Tag: Horror

When Unhinged Pasts Are Revealed, What’s Diabolic (2026) Is Sure to Scare

Diabolic blends trauma, control, and the supernatural into a hallucinatory folk-horror trip. While the film leans heavily on its past timeline, Phillips’ visceral style shines once the weirdness bleeds into the present.

Diabolic (2025) Movie PosterStreaming on VOD (YouTube, Apple TV+)

Aussie-made films can sometimes lean on the outback, or curiosity about Indigenous culture, but Diabolic takes a different path. Though the story plays out in the proverbial outback of Utah, I couldn’t help wondering why foreign investors were more interested in helping Daniel J. Phillips make this film than backing local creators. It’s not a detail worth nitpicking since the movie was shot in the land down under, but it becomes noticeable when the landscape feels slightly wrong for its intended setting. Maybe that’s part of the hallucinatory effect Phillips is aiming for.

After Elise (Elizabeth Cullen, The Bureau of Magical Things) leaves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she thinks she’s safe. She’s moved on, but the nightmares keep coming. Elise has PTSD, and that’s the terrain the film explores more than anything else. Thankfully, her boyfriend Adam (John Kim, The Librarians) and her adoptive sister Gwen (Mia Challis, Outer Banks) are understanding. Trouble starts when they take a camping trip to get away and bring drugs along, hoping to knock down the walls Elise has built so she can finally feel whole and free from her past.

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With Tales of Dark Romance in Comics, Love Hurts More Than It Heals

Love isn’t always soft, and comics know it. These dark romance comics lean into obsession, grief, and corrupted devotion, spotlighting new releases and older cult favourites that treat heartbreak as a weapon and a revelation.

Broken Heart Through Sun - Dark Romance in ComicsIn the name of dark romance in comics, some creators enjoy exploring its edges through works released for the season of hearts. When there’s no anti-Valentine’s icon the way Christmas has Krampus, these tales lean on the human condition instead. Rather than crafting a saccharine Harlequin fantasy, what’s presented here cuts deeper.

In the real world, love comes with sacrifice, compromise, and the understanding that some connections aren’t meant to last. That emotional friction becomes fertile ground for storytelling. The result is a slate of works that challenge the idea that love must be soft, safe, or everlasting. What’s offered here are current and upcoming titles that dare to be different, stories where affection and obsession blur, where devotion turns corrosive, and where heartbreak is as transformative as it is devastating.

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Just What A Useful Ghost Offers Is Not Seduction, But Suction

A Useful Ghost turns grief, spirituality, and social satire into one of the most offbeat supernatural films in recent memory. Blending heartfelt loss with possessed appliances and sharp cultural commentary, this Ghost Month standout is equal parts absurd and affecting.

A Useful Ghost Movie Poster
Playing at the Victoria Film Festival Feb 14th, 2026 at The Roxy (2657 Quadra St.) at 2pm. Buy tickets here.

Filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke has crafted a supernatural film that doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings, it suggests grief doesn’t always need to be sucked up. A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ) weaves several tales together to create the ultimate Ghost Month film. Originally debuting in August 2025 for Southeast Asian audiences, it’s now making a well-deserved splash across the international festival circuit.

The film introduces a series of suffocating situations. There is Tok (Krittin Thongmai), who dies at work from chest congestion. Elsewhere, an unnamed academic (Wisarut Homhuan) insists it isn’t dust but industrial pollution choking him. He buys a vacuum cleaner that promptly malfunctions. When Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad) arrives to fix it, he has no idea he’s about to be seduced.

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Unleashing Colum Eastwood’s The Morrigan. Just Who Is This Phantom Queen?

A slow-burn folk horror with teeth, The Morrigan reframes the goddess as something older and sharper than pop culture’s “wicked sorceress” shortcut. Through a mother and daughter caught in a modern system built to drain women dry, the film turns possession into sovereignty, and rebellion into something sacred and brutal.

2025 The Morrigan Movie PosterCineverse
Now on VOD and Digital

The worship of the Morrígan is nearly as old as time, dating back to roughly 3000 BC. In terms of raw elemental power, she rivals a force like Gaia, the very breath and blood of the land itself. Yet, history has been unkind to her. In Irish lore, she was a terrifyingly complex sovereign; in modern literature, her role was flattened to fit the needs of the “wicked sorceress” trope. While pop culture often lazily grafts her onto Arthurian legend, those who hold The Mists of Avalon as the best may need to head back to school to “unlearn” the sanitized version of the goddess they’ve been sold.

Colum Eastwood’s expansion of his short film proves he’s done the homework. He frames the Morrígan not as a simple adversary, but as a goddess of death, regeneration, and rebirth. This is the core belief of Fiona (Saffron Burrows), a woman battling a modern world designed to “steal a lady’s thunder.” The film’s strongest thematic tissue lies in the parallel between the ancient and the modern: Fiona is reeling from a husband who has abandoned her and their daughter, Lily (Emily Flain), while being professionally bled dry by Professor Jonathan Horner (Jonathan Forbes). He is a leech who steals from his TAs while the world turns a blind eye.

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Stranger Things. The Full Series in Review

After a long rewatch of Stranger Things, I look at what worked and what did not when creating the threat that would manifest in the small town of Hawkins. Thankfully, for those in the know, no foothold was made, but is this truly the end?

Stranger Things LogoWhen Stranger Things first arrived on Netflix, it began with something wonderfully small. It seemed to be simply about a group of kids playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and not expecting that world to manifest around them! After the sudden absence of Will (Noah Schnapp), they had to learn how to become heroes for real. Even though the adults didn’t believe what they’ve encountered is real, what they managed to do was the impossible: to show that dangers lurk in every corner. The shadows are alive, and the necrophagous shadows, well….

From that moment, the series evolved naturally from childhood rituals into becoming adults. As for the fantasy characters they wanted to become, all the visual motifs (including a garbage can lid modified to become a shield) came into place. And the monsters they had to face weren’t just creatures. They were metaphors to something greater shaped by the kids’ references to concepts and entities from this role playing world. Some worked, and others did not, but overall, unless the viewer was in the know, the tie-ins were more than surface level references.

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You Have To Be prettysmart To Survive The Spirit Lift In A Haunted Hotel

A retro horror deckbuilder inspired by 90s games and haunted theme park rides, The Spirit Lift blends card-based strategy with paranormal investigation inside a cursed hotel where survival is never guaranteed.

The Spirit Lift Box Welcome back to the 90s. Drawing on the aesthetics of Atari’s Haunted House and Disney’s Tower of Terror ride, The Spirit Lift aims to deliver Ghostbusters-style thrills through a retro horror deckbuilder roguelike. Set in a haunted hotel, players investigate strange goings-on by choosing action cards that come to life on PC via Steam. prettysmart games invites players to control a trio of teenage paranormal investigators, uncover the truth behind the haunting, and hopefully survive the night.

From the Press Release:

Build a starting deck by selecting a plucky team of three teen paranormal investigators from a pool of eight characters, then venture forth into a spooky, abandoned hotel. Each character alters the starting deck, affecting battle strategies and offering distinct story revelations depending on who joins the fray. Scour rooms across 13 floors for secrets, new gear and upgrades, then head to the elevator to ascend to the next ghastly level.

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