Содержание выпуска: December 2025 — SFX

JULIA DUCOURNAU knows what it means to make polarising films. Her 2016 debut Raw was a squeamish, skin-ripping cannibalism yarn. She followed it with the Palme d’Or-winning Titane, a twisted psychological tale that took auto-eroticism to extremes. Now comes her latest, Alpha, a film that was equally divisive when it premiered in Cannes earlier this year. “What can I tell you? It feels like history repeating,” she shrugs. “To me, Alpha is incredibly different from Titane, and I do not convey the same kind of emotions in it, and I didn’t put the same part of me in it. But, hey, what can I do?” Whatever side you land on, Alpha is another stark and startling vision from the French filmmaker. Set in an alternate ’90s Paris, it begins when…

A WHIMSICAL adventure that includes a singing Simu Liu, an original take on the mythical Sandman and laser farts, In Your Dreams has a lot going for it. The Netflix animated movie is an enchanting fantasy that follows two siblings (Stevie and her younger brother Elliot) on a magical journey to the world of dreams. Here, it’s their mission to seek out the Sandman and ask him to grant them the ultimate wish: the perfect family. Ah, how sweet. Or is it? What if the quarrelling parents at the heart of the story don’t want to save their marriage? “That’s a very good question,” chuckles In Your Dreams writer/director Alex Woo. “That’s something we definitely thought about and considered during the writing process. Ultimately, that’s not the case in our…

GRAB YOUR CLOAK, sword and shield – and don’t forget some ale, Nott is gonna want that – because we’re headed back to the fantasy world of Exandria. The Mighty Nein is a brand-new spin-off of animated show The Legend Of Vox Machina. Like that series, The Mighty Nein follows a group of adventurers on a quest. Also like that show, it’s frequently filthy, violent and full of laughs. Like its predecessor, The Mighty Nein is an adaptation of the hit Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. In that show, professional voice actors played out lengthy D&D campaigns, all under the watchful eye of Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer. The new series adapts Critical Role’s second campaign – no mean feat, given how much story there was to get through… “The…

IS THERE ANYBODY out there? It’s a question you’ll be asking after watching Bugonia, the latest madcap movie from Greek-born master of weird Yorgos Lanthimos. The director of The Lobster and Poor Things is back with his first remake, a wild take on 2003’s South Korean movie Save The Green Planet! Emma Stone plays Michelle, a callous CEO who’s kidnapped by one of her low-grade employees, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), the former fully convinced that Michelle is an alien from Andromeda and is out to destroy Earth. “There’s a lot of layers in the film,” says Lanthimos, who’s worked from a script by Will Tracy (Succession). “The surface of it is conspiracy theories, but for me I think the world today, and technology especially, just…

After professing his love to Eleven, Mike’s ready to lead the gang as they take on Vecna – but this time, his family are drawn into the action in a bigger way than ever before. “It becomes personal in a lot of ways,” Finn Wolfhard tells SFX. “There’s the classic action, but now it’s personal.” How’s Mike feeling at the start of this season? The town of Hawkins is in quarantine from the rest of the world, which must have a big impact on him. ★ We’re all pretty stir crazy. We’re in mission mode, where we are on a mission to end this suffering that Vecna has imposed on our group and the town, and the world. His plan is to dominate everything and the best way I could…

In November 1983, Will Byers went missing, kick-starting a succession of events that would eventually lead to his friends and family taking on a world-ending threat from the Upside Down. In season five, Will is central to the action once more. “It was definitely nice to have been given some more opportunities in the final season,” Noah Schnapp tells SFX. “And I’m excited to see how the audience reacts to it.” The new season kicks off with an alternate look at season one, featuring a de-aged version of Will in the Upside Down. What was that filming process like? ★ It was weird. I will say that I had to work with a younger kid, which was actually really cool and a full circle moment for me, because it felt…

REALITY TV. Cruelty and bloodlust packaged as entertainment. A huge division in wealth and a broken system. Fake news. Megacorporations taking over the running of America. When Stephen King published The Running Man, one of the novels he released under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, in 1982, his 2025-set story laid out a future that seemed as fanciful as it was gritty. In it, the titular game show pits desperate contestants against a pack of trained Hunters, with all of America the arena. The longer the fleeing contestants avoid capture, the bigger the prize money, and survival for 30 days means going home with a billion dollars. The snag? To be caught is to be killed, and how to avoid such a fate when not just the Hunters, but every…

