Horror critic | Senior Staff Writer at iHorror | Author of No House Is Empty | Cult, indie, queer, folk, and streaming horror.
Articles by Luna Gray
Terror Films And Microhouse Films Take Indie Horror Vertical
Terror Films Releasing has teamed up with Microhouse Films, the mobile-first vertical platform that launched July 7, and it is bringing horror along for the ride. The indie genre distributor behind the Hell House LLC franchise, Patient Seven, The Taking of Deborah Logan and Savageland is putting select titles on the phone-shaped format, starting with two new films dropped in an exclusive window to mark the platform’s debut.
The Voices That Carved the Puppet: ‘Pinocchio: Unstrung’, Rhys Frake-Waterfield Interview
A killer Pinocchio is an easy sell. You can picture the poster before anyone builds the movie: strings, teeth, a splash of red across something that used to be sweet. The version Rhys Frake-Waterfield would rather talk about is the one underneath the poster, where the puppet does not arrive already knowing what evil is. He has to be taught it. That is the part that unsettles me, and it is the part he kept circling back to when we talked.
Weekly Roundup: Freddy Returns, Jason Goes Back to Crystal Lake, and Obsession Keeps Winning
Two versions of horror showed up this week and only one of them was making anything new. In one version, the genre spent seven days reselling its own past. Netflix reissued Stranger Things as a worn rental tape. A decade-old cult film packed its sequel with famous faces before shooting a frame. Criterion boxed up a Netflix monster in 4K. A festival handed out a career award.
George A. Romero Never Needed the Zombies to Be the Scariest Part
Every zombie story made in the last half century walks through the same door. The shuffling dead, the barricaded survivors, the bite that dooms you, the headshot that saves you, the radio that stops helping: all of it comes from a farmhouse outside Pittsburgh in 1968. What most of those stories leave on the other side of that door is the reason George A. Romero built it. He was never particularly interested in the dead. He was interested in what the living do to each other once the excuse arrives.
Hocus Pocus at 33: The Halloween Classic That Refused to Stay Dead
Somewhere in the Disney vaults sits a 1993 ledger listing Hocus Pocus as a disappointment, and somewhere in Salem right now a tour guide is pointing at a house because of it. Few movies have a resume this contradictory. A Halloween institution, a costume industry, a tourism engine, and a genuine piece of shared American ritual all grew out of a witch comedy that critics shrugged at and Disney released, for reasons that remain eternally funny, in the middle of July.
Freddy vs. Jason Continued: Horror’s Greatest Rivals Return at the Same Time
Some rivalries never really end. They just change venues. On July 13, inside a single news cycle, Peacock released the first teaser for Crystal Lake, its Friday the 13th prequel series, and Paramount Pictures announced it had closed a deal for the United States rights to Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street screenplay. Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, who spent two decades circling each other before finally sharing a screen in 2003, are suddenly back in the same conversation.
Beliath Review: The Camera Should Have Looked Away
Beliath begins with the familiar rhythm of local television reporting before slowly turning the camera into something more dangerous. A small-town news crew investigates a brutal murder in the South Downs, only to uncover local folklore, unexplained deaths, and a cult that has remained hidden for good reason. Director Cristian Parras gives the found footage format a believable purpose. These are not teenagers filming themselves because the movie needs an excuse to keep recording.
EPISODE 12 Review: Leave the Woods Alone
On June 6, 2023, the fictional paranormal series Paranormal Closure disappeared from television without explanation. More than a year later, footage claiming to be its unaired twelfth episode surfaced online. That mystery provides a strong opening for EPISODE 12, directed by Shawn Robinson. It also feels like the beginning of a warning nobody intends to follow. The couple leading Paranormal Closure are immediately likable.
Beliath Review: The Camera Should Have Looked Away
Beliath begins with the familiar rhythm of local television reporting before slowly turning the camera into something more dangerous. A small-town news crew investigates a brutal murder in the South Downs, only to uncover local folklore, unexplained deaths, and a cult that has remained hidden for good reason. Director Cristian Parras gives the found footage format a believable purpose. These are not teenagers filming themselves because the movie needs an excuse to keep recording.
‘Corporate Retreat’ Skips Straight to the Exit Interview
Corporate Retreat opens with a bucket of blood. Not a tasteful streak across a white wall. A bucket. By the eight minute mark, somebody is dead, the soundtrack is strutting, and I know this workplace has skipped orientation and gone directly to the exit interview. I appreciate a film that tells me what it is before I get comfortable. Director Aaron Fisher, who wrote the film with Kerri Lee Romeo, traps the executives of Immaculate Pond Technologies inside a remote luxury retreat.
