Picture a scuba diver descending to recover his father’s remains, only to be swallowed whole by a sperm whale — with a single hour of oxygen left in his tank. That’s the setup for Whalefall, and somehow it isn’t even the month’s oddest offering.
It’s been a noisy year for the genre. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple slipped by without the attention it deserved, Obsession became an unexpected hit, and Backrooms has the look of an opening salvo in a franchise that will be sticking around for a while.
Then there’s October, a month horror studios have claimed as their own territory for decades. Thirteen movies are landing over the coming weeks, split between theaters and streaming, and 10 of them are worth a closer look.
Oct. 2 is a traffic jam
Five titles share the same release date, which says plenty about how confident everyone involved is feeling.
The creature feature in the group is Beware Boíuna. Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe and Logan Marshall-Green star as young doctors on a medical outreach trip deep into the Amazonian rainforest, where the locals want nothing to do with them and the atmosphere sours immediately.
The thing they eventually encounter is Boíuna, a massive mythological serpent said to prowl the region. Watching a handful of people square off against a monster from the depths of the Amazon sounds like a perfectly good way to spend an evening out.
Colleen Hoover goes dark
Verity heads in a completely different direction. The erotic thriller is adapted from a novel by Colleen Hoover — the writer behind box-office romance hit It Ends With Us — with Michael Showalter in the director’s chair.
Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling ghostwriter handed the assignment of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) brings her on to complete the final novel of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), an adored mystery writer left unable to write after a devastating accident.
Lowen takes up residence in the Crawford home, and before long her fascination with Verity curdles into a gradual takeover of the woman’s life.
Influencer culture gets the found-footage treatment in The Influencer Project. Chiara King appears as herself, heading to Copenhagen with a documentary crew to capture what’s pitched to her followers as an unfiltered portrait of her life. A local stalker starts paying attention.
The producing credits matter here: Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale, the pair behind The Blair Witch Project, understand precisely how far a shaky camera can carry a scare.
A horror anthology about generative AI
Director Chris Marrs Piliero’s Appofeniacs assembles an ensemble cast that includes Sean Gunn and takes aim at generative AI and the havoc people can wreak with it.
Structured as a series of vignettes that tie together by the finish, one thread tracks a ride-share driver whose path crosses with an unstable passenger. Another centers on a girl targeted by an online smear campaign.
Rounding out the date is Other Mommy, which blew up online thanks to a trailer that debuted in front of The Odyssey. Roughly one second of footage — featuring some deeply unsettling contortions — was all it took.
Jessica Chastain headlines, and she appears primed for a resurgence after a run of consistent but low-profile roles. Rob Savage directs from an adaptation of the book Incidents Around the House, in which a young girl (Arabella Olivia Clarke) is tormented by a supernatural entity wearing her mother’s exact face.
Oct. 16 brings a 1971 scandal back
Some films you simply have to see for yourself, and The Devils is one of them. Ken Russell’s 1971 release drew furious controversy, censorship and criticism on arrival; now, 15 years after his death, it’s returning as a 4K director’s cut that finally presents his complete vision.
The plot takes its cue from Aldous Huxley’s novel The Devils of Loudun, which recounts the story of a 1600s priest burned at the stake over accusations that he seduced an entire convent. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave deliver two career-best turns.
Prefer your horror with creatures? Crawlers supplies spiders — venomous ones, and enough of them that police seal off an entire apartment building.
Ángel Gómez Hernández directs, with Matilda Lutz as the building manager whose knowledge of the layout becomes key to keeping residents alive. She’s also arachnophobic, naturally.
Two Tribeca premieres, two very bad deals
Following its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, Breeder arrives in limited theatrical release. Daniel Doheny plays a cash-strapped college student who stumbles on a bargain online and relocates to the isolated ranch of a poodle breeder (Dot Marie Jones) willing to bankroll his research.
The room and board come with strings. She wants his assistance, and she’s graduating from poodles to bigger, more ambitious undertakings.
Also emerging from Tribeca, Hallowarrior heads to Shudder. Ben Sottak directs Hereditary‘s Milly Shapiro as Pumpkin, a girl in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who copes with her isolation by filling her world with Halloween decorations.
When a band of scavengers appears with the promise of escape, things go sideways, and Pumpkin is left fighting to stay alive.
One hour of air
Which returns us to Whalefall, which writer-director Brian Duffield adapted from Daniel Kraus’ novel. Austin Abrams devotees have had the date marked on their fall calendars for months.
Abrams is the diver searching the sea for his father’s remains. Crucially, the whale takes him at the beginning of the expedition rather than the end — and everything that follows unfolds against the clock.