Man, oh man. I don't know about you, but I'm breathless.
I try to keep up, I really do. But just when I feel like I'm getting a handle on my watchlist, the floodgates open all over again. This holiday season feels less like a gentle snowfall and more like a glorious, blood-red tidal wave of must-see horror. Is this the best time ever to be a fan of the genre? I'm starting to think so.
It's one thing to get a few good movies, but we're getting masterpieces from living legends. Robert Eggers finally unleashing his gothic passion project, Nosferatu, feels like a monumental event in itself. Then you have Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the dream team, returning to the world they created with 28 Years Later. I mean, seriously? Either of those would be enough to define a year, but it's just the beginning.
The theatrical lineup for this December is frankly absurd 3. We've got the sequel to the phenomenon that is Five Nights at Freddy's, but I'm personally vibrating with excitement for Dust Bunny. Bryan Fuller, the mind behind "Hannibal," directing Mads Mikkelsen as a hitman who kills real-life monsters for a little girl? Yes, please. And then there's the sheer, baffling audacity of the new Anaconda, a movie about Jack Black and Paul Rudd trying to remake the original Anaconda when a real giant anaconda shows up. You can't make this stuff up.
And that’s just what you have to leave the house for! At home, the biggest event in modern pop culture is coming to a close. Stranger Things 5 is dropping its finale episodes over Christmas and New Year's. It's the end of an era, and I'm both terrified and giddy to see how they land this thing. As if that wasn't enough, we get to go back to Derry in the prequel series It: Welcome to Derry, with Bill Skarsgård himself returning to the makeup. Beyond the titans, there is an absolute deluge of horror hitting streaming services—from classics like The Ring and From Dusk Till Dawn to modern gems like Shin Godzilla and the entire Saw franchise. My queue is weeping.
It’s not even just screens! I just dove into the comic series Exquisite Corpses from James Tynion IV, and it's incredible. The premise is pure pulp genius: every five years, the world's wealthiest families unleash twelve assassins on a small town for a fight to the death. It’s like The Purge meets The Hunger Games, and it is exactly as awesome as it sounds.
It's just… a lot. In the best possible way. We are eating so well, and I'm not taking a second of it for granted.
So, now I have to ask: with all this amazing stuff out there, what’s at the very top of your watchlist? Hit reply and let me know what you're diving into first!
Stay scared,
Herm