You’ve talked in the past about the fact you’ve had quite a bit of room to improv. Is that still true now the writers are more familiar with your performance? The collaboration that I have with Lauren [Schmidt Hissrich] and the other writers was established really early on in season one, and we were able to find this lovely dialogue between us that meant that I have a little bit of freedom to dance around the script. Most of the writers, I believe, are American – and so to bring a little bit of Britishness to it was quite important, and that’s endured. What can you tease about season five? How closely does Jaskier’s storyline adhere to what happens in the books? For fans of the books, they will see…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW!  12A |119 minutes ▶ Director Joachim Rønning ▶ Cast Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro Surprisingly, there has been only one sequel since the original Tron brought then-cutting-edge CG technology to screens in 1982. But the film franchise has gathered a halo of fans who enjoyed the pulsing Daft Punk soundtrack and an updated version of the digital universe known as the Grid in Tron: Legacy. Now, 15 years after Legacy comes Tron: Ares, boasting even more advanced filmmaking techniques but unfortunately also a shallow storyline. We’re reintroduced to the concept that continues a rivalry between tech giants Encom – the company Jeff Bridges’s Kevin Flynn ran – and Dillinger Systems. The latter is now overseen by Julian Dillinger, played…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW!  18 | 114 minutes ▶ Director Scott Derrickson ▶ Cast Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies Ethan Hawke’s mask-wearing child snatcher returns from the grave as a vengeful Freddy Krueger type in a sequel to Scott Derrickson’s 2021 thriller that struggles to build on the original’s strong foundations. Moving the action from the killer’s basement to a snowed-in youth camp, Black Phone 2 also shifts the emphasis from the first film’s teen hero Finn (Mason Thames) to his clairvoyant sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). Despite retaining most of its predecessor’s core ingredients, though, this seems more like an unnecessary extrapolation than a logical next chapter. Four years after his escape from The Grabber’s clutches, Finn is still tormented by his near-death experience. Yet it’s Gwen…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 83 minutes ▶ Directors Rachel Kempf, Nick Toti ▶ Cast Rachel Kempf, Nick Toti, Christian, Brent Cook “I wish I’d never filmed any of it, but I did. So now I’m finishing it, because what else am I going to do?” asks filmmaker Nick, in what might be the best explanation any character has ever offered for continuing to make their found footage horror movie long after they should’ve turned the camera off and run. Nick and his partner Rachel are horror nerds, and they’re obsessed with making their own short films. When they buy a dilapidated house to film in, they’re delighted to find that it’s got pentagrams scrawled all over the walls, and downright gleeful when they find an altar in the…

▶ UK/US Prime Video, streaming now ▶ Showrunner Danny Brocklehurst ▶ Cast Sam Claflin, Alexandra Roach, Bill Nighy, David Fynn EPISODES 1.01-1.06 Unlike previous Harlan Coben TV shows, Lazarus is based on an original storyline from the prolific crime author, rather than being an adaptation. It also sees him delving into the supernatural for the first time. In a clunky piece of nominative determinism, the show’s shouty, judgemental protagonist, Joel Lazarus, aka “Laz” (Sam Claflin), is a therapist who sees dead people. After Laz’s psychotherapist dad (Bill Nighy) apparently kills himself in his consulting room, Laz is visited by the ghost of Dr Lazarus Sr, who claims to have been murdered. But, as is par for the course, even a ghost as loquacious as Laz’s Dad won’t actually reveal who the…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1971 | 18 | 4K/Blu-ray ▶ Director Harry Kümel ▶ Cast Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Danielle Ouimet, Andrea Rau BLU-RAY DEBUT Set against the chilly backdrop of a seaside resort in winter, Daughters Of Darkness blends blood-lapping horror and blood–stirring eroticism. Checking into a deserted hotel in Ostend, newlyweds Stefan and Valerie draw the attention of another guest, who claims to be a descendant of Elizabeth Báthory – infamous for bathing in the blood of virgins – but is clearly the undying Countess herself. Delphine Seyrig is all languid grace and teasing menace in the role, resplendent in gowns worthy of Marlene Dietrich in her pomp. Future Cagney & Lacey star John Karlen brings simmering intensity to Stefan, as his sadistic impulses surface. And Andrea Rau is…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15 | Digital You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d got this movie’s number. Following an accident, a new mother moves into a creepy old house, then becomes convinced there’s a monster that wants to eat her baby. We know how this one goes. Except, somehow, it doesn’t. Writer/director Angela Gulner is careful about every detail of her storytelling, from her dialogue down to her characters’ socks, and so the final reel is startling, smart and surprisingly tender.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 18 | Digital Someone tell the Bye Bye Man he’s not the killer with the daftest name anymore. Strange Harvest is a true crime mockumentary about the exploits of… Mr Shiny. What starts out as a fairly convincing pastiche soon falls apart, partly due to the absurdity of “Mr Shiny”’s crimes, but partly because the filmmakers keep trying to make a horror movie instead. The gore’s effectively stomach churning, but the story should be unnerving enough not to need the shock tactics – it’s just been told wrong.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1966 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Jess Franco ▶ Cast Estella Blain, Mabel Karr, Howard Vernon, Fernando Montes BLU-RAY DEBUT Connoisseurs of Euro sleaze will find much that’s characteristic about this Jess Franco effort, a comic strip-y blend of gothic horror, SF and spy-fi. Typically, a surreal cabaret sequence is a highlight – in this case, a woman in a gauzy bodysuit seduces a mannequin on a spider’s web. However, by the usual standards of the Vampyros Lesbos director, it’s rather chaste. The titular Dr Zimmer dies 13 minutes in. No, he didn’t invent the frame, but located “the nerve centres that govern good and evil”. The focus then shifts to his daughter, as she enacts vengeance on the neurologists who snubbed him – the curare-dipped…

