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Every August the horror calendar stretches further than it did the year before, and this year it finally tore. Shudder is running its Halloween event from September 1 straight through New Year’s Eve. Tubi looked at its October horror hub and decided the doors should never close again. Lowe’s is out here selling a fifteen foot skeleton. By Wednesday the genre had annexed a third of the year and was still reaching.
Then there was Sunday, which was bad, and which put the rest of it in a very different light.
Hayden Panettiere Died on Sunday at 36
Panettiere’s representative confirmed her death on Sunday, August 16. Police in Greenville, South Carolina said a preliminary investigation showed no foul play or suspicious circumstances. A cause has not been released and the investigation is ongoing. Her father, Skip Panettiere, called her “an incredible light and a force of nature” and asked for privacy. She would have turned 37 today.
To horror, she was Kirby Reed. She played her first in Scream 4 in 2011, the movie geek who could recite the rules faster than the killer could break them. That film left her bleeding on the ground with her fate unresolved. Scream quietly confirmed her survival eleven years later, and Scream VI finally brought her back as an FBI special agent. She was also Sam in Supermassive’s Until Dawn in 2015, one of the few performances in that game that survives with any dignity intact, and she came back for the 2024 remake’s epilogue.
In May she published a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, about growing up famous, about addiction, and about abuse. Kirby got a second chance that horror characters almost never get. Thirty six is far too short a run for the woman who played her.
Zach Cregger Says It Is Survival Horror, Not Survival Action
Cregger sat down to talk about Resident Evil and drew the line in one sentence: “It’s not survival action, it’s survival horror.” His film opens September 18 with Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier who picks the worst possible night to be running deliveries in Raccoon City, alongside Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser and Johnno Wilson. The story runs parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2 without borrowing Leon or Jill, so nobody here has plot armor made of nostalgia.
Cregger says he has not watched the previous Resident Evil films. Normally that would irritate me. Here it explains the pitch, because those movies were survival action and he is the first person on this property in two decades to say out loud that the difference matters. Not enough ammunition, not enough light, and you go anyway.
The best detail in our interview is the character math. He built Bryan out of Marty McFly, John McClane and Kevin McCallister, in that order of frequency, and on set the crew would ask whether a moment was more McClane or more McFly. Confused by default, competent by accident, dangerous only when he has time to set a trap. Somebody has played these games.
Shudder and Tubi Both Decided October Was Too Small
Season of Screams starts September 1 and does not stop until December 31, with a new original or exclusive every Friday. September brings Parasomnia, Mārama, Goody Goody and Bloody Tennis. October holds V/H/S/Mixtape on the 9th, Joe Bob’s Halloween House Party on the 23rd, the FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards live on the 25th, and Hunting Matthew Nichols on Halloween itself. The Ghoul Log returns, The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula comes back for a seventh season this fall, and the library gets pressed into service for franchise runs. November and December are still blank on the announcement, which is a strange thing to advertise and a stranger thing to be excited about. I am excited about it.
Tubi went further and made the change structural. Terror on Tubi is permanent now, a year round hub holding more than 13,000 hours, after viewers streamed more than 53 million hours of horror on Tubi each month. Chief content officer Adam Lewinson’s argument is that horror was never seasonal and functions as comfort viewing, a ritual rather than an annual appointment. He is right, and the shelf he is describing includes Event Horizon, From Dusk Till Dawn and Tales From the Hood. It goes live in Canada, the U.K., Australia, Mexico and Latin America with locally curated selections. The fall originals are Buzzkill, a sorority slasher with Siena Agudong, Brec Bassinger and Aliyah’s Interlude in which the heroine can only recover her memories of the murders while drunk, and a film our report lists as R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2.
Pennywise Is Going Back to 1935
HBO renewed IT: Welcome to Derry on Monday, and season two jumps back another 27 years to 1935, Depression era Derry, built around the Bradley Gang massacre. Brad Caleb Kane runs it solo after sharing the job with Jason Fuchs, and Andy and Barbara Muschietti stay on as executive producers, calling it “an absolute privilege” to keep exploring and expanding “the amazing world Stephen King created.” There is no premiere date and no confirmed casting yet, though Barbara Muschietti has teased Bill Skarsgård’s return.
The structure is the interesting part. Season one sat in 1962 and aired from October 26 to December 14. Each season walks backward one full cycle of the thing’s hunger, and the three season plan drawn from King’s Derry Interludes would land season three in 1908, though HBO has not committed past this renewal. A prequel that gets further from its source with every year it covers is an odd shape for television and the correct one for this book.
The Bradley Gang chapter is not really a Pennywise sequence. It is a town sequence. If season two commits to that, it stops being a monster show and becomes a show about the people who agreed not to see the monster.
Stephen King Blurbed a Japanese Ghost Film, and Then So Did Scott Derrickson
Never After Dark has a trailer and a date, and it arrives with King calling it “amazing and haunting.” Dave Boyle wrote and directed, his first feature shot entirely in Japan and the first theatrical release out of his Tokyo company Signal181. Magnolia Pictures opens it September 25 at 105 minutes. Moeka Hoshi plays Airi, a wandering medium who ushers restless spirits along in the company of her dead sister Miku. A woman named Teiko calls her out to an isolated country house, and the thing waiting there is stronger than anything Airi has handled. The house’s history suggests the worst presence in the story may not be a ghost.
