Tabla de contenidos para November 2024 en SFX

YOU MIGHT WANT TO SIT down… We’ve found proof that obsessive gaming can be a very good thing. A few years ago, screenwriter Tasha Huo (The Witcher: Blood Origin) was playing the latest Lara Croft videogame, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider (2018). She was so impressed with the gameplay, story and graphics that she turned to social media to “relentlessly” post about her progress. A producer friend saw this and reached out for a meeting, asking her to pitch her take for a Netflix anime series centred on the character of Lara Croft. While Crystal Dynamics’ British archaeologist has been an action-adventure gaming icon for almost 30 years, there’s always been an issue with how much story you can cram into videogame cut-scenes and game play when she’s continually shooting,…

“LIKE A SCREWED-UP DOCTOR Who,” is how actor/writer/director Alice Lowe describes her latest film, a bruise-black romcom about a woman named Agnes who repeatedly falls for the wrong guy, dies a horrible death, and gets reincarnated a century or so later, before the whole grisly cycle starts over again. Timestalker is another characteristically left-field idea from the woman who brought us the similarly deranged pregnancy horror Prevenge in 2016. And though it’s moderately more accessible than her splattery debut, it’s not what you’d necessarily call commercial. “I wanted to be ambitious with the film,” Lowe tells Red Alert, “because I know how unusual it is to get to make a movie, and I felt like, surely I’m at the point now where I can compromise less about what I want…

Tell us about your protagonist. → Tao is a twenty-something fortune teller who immigrated when she was young. Chafing against her new life, she ran away from home, and now travels the countryside telling small fortunes for small prices. It’s a lonely existence – at least, until she meets a mercenary and a reformed thief… How long did the book take to write? → The first draft appeared in a caffeine-fuelled whirlwind; I wrote the bulk of it in about a month (but believe me, that was all that I did that month). Revising took far longer, though while some aspects evolved, the story’s core remains largely the same. Did you have to do much research? → Not a ton! That’s one benefit of fantasy – you get to make…

“FRESH MEAT! FRESH MEAT!” director Euros Lyn shouts, mischief in his voice. He’s on the set of his new film, Sky’s dark vampire comedy The Radleys, and there’s a herd of partygoer extras, potential snacks for a hungry coffin-dweller, whose attention he requires. It’s early afternoon, in the peak of summer, during one of 2023’s waves of blinding sunshine, and SFX is spending it in the dark. We’re hovering on the sidelines of Watford’s PRYZM nightclub, in a room lined with embossed studs and giant mirrors. Any and every surface is in danger of being sticky to the touch. Suddenly, an extra in a dog costume walks past. They blend into the crowd. Mesh T-shirts. Slicked, gelled-back hair. Dry ice. Blood-red spotlights. Yet it’s easy to spot him, with his…

HELLBOY’S FOURTH LIVE-action outing treads new albeit familiar territory, being derived from The Crooked Man, a three-part miniseries published by Dark Horse Comics in 1998. “It’s completely different to anything that’s been done with the character before,” director and co-scriptwriter Brian Taylor tells Red Alert, explaining that Hellboy creator Mike Mignola felt previous live-action movies hadn’t been entirely true to his vision. “It meant a lot to Mike that I was striving for authenticity, that I was striving to be as true as possible to his comics,” he says. “I wanted to adapt it as closely and faithfully as possible in the way that you would a Stephen King or Clive Barker story. Just to put a lot of love and authenticity into it – make it feel like Mike’s…

“WE LEFT THAT MEETING thinking, ‘Okay, this is never gonna get made,’” recalls Being Human creator Toby Whithouse about the frustratingly twisty-turny path his cult supernatural hit took to make it to the screen. He was on his umpteenth attempt to nail the format and the tone of a show that had started as a very different beast, and decided there was only one way to go. “I wrote a script only I would enjoy. That was absolutely just my voice undiluted. Never mind about the response, I’m just gonna write this for me. After that, I think very little changed.” Long-term SFX readers will know what Being Human became – an often very dark, supernatural comedy drama about a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost sharing a house, while…

THE ’60S WAS A DECADE OF THE monsters, as US TV stations hoovered up Universal’s old horror films to pad out their schedules. On first release, the movies had skirted controversy and censorship, but now Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula were familiar childhood figures, lending their sinister faces to everything from Aurora model kits to the punladen pages of Famous Monsters Of Filmland. Far from frightening, they were now friendly. Between the army of young monster devotees and the burgeoning trend for high-concept TV sitcoms – everything from talking horses to wisecracking Martians – a spoof horror show was pretty much inevitable. Enter Allan Burns and Chris Hayward, jobbing writers for kids’ cartoon The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle. In early 1963, they developed an idea that Burns recalled as a…

“YOU ASK YOURSELF THE QUESTION: what would it be like, if you were stuck living forever?” Interview With The Vampire’s director Neil Jordan says. “What would it be like, if life were a passage of days that were the same, the same, the same, the same? The fashions change. The cities change. The technology changes, yet you remain the same? That, to me, was a great question.” Time moves on, yet film lives immortal. And, as Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s genre-quake of a vampire novel reaches its thirtieth anniversary, he’s reflected back on his career’s work in a new memoir, titled Amnesiac. It’s an alluring, unconventional approach to autobiography, that considers the slipperiness of one’s own memories. Jordan follows his childhood in north Dublin, surrounded by both faith and…

