horror

Halloween Streaming Report 2025

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Presence (2025)

“Presence leans into the improbability of the found footage horror genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so you don’t question why the camera continues rolling; you only question why it’s choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The answer to that question gave me a goosebumpy shock and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way the best ghost stories do.” Currently streaming on Hulu

Oct 2: The Shrouds (2025)

“Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

“John Lithgow is always at his best when he’s playing inhuman villain, which in this case involves him performing a Punch & Judy puppet show that went so far off-script it became elder abuse.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 4: Cure (1997)

“A little skeptical of why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. Doesn’t really matter though; all are self-evidently great.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 5: The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

“This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 6: Sinners (2025)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Funny & sexy too, improbably.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 7: Day of the Dead (1985)

“A brains vs brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse.  Hard to buy a premise in which scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population have their research derailed by meathead fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work.  Not really sure what Romero was on about there.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Peacock, and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 8: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

“The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Still, their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds.” Currently streaming on Hulu & Shudder

Oct 9: 28 Years Later (2025)

“It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we?” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 10: Tomie (1998)

“A perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 11: Audition (1999)

“I love how the perspective and basic reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation. A shame that the wave of American torture porn that followed didn’t pick up on that note and instead just echoed the gore” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 12: Carrie (1976)

“One of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw. This is the first time I’ve watched it that made me both cry (when Carrie is enjoying herself at the prom) and jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s hand reaches out from the rubble of her home). It’s so self-evidently great on its own terms that it’s easy to forget that it’s also a great De Palma film . . . until he starts splitting the screen and importing notes from the Psycho score. That’s our guy.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and AMC+

Oct 13: The Rage – Carrie 2 (1999)

“I haven’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a movie this badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago . . . Except their deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad.” Currently streaming on MGM+

Oct 14: Companion (2025)

“It’s no surprise that this is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 15: The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 16: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

“Shameless ‘Aren’t old people scary?’ exploitation, but super effective nonetheless.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Shudder

Oct 17: Communion (1989)

“The problem with casting Christopher Walken in your alien-encounter horror is that nothing you dream up could possibly be a convincingly alien as Christopher Walken. Full honesty, though, the first alien contact scene is 100% accurate to an uncanny experience I had in New Mexico about a decade ago, which is an embarrassing thing to say about a movie that’s otherwise so aggressively goofy.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 18: Tesis (1996)

“Often feels like the made-for-TV version of Red Rooms in its aesthetics, but it’s effectively eerie nonetheless. Does a great job playing with home-video audiences’ attraction/repulsion relationship with extremely violent images (and hetero women’s attraction/repulsion relationship with violent men), even if its own academic interest in the subject is self-admittedly superficial ” Currently streaming on Shudder & AMC+

Oct 19: Fade to Black (1980)

“An uncomfortably prescient film about how everyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 20: Deadline (1980)

“Canuxploitation meta-horror that puts itself on trial during the tax shelter era, belligerently presenting academic arguments that horror allows artists to process societal ills through metaphor while frequently interrupting itself with vignettes of low-brow, for-their-own-sake gore gags of dubious artistic merit. Just about as narratively flimsy as Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, and just about as unpredictably entertaining too.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 21: The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

“I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but this is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Masque drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revelers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film Ligeia at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best-preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends this an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 22: Nosferatu (2024)

“Wouldst thou like to live maliciously? It’s becoming apparent that Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a larger studio-budget scale. As a result, this doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 23: Alucarda (1977)

“A Satanic blood orgy between Carmilla, Carrie, The Devils, and The Exorcist, staged entirely on leftover sets from Kate Bush music videos. Impossible not to oversell it” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 24: Burial Ground (1981)

“So much care went into creating a wide range of gnarly latex zombie masks for this that it’s hilarious they left so many of the performers’ hands fleshy and relatively in-tact. It looks like they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 25: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

“More like The Texas Sledgehammer Massacre amirite? Honestly, this probably wouldn’t rank in my top 5 Tobe Hooper movies, since I’m more of an 80s splatstick guy than a 70s grindhouse guy, but I do respect that it is the 70s grindhouse movie: the one that everything in its wake has sweatily scrambled to emulate.” Currently streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Screambox, and for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 26: Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

“All the things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 27: Dead Talents Society (2025)

“Last year, this wonderful influencer-era update to Beetlejuice earned gradual acclaim & notoriety on the festival circuit only to be dumped on Netflix with no fanfare to speak of long after the word of mouth had cooled. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice got the red-carpet festival premiere treatment at Venice before immediately cashing in on easy nostalgia money across every multiplex screen in America, despite not being half as charming or inspired. ‘I hate this world’ indeed” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 28: Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964)

“There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster design of all time. Loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. It’s so metal that it takes three other skyscraper monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head 🤘” Currently streaming on HBO and The Criterion Channel

Oct 29: Ash (2025)

“The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a ‘purpose’ or a ‘point,’ meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its ‘purpose’ is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its ‘point’ is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 30: Junk Head (2017)

“If this stop-motion nightmare comedy were made a decade or so earlier, it could’ve sold so many Hot Topic t-shirts. The world would’ve had no need for Salad Fingers. We’d be in a much better place.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and Kanopy

Oct 31: Frankie Freako (2024)

“Entirely accurate to the Gremlinsploitation genre it’s spoofing, in that for the first 20 minutes or so I was clawing my eyes out in fear they were never going to get around to setting loose the little monster on the poster. Once Frankie’s fully unleashed, however, it’s time to party. Shabadoo.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

-The Swampflix Crew

Cross-Promotion: Homicidal (1961) on Bonafide Tastemakers

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Our very own Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet recently guested on the Bonafide Tastemakers podcast to discuss how William Castle’s shameless Psycho rip-off Homicidal (1961) compares to its blatant source of inspiration.

Give a listen to the Bonafide Tastemakers episode on Homicidal below! And if you like what you hear, you can follow Bonafide Tastemakers on Instagram for more raucous cult cinema celebration.

-Swampflix

Day of the Dead (1985)

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One of the more exhausting tendencies of zombie outbreak stories is how they all inevitably devolve into large-scale militarism. Even the more modern deviations on vintage zombie tropes in 28 Days Later, Overlord, and The Girl With All the Gifts are largely military stories, as if there is no way to depict a worldwide zombie outbreak without filling the frame with tanks & helicopters. All zombie roads lead directly to the military, and they all trail back to George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy. Following the suburban invasion of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and 1978’s trapped-in-a-shopping mall satire Dawn of the Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead is a pure brains-vs.-brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse. If violent, crowd-controlling military action is essential to zombie outbreak storytelling, then movies might as well make the conflict between that military and the citizens it supposedly protects a central part of the text. Being more of an Idea Guy who was always eager to dig into the moral & philosophical implications of his films’ supernatural events than someone who could convincingly stage propulsive action or heartfelt drama, Romero was perfectly suited to explore that conflict at length, locking the audience into the bunker with him until he could sort it all out.

Lori Cardille stars as a scientist willing to dedicate the rest of her life to researching a cure for zombie blood infection. Unfortunately, she’s the only woman in the underground military bunker that’s been retrofitted into her research lab, and the heavily armed meatheads who provide her rations are getting tired of her work showing no discernible progress. The only thing stopping them from stripping her of her lab equipment (and more) is the parallel research of Dr. Matthew Logan, a mad scientist whose colleagues mockingly refer to as “Frankenstein”. Having long given up on finding a cure, Frankenstein has instead shifted his research to training zombie captives from the mines outside the military base on how to behave. He rigs their undead, semi-disassembled bodies to machines, stimulating them with electricity to see how their flesh might be controlled by the living’s command. He’s also taken one specific zombie as a pet, a specimen who he’s nicknamed “Bub” in loving, disdainful memory of his own father. Thanks to the power of positive reinforcement, Bub can vocalize simple phrases, operate a Walkman, salute the military officers in the room, and (most recklessly on Frankenstein’s end) fire a handgun. He can also apparently hold a grudge, since he eventually escapes containment to hunt down the bunker’s most fascistic militant in retribution for the crime of being an asshole.

There are three clear MVPs at work here, Tom Savini the most obvious among them. The all-out zombie mayhem of the final minutes (when the military base is inevitably invaded by the horde outside) gives Savini and his make-up team dozens of chances to stage and restage the classic Romero gag where a victim is overwhelmed & disemboweled by hungry zombies’ reaching hands. Before that climactic payoff, the frequent visits to Frankenstein’s lab allow Savini more freedom to construct individual animatronic monstrosities that show the mad doctor’s abandoned experiments in various stages of failure & disrepair, and the results rank among the gore wizard’s most unforgettable creations. The unlikely comic duo of Frankenstein (Richard Liberty) & Bub (Sherman Howard) are also obvious MVPs, delivering most of the film’s memorable character moments. The way Frankenstein wanders into meetings with military officials smeared from face to boot in infected zombie blood while explaining why they should pet-train the cannibal ghouls instead of shooting them dead makes for consistently rewarding comic relief. Meanwhile, his star pupil Bub is initially amusing as a slack-jawed walking corpse who can only vaguely mime human behavior while chained to the laboratory wall, but he ends up carrying most of the film’s effective pathos once he breaks free – just like the original Dr. Frankenstein’s pet creature.

Like with most Romero classics, I found the scene-to-scene drama in Day of the Dead to be frustratingly inert but was greatly impressed by its thoughtfulness in theme and tactility in violence. Maybe the main scientist’s heart-to-hearts with her infected boyfriend or the renegade helicopter pilot who could eventually fly her to safety ran a little dry, but the larger dramatic concerns about military muscle overpowering scientific experts after the breakdown of societal decorum felt true and continually relevant. On the film’s 30th Anniversary, it isn’t especially difficult to find contemporary meaning in a story about scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population but having their research derailed by a few gun-toting fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work. The most Romero stands out as a visual stylist here (outside the opportunities he gives Savini’s crew to run wild in the lab) are during a brief zombie hunt sequence in an underground cave, where he brings back the same extreme red & blue crosslighting he experimented with in 1982’s Creepshow. Otherwise, his artistry is most deeply felt in the philosophical nature of his writing, which finds a way to interrogate the inherent militarism of zombie narratives instead of casually accepting it as a matter of course.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #247: Alucarda (1977) & Nunsploitation

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Welcome to Episode #247 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of nunsploitation thrillers from around the globe, starting with the Mexican production Alucarda (1977).

00:00 Welcome
02:19 Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera (1963)
07:31 The Idiots (1998)
15:20 Ariel (1988)
22:11 Troop Beverly Hills (1989)

28:26 Alucarda (1977)
56:30 School of the Holy Beast (1974)
1:14:33 Killer Nun (1979)
1:25:48 Dark Habits (1983)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Weapons (2025)

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When preparing my review for Eddington, I couldn’t remember the bizarrely specific Pokémon-themed name that was going to be given to the AI data center being built outside of the titular town. In searching for a script for it online in order to get this name, I stumbled across a Reddit post that contained the screenplay for both that film and Weapons, and I inadvertently read a spoiler about Weapons in the beginning of the post before I could click away. To be honest, I didn’t believe it when I read it. It seemed like too much of a departure from what the advertising had presented, and I couldn’t reconcile the images that were already rattling around in my head from the trailers with the spoiler, let alone with the discourse already surrounding the film, all of which had firmly already centered itself around (pre)reading the “disappeared kids” narrative as being a school shooting metaphor. The spoiler didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but it did mean that I knew what the motivation was behind the film’s events before the film revealed itself, and I wish that I could have experienced this for the first time without that foreknowledge. 

The film’s poster tagline is also part of its opening narration: “[One] night, at 2:17 am, [almost] every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark … and never came back.” We see this first school day with most of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)’s class having failed to show up, all except for timid Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). A month later, there are still no clues as to the children’s location, and the community is still in a state of perpetual outcry, with particularly outspoken local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) calling for Justine’s arrest until she can explain what happened, a conflict that Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) attempts to prevent from escalating. We learn that Justine has had previous trouble with alcoholism and that this event has led her to drowning her sorrows once again, which leads her to have a one-night stand with an old ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Based on the pre-release information we had, one would assume that Justine would be our sole main character as we follow her along her investigation into the disappearance of her students (or that perhaps she is responsible and that the film will focus on Archer’s discovery of the extent of her involvement), but the film takes a different narrative approach, instead breaking its story into multiple sections that each focus on one character. 

Justine’s is first, of course, so that we can watch her struggle with facing the community of Maybrook while having no more answers to the children’s disappearance than they do, up to the point when she’s attacked by an apparently possessed friend, at which point the film then switches points of view to follow Archer. We see him waking up in the bed of his missing son, apparently regretting all the love he failed to show the boy when he had the chance (as we see later in Alex’s point of view section, Archer’s son Matthew is an outright bully, perhaps because of this lack of affection). He’s losing track of things at work, placing wrong orders and forgetting others entirely, and this scattered thinking can only refocus on one target: Justine. He’s frustrated with what he feels is insufficient investigation on the part of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), so he begins to follow Justine and vandalizes her car, but he comes to see that she’s just as lost in all of this as he is. I don’t want to get into all of the ins and outs of what we learn from each of these intersections between the character-focused sections because they’re much more interesting to see play out non-linearly, almost Magnolia style (which director Zach Cregger has admitted is an inspiration), before they weave into one another. It makes the whole thing feel grounded, filling in little realistic details through naturalistic dialogue — conversations about the excitement of coming home early from a business trip because it means that you’ll be home when you’re ovulating, Archer’s wife’s exasperated “I’m going to work” when she finds him asleep in missing Matthew’s room yet again, and the way that homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) spins a threadbare web of transparent but plausible lies to try and extort tiny bits of cash from friends still willing to take a call from him. There are large swathes of the film where you’ll completely forget that there’s a potentially supernatural mystery at play here because you’ll be more invested in the lives of the characters. That’s good filmmaking, baby. 

Weapons is doing pretty well on the discourse circuit. The film’s barely been out for a couple of days as I write this (on the Monday after the film’s release, having seen it in a packed theater Friday evening), and there are already many different takes on the film’s themes. I barely looked at social media today and saw more than a dozen memes about the meal that Marcus and his husband have prepared for their TV time (it includes seven hot dogs, ruffled potato chips, baby carrots, an ungodly amount of what I presume is ranch dressing, and chocolate chip cookies — iconic), and YouTuber Ryan Hollinger has already put out a video in which he claims that the film’s overall thesis is about alcoholism (even though I don’t completely agree with his analysis). Although alcoholism and addiction in general are running themes through the film, I think that the presence of these diseases is more about showing character through the ways that addiction can compel people to be the worst version of themselves. That compulsion isn’t limited to drinking or shooting up, though, as we see with Archer and how his vandalism and lack of focus are the result of his grief. If anything, the film is about parasitism and the way that parasites can compel their hosts, with addictive compulsion (i.e. the proverbial monkey on one’s back), sexual impulsivity, and grief themselves acting as metaphors for having a parasite that controls you, as the film’s villainous force does. I won’t say more than that to save you from being spoiled the way that I was. 

In discussion about the film over the weekend, a friend brought up that one critic’s complaint was that Cregger will always opt to go for a joke rather than a scare, and while I think that’s an oversimplification of the director’s style, I also don’t think it’s inaccurate, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. This is a movie about children disappearing, parents bereft of answers, communities in mourning, leaders navigating grief and expectations, and finding solace in feeding one’s diseases while also being very, very funny. Sometimes, Cregger will just throw in a little piece of weirdness just for the hell of it (the giant floating AR-15 with 2:17 shining out of it in LED alarm clock letters being the most obvious example), and that’s also a delight. It’s a rich vein for evaluation and re-evaluation, and I could possibly be enticed to see this one a second time while it’s in theaters. Recapitulating the jokes would be just as bad as giving away the ending (which is itself very cathartic and bloodily hilarious), so I’ll just give this one a whole-hearted recommendation and send you on your way, dear reader. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Together (2025)

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I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!

I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best. 

As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely loved Together. 

The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there. 

There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone. 

What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry. 

This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

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There is something both inevitable and unfathomable about there being a new I Know What You Did Last Summer legacyquel in wide theatrical release right now. Sure, the combination of Hollywood executives’ unquenchable thirst for name-brand IP and the relative dependability of horror cheapies to turn a tidy profit makes it seem like a no-brainer that this vintage 90s title would get the modern rebootquel treatment. It was pretty low on the priority list too, following a long parade of legacy horror sequels of varying quality in recent years, like Scream, Halloween, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Even so, the I Know What You Did Last Summer brand had already been downgraded to straight-to-streaming schlock in its little seen third & fourth entries, so it’s a little surprising to see the title claw its way back onto multiplex marquees. It’s especially surprising when you consider how little there is to the property beyond the recognizability of its title, which makes for easy, memorable parody in Scary Movie-type yuck-em-ups. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film is a by-the-numbers teen slasher with little bloodshed and little novelty. Its setting in a North Carolina fishing village provides some nice background texture for its otherwise indisticntive murder spree, justifying its hook-handed fisherman killer’s costuming beyond its connection to a timeless urban legend. By the second film in the series, it was already apparent that those details weren’t enough to keep the party going, since I Still Know What You Did Last Summer immediately jumped the shark by sending its teens-in-peril on the kind of Bahamas beach trip that usually arrives multiple seasons into a hokey sitcom like Saved by the Bell. That tropical island locale does little to distract from the fact that the series’ killer isn’t iconic enough to have earned a recognizable moniker by his second outing. You can’t even joke about I Still Know being subtitled The Fisherman’s Tropical Vacay or The Hook Man’s Island Getaway because no one would know what you’re talking about. When the killer’s teenage victims refer to him as “The Slicker Guy” deep into the third act, you can feel the whole brand falling apart from under you . . . and yet here we are, two more sequels and a televised series later.