There’s a flood of recent theatrical releases hitting shiny disc. The second effort by the directors of Talk To Me, BRING HER BACK (out now, Blu-ray/DVD) sees two orphaned siblings discovering there’s something very wrong with their new foster brother. We said: “A sense of dread pervades every frame… an Exorcist-inspired flick with an evil, unfamiliar twist.” Extras: directors’ commentary, a Making Of (20 minutes), a deleted scene, and the ritual video seen in-film. Set on the alternate Earth-828 in 1964, retro-futuristic reboot THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD) tasks Marvel’s first family with protecting their world from planet-devouring cosmic being Galactus. We said: “This is a fun world, one that makes a beleaguered movie empire feel new again.” Bonus-wise, you get director/production designer commentary, three featurettes (32…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Andrew Michael Hurley ▶ Publisher John Murray Folk horror master and Starve Acre author Andrew Michael Hurley returns with an eerie new novel set in a rundown seaside town. Tom Shift has spent the last few years alone. Now facing the end of his life, he wants to do some good by gifting money to his penniless penpal, Oliver. They agree to meet for dinner at the Castle Hotel in Saltwash, but when Tom gets there, Oliver is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a group of elderly people have gathered to take part in a mysterious lottery that Tom is quickly inducted into. Hurley is a master of atmosphere. He perfectly evokes the weirdness of gone-to-seed English seaside towns and out-of-season…

▶ RELEASED 6 NOVEMBER 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Cristin Williams ▶ Publisher Gollancz Slavic mythology dovetails with post-revolutionary Russia’s obsession with the occult and mind control in this atmospheric and evocative alt-history fantasy. It’s 1923, and imprisoned anarchist/poet/sorceress Katya Efremova is being experimented on by Lenin’s secret police. She’s then relocated to a political prison on a remote, frozen island. There she’s forced into hard labour with a bunch of the cheeriest half-starved and regularly tortured inmates you could hope for, including a cossack were-bear who has the hots for her – which is exactly what Katya doesn’t want. She’d rather follow clues left by her mother to uncover an ancient, mystical tome that could save Russia. Or is she just a pawn in a larger game? There’s…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 416 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Thomas Olde Heuvelt ▶ Publisher Bantam The thorny issue of assisted dying is given a supernatural horror twist in the latest novel from the author of HEX. Every November, the overachieving residents on Bird Street, Lock Haven WA, experience Darker Days. Most of the year, they’re the luckiest, most affluent and most successful people around. But each November, their luck runs out, and increasingly worse things happen until they offer up a sacrifice to a being known as The Accountant. Because they’re not really evil, they always try to find a willing victim – someone close to death who’s considering assisted euthanasia anyway. Which is fine, until one year the list of potential candidates grows shorter and shorter until the…

▶ RELEASED 6 NOVEMBER 387 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Hayley Gelfuso ▶ Publisher Atlantic Books Memories make us who we are – and the memories of history create the world we live in. In this debut novel, memories are made real in the time space, a place where the memories of the dead are stored in books on shelves. Some people – timekeepers – can access them, and some of these choose to shape the current world by burning the memories of those they think history was better off without. Eleven-year-old Lisavet Levy is thrust into the time space by her father on Kristallnacht. When he never returns, she grows up in a library of memories, learning cultures and languages, with all of human history to dive into. She…

It was the sound of the aeroplane that first alerted Shay to something strange. As he was strolling back down Viewfield after the nostalgia visit to his primary school, St Michael’s, he was given cause to look up by the unusually loud noise of a jet engine. He was wondering whether it was so loud because it was flying low. He realised that he wouldn’t know: he couldn’t remember the last time the sound of an aeroplane had caught his attention. Ten feet further on, he passed a woman in her mid-thirties. She struck him as somehow old-fashioned. It wasn’t one thing. In fact, it was pretty much everything. Her short but neck-hugging hairstyle, her knee-length denim dress, her beige tights… These days, women’s tights were almost always black. Had…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Rebellion ▶ Writer/artist Andreas Butzbach GRAPHIC NOVEL Asking the important question, “What if a robot had a really big sword?”, this new graphic novel is very much in the tradition of 2000 AD’s punky spirit, even if it doesn’t manage to linger long in the memory. Written and drawn by German artist Andreas Butzbach, it’s an episodic collection of oddball tales set on a devastated planet in the wake of a mysterious war. Now largely populated by self-sustaining technology and weird alien beasts, the resulting wastelands are also home to a taciturn sword-wielding robot who wanders from place to place in the company of a talking metal skull. The biggest strength here is the visuals, with Butzbach going for a jagged, heavily stylised artistic approach,…