• This haunted house marks a return for the Ghostbusters franchise to Halloween Horror Nights, having first appeared in 2019. • Creators got the script for the film as they were developing this haunted house, which appears in both Orlando and Hollywood. They then later saw a rough cut before the finished movie was released. • The Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire house is located in sound stage 23 in Universal Orlando, also home to Monstruos: The Monsters Of Latin America. • Because two houses are staged in the same space, they were unable to traditionally lower temperatures – however, the air conditioning, timed blasts of cold air and suggestion of ice makes you feel much chillier! • The creative team replicated film-used techniques to achieve the ice spike effects. • The…

TWO YEARS AGO ALAN MOORE PUBLISHED Illuminations, a terrific collection of short stories. It wasn’t his first literary work, but it seemed to mark the start of a new phase in Moore’s career now that he’s left the world of comics behind for good. When SFX interviewed him about it, he mentioned that he was working on an ambitious sequence of novels to be titled the Long London quintet. Two years on, the first instalment is here, and it’s every bit as delightful, hilarious and bizarre as you might hope. The Great When takes place in 1949 in the bombed-out ruins of the capital, a city still pulling itself together after the war. The book blends fact and fantasy and makes use of a cast of real life London notables,…

▸ RELEASED 11 OCTOBER 15 | 113 minutes ▸ Director Gary Dauberman ▸ Cast Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, Bill Camp, Alfre Woodard Missing its original release date by two whole years – excuses include everything from the pandemic to high-level studio restructuring – this third version of Stephen King’s classic novel about a writer returning to his home town, only to discover a vampiric infestation, finally emerges from the corporate crypt. Screenwriter/director Gary Dauberman has a proven affinity for King’s work, having co-written the It movies, and he clearly comes to the source material as a fan. Conjuring a low-key, low-tech retro vibe, the film preserves the mid-’70s ambience of the book without ever feeling like disco era cosplay. “It preserves the mid-’70s ambience of the book” There’s an authentically…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 111 minutes ▸ Director Rupert Sanders ▸ Cast Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, Laura Birn “If I’m ever hard to love, just try to love me harder.” Alex Proyas’s original 1994 version of The Crow is so beloved among goths of a certain age that it seems almost sacrilegious for anyone to make another one. But Rupert Sanders’s reboot isn’t for ’90s kids anyway. There’s no nostalgia here, no cheeky winks or needle drops. Instead, it’s a dark supernatural revenger that believes so fervently in its central love story that it’s hard not to get a little swept away by it. This time around, Eric and Shelly are two messed-up kids who meet in rehab and end up running afoul of a creepy…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 99 minutes ▸ Directors Brian Taylor ▸ Cast Jack Kesy, Adeline Rudolph, Joseph Marcell, Leah McNamara Okay, let’s try this again… Hellboy first made it to the big screen in 2004 with Guillermo del Toro’s take on Mike Mignola’s half-demon superhero. It found a strong fanbase, but attempts to turn it into a trilogy floundered. The franchise was rebooted in 2019 – and bombed. Now, five years later, Hellboy returns with a second reboot, a new leading man and a visibly reduced budget. The Crooked Man wastes little time on backstory. It’s 1959. Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and BPRD agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) find themselves stranded in a small Appalachian town beset by witches. Meanwhile ex-soldier Tom (Jefferson White) is trapped in a Faustian…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 15 | Download Rising above its risible title – Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives, in its full awfulness – this German chiller proves to be an effective mix of suspense and the supernatural. Alone in her new home, a pregnant woman faces not only unquiet spirits but a more personal reckoning with her country’s genocidal past. As a single, continuous shot summons an escalating sense of dread through creaks, footsteps and fading light, it’s an exercise in paranoia that makes a virtue of its confines.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 15 | SVOD ▸ Director Damian McCarthy ▸ Cast Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Caroline Menton SHUDDER We called Damian McCarthy’s 2020 debut Caveat “hauntingly odd”, and can dust that phrase off for his follow-up, which confirms the Irish writer/director as a horror auteur. In a strange way, it’s a whodunnit. In a gripping prologue, a woman renovating a country house gets a knock on the door, and a warning that someone’s sneaked inside. But can the one-eyed man who delivers it – an ex-patient of her shrink husband – be trusted? Post-titles, we learn Dani was murdered. No need to call in Poirot here though, since her blind twin Darcy can psychically “read” objects, and a year on, has acquired the supposed…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 12 | SVOD ▸ Director McG ▸ Cast Joey King, Brianne Tju, Keith Powers, Laverne Cox NETFLIX Scott Westerfeld wrote his novel Uglies in 2005, three years before the first Hunger Games book was published. The film rights sold in 2006. Stuck in development hell ever since, the movie’s actual arrival on Netflix in 2024 feels like something from the Victorian era; the dystopian YA genre has long gone. Still, while Uglies missed the boat timing-wise, it’s not actually that bad. A few hundred years from now, humans live happy lives with no war and suffering. How did they achieve this? By inventing surgery to make themselves “pretty”: if everyone is beautiful, there can be no strife! Of course this is highly dubious, as…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 7 OCTOBER 1982 | 15 | 4K & Blu-ray ▸ Director Albert Pyun ▸ Cast Lee Horsley, Kathleen Beller, Richard Lynch, Richard Moll BLU-RAY DEBUT 1982 was a vintage year for film – ET, Blade Runner. But its most profitable indie was this sweaty mess, due to Conan hype and a shoestring budget. It’s your classic muscular fantasy. Princess Alana hires warrior Talon to overthrow a usurper and free her people. He wields a three-pronged sword that can launch its blades like rockets. David Whitaker’s triumphant music owes a debt to John Williams, but it’s a perfect fit. There are excellent lo-fi effects, like faces coming alive on a tomb, and star Lee Horsley exudes charismatic swagger. However, it’s a difficult watch. Stuntman Jack Tyree died following a…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Alan Moore ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury Alan Moore’s latest novel moves out of Northampton (the setting for both 1996’s Voice Of The Fire and 2016’s Jerusalem) and away from the comics biz satire of “What We Can Know About Thunderman”, from 2022’s Illuminations collection. It’s the first in the writer’s Long London quintet, a series set in both the everyday reality of the capital and “the Great When” – the city’s imaginal shadow, a place where concepts are incarnated as living beings and only the brave or the foolish dare set foot. Falling firmly into the latter category is the wonderfully-named Dennis Knuckleyard. It’s 1949 and Dennis is 18 years old and condemned to a life working for formidable bookshop owner…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 320 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Ian McDonald ▸ Publisher Gollancz We tend to see our countryside as “natural”, but much of it is nothing of the sort. Rather, we look out on curated agricultural landscapes that are often anathema to species that might otherwise flourish. Hence the current interest in rewilding, the idea that ecosystems will regenerate if humankind encourages them to do so – or even just leaves well alone. But what will grow? In Ian McDonald’s latest novel, which makes merry with both the current vogue for folk horror and the trope of placing annoying kids in danger, the answer is something ancient and predatory. At the centre of the novel lies Lisa, a ranger tasked with leading a group of children and…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 320 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Yume Kitasei ▸ Publisher HarperVoyager A motley bunch of treasure hunters – of varying sentience, race and preferred personal pronoun – are on a wormhole-hopping search for an artefact that could start or stop an intergalactic war in this colourful space opera/Indiana Jones hybrid. Honestly, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the publishers toyed with calling it Raiders Of The Lost Space Ark. Former art thief, now respected xenobiologist Maya Hoshimoto (human), her old partner in crime Auncle (Frenro, a blobby alien race), medical droid Medix (robot with Pinocchio complex) and cyborg soldier Wil (mostly human) are in a race against time to locate the titular Grail. The network of “nodes” that the various races use to nip around…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 352 pages | Paperback/ebook ▸ Author Bill Wood ▸ Publisher Scholastic Books Poor Buffy barely has time to settle into her new high school before a string of suspicious (and potentially supernatural) murders have whipped her small town into a frenzy. The police are useless, so it’s down to her and her new ragtag group of nerdy friends to save the day. And yes, that really is the synopsis for a YA book released in 2024, not the plot of the first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Bill Wood’s debut is rammed with references, from character names (“Mrs Strode”, a creep called Loomis) to character dynamics (our protagonists here could be Riverdale’s core four, or the Scooby Gang). It’s a little bit exhausting. We’ve come…

