leebutler Horror, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Clayface (2026) – Skin Meltingly Creepy

Released: 22nd October
Seen: 8th November

Every so often, the superhero genre tries something new, something to try and keep it from being essentially a spin on the standard formula. One of the things they don’t do as often as they probably should is try to blend the superhero genre with the horror genre, though when they do try it can at least be interesting. When Brightburn did it, you got a wild alt-world version of Superman that asked “Hey, what if Ma and Pa Kent couldn’t actually save Clark at all”. When Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness did it, we effectively got Marvel’s take on Evil Dead that explored how grief could harm people around you (admittedly not as well as WandaVision explored that same idea but hey, it was still fun). Finally, when Morbius did it, you understood why villains shouldn’t get stand-alone movies. If nothing else, taking the superhero genre and throwing in some horror elements is something that’s at least interesting and, in the case of Clayface, can lead to a genuinely brilliant take on a classic subgenre.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Leviticus (2026) – Holy

Released: 18th June
Seen: 30th October

The concept of conversion therapy is simple to understand in theory, the idea that people can be changed from gay to straight through “therapy’ is one that’s been around for years… in practice, it’s torture. It’s straight-up torture and there is no middle ground on this, people are made to watch gay porn while being electrocuted to create a link between the pain and the desire, they’re beaten until they decide to ‘be straight’ or they’re just raped until eventually they break. So many options to try and turn a queer person into a straight person, every single one of them is straight-up torture done by people who should be thrown in the darkest prison cell you can find and absolutely none of them actually work because the victim of this torture isn’t suddenly straight, they’re just traumatised and are repressing who they are to avoid being hurt. It’s a real-world horror that is thankfully illegal in several places, medically frowned upon in others and hopefully will one day be considered as horrific a practice as “Drilling a hole in someone’s head to relieve headaches”. It’s also a powerful topic that can make for a compelling drama if done well and Leviticus does it so well that it might be one of the best uses of this specific real-world horror.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Horror, Review, Romance, Thriller

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (2026) – Hawt

Released: 7th August
Seen: 26th October

The 80s slasher boom was an absolutely fascinating period of history when it comes to horror that can be looked at from so many angles. There’s the obvious business angle where films were effectively made by throwing darts at a calendar and making something around the date that it landed on, how many films essentially exist because the tax breaks in certain countries made them so cheap that it was almost like printing money or just how that era was a breeding ground for talent getting to break in with cheap films that could get high returns. Then there’s the actual stories of the films themselves, how the creation of the Final Girl inadvertently created a feminist icon, how these stories often revolved around sex and death being intertwined just as the AIDS crisis was ramping up or how they often took real-world fears and events and turned them up to an 11. For a genre filled with killer dolls, dream-based serial killers and a lot of summer camp hijinks, it is a surprisingly deep category of film that people have talked about a lot over the years since. Now it’s filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s turn to take us through their unique perspective of this period of cinema as a trans woman who clearly loved the genre of films that she’s pointing to with Teenage Sex & Death At Camp Miasma, even for all the parts of them that didn’t age well.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Backrooms (2026) – Back To Yellow

Released: 28th May
Seen: 24th October

It all started with a single image posted to a forum in 2019. 4Chan, a site with a controversial reputation (to put it kindly), had a paranormal forum, and one day someone posted a single image. This image

A room with yellow wallpaper, seemingly empty with a strange pattern on the wallpaper, a carpetted floor that appears well worn and several overhead lights

This simple image of a strange set of rooms with mismatched off-yellow wallpaper and a carpet that looks like it’s made friends with every incontinent animal on the planet became known as The Backrooms, a piece of internet folklore (AKA A creepypasta) that soon took on a life of its own. It began as a series of stories, people making up an elaborate history for this world until a young filmmaker named Kane Parsons made a YouTube video that imagined what would happen if someone with a camera got lost in the Backrooms and something was coming after them. These became so popular that it was seemingly inevitable that they would lead to a movie being made about this liminal space; what was less inevitable was that the film would actually be good.

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leebutler Drama, Music, Review, Thriller

Mother Mary (2026) – Mother!

