Ghouls Next Door

The Hunger Games is a timeless classic of young adult fiction that inspired an uprising in the dystopian teen sub-genre. Writer Suzanne Collins created the series after experiencing the disconnected reality of television. Cycling through channels that featured reality TV shows like Survivor, fashion and celebrity red carpets, and coverage of the war in Iraq, Collins wanted to capture the public’s talent for compartmentalizing and the power of propaganda.

They Live is a timeless science fiction, dystopian piece of media criticism. Director John Carpenter argues the film is a documentary, and he says what we’re all thinking, using alien overlords to reveal the real-world villains of Mass Media, Big Corporations, and the Surveillance state. All of Carpenter’s nightmares have only increased since the 1988 release, with the rise of Flock cameras, media conglomerates taking over the communication world, and the advertising business infiltrating every waking minute of our lives.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a triumphant and heartbreaking tale of human resilience. Against the backdrop of the end of the world, Carl and his fellow crawlers fight for their lives against a system hell bent on minimizing them to tools of entertainment. Turns out aliens are real and they’ve got intergalactic reality shows of Hunger Games-proportions.

Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, cautions us against the horrors of forgiving, forgetting, and relinquishing control. A tale told before its time, watching it merely two years after its release, the film feels disturbingly prescient in a post Epstein Files ‘release’ world.

Obsession is an insidiously terrifying new horror film that follows Bear after he makes an ill-advised, harmful, and desperate wish for his crush, Nikki, to love him more than anything else in the world. Obsession is timely and unsettlingly so, confronting current-day horrors around the male loneliness epidemic and the ways young men are weaponizing their existence against women.

The Menu is a brilliant, vicious critique of celebrity chef culture. The dark comedy film confronts the absurdity around elite fine dining experiences that have taken the “love out of eating.”

Opus, the debut film of director and former music journalist, Mark Anthony Green intends to critique cultural criticism, celebrity obsession, and the hierarchy of fame.  There’s a level of anticipation with Green at the helm, an expectation of truths revealed, insider knowledge shared and no-holds-barred. However, while the film is pretty to look at and has some of the most insane moments of body gore I’ve seen in some time it leaves a lot to be desired.

They Will Kill You is a punchy, gory, and brilliant mess. It was delightfully unexpected, and while at times it certainly feels like “John Wick but with a Badass Black Woman,” that’s not a negative! It is a relentless assault of silly world-building and over-the-top body gore. 

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a punchy, gore-filled and brutal sequel to a beloved horror classic. After surviving a night of torment at the hands of her brand-new wealthy in-laws, Grace is once again confronted by the sinister, evil antics of the elite as they hunt her down. Only this time, she’s not the only victim as her “emergency contract” and previously forgotten sister, Faith, has been chained (literally) to her.

SGJ has a knack for transforming folkloric monsters we’ve grown accustomed to, twisting them into a new, sympathetic, and terrifying creature; something entirely of his own making. He did this in Mongrels, the sometimes funny, most often dark, familial story about werewolves and ancestry (and one of my favorite SGJ novels). He’s done it again in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, now with vampires.