Tag: horror movies

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Sam Raimi’s Every House is Haunted Gets a New Studio

A Horror Project Finds Its Home

Some movies spend years wandering the development wilderness before finding the right studio. Every House is Haunted has been one of those projects — until this week. Deadline reported that 20th Century Studios has acquired the supernatural thriller from Netflix, ending roughly five years in development limbo at the streamer. Netflix picked up the original script back in 2021, and the film has been waiting for its moment ever since.

Now it has one. And the talent lining up behind it suggests this could be worth the wait.

The Raimi Factor

Producing is Sam Raimi, via Raimi Productions alongside Zainab Azizi. Raimi's name on a horror project still carries genuine weight — the man practically invented the modern horror playbook, and his instincts for supernatural material are unmatched. This move comes on the heels of his team's 20th Century Studios hit Send Help, so the studio-producer relationship is already proven.

Joining the producing ranks: Roy Lee, the veteran horror producer behind Weapons, and Andrew Childs (The Long Walk) for Vertigo Entertainment. Ian Rogers, the author of the source material, executive produces alongside Starlight Media. That's a production bench with serious genre credibility on every chair.

The Source Material Is a Gem

The film is based on Ian Rogers' acclaimed short story "The House on Ashley Avenue," from his Every House is Haunted collection. The premise, per Deadline: an insurance investigator tries to debunk claims that a couple's death was caused by a haunted house — until a psychic and the mysterious occurrences he witnesses with his own eyes challenge his skepticism.

That's a beautiful setup. The skeptic-protagonist is horror's most reliable engine, because the audience gets to be converted along with the character. An insurance investigator — a professional debunker, a man whose entire job is finding the mundane explanation — forced to confront the unexplainable is the kind of premise that writes its own tension. And grounding it in a single house, the Ashley Avenue house, gives it the contained, escalating dread that the best haunted-house films share.

New Directors, New Energy

Directing are Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, the duo behind Netflix's 2024 hit Don't Move — a film that topped the streamer's movie charts for two weeks. They replace previously attached director Corin Hardy and will revise the screenplay (the original script was by Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman).

This is a smart handoff. Schindler and Netto proved with Don't Move that they can build sustained, suffocating tension from a simple premise. A haunted-house thriller is exactly the kind of assignment that plays to their strengths: atmosphere, escalation, and the kind of scares that come from what you don't see.

Why the Studio Move Matters

Netflix's loss is theaters' gain

The project languished at Netflix for five years. At 20th Century Studios, it's a theatrical horror film — and theatrical horror is having a moment. Genre fans turn out for well-made supernatural thrillers on the big screen, and the studio clearly sees this as a theatrical play. That ambition alone changes the project's trajectory.

The horror ecosystem is thriving

October is proving it right now. Clayface arrives as DC's horror-tinged offering, and the seasonal appetite for scares extends well beyond Halloween — haunted-house attractions like Bayville Scream Park, returning with five haunted houses, show how deep the cultural hunger for a good fright runs. A well-crafted haunted-house movie with Raimi producing slots directly into that appetite.

Every House is Haunted has franchise bones

The title isn't just a film title — it's a short-story collection, a whole universe of haunted houses. If the first film lands, the material is sitting right there. Studios think in universes now, and Rogers' collection is a ready-made one.

What's Still to Come

Let's be honest about where things stand: no cast has been announced, no release date is set, and the project is in active development with a new studio — not yet in production. Industry talk will now turn to casting, and with Raimi's name attached, expect the announcement to draw real names. The film is officially on the move, and in this business, that's the hardest part.

Five years in limbo would have killed a lesser project. Every House is Haunted survived — and it survived by landing with better backers, sharper directors, and one of horror's defining producers. The release date is still TBA, but the haunting has officially begun. Keep the lights on.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Clayface: DC’s New Horror Movie Arrives Oct 23, 2026

Three weeks from today, the bravest bet on any studio’s fall calendar hits theaters. Clayface — a $40 million body-horror film about a disfigured Gotham actor whose experimental treatment turns his flesh to clay — opens October 23, right in the Halloween corridor. It’s the first true horror entry in James Gunn’s DCU, and everything about it suggests Warner Bros. believes in it as a genuine genre movie, not a superhero tie-in wearing a costume.

The tagline: “Look fear in the face.” They’re not kidding.