Jacked Keeps Resetting Its Own Suspense
A stalker movie lives or dies on distance. The threat needs to be closing in, or at least feel like it might in the next breath, and the audience has to feel that gap shrinking whether or not anyone on screen does. Jacked understands this. It just keeps resetting the gap instead of closing it. The setup is clean. In the summer of 1987, two small-town teenagers named Lindsay and Jay spend a good day at a lake, their car dies on the drive home, and a stranger begins circling them in the dark.
Crystal Lake Teaser Makes Pamela Voorhees the Main Event
The first real footage from Crystal Lake is here, and it belongs to Pamela Voorhees. A24 and Peacock released the teaser for their Friday the 13th prequel series on Monday, with Linda Cardellini playing the camp mother Betsy Palmer originated in 1980. The eight-episode series premieres Thursday, October 15, on Peacock. For a franchise best known for a large man in a hockey mask, the teaser spends its running time somewhere stranger. The camera drifts through a Camp Crystal Lake wrapped in fog.
Paul Tremblay Would Like You to Know You Can Say No
Paul Tremblay says his name into my recorder and confirms, for the record, that I have permission to use it. I had reached out wanting to talk about horror in general, and about the small crowd of adaptations circling his work, and somewhere in the scheduling a new novel appeared that I had not known about when I asked. The publisher had sent the audiobook, which landed too late for me to get through before we met, and I say so. Tremblay waves the whole thing off. Ask whatever you want, he tells me.
Sam Neill and the Terror of the Reasonable Man
The actor, who died Monday in Sydney at 78, spent decades playing clever men who slowly ran out of explanations. Sam Neill died on Monday in Sydney at the age of 78. His family shared the news in a statement, calling his death sudden and unexpected, and noting that he remained cancer free after years of treatment for blood cancer. They said he was surrounded by family. They thanked the staff at St. Vincent’s Private Hospital and asked for privacy.
Evil Dead Burn Is Filth, and It Knows It Original
I made a noise during Evil Dead Burn that I have never made in a theater before. It landed somewhere between a laugh and an apology, and I made it more than once. That is the whole review, really, but iHorror pays me by the word, so let me explain what kind of movie earns a sound like that. Alice, played by Souheila Yacoub, has just lost her husband and goes to grieve with his family at their remote house. You already know the family is not going to stay a family for long.
Cold Prey Trilogy Limited Edition Blu-ray Review: The Slasher Gets Frostbite, and It Suits Him
Most slashers keep their killers indoors, or at least somewhere with cell service. Cold Prey drags the whole formula up a Norwegian mountain, snaps the phone signal like a dry twig, and lets the weather do half the stalking. Second Sight Films has now gathered all three Fritt Vilt movies into a Limited Edition Blu-ray box set, available now in the UK. Now, the short version of this: it is worth buying.
This Week in Horror: Deadites Land, Goodman Signs, and the Witches of Camp Move In
The loud story this week is a franchise chainsaw revving back to life in a multiplex near you. The interesting stories are quieter and stranger, scattered across a Miami festival lineup, a content moderator’s screen full of footage she should not be watching, and a summer camp in the woods where the counselors know a little magic. Big horror had a good week. Small horror had a better one. Here are the five stories worth your attention.
Evil Dead Burn Reviews Are Split Over One Big Question: How Brutal Is Too Brutal?
The Deadites are back in theaters this weekend, and the critics beat everyone to the blood puddle. Now they are elbowing each other in it. Evil Dead Burn opens July 10 by way of Warner Bros, and the early reviews landed somewhere more interesting than a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
The Complete Evil Dead Bible: Timeline, Necronomicon, Deadites, Ash Williams, Easter Eggs, and Every Movie Explained
Most horror franchises die the same way. They get too clean. They build a continuity so tidy that the scares curdle into homework, and eventually the only people still watching are the ones keeping a spreadsheet. Evil Dead has spent more than forty years refusing to do that. It has been a grubby regional splatter film, a rubber-limbed comedy, a medieval fantasy adventure, a brutal modern possession picture, a gore-soaked cable series, and a family tragedy in a condemned apartment building.
All the Horror Coming to Streaming in July 2026
July is the month the streaming services quietly assume you are outside. They are wrong about me. While everyone else is standing over a grill, the catalogs are filling up with fresh theatrical horror, a few genuinely strange originals, a Shudder slate that is pulling its weight, and the usual heap of library titles that reappear like they never left in the first place. There is new stuff worth clearing an evening for and old stuff worth revisiting with the AC cranked.