The benefit of contributing to a legacy this bland is that it sets expectations low. No army of black t-shirted horror bros are going to be outraged about the blasphemous desecration of I Know What You Did Last Summer as a sacred object, not the way they were with more disastrous franchise refreshers like The Exorcist: Believer or the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street. That gives director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson free rein to be playful & flippant with the material, even if the exercise requires her to be absurdly reverent to the fabled events of 1997. Through reluctant re-unions, nightmare visitations, and a presumptuous sequel set-up stinger, the main casts of the first two I Know What You Did features return here for unearned moments of horror-icon spotlight: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and, briefly, Brandy. As is now legacyquel tradition, they help fill in a younger cast of imperiled teens on their initial bouts with the slicker killer, adding gravitas to previous outings by constantly referencing Trauma in therapy speak (in this case through classroom lecture and conversational references to The Body Keeps The Score). The 4th of July celebrations, fish-themed parade floats, department store mannequins, and town-hall beauty pageant stage of the original film are all treated with sacred reverence as if anyone would remember those details without having recently rewatched it as homework. Robinson undercuts that reverence with metatextual jokes about how “Nostalgia’s overrated” or how it’s not a viable plan to “fuck off to the Bahamas” to escape this particular killer, but those one-liners only go so far. Her bolder choice is to double down on the sassy, aggressive girliness of her straight-to-Netflix comedy thriller Do Revenge here, aiming her I Know What You Did sequel at teen-girl sensibilities instead of trying to please those teens’ aging Millennial parents. Considering that the first Last Summer movie excelled more as a teen melodrama than as a bodycount slasher anyway, it makes sense that this cutesy reboot would be rigorously engineered specifically “for the girlies and the gays.” What’s impressive is that it pulls off that girlish tone while still being the most violent entry in its series to date.

As with the original cast, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer crew is populated by young twentysomethings who are likely only famous to children (give or take whatever die-hard fans Chase Sui Wonders might have picked up from her turn as the least recognizable actor in Bodies Bodies Bodies). As with the original cast, they spend a reckless night partying on a public road by the fishing-village coast, leading to an anonymous stranger’s vehicular death. They do nothing to rescue or report in that moment of crisis, which seemingly leads to vengeance from beyond the grave the following summer, when a hook-handed killer in a fisherman slicker threatens them with notecards & puncture wounds. This reboot does not deviate from the narrative formula of the original, but it does deviate in tone & extremity. While the 1997 film kept most of its kills offscreen and cleanly preserved on fishing-boat ice, the new one leans into its R rating and throws in some additional fishing-themed tools of death to expand the killer’s arsenal: boning knife, anchor rope, harpoon gun, etc. Robinson also expands the horror-nostalgia scope to include allusions to other famous properties, borrowing the Jaws mayor’s refusal to postpone his town’s 4th of July celebrations, the Scream killer’s kitchen-island voyeurism, and some horror-nerd cred from references to podcasts like Colors of the Dark & This Ends at Prom. She balances out all of this genre-fan pandering by keeping the mood light, sassy, and gay. Same-sex couples, bisexual hookups, and a self-satisfied coining of the term “gentrifislaytion” align the film with other recent reclaimed-for-the-girlies horror titles like Do Revenge, Clown in a Cornfield, and 2021’s Slumber Party Massacre remake than traditionally macho horror-convention-bro fare. I don’t believe any of those titles are remarkably great films, but I also recognize that I am not their primary target audience. I was 12 years old when I watched the first I Know What You Did Last Summer in a suburban movie theater, duped into enjoying an afterschool-special melodrama about reckless driving because it was dressed up in the rain-soaked clothes of a post-Scream slasher. Today’s 12-year-olds now have a mediocre-to-everyone-else slasher of their very own here, just as lacking in distinct iconography but now doubly violent, fun, and queer-friendly. I think that’s beautiful.

-Brandon Ledet

Son of Godzilla (1967)

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Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.

Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.

As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #242: Sinners (2025) & New Releases

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Welcome to Episode #242 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2025, starting with Ryan Coogler’s Southern-fried vampire musical Sinners.

00:00 Welcome

01:37 Mike Flanagan
03:04 Disclosure (1994)
04:50 Brokeback Mountain (2005)
09:53 Smiley Face (2007)
13:15 A Room with a View (1985)
17:01 High Heels (1991)
21:07 Querelle (1982)

25:12 Sinners (2025)
45:04 Companion (2025)
57:57 The Actor (2025)
1:08:58 Dead Talents Society (2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Wolf (1994)

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Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen. 

Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart. 

It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else). 

Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart. 

There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond