leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review

Bring Her Back (2025) – Unnerving

Released: 29th May
Seen: 18th September

2022 was an absolutely incredible year for Horror films, one of the best that we’ve ever had. It was so good that when the time came to make my best of the year list I had no choice but to fill 5 of the top 10 slots with 6 movies (For those wondering how that works out, 2 films tied for one spot… it was a good year, what can I say!), and still had to put two more in Honourable Mentions. One of the horror films I didn’t put on the list that year was a little film called Talk To Me but let me be clear, that film was also one of the best films that was released that year. Talk To Me was an absolutely stunning original horror film that instantly put the Philippou brothers on the map as a pair of young directors to keep an eye on. While they’d had some positive response to their work on YouTube, their debut feature film really opened the floodgates to get them noticed. Of course, doing one great horror film is fine and all, but the real trick comes with the follow-up: Can you pull off the same magic again? Yes, yes they fucking can, in fact, they can go even more insane than they did before.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Clown In A Cornfield (2025) – Friendo Loves You

Released: 8th May
Seen: 24th August

In 2020, Adam Cesare released the young adult novel Clown in a Cornfield. The novel was a big success, ending up winning the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel and pretty much instantly getting optioned for a film. There would end up being 2 more novels written in the Clown in a Cornfield series over the years but the film took a little while to get made (probably because 2020 was not exactly a great time to try and film a movie, what with all the COVID hanging around) but eventually a little film called Clown in a Cornfield came out and made a brief splash before getting eclipsed by Final Destination: Bloodlines… which is a shame because it’s the kind of movie that deserves a lot more love.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review

Weapons (2025) – Loaded

Released: 7th August
Seen: 23rd August

In 2022, the film Barbarian was released to an unsuspecting public. No one knew what it was about and audiences kept the core details quiet so everyone could be surprised but there was one thing that was pretty universally acknowledged by those who saw it… Barbarian was one of the best horror movies of 2022. That’s saying quite a lot, because 2022 is widely considered one of the best years for horror cinema in general. Hell, when I made my best-of list for 2022, a solid half of the list was horror films, with Barbarian being the highest on the list. After that movie I was truly excited and a little nervous to see what writer/director Zach Cregger would do for an encore… turns out he would go absolutely fucking insane and for that we thank him and ask him to do it again as soon as possible.

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leebutler Drama, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Drop (2025) – Pick Me Up

Released: 17th April
Seen: 9th August

Every time a new technology comes out, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the horror genre takes it on and plays with its darker elements. AI brought us M3GAN, mobile phones led straight to the novel Cell by Stephen King. This goes back to VHS’s ending up inspiring things like The Ring, so every new piece of tech can be used in a terrifying way. A pretty perfect piece of technology for this exact situation would be something like the airdrop, a way for someone to just anonymously drop an image or message onto your phone without needing to know your number. They don’t need to know who you are, you just have to be within range and then you can have whatever they want sent to you. Drop takes this idea of a mysterious man sending secret messages to someone and it is pulse-poundingly brilliant.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Mystery, Review

Fountain of Youth (2025) – Ancient

Released: 23rd May
Seen: 26th May

The first streaming company to ever win a Best Picture Oscar was Apple TV+ who pulled off this genuinely impressive feat with a little film called CODA, a touching little comedy about a family where everyone except the eldest daughter was deaf and how she wanted to break out on her own even though that would end up creating a problem for her family and their business. It was a genuinely impressive moment for Apple, their streaming service was one of the smaller ones on the market with only eight narrative feature films to their name at that point. It gave them some sort of prestige, maybe Apple was going to be the smart streaming service that would make smaller interesting films that could be awards contenders or at least not churn out films so bland and basic that the term ‘content’ is the only way to fairly describe them… and now they’ve released Fountain of Youth, Apple’s moved into the content industry.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Netflix, Review, Thriller

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025) – Down With Prom

Released: 23rd May
Seen: 24th May

In 2021, a horror film event happened that really showed the potential for what could be done with a streaming platform that wanted people to notice what it was releasing. Over the course of three weeks Netflix released the Fear Street Trilogy, a set of horror films inspired by the R.L. Stine books that all took place in different time periods, played around in different eras of the horror/slasher genre, and all connected to create a grand overarching story. It was dark, twisted, queer and just a ton of fun. I even named the entire trilogy as one of the best films of 2021, which is a choice I stand by because every single entry did something truly great within the slasher genre. They were films that understood what makes the genre fun and their success as an event pretty much guaranteed that there was going to be more. When they announced that we were going to get a new entry with the subtitle Prom Queen, this reviewer was excited at the prospect… never be excited about things, it leads to disappointment.

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leebutler Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Thriller

Another Simple Favour (2025) – Meh-mbo Italiano

Released: 1st May
Seen: 13th May

In 2018 a little film called A Simple Favour came out to rapturous applause. A fun, extravagant murder mystery thriller with a pair of female leads at the top of their game that delivered on every single front, it was a smash hit all around. I personally loved it so much that I named it the best film of the year that it came out and it came out in the same year that Avengers: Infinity War came out so the bar was high. That was 7 years ago, with the additional time and looking back on their cultural impact I have to admit that maybe I put it too high on the list (lists of that nature are never perfect, merely reflecting the critics belief in the moment they create the list) but I still stand by it being an absolutely brilliant movie that probably should’ve had a sequel years ago. We finally have got one, but was the wait too long for another favour?

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leebutler Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Review

Heart Eyes (2025) – Love

Released: 13th February
Seen: 13th May

The Holiday Slasher is an idea that basically defined the boom period of the slasher genre back in the 80s, the idea being that a producer could just pick any random holiday and make a movie around it. This simple idea led us down the rabbit hole of My Bloody Valentine, Leprechaun, Silent Night Deadly Night, Thanksgiving and about a hundred other horror films of varying quality. Of course, lately there’s been a lot less of this kind of film, mostly because every holiday was already handled by a film from the 80s, so there’s not much new territory to tread on here. If you can’t do something new though, at least do something fun, and Heart Eyes is doing something very fun.

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leebutler Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Review

Nosferatu (2025) – A Symphony Of Brilliance

Released: 1st January
Seen: 3rd February

The 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror feels like some kind of miracle, namely that we still have access to the film at all. Made in Germany as an unofficial adaptation of the Dracula novel, the original film was the subject of a copyright lawsuit brought on by Bram Stroker’s widow and all copies were supposed to be destroyed by fire. Somehow, a few copies of the film managed to survive and would soon be circulated around the world where it would become not only a cinematic classic but one of the most influential horror films of all time. People have referenced Nosferatu for almost a century now, the infamous shot of Count Orlock’s shadow against the wall with his fingers stretched out alone has been copied by more films than one would dare count and so many vampire films have copied the visual appearance of Count Orlok to some degree. It’s a film that has influenced many and even been the subject of a few remakes, including this remake by Robert Eggers which manages to take the classic material and elevate it in a way only Eggers can.

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leebutler Drama, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Conclave (2025) – Oh Lord

Released: 9th January
Seen: 2nd February

When a pope dies there is a process that has to be done in order to select a new pope known as a Papal Conclave. The basic idea is that all eligible cardinals come to Rome where they are sequestered in a large room and vote on the next pope. They do this repeatedly over and over again until someone has a two-thirds majority and then they become the new pope. The cardinals are not meant to interact with the outside world during this process and each time a vote happens the votes are burned and the colour of the smoke tells the outside world that there’s a new pope. This feels like the kind of thing that was meant to be turned into a political thriller and thanks to Conclave it has been… it’s good, it’s very good, honestly, there’s not much more that can be said than that but I’ll try.

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