Why Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance Still Matters
Shelley Duvall would have turned 77 today, and I would bet the first picture in your head is her face doing that thing it does. Eyes the size of dinner plates. Mouth already halfway to a scream. Backing up a staircase with a baseball bat while the man she married tries to redecorate the inside of her skull. Great shot. Iconic even. It is also about two percent of what she actually did in The Shining, and horror has been coasting on that two percent for forty years like it is the whole meal.
V/H/S: SCP Drags the SCP Foundation Onto Tape
For thirteen years the V/H/S franchise has been rooting through the world’s cursed camcorders looking for the scariest thing on tape. It turns out the scariest thing was a filing cabinet the whole time. The next installment is V/H/S: SCP, and it drops the found footage anthology into the SCP Foundation, the giant online horror project that has spent years pretending to be a leaked government archive. This is the rare crossover where you read the headline and immediately think, well, obviously.
Disability Pride Month and Horror’s Favorite Lazy Shortcut
July is Disability Pride Month, so it is a good time to admit something about the genre I love. Horror has spent about a hundred years teaching audiences that a wrong body is a warning label. A scar means intent. A limp means secrets. A face that does not sit the way faces are supposed to sit means get out of the house, now, before it turns around. I am not here to confiscate anyone’s slashers. I want more from them. Watch enough of this stuff and you start to clock the reflex.
The Fetus Crawled Out of Hell’s Bargain Bin Original
Joe Lam’s demon baby is cheap, gross, and a whole lot more fun than it has any right to be, mostly because Lauren LaVera refuses to phone it in. I went in expecting a slog and came out with a stupid grin, which is not the reaction the poster was aiming for but it is the one the movie earned. The Fetus is not good in the way your film professor means good. It is good in the way a gas station burrito is good at two in the morning.
Beginners Guide to J-Horror
The best J-horror was never really about a ghost standing in a corner. It was about transmission. A videotape, a phone call, a website, a house, one bad decision made by a lonely person, and suddenly the thing that took the last victim is turned toward you. The scares are great, but the actual engine underneath the genre is contagion. The curse spreads. That is the whole terror. It also happens to be the reason this stuff has aged better than almost anything else from its era.
Spielberg Helps The Mandela Catalogue Escapes YouTube
Steven Spielberg is now producing a horror movie about entities that torment people through their screens. Read that again. The man who taught a generation to fear open water and the family television has looked at the scariest corner of YouTube, and he wants in. The Mandela Catalogue, the analog horror series that has been quietly wrecking people since 2021, is becoming a feature film.
This Week in Horror: Pinhead, Werewolves, and a Clown in Court
Three trailers, one lawsuit, one theme park resurrection, and Paul Dano signing up to lose his mind in Cold War Berlin. Horror did not have a loud week. It had a busy one, the kind where nothing blows up but a lot of quiet things get very interesting. No new masterpiece dropped. What we got instead was a genre spending the slow part of summer sorting out who owns what. Here is everything worth your time.
The Door Was Never Just a Door: The Folklore Behind Horror’s Most Dangerous Thresholds
Horror trained us to fear the wrong parts of the house. We learned to dread the basement, the attic, the hallway with one working bulb, the door at the end that stays shut for a reason. All good instincts. All too late. By the time you are creeping toward the basement, the thing is already in the house with you. Older folklore was more practical about it. The danger did not start in the basement. It started at the front door, and people spent an enormous amount of energy trying to keep it there.
Terrifier, Scream, and Blair Witch Show Horror’s Scariest Monster May Be the Contract
Horror fans are used to lawsuits sounding less exciting than masked killers, cursed forests, and clowns with garbage bags full of weapons. But lately, some of the genre’s biggest names have been dragged into court-adjacent stories that say a lot about how horror gets made, marketed, and monetized. Art the Clown may not talk, but the court filings certainly do. Here is what is actually happening, and why three very different disputes keep pointing at the same nervous question.
Pinocchio: Unstrung Made a Liar Out of Me
I sat down for Pinocchio: Unstrung with my arms crossed, and my expectations parked at “public domain cash grab.” Five movies into a franchise built on lapsed copyrights, I figured I already knew the shape of the thing before the lights dropped. Then the puppet turned its head, and I uncrossed my arms so I could get a better grip on the seat.
The Forbidden Lands Review: A Small, Strange Folk Horror Worth Meeting on Its Own Terms
Some movies arrive sanded down and shrink wrapped, every corner rounded off by a studio so you never catch your hand on anything. The Forbidden Lands is not one of those movies. Mattia De Pascali’s Italian feature (original title Le Terre Incolte) feels handmade in the way a wood carving feels handmade, the tool marks still in it, a little crooked, a little cursed around the edges. I watched it, I liked it, and I am about to spend several paragraphs being honest about why that came with conditions.