Released: 14th May
Seen: 9th September

When it comes to pop music, the genre largely belongs to women, and they manage to turn that light, fluffy, fun music into an absolute art form. From early icons like Madonna and Cher, to the 90s icons of Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera, to the millennial iterations of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, all the way up to the modern pop princesses like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, every generation gets a pop girlie or two that they can latch onto and call their own. They are often expected to give the world grand, elaborate performances to provide their bright bubblegum music a touch of heft; any deeper meaning or impact of their music often has to wait a few years for people to reevaluate it, and any mental anguish they may go through while being a pop icon is pushed down, hidden for people to find out about in tabloids years later. Witnessing a pop icon in trouble is almost a rite of passage, and Mother Mary gives us a pop icon going through the wringer and it really does work… until the ghosts show up.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Thriller

Passenger (2026) – Directionless

Released: 28th May
Seen: 12th August

Driving has become one of those things that everyone more or less needs to be able to do to be a significant part of society nowadays. Sure, you could theoretically get by on public transport and walking but everything is so far away and public transport is woefully underfunded in most places so as a general rule, you’re going to need to know how to drive. Because we spend so much time behind the wheel of a car it would make sense to have a horror movie where driving is a major element of the story, tap into some of those fears that come with the act of getting into a ton of steel on wheels and moving at 100 kms per hour alongside other tons of steel on wheels. There’s something naturally there that could make for quite the interesting film… or you could just do a fairly standard haunted house movie on wheels, that’s also an option available to you if you would like it and apparently that’s what Passenger went with.

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leebutler Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Undertone (2026) – Underdone

Released: 25th July
Seen: 9th August

In 1927, the film The Jazz Singer came out and changed the world. While it was possibly the first film to use sound (depending on how we want to define it there are several candidates for the first sound picture), it was certainly the first to be popular and to allow the use of audible dialogue, and so, with the simple line “You ain’t heard nothing yet”, that film entered the history of cinema as an important benchmark (even though that benchmark comes with a notable history of racism… but so does most early cinema, let’s be honest). Since then, sound has been an essential element of the cinematic experience; it can make or break a film. There are countless stories of films that were deemed to be bad because they didn’t have the soundtrack completed yet, a bad sound mix can make a serious scene into an accidental comedy, there’s an absolutely hilarious version of the trailer for The Mummy that muted the wrong audio track which became the only interesting thing about that movie. Sound is important and so when a horror film sells itself on its sound by saying it’s the scariest movie you’ll ever hear you hope that it can deliver on that… in the case of Undertone, it sounds good but I’ve heard scarier.

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leebutler Crime, Drama, Horror, Review, Thriller

Psycho Killer (2026) – Boring Heads

Released: 20th February
Seen: 6th August

In 1995, the movie Se7en came out to good reviews and a great box office. It’s the film that made people start noticing David Fincher as a director, gave several people involved some much-needed career boosts and is nowadays considered an absolute classic of the genre, showing how genuinely intelligent and dark a crime thriller could actually be. The man who wrote it was Andrew Kevin Walker, who has written several other films, done script doctoring on some major works like Fight Club and even wrote an episode of Tales From The Crypt, so he should be considered a genuinely great writer… and he wrote the script for the movie Psycho Killer, so even the greats can write absolute trash.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Scream 7 (2026) – Annoyed Yell

Released: 26th February
Seen: 2nd August

In November of 2023, it was announced that Melissa Barrera was no longer going to be a part of Scream 7. She was fired over a handful of posts she’d made calling the attacks in Gaza a genocide, these posts were deemed anti-semitic by Spyglass… they were not, they were calling out the actions of the government of Israel and specifically those of its leader, who right now has a warrant out for his arrest in relation to war crimes, specifically the genocide in Gaza. This was a pretty obvious overreaction back in 2023 but the feeling of anger towards Spyglass only grew as the war raged on and it became even more obvious that Melissa was right, which led to a lot of people calling for a boycott of Scream 7. This is why I didn’t go see the film during its initial release, despite loving this franchise which was my introduction to the horror genre that I love so much. Now Melissa has come out and said she’s moved on from everything, and the film made so much money that it feels silly to keep boycotting it (this isn’t a Harry Potter situation where the people who made it are so hateful that giving them a dollar actively harms others) so I finally saw it… and it’s probably the worst entry in this legendary franchise.

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leebutler Action, Drama, Review, Thriller

In The Grey (2026) – Greyscale Guy

Released: 15th May
Seen: 24th July

Some directors have a certain style that you come to expect when you hear that they’ve made a film. You go to a Hitchcock film and you expect a film full of suspense, you go to a Tarantino film and you expect something very violent with a lot of swearing that borrows a lot of aesthetics from old movies you’d find in a drive in, you go see a Uwe Boll film and you expect to see the cinematic equivalent of testicular cancer. A director gives you a good idea of what kind of film you can expect to see, so what do you expect when you hear that Guy Ritchie has made a new film? You expect something exactly like In The Grey, a film that is so obviously made by Guy Ritchie that he didn’t even need to bother putting his name on the film because it’s so clearly a film in his style that it couldn’t be anyone else… It’s also just kind of dull.

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