▸ RELEASED 10 OCTOBER 448 pages | Paperback ▸ Authors Erin E Adams ▸ Publisher Dead Ink Books Coming home is never easy, but it’s significantly harder if you are newly single, attending a wedding, and one of the few black women who grew up in a town where those like you have been ritualistically murdered for the past century. Haitian-American writer Erin E Adams’s debut novel terrorises the reader by infusing each chapter with the tensions of a dark racist history, creating some impressively gory imagery – as well as the true horror of attending a wedding while freshly dumped. Our protagonist Liz returns from Manhattan to her rustbelt hometown to attend the nupitals of her best friend, only for the bride’s young black daughter Caroline to go missing…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Marvel Comics ▸ Writers/artists Various SPECIAL Commemorating the eight and a half decades since Marvel forerunner Timely Publications released its first comic, the framing sequence of this oversized anthology takes place in a 85th century museum and features a malevolent alien tour guide who wildly misinterprets the meaning of various ancient superheroic artefacts. Sadly, its imaginative potential is only really realised by Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada and Stephen Byrne’s opener. Featuring his trademark fluid linework, Alan Davis’s multiverse-spanning Excalibur 10-pager affectionately harks back to not only his original late-’80s run on the UK-set X-book, but also his classic ’70s take on Captain Britain. Meanwehil (Christopher) Priest and Carlos Pagulayan’s irreverent “Rush Hour” improbably imbues Peter Parker with a Spider-mobile and strands him in an…

THE TRANSFORMERS FRANCHISE is going back to the beginning for its latest instalment; Transformers One tells the story of how robot good-guy Optimus Prime and villain Megatron went from best-bud bromance to bitter adversaries, in a new CG-animated feature film from Josh Cooley, director of Toy Story 4. Cooley grew up watching the ’80s Saturday morning cartoon. “My favourite was Optimus Prime,” he says. “I wanted to capture the feeling I had playing with those toys, watching the cartoon. Not so much exactly what happened, but my memory of it – the joy I felt, and that feeling that anything is possible.” Earlier drafts of the screenplay took a lighter approach, but Cooley and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura found themselves drawn to the tragic backstory of Optimus and D-16 (later…

MIDNIGHT ON STATEN Island, New York. SFX has missed the last ferry back to Manhattan and an eerie mist rolls over the streets outside. Inside, however, it’s laughter that fills the air. Filming has just wrapped after a long day – one of 45 – for Terrifier 3 and the crew are in high spirits. Damien Leone, creator, writer, director and producer of the supernatural slasher movies, is showing us a rough early edit of a scene – which is all kinds of meta given that we’re also standing on location for the same production, which will finish filming in just a few days. It’s also absolutely bloody brilliant – much like the day we’ve had… SEND IN THE CLOWN When SFX arrives at Amendment 18 – a Prohibition-themed catering…