FROM MARVEL’S NEW STRANGE Tales to Dark Horse’s Stranger Things and Dungeons & Dragons crossover, RPGs “feel a bit zeitgeisty” right now according to writer Kieron Gillen, whose like-minded Image title DIE with artist Stephanie Hans is returning for second series DIE Loaded. “The idea for DIE hit me the same weekend Stranger Things debuted, almost as if there’s an amoral god outside time and space trying to shape society more to its liking,” laughs Gillen. “More seriously? Well, it’s been around for a while. It’s generational. I knew a revival was on the way in the ’00s when I heard that in LA dads were getting competitive over who ran the best games for their kids. People who grew up on it are now in a position to insert…

PREPARE FOR A TRULY wild animated adventure when Zootropolis 2 roars into cinemas. The follow-up to the 2016 Disney film – which is also known as Zootopia, Zoomania and Zootopie in other parts of the world – is jam-packed with fur-raising fun and a stack of wise-cracking new creature characters. When it comes to the newcomers for the sequel, top of the list is a 10 metre-long pit viper called Gary (voiced by The Goonies and Indiana Jones actor Ke Huy Quan). Fans of the first film might recall that there were no reptiles in the plot. Instead, the narrative focused on mammals; specifically the relationship between an optimistic rabbit, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), and a super-sly fox, Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman). “For Zootopia 2, we knew we were going…

STRANGER THINGS’ FINAL SEASON has been a long time coming. A really long time. So much so that the kids – if you can call them that – are all grown up. Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven, has married a Bongiovi and adopted a child; Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas) recently celebrated his 24th birthday; Finn Wolfhard (Mike) released an album of indie-rock tracks and toured North America with his band between seasons of the show. “It’s okay,” Ross Duffer, one half of the show’s creating duo, the Duffer brothers, assures SFX after we apologise for referring to his adult cast as kids. “I still call them kids, too.” It’s hard not to when we’ve seen the five of them, rounded out by Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) and Noah Schnapp (Will), grow…

In season four, Lucas tried to define himself away from just being a nerdy Dungeons & Dragons player, only to realise who his true friends have always been. Now, after a confrontation with Vecna, he’s hoping Max will eventually wake from the coma she has been put in. “I wish we could talk freely about it, because I feel like the last season is my favourite season,” Caleb McLaughlin tells SFX. Luckily, his tongue isn’t too tightly wound… Last season, Lucas was trying to find his own feet with a different group of friends. Where do we find him this season? ★ Lucas was going through this crisis of identity as a teenager, which I feel like a lot of people go through in their own ways. Lucas’s version was…

Dustin has traditionally been the funny guy on Stranger Things, but not any more. After the death of Eddie, he’s been shaken to his core – something that will be explored across the bumper season five. “It felt like we were filming eight movies,” Gaten Matarazzo tells SFX. “We were in Atlanta that whole year, which was nuts, but so much fun.” Where’s Dustin’s headspace at the beginning of this season, especially with the gang being held in a quarantined Hawkins? ★ I knew we were going to have to shift everything going in, considering the circumstances after season four, and I was really excited to see where the Duffers were going to take it. All of us have, throughout the process of the show, experienced our plethora of traumas…

LAST YEAR WICKED proved not only to be popular but utterly defied gravity. With the highly anticipated follow-up Wicked: For Good out this month, Jon M Chu is still riding high on his commercial and critical success. “It was honestly such a relief that it was received so well – that’s the dream. That the movie that you make, that you care so much about, that every frame, every colour, every shade of lighting you put so much love and effort into, that an audience has resonated with that. “A big thing for me was all of a sudden all the calls that I got from people around the industry that I’d never gotten calls from. I’ve done a decent amount of movies, and I’d like to think I’ve made…

I’M STILL ME BEFORE I was a mother and after a mother, but it did shift my outlook on the world,” says Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, creator, showrunner, and all-round guardian of Netflix’s The Witcher. When her lead, Henry Cavill, parted ways with the series at the end of season three, it offered Hissrich and her team a chance to pause and consider who Geralt had become over the passing years. Same white hair. Same yellow eyes. Same belief that the grunt is a valid language unto its own. But the White Wolf has people in his life now, a woman to love (Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer) and an adoptive daughter (Freya Allan’s Ciri) to care for. At the end of season three, he cast aside his philosophy of neutrality. All that…

WHEN PEOPLE SAY they don’t believe telepathy exists I find myself sincerely confounded. How could you believe that it doesn’t?” Jan Chappell isn’t just defending a key aspect of Cally, the psychically gifted interstellar rebel she played in Blake’s 7. She’s speaking from personal experience. “It’s just an everyday part of my life and always has been,” she shares, revealing how she found her way into a character unlike any she had played before. “Cally was telepathic, which I identified with. I studied it when I was at school, along with handwriting and hypnotism, because I loved going to the library and pulling out books on all sorts of things. “I suppose I was 13 or 14. We’d go to the little hockey shed at lunchtime and do one of…

