Halloween 2024 storyscream: the best spooky things to watch and play – The Verge

Classic survival horror is still alive and scaring

2024-10-26T11:00:00-04:00

Fear the Spotlight. | Image: Blumhouse Games

More than most genres, survival horror feels rooted in time. It started with the methodical Resident Evil on the original PlayStation and is defined in part by limitation - a slow pace, grimy visuals, and scant resources to help amplify the scares. Many of those elements stemmed from the early, awkward days of 3D gaming, whether it was Resident Evil's clunky controls, which made zombie chases more terrifying, or Silent Hill's fog, which lent an iconic atmosphere while also letting the developers get around technical limitations of the time.

And a few decades later, developers are still finding ways to bring the most important elements of th …

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The Lake House is a welcome return to Alan Wake 2 — and a bridge to the future

2024-10-26T10:00:00-04:00

After a year, Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment has opened the gates to a mysterious location in the 2023 third-person horror hit Alan Wake 2, known as The Lake House. In this short DLC, released just in time for Halloween, players step into the shoes of Kiran Estevez, the long-suffering agent of the mysterious Federal Bureau of Control we meet in the main game, who allies with Alan Wake 2's protagonists, Alan Wake and Saga Anderson. Set before the events of Alan Wake 2, The Lake House sees Kiran recounting a horrifying event at the titular location to Saga, yet the plot is almost firmly removed from the main game itself.

This is both a b …

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Get cursed in the latest No Man’s Sky event

2024-10-23T10:17:45-04:00

The latest No Man's Sky event will have players straddling the boundary between this world and the next. The Cursed expedition event runs for the next two weeks and features new bosses, new gear, a flying saucer, and a UFO players can make their own.

As with every new NMS event, the developers at Hello Games are changing up how the game works. The Cursed takes place in a new universe where the line between life and… unlife?? is perilously thin. The exosuit, which normally protects players from the harsh environs of space and alien planets, now comes with an "anomaly suppressor" that'll keep them stable as reality shifts around them. Additio …

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The Substance is a grotesque takedown of our obsession with youth

2024-09-10T13:30:00-04:00

As much as studios love hyping up their latest scary movies as being so terrifying that they traumatize audiences, it is rare for features to live up to that kind of buzz. But The Substance writer / director Coralie Fargeat's new body horror is infinitely more disturbing (a feature, not a bug) than any of its early trailers have let on.

Films about the agony of living up to female beauty standards aren't new, but The Substance weaves them into an incisive feminist parable that feels jacked directly into the moment that has given us on-demand Ozempic and Brat. And what the film lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with an inspired - if stomac …

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Alien: Romulus is a solid franchise tribute plagued by weird optics

2024-08-14T15:00:00-04:00

It's mind-boggling that Alien: Romulus almost wound up debuting on Hulu instead of theaters. The film's intricate set design alone makes it one of the series' most visually impressive chapters, and its practical effects are a welcome change of pace in a summer blockbuster season that has been dominated by uninspired CGI spectacle.

Director Fede Álvarez's new standalone entry in the long-running sci-fi / horror franchise feels especially primed to speak to a new generation of fans. But as fun as Romulus is to look at, its story plays more like a compilation of the Alien series' greatest hits than a movie that's trying to sing its own tune. A …

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Horror movies need to be more than a big mood

2024-08-11T09:00:00-04:00

The release of Get Out in 2017 disturbed Hollywood - not just the box office but, briefly, the entire horror genre, which had long been the most consistent moneymaker in the industry. The film made a multiple of 56 times on its $4.5 million budget and was less a breakthrough and more of a victory lap for Blumhouse, the studio that had for nearly two decades championed scary movies at a low cost with hopes of a high return.

Partly, Get Out was exceptional - not the first movie where the true horror is racism, but one that balanced the terror with humor and absurdity. Eager to repeat that success, Hollywood greenlit a swath of horror movies a …

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Cuckoo is a picturesque nightmare that struggles to get its point across

2024-08-09T13:30:00-04:00

Coming on the heels of Longlegs and Immaculate, director Tilman Singer's Cuckoo feels like the next phase of Neon's plan to dominate this summer of horror. The movie's haunting atmosphere and gorgeous cinematography make it seem primed to tap into Hollywood's current obsession with unsettling features running on spooky vibes alone. But for all of its hype and a solid performance from its leads, Cuckoo suffers from a lack of thematic coherence. It's definitely the strongest of Neon's recent scary movies, but that isn't exactly a high bar to clear.

Set in a corner of the German Alps where few foreigners tend to wander, Cuckoo follows as sulle …

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A24’s MaXXXine flips the script to give you something fresh to scream about

2024-07-03T10:00:00-04:00

With X and Pearl, it was hard to miss that Ti West was using pornography and horror as lenses through which to tell a story about the evolution of film. Both were explorations of how naked bodies have always been a subject of cinematic fascination, and while the movies were tonally different, they similarly spotlighted how sex has always been one of the driving forces behind the advancement of movie-making technology.

MaXXXine enters the X franchise knowing full well how easily it could fall victim to the threequel curse if it simply dropped its star into a new decade to fight for her life on yet another farm. And while it features plenty o …

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‘MaXXXine is very different from both of them’: Ti West on closing out his X horror trilogy

2024-07-02T10:00:00-04:00

MaXXXine. | Image: A24

For the last few years, Ti West hasn't stopped thinking about the horror villains Pearl and Maxine. Since 2020, the writer and director has been fully immersed in the genre-spanning franchise that started with the '70s slasher flick X and continued with the technicolor prequel Pearl, which were filmed back-to-back in New Zealand during the pandemic and released in 2022. Now things culminate with the premiere of the series' third act, the very '80s thriller MaXXXine. It's been an intense process that has meant West hasn't had much time for anything else. "It's all such a blur at this point," he tells The Verge. "It's been seven days a week, 1 …

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For the director of I Saw the TV Glow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was just the start

2024-05-21T10:00:00-04:00

There is an honesty to I Saw the TV Glow's depiction of growing up as a lonely, fantasy-obsessed kid in the '90s that makes it resonate. And that's true regardless of whether you, like writer / director Jane Schoenbrun, were a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The film's mind-bending story centers on Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). The two outsiders spark an unlikely friendship over their shared love of The Pink Opaque, a fictional fantasy / horror series that feels like a twisted mashup of The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Between its angsty, lo-fi atmosphere and pivots into explicit B-movi …

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