Category: Thriller

Released: 26th October
Seen: 23rd November

In 2014, a man named Scott Cawthon released a game called Five Nights at Freddy’s. The idea of the game was incredibly simplistic, you played a bodyguard who has the job of watching over a defunct pizzeria via a set of monitors rigged up to cameras all around the building. There are only two doors into the room that can open and close and you have to just get through a series of five shifts from midnight to 6am, which is difficult because the animatronics in the restaurant are alive and are coming to get you.

As the nights go on, the game gets harder and harder and if you fail then one of the animatronics leaps at the screen creating a loud jumpscare that ends the game instantly. It’s a simple game that happened to get noticed by a certain segment of gamers who play games while overreacting on camera and soon became an obscenely popular franchise with a new game being churned out seemingly every couple of months. It was such a monster hit that a film adaptation was inevitable, indeed one was greenlit in 2015… it’s languished in production hell for 8 years but now it’s out and you can kind of tell this thing has been rewritten a couple dozen times, but it’s not like my opinion matters on the subject.

Released: 17th November
Seen: 15th November

In 2007, the film Grindhouse got a sadly small release to the world, a release that flopped because people seemed to just hate fun that year. Those who did see this glorious little event were treated to a pair of wonderful throwbacks to the days of the grindhouse cinema which were split up by a set of hilarious fake trailers for movies like Werewolf Women of the SS and Don’t. Some of these fake trailers would end up being turned into feature films, those being Machete and Hobo With A Shotgun but there was one trailer that people have spent the last 15 years begging to be turned into a movie.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 2nd June
Seen: 18th October

In 1973, Stephen King wrote a short story called The Boogeyman. The short story was published in a magazine called Cavalier and eventually was part of the first collection of King’s short stories known as Night Shift, which is also how we got such stories/films as The Mangler, The Lawnmower Man and Children of the Corn. The great thing about this process is that King tends to have some great terrifying ideas that work well in film and a lot of these short stories have fascinating ideas that would work great in a horror film… the downside is that they’re short for a reason and in order to make something feature length any filmmaker has to take what King did and build upon it and that’s usually where things start to falter.