King blurbs generously and often, so I price his enthusiasm accordingly. The festival record is harder currency. It took the Midnighter Audience Award at SXSW and the Grand Jury Prize for a feature at Overlook, which means a midnight crowd and a jury agreed, and those two groups agree about nothing. Derrickson called it “intelligent, unpredictable and bone-chilling.” Boyle has been making features for two decades without much attention from this corner of the room. That changes in September.
Fantastic Fest Put Anna Biller and Mike Flanagan on the Same Schedule
The 21st Fantastic Fest runs September 17 through 24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin. It opens with Beware Boiúna, Mike P. Nelson’s Lionsgate creature feature about something very old waking up in the Amazon, closes its film program with The Swallow, and then sends everyone home with a GWAR concert. Cregger’s Resident Evil plays as a 93 minute gala ahead of its September 18 nationwide release, and Flanagan’s Carrie screens as a two episode block, relocating the bullying to social media, which is either the most obvious update available or the only one left.
The rest is where the week’s real gift is buried. Anna Biller is bringing The Face of Horror, 120 minutes about a vain knight, and if you have seen The Love Witch you know that sentence is worth a plane ticket. That closing night slot belongs to Kölsch and Widmyer and a sentient pile of sludge, which is a sentence I did not expect to type this week. Joko Anwar has a supernatural prison thriller, and Nick Simon built What Happened to Doris? out of the paranormal case that produced The Entity. There is also a found tape movie assembled from an unaired children’s show, a premise I have watched fail eleven times and will absolutely show up for a twelfth.
The restorations are not messing around either. Blood Feast in 4K, a fresh 35mm print of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for its fortieth, plus Screamplay, Frisk and the French backyard oddity Ogroff. Herschell Gordon Lewis in 4K. The man would have laughed himself sick.
Ryan Murphy Handed Lizzie Borden an Axe and a Thesis
Netflix dropped the trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story ahead of its September 17 premiere, eight episodes from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie, Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall play Andrew and Abby Borden, Billie Lourd is sister Emma, and Vicky Krieps plays the maid Bridget Sullivan, with reports that she also turns up as Elizabeth Báthory. The trailer is loud, modern and openly uninterested in period accuracy, and it hands Bridget the mission statement: “There’s nothing wrong with blood. Blood is power. Blood is freedom.”
Then it ends with Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos, which reframes the season as an argument about lineage instead of a true crime reenactment. That is a real idea. It is also Monster doing the thing Monster does, where a real idea arrives wrapped in enough neon and needle drops that you have to check whether you were meant to take it seriously. Ask me again on September 18.
Quick Hits
The red band trailer for Crawlers puts Matilda Lutz in an apartment building overrun by spiders and then has the police quarantine everyone inside it, which is the part that made me flinch. Ángel Gómez Hernández directs, Roadside Attractions and Saban Films open it October 16.
Whalefall lands the same day from 20th Century Studios, with Brian Duffield adapting Daniel Kraus’s novel alongside Kraus and giving Austin Abrams roughly an hour of air inside a sperm whale. Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue and Jane Levy co-star. Two Austin Abrams survival pictures in four weeks is a hell of a quarter for one man’s lung capacity.
The Creep Tapes returns September 15 on Shudder and AMC+, six episodes with Patrick Brice directing every one and Mark Duplass back under the Peachfuzz mask. Kate Siegel guests, and the trailer flashes what looks like an older version of the mask.
Halloween Horror Nights opens August 28 in Orlando and September 3 in Hollywood, both running to November 1, with houses built on Sinners, Evil Dead Burn, Hellraiser and Stranger Things 5, plus an Ozzy Osbourne house. Hollywood gets its own Killer Klowns From Outer Space house and an original called KILLceañera: Music by SLASH, while Orlando turns the Klowns loose in a Downtown Clowntown scare zone with Art the Clown instead. Hollywood’s Terror Tram belongs to Art as well.
Lowe’s fifteen foot Skeleton Watcher answers Home Depot’s twelve footer with three extra feet and a $429 price tag. The trigger plate is sold separately.
Elsewhere on the site: interviews with Scott Conner about his eighties throwback slasher Deathwoods and Tabitha Brownstone about Gator Face, reviews of The Depths and The Demon Detective, and a Morgue Files dig into At the Mountains of Madness, the adaptation that keeps almost happening.
See You Next Week
So that was the week. A loss the genre will be sitting with for a long time, a director promising to run us out of ammunition in a dark city, and a Halloween season that now begins before Labor Day and ends after Christmas.
I want to know where you land on that last one. Shudder booking through December 31 and Tubi keeping the haunt open year round is either the best structural change horror distribution has made in a decade or the fastest way to spend down the one month that used to feel like ours. Pick a side. And if you are already mapping out your Fantastic Fest week, tell me whether you are in line for Anna Biller or for Blood Feast in 4K, because I have been going back and forth on that since Tuesday.