▶ RELEASED 21 NOVEMBER TBC | 98 minutes ▶ Director Dylan Southern ▶ Cast Benedict Cumberbatch, David Thewlis, Vinette Robinson, Sam Spruell Adapted from Max Porter’s 2015 book Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, this morose drama puts an elevated horror spin on a story of family bereavement. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Dad, who’s struggling to keep life moving forward as normal for his two boys after the death of his wife. Dad’s an illustrator, and seemingly springing from his scratchy coal sketches is the otherworldly Crow, a sweary tormentor voiced by David Thewlis. Documentary maker Dylan Southern makes his fiction feature debut here with no shortage of atmosphere and a couple of impressive flourishes. The boxy aspect ratio adds to the claustrophobic tone, and there’s a striking sequence where…

▶ RELEASED 28 NOVEMBER TBC | 133 minutes ▶ Director Luke Sparke ▶ Cast Ryan Kwanten, Tricia Helfer, Nick Wechsler, Jeremy Piven If you felt Jurassic Park skimped on jungle warfare and Platoon came up short in the dinosaur department, Primitive War could be the film for you. Writer/director Luke Sparke’s high-concept actioner (based on Ethan Pettus’s self-published novel) brings prehistoric creatures to 1968 Vietnam, and the results of this unlikely DNA-splicing are surprisingly successful… up to a point. The film understands its source genres well enough to be both a fairly decent dinosaur movie, and a fairly decent Vietnam movie. But it overplays the homage card, with many of its choices feeling a little too obvious, from the familiar selection of prehistoric creatures on the rampage (T. rex, Raptors,…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 18 | Blu-ray/digital ▶ Director Alexandre O Philippe Another year, another doc by Alexandre O Philippe, who’s previously delved into topics such as Psycho, Alien and The Exorcist. The subject here: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. No point going over how it was made again, right? Philippe seems to agree. Instead, he has five admirers of Tobe Hooper’s gruelling 1974 horror offer appreciations, one by one. Impressively, four are big names: comedian Patton Oswalt, directors Karyn Kusama and Takashi Miike, and Stephen King. Avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage is namechecked twice, which speaks volumes; no one here is yukking, Beavis & Butthead style, over the kills. Oswalt’s pet theory is that the violence is being replicated globally, due to a diseased sun (nonsense). Miiike reckons…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1990 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Larry Cohen ▶ Cast Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones, Megan Gallagher BLU-RAY DEBUT The prolific maverick Larry Cohen was a master of the high-concept pitch, and this one’s worthy of an urban myth: what if the ambulance picking people up is abducting them for medical experiments? Eric Roberts is a comic artist caught in a mystery when the woman he’s hitting on collapses, then disappears. Part Hitchcockian thriller, part Coma, it also ticks comedy, romance and horror. Despite the titular vehicle’s sinister green-lit interior, and a mad scientist villain, the latter takes up a smaller pie-chart slice than you’d expect. The most horrific thing here is Roberts’s mullet. Scenes set in an ersatz Marvel bullpen add interest for genre fans…

▶ RELEASED 10 NOVEMBER 2024 | 15 | Digital For a very simple story, this Brazilian monster horror throws an awful lot of facts and figures at you. Something happens in 1973, then 1997; there are stats on rainfall in Rio de Janeiro; and some convoluted business about a firefighter appealing to move back to active duty after a breakdown. All that just to do a haunted house movie about childhood trauma. It’s atmospheric enough, but could have used a brutal pass by a script editor.…

If Guillermo del Toro’s take on Frankenstein looks too strong for your stomach, you could always revisit Tim Burton’s EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (3 November), which sees the titular innocent taken in by a suburban family. We said: “Satirical in a charming way, it ends up slightly too fey for its own good.” Bonuses? Just two commentaries and an EPK piece from the Blu-ray. In Georges Franju’s 1960 horror EYES WITHOUT A FACE (out now), a surgeon kidnaps young women, cutting their faces off to restore his disfigured daughter. We said: “For a film that hinges on surgical terror, it’s extremely beautiful.” The one major new bonus is a commentary by critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. A second track, a Franju career overview, an actor interview and two shorts are retained from the 2015…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1985 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Po-Chih Leong ▶ Cast John Sham, Hoi-Lun Au, Lung Chan, Jing Chen BLU-RAY DEBUT Anyone with an interest in how US cinema had an influence overseas should get something from this Hong Kong horror. The way it pits rural folk against educated city-dwellers echoes the likes of The Hills Have Eyes. A teacher takes six students on a trip to a deserted island – left alone until the boat returns in two days. Unfortunately, it’s home to three deranged brothers, who are intent on adding one girl to their clan. As is not uncommon with Hong Kong films of the period, certain elements may cause you to wince – not only is the snot-dribbling youngest brother clearly intellectually disabled,…

▶ RELEASED 6 NOVEMBER 320 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Natasha Siegel ▶ Publisher Bloomsbury Archer A lesbian gothic romance that takes place across centuries, As Many Souls As Stars is confident and occasionally impressive. But, rather like its characters, it’s also too caught up in its own introspective musings, leaving the reader a bit bored at times. Its star is a demonic entity who calls herself Miriam and feeds on human souls. She becomes entranced by the powerful soul belonging to Cybil Harding, the “First Daughter” of her landowner family in 16th century England. Poor Cybil lives under a curse, doomed to lose anyone she loves. At first, Miriam wants to devour her, but then a strange feeling takes over. Could it be love? Similarly, Cybil is drawn to…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 229 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Authors Justin Hardy, Dominic Hardy ▶ Publisher The History Press This companion piece to a documentary that’s screened at festivals, but still awaits a wider release, has a remarkable story behind it. In 2021, a woman found sacks of paperwork in her attic, left by a prior resident: an ex-wife of The Wicker Man director Robin Hardy. She contacted the family, resulting in two of his sons going through a suitcase full of documentation on dad’s tale of pagan sacrifice. Not a good jumping-on point, it’s strictly for Wickermaniacs. And it’s not the treasure trove they might be hoping for. A few interesting letters relating to courting studios and the edit are reproduced, but you’ll learn nothing new about production. The…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher DC/Black Label ▶ Writer W Maxwell Prince ▶ Artist Martín Morazzo ISSUES 1-3 As influential classic comics go, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman is in the top rankings. Now, as well as being an influence on James Gunn’s Superman movie, its DNA is all over DC’s latest Black Label miniseries. Hailing from the creators of the long-running Image Comics horror anthology Ice Cream Man, The Kryptonite Spectrum offers a deeply quirky take on Superman’s relationship with his home planet. The plot is sparked off by the discovery of four new strains of Kryptonite. Superman decides to test them on himself, and the first three issues showcase different results, whether it’s Kal-El regressing to boyhood or spending a day as a skyscraper-sized giant. There’s…

China Syndrome 2 JULY 1986 Big Trouble In Little China was never going to be easily pigeonholed. Even director John Carpenter reached for the hyphens as he sold it to the press. “It’s an action-adventure-comedy-kung-fu-ghost-story-monster movie,” he revealed, pausing for breath as he bolted the genres together. “There’s no way that there’s been a film like this!” It was nearly an even stranger brew. The original screenplay by Gary Goldman and David Z Weinstein was set in the 1880s and collided ancient Chinese mysticism with classic Hollywood gunslinging. WD Richter – writer of 1978’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and director of cult fave The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension – was hired to haul this wuxia Western into the 1980s. While it made the screen as Big…

DESCRIBING IT AS “THE BOOK I’ve always wanted to write,” Paul Cornell traces The Mighty Avengers vs The 1970s – his contribution to Bloomsbury Books’ new Marvel Age Of Comics series – to first discovering Earth’s Mightiest Heroes through a British reprint in 1973 before purchasing an issue of their original US title a few months later. “The differences between the two opened up a whole world of exciting questions and that’s what addicted me to the Marvel Universe,” he explains. “What I’m trying to do with this book is critique superhero comics on their own terms, and write a fun, accessible book about the challenges facing writers working under enormous pressure in a shared universe.” With the Avengers so ubiquitous thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s hard to…

WITH AN EARLY 2026 RELEASE date quickly approaching, the finer details of A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms are finally starting to land, including some head-swerving teases from the cast and crew. What’s in store for Game Of Thrones fans? For starters, the six-part spinoff will incorporate a grittier and more grounded tone than its predecessors, as well as some of the most intense, ass-kicking medieval action seen on the small screen. The highly-anticipated HBO series is based on George RR Martin’s novellas about a hedge knight called Ser Duncan the Tall, aka Dunk (played by Peter Claffey), and his young squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell). The story is set a century before Game Of Thrones, in a time where the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne. In the…

Season five has been split into three parts, the first four episodes (Volume One) coming on 26 November, followed by three more episodes (Volume Two) on Christmas Day, and the finale on New Year’s Eve – and unlike the split in season four, this time, the Duffers knew it was coming. “I’m also excited about the first volume because, in season four, we weren’t aware that it was going to get split in two,” Ross says. “It’s not Netflix’s fault, it’s nobody’s fault. There was the pandemic, and we ended up dividing it in two so we could get episodes out sooner. But this time, we knew we were going to divide it into two, so it really is in two halves. Volume One really exists as its own mega-movie. It…

“We’re trying to be very careful about what else is made in the Stranger Things Universe, or whatever you want to call it,” Matt says. “It’s on a case-by-case basis, like the play [Stranger Things: The First Shadow] came about because Stephen Daldry, who we didn’t know personally, but as a filmmaker, we’ve always looked up to him, and he came to Netflix and said, ‘Hey, I love Stranger Things. I’d love to make a play out of it.’ So that happened. We liked that it came from an artist’s passion; it wasn’t to cash in on the franchise. It’s a prequel and the intention with that was, if you’re a big fan of the show, you’ll get something out of it, but you absolutely do not have to have…

Speaking to SFX, Finn Wolfhard said the Duffers compare each season of the show to a different movie (see p36) but he didn’t know which movie they likened the new season to. So we asked them. “We talked a lot for season four about Nightmare On Elm Street and Hellraiser for the fact that the really psychological ’80s horror was our touch point,” Ross says. “But for this season, we didn’t have one specific touch point that’s easy to point to. It was more looking at all the seasons that we had made of Stranger Things and asking, ‘How do we bring this full circle?’ A lot of it was looking back at season one and making sure that, when this all ended, it felt like one singular story, it felt…

“WE’RE NOT JUST A GREATEST HITS recitation,” says Arvind Ethan David, the writer, producer and general hoopy frood behind an ambitious new stage version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. “We are, in the best sense, a tribute band – in the sense that Oasis is a tribute band to the Beatles!” Some might say that the genius of Douglas Adams will live forever. Originally a 1978 BBC radio serial before it became a ferociously quotable franchise of novels, LPs and commemorative towels, alongside a videogame and live-action adaptations, both big-screen and small, Hitchhiker’s can be safely filed under “phenomenon”. Adams’s absurdist cosmic fable has been brought to the stage before – madcap Ken Campbell directed the first theatrical take at the ICA in May 1979 – but never…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 118 minutes ▶ Director Yorgos Lanthimos ▶ Cast Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone A new Yorgos Lanthimos film always brings a mixture of anticipation and apprehension – will his particular style of darkly hewed satire translate this time (as with Poor Things and The Favourite), or will it get lost in the weeds of stylistic weirdness? Fortunately Bugonia, a remake of 2003 South Korean effort Save The Green Planet!, falls into the former category. With The Menu’s Will Tracy adapting original writer/director Jang Joon-hwan’s story of alien conspiracy theory, kidnapping and sweaty desperation, Lanthimos is able to mix the driving themes of climate chaos, unchecked capitalism and bee colony collapse with a funny, moody and emotionally satisfying farce that never ends…

▶ RELEASED 14 NOVEMBER 18 | 128 minutes ▶ Director Julia Ducournau ▶ Cast Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey After the punk rock madness of Titane and the rotting flesh of Raw, Palme d’Or-winning director Julia Ducournau turns inward, crafting a feverish coming-of-age tale that mutates into something cold and tragic: a fable about infection, fear and the limits of love. After rebellious 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) returns home with a bleeding tattoo, her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor who is brittle but loving, suspects the mark links to a spreading bloodborne illness that slowly turns its victims to stone, and has already claimed her drug-addicted brother Amin (Tahar Rahim). It’s an unspeakably cruel proposition, a literalisation of paralysis, guilt and shame, and Ducournau showcases her knack…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1980 | 15 | 4K/Blu-ray ▶ Director Ken Russell ▶ Cast William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid Essentially Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde if it’d been written by Carlos Castenada, Ken Russell’s characteristically unrestrained take on a script by Network’s Paddy Chayefsky is a bracing mix of acid trip visuals and hoary old tropes. William Hurt seems slightly miscast (insufficiently beardy weirdy) as a Harvard professor obsessed with combining hallucinogenic mushrooms acquired from a Mexican tribe and sensory deprivation. This eventually causes him to regress to an earlier stage of human evolution. When said hairy apeman escapes to scamper round the streets, you may get the giggles. And it’s disappointing that, after kicking open the doors of perception, the film slams them shut again for…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 |15 | Digital The spirit of The Cabin In The Woods is revisited in this entertaining postmodern horror-comedy from Indonesia. Five college students head into the sticks for a break, only to realise that they’re literally inside a horror movie, subject to the whims of a writer still figuring things out on the page. There’s a bit too much exposition, but strong central performances and a premise that’s more Six Characters In Search Of An Author than Scream make for a charming and likeable film.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1994 | 15 | 4K ▶ Director John Carpenter ▶ Cast Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner This mystery about a missing author plays like a mash-up of Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone. Sam Neill is an insurance investigator tasked with locating Sutter Cane. The trail, impossibly, leads to Hobb’s End, a town from Cane’s novels. Are events detailed in his latest manuscript – like humanity transforming into monstrous form – becoming reality? Featuring the odd physical effect worthy of The Thing, and a wryly metatextual ending, the film riffs on the moral panics around the malign influence of culture on consumers – which may explain why it’s bookended by blasts of heavy metal. As Lovecraftian cinema goes, it’s not up there with Stuart…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1976 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Charles B Pierce ▶ Cast Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Dawn Wells, Jimmy Clem 88 Films is releasing this under its Slasher Classics Collection brand, which feels slightly misleading. Loosely based on killings around a town on the Texas/Arkansas border in 1946, its vibe is more true crime docu-drama – despite the killer’s penchant for wearing a burlap sack (like Jason before he picked up a hockey mask). That said, the sight of said sack moving in and out as he breathes is downright creepy. And one particularly grim murder scene – where the killer improvises a trombone into a weapon of torture – tips proceedings over the edge. The attacks feel authentically chaotic. The period feel is well realised.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1987 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Ruggero Deodato ▶ Cast The Barbarian Brothers, Richard Lynch, Eva LaRue, Michael Berryman​ BLU-RAY DEBUT The director of Cannibal Holocaust was behind this silly fantasy adventure. Bodybuilding twins the Barbarian Brothers (real names Peter and David Paul) play a pair of, er, barbarian brothers imprisoned by an evil warlord. When they grow up, saving the land – and, more importantly, the circus troupe that raised them – is dependent on finding a magical ruby, if they can find time in-between severing limbs and showing off their impressive pecs. Although it’s no classic, The Barbarians is at least entertaining. The two leads take knuckleheadedness to spectacular extremes, while the gore frequently borders on comical. The sets and effects are also, at…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Alexandra Bell ▶ Publisher Del Rey Sometimes, a novel has all the right elements, but they just don’t quite come together. Eve Shaw is an art expert with a magic octopus tattoo and a tragic past. A series of coincidences (or are they?) lead her to the auction-house world’s equivalent of an urban legend: a picturesquely ruined hotel up a mountain in Switzerland. After a perhaps excessive amount of descriptive throat-clearing, the book sends her back in time to the White Octopus’s 1935 heyday: all art deco hallways, free-flowing champagne and mirrors you don’t want to look at for too long. But she can’t shake the feeling that she’s being recognised by apparent strangers – and she, too, spots familiar…