The Ice Cream Truck Is a Crime Scene Now: Eli Roth’s ‘ICE CREAM MAN’ Gets a Green Band Trailer and a Bloody New Poster
The jingle of an ice cream truck is about to become the worst sound on your street. Eli Roth has released a green band trailer and a fresh official poster for ICE CREAM MAN, and even the version safe for daytime television looks like a birthday party that called an ambulance. The premise is simple and deeply unwell. A smiling vendor coasts through a sunny town, hands the local kids a frozen treat, and the treat flips a switch in them. The children get hungry in a way no snack will fix.
Is Audio the New Indie Film? American Afterlife Makes the Case
The next genre story that gets under your skin might not announce itself with a teaser drop or a midnight screening at a festival with bad coffee and worse seats. It might already be sitting in your podcast feed, waiting for you to put your earbuds in. That is the bet William Stuart is making.
Robert Eggers’ ‘Werwulf’ Trailer Turns Christmas Into a Medieval Nightmare
Some families do hot cocoa and a Pixar movie on Christmas Day. Robert Eggers would like to offer you a cursed farmer foaming in the mud of 13th-century England instead. Focus Features has dropped the first official trailer for Werwulf, and it is exactly the filthy, folklore-soaked period horror you’d hope for from the man who keeps making the rest of the genre look underdressed. Mark the calendar, this one howls into theaters on December 25, 2026.
‘Shadows of Willow Cabin’ Review: A Queer Ghost Story Where the Baggage Bites Back
Let’s get one thing out of the way, if a person you met on a dating app invites you to a remote family cabin with no neighbors and questionable cell service, the correct number of red flags is “all of them.” Horror movies have been built on worse logic, but Shadows of Willow Cabin understands that the bad idea isn’t really the location.
The Zombie Has Never Been Just a Dead Body
Start with the older fear, the one that has nothing to do with appetite. A person dies. That is bad, but it is not the worst of it. The body gets up again, not because it is hungry, but because it now belongs to someone else. It works, It obeys. It goes where it is sent, and the one thing it cannot do is leave. That is where the zombie begins, and it is a quieter horror than the one we print on lunchboxes now. Nobody is being eaten. Somebody is being used.
This Week in Horror: CAMP Lands in New York, Obsession Refuses to Die, and Rupert Grint Has a Monster Baby
I usually write this column from my couch with a blanket and a strong opinion. This week I wrote part of it from a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue, because the genre decided that June was not allowed to be quiet and neither was I. We have a summer camp opening in Manhattan, a $750,000 movie that is currently eating the box office alive, a violinist with bad instincts on Peacock, and a Weasley raising something that should not exist in the Finnish woods. I am tired. I am thrilled. Let us get into it.
CAMP Review and Interview: Avalon Fast Casts a Witchy Spell Over Summer Camp Horror
CAMP is the kind of horror movie that looks soft until you realize it has teeth. I went in expecting some flavor of summer camp slasher, the genre where teenagers get picked off between canoe trips. That is not this. Avalon Fast has made something stranger and a lot more wounded, a film about a girl who is desperate to be forgiven and finds a circle of people willing to forgive her, no questions asked, no conditions attached. The catch is in the woods. There is always a catch in the woods.
A24 Takes Google’s AI Money, and Horror Fans Have Questions
A24 spent the last decade as the studio horror fans point to when someone insists the genre has nothing left to say. Hereditary, Midsommar, The Witch, Talk to Me, X, Pearl, Men, Saint Maud. That is a murderers’ row of strange, filmmaker-driven nightmares, and it is the reason the little A24 logo at the front of a trailer became its own kind of trust fall. So when the studio shows up holding Google money to go play with AI, the people who built that trust are going to give it a long, narrow look.
The Creep Tapes Season 2 Blu-ray Earns the Shelf Space
Most movie killers want you afraid of them. Peachfuzz wants you to make small talk first. He wants the nervous chuckle, the “ha, okay, this guy is a lot” face, the moment where you decide to be nice about it because leaving would be rude. Then he kills you. Season Two of The Creep Tapes spends six episodes finding fresh ways to weaponize basic human courtesy, and I am sorry to report it works on me every single time. I keep being polite to my television. The television keeps not deserving it.