The team behind the terror

Start with the script: Mike Flanagan, with rewrites by Hossein Amini. Flanagan is the finest horror writer working in mainstream film and television — the man behind The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep — and his involvement alone tells you this isn’t a cash-in. Then the director: James Watkins, who made Speak No Evil, one of the most upsetting studio thrillers in years. Watkins knows how to make an audience squirm with nothing but a dinner table and bad manners. Give him a man melting into clay and a Gotham City budget, and the possibilities are genuinely unsettling.

The cast seals it. Tom Rhys Harries — a Welsh stage talent with real presence — plays Matt Hagen, the aspiring actor at the story’s center. Naomi Ackie, electric in everything she touches, plays Dr. Caitlin Bates, the scientist behind the treatment. Max Minghella and Eddie Marsan round out the ensemble in roles still under wraps. This is casting with conviction: no stunt names, just actors who can carry dread.

Why “no template” matters

Peter Safran called Clayface a “riveting horror-thriller” at CinemaCon, and Gunn has positioned the film as proof that DCU movies won’t share one template. That’s the thesis worth watching. The superhero era’s biggest creative problem has been sameness — every film the same shape, the same quips, the same third-act sky battle. A $40 million slow-burn tragedy-horror about a man losing his face, his identity, and then his humanity is the opposite of the template. It’s a risk, and it’s exactly the kind of risk that makes people fall back in love with this stuff.

The Fly comparisons are already floating around, and honestly, they flatter the material. If Clayface earns even a fraction of Cronenberg’s tragic body-horror legacy, we’re in for something special. Set before the events of the animated Creature Commandos (where Alan Tudyk voices the character), the film has room to be its own thing — a standalone nightmare that happens to live in Gotham.

The Halloween corridor play

Planting a comic-book horror film three weeks before Halloween is a statement of confidence. Warner Bros. isn’t hiding this in January. They’re putting it where horror audiences live, in the season when they show up. A $40 million budget means it doesn’t need Avengers money to be a hit — it needs the horror crowd, the curious, and the word of mouth that a genuinely scary October movie generates.

October 23

Clayface is the kind of swing that reminds you why the movies are fun: a disfigured actor, a mad scientist, a Flanagan script, a director who knows exactly how to hurt you, all for the price of a mid-budget thriller. Look fear in the face. We’ll be in the theater, probably through our fingers.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Other Mommy Review: Chastain’s Chilling Halloween Horror

“Can I go inside your heart?”

That is the question at the center of Other Mommy, and if it does not chill you a little, read it again slowly. Universal Pictures releases the film exclusively in theaters on October 9, and horror fans have already crowned it the Halloween season’s best bet. After watching the trailer, it is not hard to see why.

The setup

The film is adapted from Josh Malerman’s bestselling 2024 novel Incidents Around the House. Malerman wrote Bird Box, so he knows how to find the soft spot in a reader’s chest and press on it. The story follows Bela, a young girl played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who forms a bond with a supernatural entity inside her home. The entity looks uncannily like her own mother. It keeps asking to get inside her heart. What begins as an unusual friendship turns sinister as Bela realizes the presence she welcomed may be hunting her family.

Jessica Chastain plays both roles: Bela’s protective mother and the thing wearing her face. It is a dual performance built on small, awful details. Chastain has described finding the character’s unblinking smile and shaping every physical choice around what the entity would offer a lonely child: the mother Bela wishes she had. Jay Duplass plays her father, Daddo. The supporting cast includes Dichen Lachman as a paranormal scientist, Arian Moayed as a family friend, and screen legend Karen Allen, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame, as Bela’s grandmother.

The team behind the dread

Director Rob Savage made his name with Host, the lockdown horror film shot entirely over video call, then proved he could go big-studio with The Boogeyman. He knows how to build dread out of nothing and how to spend a budget. Producer James Wan, the architect of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring, backs the film through his Blumhouse and Atomic Monster banner. The screenplay comes from WGA Award winner Nathan Elston.

Savage recently told Entertainment Weekly the film contains around 50 jump scares, then immediately complicated his own count: a great scare, he argued, does not need the classic quiet-quiet-loud formula. What he promises instead is dread, set pieces and a deep paranoia where the audience can never quite tell whether they are looking at Mommy or Other Mommy, or whether any grown-up in the frame can be trusted. For a 93-minute horror film, that is a tight, mean machine.

Why it might actually get you

The trailer did something unusual. It played before The Odyssey in theaters and went properly viral, with audiences reporting genuine unease. That matters. Trailers are engineered to startle; this one reportedly left people sitting in the dark feeling wrong. The second trailer shows restraint too, holding back how the entity actually operates. In an era when marketing routinely spoils the third act, that discipline is encouraging.