▶ RELEASED 6 NOVEMBER 594 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author JT Greathouse ▶ Publisher Gollancz JT Greathouse flexes the muscles of his imagination with The Tower Of The Tyrant, drawing a world where rival factions – variously secular, religious and magical – vie for influence and control. The anchor for the story is Fola, a sorceress from the fabled City of the Wise who crosses paths with Siwan, a young girl whose soul is bound to a terrifying raven spirit, and her guardian Llewyn. The trio become entangled with Owyn, heir to the throne of Parwys, a kingdom haunted by vengeful spirits motivated by a grievance lost to the mists of time. There’s a lot to digest, from political intrigues to clashes between competing ideologies, but Greathouse never lets the…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Olivie Blake ▶ Publisher Mantle The girls of The House are perfect. Only the most beautiful, brilliant and ineffably cool are invited to join the sorority, so logically, of course, they all go on to become incredibly successful women. Sociology professor Sloane is struggling to juggle her career, husband, and baby, so when she’s asked to become an academic advisor to the House, she’s initially jealous, then intrigued. How do these women manage to have it all, and still have such shiny hair? The title (and the tagline: “Good girls deserve a treat”) hint at what might be going on, but the House keeps its secrets until at least three quarters of the way through. In alternating chapters, Sloane and…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Alastair Reynolds ▶ Publisher Gollancz Space opera maestro Alastair Reynolds moves into murder mystery territory with his latest. But don’t worry – while Halcyon Years may sound like the name of a retirement home, this is no The Thursday Murder Club, but a hugely entertaining film noir pastiche set on a generational spaceship. The laconic private eye in this case is Yuri Gagarin. Yes, that Yuri Gagarin. Or maybe not. It’s complicated. He’s enlisted by a mysterious femme fatale to investigate the apparently unrelated deaths of two teens from rival powerful families. What he uncovers is a conspiracy that shakes the ship’s society to the core. And involves the kind of mind boggling images and concepts Hollywood directors should be lining…

▶ RELEASED 11 NOVEMBER ▶ Publisher AWA Studios ▶ Writers Cullen Bunn, Larry King ▶ Artist Mike Deodato Jr GRAPHIC NOVEL While Wicked adds songs to L Frank Baum’s classic fantasy, this Elton John-endorsed graphic novel takes a more action-packed approach, initially at least. With the Tin Man transformed into a formidable Iron Man-esque figure, main protagonist Tip is rescued from the clutches of evil witch Mombi by the gun-toting Special Oz Operations Team. The story then settles into a more traditional narrative as they journey along the Yellow Brick Road to Emerald City. With the Wizard and Dorothy quickly sidelined, the stableboy at first makes for quite an unassuming lead. But all is not what it seems as co-writers Cullen Bunn and music producer Larry King deliver a clever twist…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Image Comics ▶ Writer/artist David Marquez ISSUES 1-4 While comparisons can be drawn with his current work on Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men – or indeed, other schools for gifted youngsters, as seen in Wednesday or Harry Potter – David Marquez’s first series as a writer/artist excels not only with its typically lush artwork, but also its compelling storyline. It centres on 13-year-old Aida, the reluctant hero of the title, who’s ostracised by her fellow pupils as her preternatural abilities – devastatingly powerful, if the flashbacks in a city ruined by an explosion that she apparently caused is any indication – fail to manifest properly. Approached by a rival faction, she questions her loyalties and discovers the true nature of their power, The Word, which is where…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Reviewed on PS5 ▶ Publisher Sony Interactive Ent VIDEOGAME Ghost Of Yōtei takes the ancient Greek approach to retelling history, weaving together truth and mythology so neatly that you can no longer see the seams. It’s set at the turn of 17th century Japan. You play as Atsu, a hardened ronin on a quest to slay her family’s killers. She’s an archetypal figure in an archetypal samurai revenge story, but Ghost Of Yōtei employs a larger-than-life sheen at every opportunity. Gorgeous visuals make the open-world RPG look like a living painting, while an emphasis on discovery means you’ll often stumble upon your next adventure by pure coincidence. A passing storyteller may recall the legend of an undead samurai, which you can then investigate, while following…