Round the Decay Lets the Wrexsoul Out
Newport’s Valley is the kind of scenic little town where the hiking is gorgeous, the locals are friendly, and nobody mentions the tomb. Round the Decay, the folk horror creature feature written and directed by Adam Newman, drops a grieving woman and a handful of hikers into exactly that arrangement and lets the arrangement do what these arrangements always do. Something old gets dug up. The town keeps smiling.
This Week in Horror: A Blair Witch Refusal, Curry Barker’s Chainsaw, and Evil Dead’s Trip to 1972
The week opened with one of the original Blair Witch actors going on record to say she wants nothing to do with the reboot, and it closed with me sitting in the dark at 2 a.m. crying over a Wicker Man bonus disc. In between, a YouTube guy who made a movie for eight hundred dollars got handed Leatherface, and a producer reminded everyone that the next Evil Dead takes place before color TV had fully settled in. Nobody is having a quiet June. Let us get into it.
Children of the Wicker Man Is Not a Victory Lap
I watched Children of the Wicker Man alone at 2 a.m., and by the time the credits came up I was crying in a dark room about a man I never met and his two sons I had never heard speak until that night. I told them so the next morning, on a video call, before I asked a single real question. It felt important to get that out of the way first. Justin Hardy, who has spent a career making documentaries and dramas for Channel 4 and the BBC, sounded almost startled.
The Door Was Never Locked: Why Debt Is Horror’s Most Reliable Trap
Samantha Hughes can tell the job is wrong. There is no baby. The house sits at the end of a road the road itself seems embarrassed about. Mr. Ulman, played by Tom Noonan as a man who has never once told the whole truth about anything, keeps quietly revising the terms of the evening. Every instinct Samantha has is filing a complaint in triplicate. She takes the job anyway, because she is a college student saving for a deposit on her own apartment, and the Ulmans are offering four hundred dollars.
‘Evil Dead Wrath’ Is a Coming-of-Age Nightmare Set in 1972
The next batch of Evil Dead characters will have to survive puberty and demonic possession on the same weekend, because apparently growing up was not punishing enough on its own. Producer Robert Tapert has revealed that Evil Dead Wrath, the next film in the franchise from director Francis Galluppi, takes place in 1972 and is built around a coming-of-age story. Speaking at Michigan State University this past April, Tapert laid out how far Galluppi is pulling the series away from the cabin formula.
Lucio Fulci at 99: The Godfather of Gore Was Always More Than Blood
There’s a woman trapped behind a door in Zombi 2, and on the other side a dead man has her by the hair, dragging her face toward a long spike of broken wood one slow inch at a time. He’s in no rush. Neither is the camera. It just sits there while the splinter gets closer to her eye, and closer, and you do that useless thing where you tilt your own head back like it’ll help. It doesn’t. The wood goes in anyway. I’ve seen it more times than is probably good for me and I still pull a face every time.
The Worlds of Lucile Hadžihalilović, Collected at Last
Four films, one box, two North American Blu-ray premieres. I got twenty minutes with the director, and she spent most of it politely dismantling the questions I thought were clever. “You can make a film about something very dark, but the act of making a film is optimistic, I think, by itself.” Lucile Hadžihalilović said that to me near the end of our twenty minutes, and I have not been able to put it down since. I had just watched four of her films in a row.
Villa Diodati at 210: How One Rained-Out Summer Gave Us Frankenstein and the Vampire
I have loved the summer of 1816 since I was a kid, which probably tells you what kind of kid I was. It is the worst vacation in the history of literature and the best thing that ever happened to horror. Picture the villa above Lake Geneva. The rain will not stop, the cold has no business being there in June, and the dark sits against the windows like it wants a look at the people inside. There are five of them.
Inside Curry Barker’s Plans for ‘Anything But Ghosts’ and Texas Chainsaw
Two jobs are sitting on Curry Barker’s desk, and they could not look more different from across the room. One is a fake haunted house run by two grifters with a fog machine and a bag of cheap tricks. The other is a real farmhouse in Texas where the family eats people. Barker has signed on to both. The first is Anything But Ghosts, the supernatural horror film he directed and co-wrote with his longtime partner Cooper Tomlinson, now in post-production for Focus Features.
Why Original ‘Blair Witch’ Star Rei Hance Refused to Join the New Film
For weeks the loudest thing about the new Blair Witch was a name that kept not showing up. Two thirds of the original trio signed on. The third stayed quiet. Now Rei Hance, the actress originally credited as Heather Donahue, has filled that silence herself. She is not part of this one. She was offered a deal to come aboard, and she turned it down.
Show More
loading
Actions
Get in touch with Luna
Contact Luna, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack