeshift modern army, complete with explosives, contraptions, and a vehicle that feels hilariously out of place in the period setting. The action is messy, noisy, and deliberately overblown, with exploding skeletons and clashing armies staged more like a rowdy theme-park spectacle than a conventional epic. Raimi understands that the point is not realism. The point is seeing Ash yell at an undead army while wielding a chainsaw and acting like he personally invented warfare.

The movie’s dialogue is another major reason it remains so beloved. “This is my boomstick” has become the obvious classic, but Army of Darkness is packed with lines that sound like they were designed to be repeated by friends after midnight screenings. Campbell’s delivery turns even the dumbest insult into something memorable. The movie knows Ash is absurd, but it also understands that he needs to be just cool enough for the audience to enjoy watching him survive. He is a lovable jerk because he is never actually in control for long. The universe keeps humiliating him, and Campbell makes every humiliation feel like another opportunity for a louder comeback.

Army of Darkness is not the scariest Evil Dead movie, the most atmospheric, or even necessarily the best constructed. It is uneven, shamelessly goofy, and occasionally held together by pure momentum. But it has a distinct personality that most franchise sequels would kill for. Raimi and Campbell take a low-budget horror premise and stretch it into a medieval monster comedy without losing the series’ manic spirit. It feels handmade even when it is big, silly even when it is violent, and weirdly triumphant despite Ash being one of the least heroic heroes in fantasy cinema. For fans of practical effects, stop-motion creatures, quotable cult movies, and Sam Raimi operating with absolutely no interest in restraint, Army of Darkness remains a blast.

Horror Film Review: The Evil (dir. by Gus Trikonis)

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Arleigh

“When am I gonna make you see? It’s something inside the dog!” — Dr. Caroline Arnold

On paper, The Evil has no business being as entertaining as it is. It has a familiar haunted-mansion setup, a group of characters making predictably bad decisions, a handful of effects that are more enthusiastic than convincing, and a story that often feels like it was assembled from supernatural-horror leftovers. Yet Gus Trikonis’s 1978 film somehow makes that combination work. It is a scrappy, surprisingly lively late-1970s chiller that keeps finding ways to turn its limitations into part of the fun. The movie may not have the elegance of The Haunting or the full-scale dread of The Omen, but it has momentum, personality, and just enough weirdness to make it stick in the mind.

Richard Crenna plays Dr. C.J. Arnold, a well-meaning physician who buys the old Vargas mansion with plans to turn it into a rehabilitation center. He brings his wife Caroline, played by Joanna Pettet, along with a small group of friends and workers, to spend time cleaning up the place and preparing it for renovation. It is the kind of horror-movie premise where viewers can tell within seconds that nobody should be spending the night there. The mansion is enormous, decaying, isolated, and full of the sort of dark hallways that seem specifically designed for people to wander into alone. Still, C.J. sees a building with potential rather than a nightmare waiting to happen, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of that mistake.

Before long, the house starts acting up in all the expected ways. Doors move on their own, strange noises echo through the corridors, flames appear where they should not, and the guests begin to realize that the mansion’s history is more sinister than they were led to believe. None of this is particularly groundbreaking, even for 1978, but The Evil understands the usefulness of a clean, direct setup. It does not waste a huge amount of time pretending the house is safe. The film gets its characters into trouble, gives them an increasingly hostile environment, and lets the tension build through a series of practical, often mean-spirited scares.

The movie came out during a period when horror was especially interested in demonic forces, cursed places, possession, and spiritual danger. You can feel the shadow of films such as The Exorcist, The Omen, Burnt Offerings, The Sentinel, and The Legend of Hell House hovering over it. The Evil is clearly playing in that same sandbox, mixing the isolated-house horror formula with the era’s fascination with the Devil and the supernatural. What keeps it from disappearing completely into the crowd is not originality so much as commitment. The film believes in its own nonsense, and that sincerity goes a long way.

Gus Trikonis directs the material with a briskness that suits it. At around 85 minutes, The Evil moves quickly enough that it rarely gives viewers much time to dwell on its thinner character work or its occasionally awkward plotting. The mansion itself does a lot of the heavy lifting. It has the faded, neglected grandeur that every good haunted-house movie needs, with dark rooms, winding staircases, sealed-off spaces, and enough shadowy corners to make even a simple walk down a hallway feel questionable. The location gives the movie a genuine sense of place, which is important because much of the film depends on the audience accepting the house as an active threat rather than just a backdrop.

There is a very specific low-budget 1970s flavor to the production that adds to its charm. The movie is not sleek or refined, and that works in its favor. The roughness of the camerawork, the muted colors, the occasionally dated sound design, and the practical effects all give it a handmade quality. The Evil never looks expensive, but it often looks tangible. When the house lashes out, the effects may not always be flawless, but they have physical weight. A lot of modern horror relies on digital polish to sell its scares; this film has to make do with tricks happening in front of the camera, and that gives the best moments an immediate, almost old-fashioned punch.

The movie is at its strongest when it keeps things simple. A character hears something in another room. Someone gets separated from the group. A familiar household object or feature of the mansion suddenly becomes dangerous. These are basic horror devices, but Trikonis uses them efficiently. He knows that the fear of walking into an empty room is sometimes more useful than a long explanation of why the room is dangerous. The Evil is not a slow-burn ghost story in the style of The Innocents. It is more interested in delivering jolts and keeping the body count moving. That can make it feel mechanical at times, but it also makes the movie easy to enjoy as a late-night scare picture.

Richard Crenna gives the film more credibility than it probably deserves. He plays C.J. as a rational, decent man who believes he can bring order and purpose to a place everyone else would wisely avoid. His growing inability to explain what is happening gives the movie an anchor. Crenna does not act embarrassed by the material or play it with a knowing wink. He treats the situation seriously, which makes the supernatural chaos around him feel more convincing. He is the kind of sturdy, professional lead who can sell even the film’s more ridiculous turns simply by looking genuinely alarmed.

Joanna Pettet also helps keep the human side of the movie from getting completely lost. Caroline is more willing than C.J. to recognize that something is wrong with the mansion, and that divide gives their relationship a modest but effective tension. The rest of the cast, including Andrew Prine, Cassie Yates, Mary Louise Weller, and Lynne Moody, is more variable. They serve the story well enough, though most of them are defined more by the danger they face than by particularly deep characterization. The film does not spend much time building rich backstories, but the actors keep the group dynamic watchable.

The middle section is where The Evil shows its limitations most clearly. The structure can become repetitive: something strange happens, someone investigates alone, the house responds, and the survivors become more desperate. The mythology behind the mansion is also not always developed with much precision. But again, the movie gets away with more than it should because it keeps pushing forward. It has the energy of a film that knows it cannot afford to be boring. Even when the story is familiar, there is usually another strange image, creepy sound, or sudden danger waiting around the corner.

The final stretch is best left mostly unspoiled, because the movie takes a turn that is much stranger and more ambitious than its early scenes might lead you to expect. It broadens the scope of the story without abandoning the slightly tacky, practical-effects character that defines the rest of the film. Some viewers will probably find the shift abrupt, especially if they are expecting a straightforward haunted-house ending. Others will enjoy the fact that The Evil refuses to settle for the safest possible conclusion. It is a movie that starts with a familiar premise and gradually gets more unhinged, and that unpredictability is a real asset.

Ultimately, The Evil is not a lost classic, but it is a lot more fun than its reputation and basic setup might suggest. It has no right to work as well as it does. The premise is familiar, the characters are not deeply written, the effects are uneven, and the story occasionally runs on pure genre momentum. Yet that momentum is exactly what makes it enjoyable. Trikonis delivers a lean, energetic little horror movie with a great old mansion, a convincingly serious Richard Crenna, a few solid practical scares, and enough late-game insanity to make the experience memorable. If you enjoy the rougher, more obscure side of 1970s supernatural horror, The Evil is the kind of movie that can catch you off guard: imperfect, sometimes goofy, but much more entertaining than it has any right to be.