What kind of vampiric homework did you do in preparation? I read Dracula and obviously The Radleys, the book, which I really enjoyed. I wasn’t a big vampire fan, prior to making the film. So I learned a lot of the codes. Asking people across the threshold – obviously, everyone knows about the garlic and don’t look in the mirror and the stakes through the heart etc, etc. But asking a vampire into your house being part of vampire code was a new one to me. How did you collectively decide on Will’s look? Joanna [Eatwell, the film’s costume designer], and I had conversations very early on about him. I didn’t want him to be effete. I didn’t want him to be fey, in any way. He teaches undergraduate English.…

YOU CAN STAKE IT, DECAPITATE IT OR SEAR A crucifix into its flesh, but like any self-respecting case of vampirism, Salem’s Lot always comes back for more. The book was the first manifestation. Stephen King’s 1975 novel told of a town in rural Maine infested by the undead. “I wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the 20th century, to America,” King recalled of a tale that cast tomb-cold European shadows over New England. A memorable TV version arrived in 1979, pitting Starsky And Hutch icon David Soul against the monstrous forces of Jerusalem’s Lot, while 2004 brought a further small-screen adaptation, this time with Rob Lowe. Now comes yet another resurrection, rising out of that cursed Maine soil. “I’ve been a Stephen King fan since I…

In the pilot Andrea Riseborough (shown below) played Annie, Guy Flanagan played Mitchell and Adrian Lester was a far more stereotypical vampire boss. So why were they replaced for the series? Whithouse explains: “Between the pilot being made and the series being commissioned, Andrea’s career was already rocketing into the stratosphere. There was simply no way we were going to get her for multiple seasons of a micro-budget BBC Three show. Straight away the constellation was shifting. “Also, a pilot is a learning process for the writer. Seeing it on screen, hearing how the dialogue sounds in the actors’ mouths, I had to process all that data. The biggest adjustment was the tone of the vampires. In the pilot they were too Anne Rice – frilly and ominous, and at…

PRIOR TO THE DEVIL’S HOUR coming out in October 2022, cast and crew found it almost impossible to nail the series down. That is, without spoiling its otherworldly concepts. As Jessica Raine (Lucy Chambers) told SFX at the time, “I don’t quite know what genre to put it in. I don’t really know what to compare it to, and I think that’s a good thing.” Advance promotion subsequently pigeonholed the series into a genre it didn’t quite belong to. “Everyone kept saying ‘It’s a psychological thriller,’ but it’s not psychological,” creator and writer Tom Moran tells SFX. “Actually, that’s the reveal. It’s not about people going mad, it’s not about aspects of their psyche. It’s about something much bigger than that. I would always describe it now as an existential…

OVER TWO DECADES ON, IT’S hard to describe, to anyone who wasn’t around at the time, the impact Danny Boyle’s 2002 contagion horror 28 Days Later had upon its release – a film so inventively terrifying that it single-handedly revived the zombie horror genre that had laid dormant for decades. Five years afterwards, an atmospheric sequel re-entered that horrific post-apocalyptic world with new blood and a fresh take on the enraged Infected. 28 Weeks Later saw Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo appointed as director – personally selected by Boyle on the strength of 2001 thriller Intacto, his feature debut. “I must confess that I was very doubtful when I received this flattering invitation from Danny Boyle. Because, whilst I thought 28 Days Later was excellent, it wasn’t the kind of…

▸ RELEASED 4 OCTOBER 12A|138 minutes ▸ Director Todd Phillips ▸ Cast Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener It’s been five long years since Joaquin Phoenix’s take on Batman’s nemesis danced onto our screens, winning armfuls of awards and making the GDP of a small country at the box office. But for the titular Joker, aka Arthur Fleck, only two years have passed, spent in Arkham Asylum awaiting what the media has labelled “The Trial Of The Century” – the first to be broadcast on television, with district attorney Harvey Dent calling for the death penalty. The first film acted as an origin story, seeing the mild-mannered, mentally ill aspiring comedian become the villainous Joker, killing six people along the way, while this film is fascinatingly inert, only covering…

▸ RELEASED 11 OCTOBER TBC | 89 minutes ▸ Director Alice Lowe ▸ Cast Alice Lowe, Jacob Anderson, Nick Frost, Aneurin Barnard Not that she’s ever acknowledged as such by BAFTA, but Alice Lowe really is one of our most treasured filmmakers. As the co-writer of Ben Wheatley’s serial killerson-holiday comedy Sightseers, and also the writer/director of 2016 splatterfest Prevenge and now Timestalkers, she’s one of British cinema’s most eccentric voices, but one who’s work is probably a bit too leftfield for mainstream folk. On paper, Timestalker looks like her most accessible picture yet, telling the story of a one-sided love affair through the centuries, as Lowe’s character – or at least versions of the same character – attempts to hook up with Aneurin Barnard’s smouldering bad boy. At various…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 99 minutes ▸ Directors Salvador Simó, Li Jianping ▸ Cast Mayalinee Griffiths, Bill Nighy, Anthony Howell, Bill Bailey This CG-animated fantasy is set and was animated in China, is a Spanish co-production, and has a story based on an Australian book by Carole Wilkinson (not to be confused with the novel by Robin Hobb). You might expect the results to be messy, but instead they’re just boring. In a fantasy past, the last dragons are imprisoned and exploited by China’s rulers, but a few people – the dragonkeepers – still have a rapport with them. Ping is a little peasant girl toiling in a fortress, who’s soon revealed to be one of their number. She escapes with the aged male dragon Danzi, and together…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 84 minutes ▸ Director Chris Weitz ▸ Cast John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Keith Carradine This tepid techno-thriller slipped in and out of cinemas rather sheepishly last month. And that’s not really surprising – AfrAId (yes, that really is how they’re styling the title) feels painfully dated, and that’s despite a script that throws in every hot button online parental fear from doxxing to revenge porn and swatting. Curtis (Star Trek’s John Cho) is a marketeer given the assignment of trialling AIA – a “next generation digital assistant” – in his home. It soon becomes clear that while AIA is good at reading to the kids and consoling grieving mother Meredith (Katherine Waterston), it’s also quick to break boundaries when it comes to…

▸ UK/US Disney+, streaming now ▸ Showrunners Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit ▸ Cast Gaten Matarazzo, Tony Revolori, Bobby Moynihan, Marsai Martin EPISODES 1.01-1.04 Lego animation Rebuild The Galaxy is assembled from one of the most promising ideas in recent Star Wars history. After inadvertently removing a mystical Lego brick from a Jedi temple, scruffy-looking nerf herder Sig Greebling (Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo) is transported to a radically different version of your favourite galaxy. The reinvention stretches way beyond “Spock’s got a goatee” too, because in this fun new timeline Luke Skywalker is an ageing surfer dude, Admiral Ackbar has been replicated as a legion of Clone Troopers, and – in a neat callback to a longstanding internet theory – Jar Jar Binks is now a Sith Lord. Unfortunately, this four-part miniseries isn’t…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 7 OCTOBER 1977 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director John Boorman ▸ Cast Linda Blair, Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Max von Sydow BLU-RAY DEBUT Slated by author William Peter Blatty for missing the point, and voted the second worst film of all time in 1980, Exorcist II has a bad rep. Richard Burton plays a priest tasked with investigating Father Merrin’s death. After hypnotic communions with Regan and trips to Africa, he learns she’s one of several teens whose healing powers led them to be targetted by Satan. It often tips into risibility – a “synchroniser” device which creates the pair’s psychic bond (via two halogen bulbs and an audio tone) is especially goofy. But sequences of locust swarms (Pazuzu is established as a god of “evil spirits…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW!/ 31 OCTOBER 2024 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Simon Barrett (You’re Next) penned this gnarly horror set post-Rapture, among survivors who have renounced speech. Escaping a sacrifice to throat-ripping beings in the forest, a woman runs the gamut of life-threatening scenarios. As an experiment in dialogue-free storytelling, it’s initially fascinating, and Samara Weaving proves equal to the challenge. But there isn’t much to it beyond constant peril. + Extras None.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1968/1972 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD ▸ Directors Vernon Sewell, Peter Sasdy ▸ Cast Peter Cushing, Wanda Ventham, Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson Two further exhumations from the Tigon vault see the Brit studio taking markedly different approaches to screen horror. The Blood Beast Terror shamelessly apes the style of rival Hammer’s period chillers, complete with star Peter Cushing. While a blood-thirsting moth-monster makes for an intriguing spin on the traditional vampire, the thrills are distinctly lacking, scuppered by pedestrian direction and one of the most anticlimactic pay-offs in movie history. In 1968 this already felt like a relic. Capitalising on a recent, topically minded TV hit – even as it cruelly sidelines the show’s stars – the big-screen version of Doomwatch is more of the moment. It…

Russell Crowe plays an actor in a possession movie in THE EXORCISM (7 October, Blu-ray/DVD). Director Joshua John Miller’s dad played Father Karras in The Exorcist, and it reprises some of that film’s seminal moments. We said: “Barely registers as a footnote to William Friedkin’s masterclass.” No extras. High-concept slasher IN A VIOLENT NATURE (out now, Blu-ray/DVD) is told from the killer’s POV, with the camera roaming after its vengeful corpse. We said: “Appealingly grungy moments, and the kills are inventive. But is that enough to justify a full-length running time?” No extras again here. KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD) leaps forward 200 years, following an innocent chimp whose community is wrecked by a bonobo dictator. We said: “Refreshes the franchise by creating the space for…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Kate Heartfield ▸ Publisher HarperVoyager Threads bind literally and figuratively in this supernatural Second World War thriller. Four sisters blessed with varying degrees of second sight (and varying degrees of acceptance of their gift) play disparate parts in the fight against a Nazi officer who believes the Bayeux Tapestry holds the secret to victory. One sister is trapped in Vichy France, another trains as a spy, a third is enlisted as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, while the fourth stays at home with an illegitimate child. They may be separated but their fates are entwined by their gifts. Too on-the-nose to be classed as magic realism, but too earnest to be considered a ripping yarn, Kate Heartfield’s dense and atmospheric…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 224 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Robert Sellers ▸ Publisher The History Press The recent flurry of clickbait pegging Aaron Taylor-Johnson as heir apparent to that coveted licence to kill proves that James Bond remains the most gossip-worthy gig in cinema. Hellraisers author Robert Sellers sifts the secret history of the franchise to reveal an entire multiverse of men who were nearly 007, from Richard Burton – a fan of the novels and a favoured choice of Ian Fleming – to Henry Cavill, pipped by Daniel Craig in 2005. Boosted by exclusive interviews, it’s a fascinating litany of close calls, near misses and the occasional narrowly averted disaster, one that seems to take in every alpha male with an Equity card. Oliver Reed was a serious…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 248 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Jungeun Yun (translated by Shanna Tan) ▸ Publisher Doubleday Already a bestseller in Korea, Marigold Mind Laundry is the first novel from an author known for her non-fiction. It tells the tale of Jieun, a woman with remarkable powers who has lived a thousand lifetimes in search of her lost family. Eventually, Jieun settles and opens the Marigold Mind Laundry – a place where people can wash away painful experiences that are holding them back. We hear the stories of a selection of those customers, including an influencer looking for any way out, a woman whose relationship failed, and a man who has never escaped the torture of his childhood bullying. Each is helped to come to terms with their pasts,…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 300 pages | Hardback ▸ Author Chris Jones ▸ Publisher Graphetti Ltd Many years in the making, this history of the BBC’s cruelly curtailed ’80s sci-fi saga is a very impressive labour of love. It takes you through pre-production and the various stages of filming (regaling us with tales of seasick crew and a near-death incident), plus the two series launches and the aftermath of the decision not to complete the trilogy. Author Chris Jones draws on a deep well of testimony: interviews with 54 cast and crew, from producer Richard Bates to a then 15-year-old extra. With their help he’s accumulated a treasure trove of imagery: candid on-set snaps, continuity Polaroids, costume designs, storyboards, script trims. Priceless artefacts include a letter telling star Jim Baker…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher DC Comics ▸ Writer Leah Williams ▸ Artist Daniel Hillyard ISSUES 1-4 The original Gotham City Sirens was a 2009 superteam book centred on the unlikely alliance between three of DC’s greatest anti-heroes: Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn and Catwoman. While all of these characters have continued to headline their own comics in the years since (and Harley and Ivy are now well-established as one of comics’ most beloved power couples), it’s surprisingly taken 15 years for a follow-up. Leah Williams, Daniel Hillyard and Tríona Farrell replace the original creative team of Paul Dini and Guillem March for this four-issue limited series. When a herd of cyborg bison stampede through Gotham City, pursued by a group of topless cowboys, Harley rustles up the Sirens. Somehow this is…

