The Halloween 2023 StoryScream: things to play and watch this spooky season – The Verge

In Alan Wake 2, you will never feel safe

2023-10-27T09:30:00-04:00

Horror drowns in symmetry: evil twins, two souls occupying one body, light and dark creating shadow, the Other Side, the Dark Place, the Upside Down. It is part of the cascading telemetry of fear utilized by our best horror artists, weaving nightmares out of pleasant dreams, whittling hell from the bones of our heavens.

Remedy Entertainment has created not only one of their best games to date but one of the best games of this already incredible year. Indeed, it is my game of the year. Alan Wake 2, Remedy's first full-on third-person survival horror, is the culmination of everything the studio has been building toward and playing with, as id …

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Junji Ito has a terrifying new short story collection just in time for Halloween

2023-10-23T12:00:00-04:00

It's been an interesting year for fans of Junji Ito. 2023 will be bookended by animated adaptations of the famed horror master's work; it started with Netflix's anthology in January, while Adult Swim's take on Uzumaki is expected by the end of the year. And right in the middle is a new collection of his work in English with Mimi's Tales of Terror. It's a series of short stories inspired by urban legends - just the thing for dark, cold October nights.

The book is actually an adaptation itself, taking nine stories from Shin Mimibukuro - a collection of Japanese urban legends written by Hirokatsu Kihara and Ichiro Nakayama - and turning them i …

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Dead Space is coming to Xbox Game Pass just in time for Halloween

2023-10-17T17:52:28-04:00

There's a whole host of great games hitting Xbox Game Pass throughout October, including the grisly Dead Space remake that's arriving just in time for Halloween. The Dead Space remake offers a complete overhaul of the original 2008 sci-fi horror title, and it's headed to Game Pass for cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X / S on October 26th.

But if you can't wait until then, the Yakuza spinoff Like A Dragon: Ishin! is available to play through Game Pass on cloud, console, and PC starting today. Here's the rest of the games coming to Game Pass through the end of the month and when they're arriving:

F1 Manager 2023 (cloud, console, and PC): October 1 …

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A new Alan Wake game just launched in Fortnite

2023-10-17T10:00:00-04:00

There's another Alan Wake game in the works - but this one was built inside of Fortnite. Today, Epic Games announced the launch of Alan Wake: Flashback, a Fortnite experience that "reimagines Remedy Entertainment's iconic story." It's available for free inside the game right now using the island code 3426-5561-3374.

While promotional tie-ins are nothing new for Fortnite, the Alan Wake experience appears much more involved than most, which makes sense given the publishing relationship between Remedy and Epic Games. It also comes at a time when Epic is making a big push for Fortnite's creator-made experiences in an attempt to help the game ev …

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Franz is the creepy thing that lives in your phone

2023-10-13T10:02:01-04:00

A promotional rendering of Franz — she’s much more cartoonish (usually) in the app. | Image: Ice-Pick Lodge

On Christmas Day 2021, a man took a crossbow to Windsor Castle with plans to kill Queen Elizabeth II. (He failed.) In court, the would-be assassin claimed he'd been egged on by a virtual companion named Sarai on the AI platform Replika. A virtual friend "always agrees with you when you talk with them," warned an expert quoted by the BBC in an article about the saga last week, deeming the chatbot system dangerous. "It always reinforces what you're thinking." Including, it seems, regicide.

Virtual companions have become a popular novelty in the past few years, and the BBC article offers a pervasive truism about them: that real people are draw …

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The Fall of the House of Usher is Mike Flanagan’s most ambitious horror story yet

2023-10-10T13:00:00-04:00

Since The Haunting of Hill House debuted in 2018, Mike Flanagan has steadily built up an impressively diverse anthology of limited series on Netflix, with releases coming on a near-annual basis. The intervening years have included a romantic puzzle box, a small-town vampire story, and a collection of teen ghost stories. But with The Fall of the House of Usher - which is likely the final collaboration between Flanagan and Netflix - the showrunner has created his most ambitious story yet. It's still the slow-burning human drama fans have come to expect, but this time, it tells a much more complex story that touches on everything from AI to the …

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Amazon’s Totally Killer is, like, such a fun slasher movie

2023-10-05T09:45:00-04:00

Totally Killer never tries to hide what it is: a classic slasher movie fused with Back to the Future. And it turns out that adding time travel to the well-worn horror genre helps bring some new life to it in a way that actually feels pretty fitting. If you're looking for a nostalgia-laced slasher to stream ahead of Halloween, this is it.

Initially, the movie is set in the present day, in a small town living in the aftermath of a trio of grisly murders that happened 35 years prior. That's part of the reason why Jamie's (Kiernan Shipka) mother (Julie Bowen) is so darn protective. She lived through the original ordeal in 1987, and since the "S …

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Castlevania: Nocturne is a revolutionary epic that does the franchise’s best games justice

2023-09-28T16:06:12-04:00

Drolta Tzuentes as she appears in Castlevania: Nocturne. | Image: Netflix

Netflix's first Castlevania animated series excelled by balancing its quiet, beautifully performed moments of human drama with explosive and artful action set pieces dazzling enough to evoke the feeling of playing Konami's classic side-scroller for the first time. Despite the first show's strengths, its regular issues with pacing and effectively cultivating characters from season to season made the idea of Netflix keeping the vampiric daddy issues ball rolling with Castlevania: Nocturne - a new spinoff series from executive producer Clive Bradley and co-directors Sam Deats and Adam Deats - a dubious one.

Nocturne both looks and feels a lot …

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Hulu’s No One Will Save You is taut, minimalist sci-fi horror

2023-09-22T00:00:00-04:00

No One Will Save You wastes no time getting started. After a brief setup, it gets right to the action: a home invasion that's actually an alien invasion. What follows is an incredibly tense, surprisingly quiet mix of sci-fi and horror, just the thing for a fall evening at home.

The movie - which is streaming now on Hulu - comes via writer and director Brian Duffield, who previously wrote similar genre twists The Babysitter and Love and Monsters. It centers on Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), a young woman who lives alone in a big, isolated house and who - for reasons that aren't clear until much later in the story - is either ignored or hated by basi …

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Four very different horror movies from TIFF 2023

2023-09-21T09:00:00-04:00

Sleep. | Image: TIFF

This year is shaping up to be a good one for horror, particularly on the festival circuit. Things kicked off nice and early at Sundance with the impressive quartet of Birth/Rebirth, Talk To Me, In My Mother's Skin, and Infinity Pool. This month at TIFF, meanwhile, I watched another four movies that each add something interesting to the genre. What's most impressive about these films is how, when combined, they really show off the breadth of what's possible under the horror banner. You'll wince and cover your eyes, but you'll also laugh.

Sleep

Sleep is the first feature from director Jason Yu, and it really taps into a common fear: namely, th …

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