There is also the Malerman factor. Incidents Around the House is told from a child’s perspective, and the novel’s power comes from the gap between what Bela understands and what the reader does. If the film keeps even half of that, it will be the rare horror movie that works as a drama too. Chastain does not do paycheck roles. She picked this one.

The scares, on paper

Savage’s recent interviews suggest a director thinking hard about craft, not just shocks. He talks about building scares without the classic quiet-quiet-loud formula, about dread as a sustained pressure rather than a series of pops. The final trailer hints at set pieces with real imagination: one sequence has the entity hunting Bela through an indoor play park, galloping down twisting slides before cornering the child in an endless ball pit. A ball pit. The most innocent place on earth, turned into a trap. That is the kind of image that lodges in your head and stays there.

The film’s best trick may be its ambiguity. Chastain herself has leaned into the question of whether Bela is seeing a monster or a darker side of her own mother. A horror film that keeps you guessing about reality for 93 minutes, led by an Oscar winner playing against herself, is exactly what October is for.

Plan your scare night

Horror this good deserves a full evening. Brave one of the 20 haunted houses in and around NYC to warm up, catch Other Mommy on October 9, and then cleanse your palate with something cheerful, like the city’s 2026 holiday tree and lights celebrations. Just remember the question. Can I go inside your heart? Answer carefully.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Resident Evil Review: Zach Cregger’s Horror Triumph

Video game movies used to be where good ideas went to die. Then directors like Zach Cregger showed up. His Resident Evil — in theaters now — isn’t just the best film in the franchise’s history. It’s one of the best horror films of the year, full stop. And audiences agree: a $60 million domestic opening, $200 million-plus worldwide as of this week, and a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score. When was the last time a horror movie made everyone this happy?

Dread, done right

The premise is lean: Bryan (Austin Abrams) finds himself in a race for survival, in a brand-new story built from the bones of the beloved games. No homework required. You don’t need to know the lore, the timelines, or which game had the mansion. You just need a pulse.

What makes it sing is Cregger’s understanding of what actually made those games great. He told The Atlantic he plays them because “the game design and the pacing and the dread is so effective… That, to me, is the heart and soul of those games.” That’s the whole movie in one quote. This is horror built on pacing, not jump scares — corridors that feel too long, silences that feel too loud, a camera that knows exactly when to look away.

Abrams carries it beautifully. Bryan isn’t a superhero; he’s a guy trying to stay alive, and Abrams plays every shade of that fear without ever tipping into melodrama. You believe him. That’s rarer than it sounds.

Craft you can feel

What separates this from the average horror release is the craft. The sound design alone deserves mention — every creak, every distant thud, every held breath is placed with intention. Cregger understands that dread is a rhythm, and he conducts it like a maestro. The production design leans into decay and detail: environments that tell stories before anyone speaks. It’s the kind of filmmaking that rewards the big screen, where scale and sound do half the scaring for you. This is a director who learned pacing from games and atmosphere from the masters, and it shows in every frame.

The numbers tell the story

Let’s linger on the box office, because it’s genuinely remarkable. Sixty million domestic out of the gate. A second weekend holding at $23.3 million and pushing past $100 million domestic, per TheWrap’s roundup. Two hundred million worldwide and counting. For an R-rated horror film in September, those are the kind of numbers that make studio executives weep with joy.

And here’s the kicker: the same week Resident Evil crossed $200 million, Cregger’s next film — the Jennifer Lawrence sci-fi thriller The Flood — was announced. One director, one week, a historic hit and a dream project greenlit. Hollywood loves a winner, and this is how winning weeks look.

Why it works as an adaptation

Most game adaptations fail because they treat the source like a Wikipedia page to summarize. Cregger treated it like a feeling to recreate. The dread, the resourcefulness, the sense that safety is always one wrong turn away — that’s the games, translated honestly into cinema. Parade calls it a box office hit; we’d call it a template. This is how you do it.

The verdict

Resident Evil is scary, smart, and propulsive — the rare franchise entry that respects its source while doing something entirely its own. Cregger has now delivered Barbarian, the Oscar-winning Weapons, and this: three for three, each one distinct, each one excellent, each one proof that original voices still win big. He’s not just the most exciting horror director working. He might be the most exciting director working, period.

If you like horror, see it on the biggest screen you can find. If you don’t usually like horror, see it anyway — this is the one that converts people. Few films earn both critical love and crowd love in the same breath; this one did, and then some. A genuinely joyful week for the genre, and a triumph worth celebrating.