DURING ONE OF PEDRO PASCAL’S final recording sessions for his role in DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, he turned to its writer-director Chris Sanders and confessed: “You know, I’m more me in this role than a lot I’ve done in the past.” Pascal voices a fox called Fink, one of the many critter residents of an uninhabited isle. When he encounters a crash-landed robot named ROZZUM unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o) – “Roz” for short – he reluctantly volunteers to help her raise an orphaned gosling she comes to name Brightbill (Kit Connor). Fink is as charming as can be, a disarming collision of world-weariness and childish mischief. And for anyone who’s followed the actor’s nitro-fuelled career of late, as he descends from a galaxy far, far away to battle Paul…

♦ More cast for the new Doctor Who spin-off The War Between The Land And The Sea have been announced. Ruth Madeley and Colin McFarlane will reprise their roles as UNIT’s Shirley Anne Bingham and Torchwood’s General Pierce, alongside the previously announced Russell Tovey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jemma Redgrave and Alexander Devrient. The five-part drama is currently filming in various locations. ♦ Covers for two of the Icons book series have been released. Frida Kahlo And The Skull Children by Sophie McKenzie is published on 24 October by Penguin, with Charles Darwin And The Silurian Survival by LD Lapinski following on 21 November. A third volume is planned for March. ♦ The Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver has been made available for purchase after previously being a SDCC exclusive. The “hi-spec electro-plated…

DAVE PROWSE GAVE DARTH Vader his commanding physicality, but James Earl Jones brought the Sith Lord’s soul to the screen. Augmented by the steady, rhythmic gasp of a respirator, Jones’s resonant basso profondo voice could be threatening or seductive, sly or vicious, the very essence of the Dark Side of the Force. “I just consider myself to be special effects,” the acclaimed actor once confessed. “That’s how I approached it. I just sat there and had all the fun of playing my voice like an instrument.” Born in Arkabutla, Mississippi and raised in Michigan, Jones took to reciting poetry to overcome a stammer that had left him mute for much of his childhood. After studying drama he entered the theatre, making his Broadway debut in 1958. His first film part…

Where do we find Sienna in Terrifier 3? We find her five years later. She has been in and out of mental health facilities and just really struggling. Damien and I have played with this idea that a lot of people think she has made a lot of this up. So she’s struggling with her own mental health. She’s struggling with the perception of what her loved ones and people who are just strangers, how they perceive her. So she’s not doing great. She’s a bit unhinged at this point, and that was really fun to play. She’s with her family. She’s moving back in and and she’s getting a whiff of what’s to come. How is Sienna going to combat an evolved Art the Clown? You see her put…

FOR TWO SEASONS THE CORE conceit of horror series From has been that of a rural American town that won’t let anybody leave. All of its residents – from de facto sheriff Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau) to sweet young Ethan Matthews (Simon Webster) – stumbled into the town’s limits, and no one has found a way to escape. To make matters worse, when night falls shape-shifting monsters emerge from the woods and kill anyone outside for their sport. Until this season’s premiere, From’s claustrophobic parameters have been integral to its premise. Yet for season three, creator John Griffin and executive producer Jeff Pinkner have shattered their rules by allowing Tabitha Matthews (Catalina Sandino Moreno) to return to the outside world, waking from a dream to find herself in a Camden,…

SET IN A POST-APOCALYPTIC world that’s been invaded by fearsome extraterrestrials with heightened hearing, noise – or a lack of it – is an essential element in the three A Quiet Place films to date. Leading a hushed existence is equally important in Stormind and Saber Interactive’s new single-player videogame A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, if you want to avoid the clutches of the aurally acute aliens. “Sound plays a crucial role in The Road Ahead, much like in the films,” says Stormind Sound Designer Diego Sambataro. “The game emphasises the ambient sounds of the environment over action-related sounds to create an atmosphere of tension and silence. “The absence of external events reinforces the sense of isolation, making the sounds of the player’s actions – such as footsteps –…

WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED in the year that Joe Dante’s Gremlins turns 40 that audiences would be getting new stories that expand the Mogwai mythology? The next chapter of the animated prequel series, Gremlins: The Wild Batch, returns for the spooky season with major guest voices, a whole new continent to mess up and Easter eggs galore. Creator Tze Chun and co-showrunner Brendan Hay tell SFX that after an initial season of establishing how young Sam Wing (Izaac Wang) met a young Gizmo the Mogwai, the series is broadening its ambition by adding more magic and shifting locales from Shanghai to San Francisco. “We really wanted season two to be an East meets West of American mythology and Chinese mythology,” Chun says. “One thing that Brendan and I always talked…

HORROR WRITERS LOVE TO TELL stories about people stuck behind barriers that bring out the worst in humanity. Clifford D Simak’s All Flesh Is Grass (1965) to Stephen King’s Under The Dome (2009) are but two of many instances where the scenario is explored. However, a title in that subgenre that screenwriter Ian McCulloch (Yellowstone) did not know was Robert R McCammon’s bestselling 1988 novel, Stinger. So when James Wan’s production arm Atomic Monster contacted McCulloch gauging his interest in adapting the book into a streaming series for Peacock he literally had to be sent a copy of the book. “I grew up reading a lot of things like Stephen King but I never heard of Robert McCammon until they said, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’” McCulloch explains…

IN A TIME WHEN AGE-OLD IPS ARE monopolising the movie box office, it’s testament to the power of Smile that this wholly original story became the highest-grossing horror of 2022. Writer/director Parker Finn’s chiller about a psychiatrist who becomes convinced she’s being threatened by a supernatural entity was a breakout hit for the Ohio-born filmmaker. It impressed Paramount enough that they’ve signed him to helm their Robert Pattinson-starring remake of cult classic Possession. In the meantime, however, there’s the matter of Smile 2. Alhough – spoiler alert – Sosie Bacon’s psychiatrist Rose burned to death at the end of the first film, here we are again, with a sequel that promises to take this freshly minted franchise in a radically different direction. This time, as Finn tells SFX, it focuses…

HOW DO WE SAY GOODBYE TO arguably the most useless brood of vampires that history has ever seen? Yes, season six of FX’s What We Do In The Shadows will be the swan song for the Staten Island roomies: Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), kinky old marrieds Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry) and Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou), Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) and their long-suffering familiar turned vamp, Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén). Although it was initially created by Jemaine Clement as a spin-off series of his 2014 mockumentary of the same name, showrunner Paul Simms (Flight Of The Conchords) has since been at the wheel and tells SFX that after lots of award wins and goodwill from critics and audiences, the team decided to follow the wisdom of “better…

▸ RELEASED 18 OCTOBER U|102 minutes ▸ Director Chris Sanders ▸ Cast Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu Chris Sanders previously co-directed two exceptional animated films: Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon. Now he’s directed The Wild Robot, which is bold, spectacular and very enjoyable, but whose story is harder to buy into than its predecessors. A robot that’s designed to serve humans accidentally falls onto a verdant island, with no people but abundant wildlife. The animals violently reject the newcomer, but Roz, as the robot comes to call itself, transforms its own programming when it “adopts” and raises a gosling. The Wild Robot looks terrific, mixing CG with painterly textures in the manner of recent DreamWorks animated movies (and without ever feeling the need…

▸ RELEASED 11 OCTOBER PG | 104 minutes ▸ Director John Cooley ▸ Cast Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key This CG animation reboots Transformers, providing an origin story for the shapeshifting robots, so you don’t need to know or remember any other versions. Indeed, you may enjoy it more if you don’t know the property well, in which case the story will throw up some engaging twists. It’s also well-paced, coherent, has decent character arcs and is likeable. That’s quite an achievement given that the film is set entirely on Cybertron, and the characters’ facial expressions are mostly functional. Thankfully their voices are much more human, starting with Chris Hemsworth as an underdog mining bot called (initially, at least) Orion Pax. He finds a map to a…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 110 minutes ▸ Director James Watkins ▸ Cast James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi, Scott McNairy “Harrowing”, with “a climax of The Mist-level bleakness”; that was how SFX described Christian Tafdrup’s Danish horror. Now, only two years later, an English-language remake is in cinemas, raising the question “Why bother?” Well, James Watkins (Eden Lake, The Woman In Black) has essentially produced a cover version played with entirely new instruments. Familiar moments are given new context, stressing different emotions, while the third act takes a surprising turn that’s entirely new, amounting to a riff on a Sam Peckinpah shootout. For some, that will sound like a misunderstanding of the original film’s intentions – though that is a misunderstanding of Watkins’s reasons for his rendition. There’s…

▸ RELEASED 7 OCTOBER 2024 | N/A | Download This romantic black comedy is set in a cult-like, dystopian society. Bel Powley stars as a woman in a peaceful community who misses a dose of an emotion-numbing “vitamin”. Free of its influence, she discovers laughter, closely followed by sex, and starts to spread the word – but it isn’t long until emotions get messy. It’s decently acted and directed, with soothing cinematography, but given that you’re an SFX reader, you’ll have seen this story a million times before. Watch THX 1138 instead.…

▸ RELEASED 14 OCTOBER 2024 | N/A | Download Ghostwatch Belfast, in a nutshell. Like the Beeb’s notorious faux live broadcast, clearly the template, it sees a ’90s TV crew visiting a family plagued by strange goings-on. It’s a likeable effort, with – thanks to adverts which reveal inter-crew friction – more humour than the original, and the odd neck hair-troubling moment. But there’s nothing here as chilling as the original’s Mr Pipes, and attempts to mix in a sci-fi element make zero sense.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1966 | PG | Blu-ray/DVD ▸ Director Terence Fisher ▸ Cast Edward Judd, Peter Cushing, Carole Gray, Eddie Byrne Sharing an island setting, a star (Peter Cushing), a director (Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher), and a production company (Planet Film Productions) with Night Of The Big Heat, this British horror is superior to its stablemate. A dapper Peter Cushing (hat jauntily angled) is a pathologist summoned to explore the mystery of a jelly-like corpse, completely lacking in calcium phosphate. Turns out a lab’s cancer research has spawned bone-sucking beasties, that can reproduce at a rapid rate. The film boasts a palpable sense of urgency and some shocks that are surprisingly tough for a PG, and Cushing’s character has a nice line in wry quips. But it’s…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1982 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Robert Wynne-Simmons ▸ Cast Mary Ryan, Mick Lally, Cyril Cusack BLU-RAY DEBUT Though, as Robert Wynne-Simmons insists, it’s not really folk horror, this later work by the director of Blood On Satan’s Claw should appeal to fans of the subgenre. Another rural tale with a pagan sense of the mystery of nature, it’s set in pre-famine Ireland, and centres on the “simple” Maura (beautifully played by Mary Ryan), who encounters Scarf Michael (Mick Lally), a “wild fellow” reputed to own a violin stringed with dead men’s hair. He’s more of a mischief-maker, using his magical fiddle for pranks – like turning a woman’s lover into a goat. Their association sees Maura denounced as a witch. It’s an earthy affair…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 224 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Mason Coile ▸ Publisher Baskerville You know that cliché about how struggling couples think having a baby will smooth over their marital woes? Engineers Lily and Henry try it twice over in this nasty little sci-fi horror: Lily’s pregnant, and Henry’s created a monster. “William” is an existentially troubled half-robot (head, arms, torso; no legs). He’s Henry’s pet project, the most advanced creation he’s managed to put together since a crippling anxiety disorder stopped him from leaving his high-security smart home. But if there’s something creepy about his initial animatronic efforts (a tiny jerking magician on a bicycle; a mangy-looking dog) then there’s something really creepy about William. When Lily hosts a Halloween party, the needling of her colleagues prompts…

▸ RELEASED 17 OCTOBER 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Kate Dylan ▸ Publisher Hodderscape Being a magic-user in a society that hates you is, to put it mildly, a bit of a bummer. Cemmy’s powers, for example, allow her to shift through spaces, unseen – but as she can’t really use them for anything legal, they’ve become a handy way to steal things. And why not? Let’s face it, we probably would, too. Cemmy is a half-Shade (the child of magical and non-magical parents), whose very existence is illegal. While hiding from the murderous Council of Shades, Cemmy is tricked into an Ocean’s 11-style heist by a nasty chap named Savian and his underling, Chase. Forced to risk her life for a mysterious prize, Cemmy soon realises that this…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Bear Alley Books ▸ Writer Willy Patterson ▸ Artist Gerry Embleton COLLECTION Dubbed “the serial that’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before!” when it first appeared in the pages of British weekly Swift in 1962, Phantom Patrol now seems like an endearing product of its era. It centres on a bunch of British soldiers who are flung back through the centuries after stumbling upon a time travel device. Characters such as Corporal Jock McLuckie and Private Paddy O’Connell conform to national stereotypes, while the group also pick up stray German Erhart, whose constant but ultimately doomed attempts to escape become repetitive. With the first half of the story mostly set in Ancient Greece and Egypt, Willy Patterson throws plenty of historical details into his…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Pantheon/Jonathan Cape ▸ Writer/artist Charles Burns GRAPHIC NOVEL Over the course of this 224-page hardback, Charles Burns lovingly recreates passages from the classic 1956 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and the coming-of-age drama The Last Picture Show. To a degree, the book is an amalgamation of the two. Like Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film, it follows a group of American high-schoolers; along the way, it deploys eerie imagery echoing Don Siegel’s human-duplicating pods. Which is not to say that Final Cut is out-and-out science fiction. Its central characters are making a sci-fi themed Super 8 movie, conceived by the creative but withdrawn Brian, whose sketchbook is full of weird drawings of floating aliens which resemble a melding of brain and heart. But despite surreal…

▸ RELEASED 23 AUGUST - 6 SEPTEMBER, RIP ▸ Reviewed on PS5 ▸ Also on PC (Well, not anymore…) ▸ Publisher Sony VIDEOGAME Pulled due to poor sales a mere 11 days after release, and rendered unplayable three days after that, this Sony-backed shooter deserved so much more. Dull cut-scenes and questionable character names aside (a Thanos and Drax mashup called “Star Child”? Really?), there was actually a lot to love about Concord. The game modes were overfamiliar, in that they riffed half-heartedly on the instantly familiar concepts of Team Deathmatch and Domination. It was the character abilities that brought the experience to life. Guardians Of The Galaxy wannabe IT-Z compensated for her low health pool with a projectile that temporarily supercharged her weapon, for example, while Daw could create…