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Since it's the beginning of October, I thought it would be helpful to share what people believe to be some of the scariest movies ever created, just in case you're looking to have a frightful night in this month...

Kate Siegel is happy to get very real about extraterrestrial life very quickly. When asked if she believes in aliens, she offers a specific and chilling response.

“I’m a huge sci-fi reader…Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors of all time,” she says. “In the world right now there’s a lot of discourse about aliens being real. The needle is turning towards, ‘Yes, aliens exist.’ It’s a matter of when and where we will contact them, and not if they exist. I imagine that aliens are here on this planet and we’ll end up realizing it’s something obvious, like an octopus or a fungi structure is actually an alien that had been here forever. I think the most terrifying realization would be that they were under our noses all the time.”

This analysis makes Siegel the perfect contributor to “V/H/S/Beyond,” the seventh chapter in the horror anthology series, and the first solely devoted to sci-fi tales...

What started out as a woman thinking her house was haunted has now sparked a police investigation.

Katie Santry from Columbus, Ohio, took to TikTok earlier this week when she noticed her home office, including her laptop screen, was wrecked. Later, while attempting to put up a fence in her backyard, she and her boyfriend Brandon found a rolled-up carpet buried in the ground. Now, her videos have received millions of views on TikTok, as both Santry and the internet try to decipher her mysterious findings.

“Is there a dead body in that rug? Or is it the ghost of the rug’s past?” she questioned in one of her videos, adding: “My next-door neighbor also died in her house the day we bought this house last October.”

“That house started getting boarded up the same day this happened. So it was just a series of weird, coincidental events that, with a creative mind, could be construed as ghostly.”

Santry had enlisted help to dig up the rug in her backyard, but she later realized it was too long and received comments from TikTokers encouraging her to call law enforcement.

When the Columbus Police Department arrived at her home, they looked at the area and decided it was worth calling in an excavator to dig up the rug. However, after notifying the chief of police, it was decided that the officers could not deploy resources. It would be up to Santry to dig up the carpet herself and call them back if anything was found...

Absolution is the surprise fourth volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, which began with Annihilation and continued with Authority and Acceptance. The original trilogy was published in rapid succession ten years ago, all three volumes appearing in 2014, the same year that Adrian Collins founded Grimdark Magazine. It is thus a special treat to review this fourth volume of VanderMeer’s erstwhile trilogy in our tenth anniversary issue of Grimdark Magazine.

For the uninitiated, the Southern Reach series is a sci-fi horror centered on a mysterious coastal region known as Area X, where biological evolution has been accelerated in unexpected and terrifying ways, presumably due to extraterrestrial interference. Annihilation introduces us to an all-female team of scientists investigating Area X known only by their occupation: a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor. These four women comprise the twelfth expedition into Area X after the successive failures of all the previous missions. The second novel, Authority, turns its attention away from Area X to focus on the Southern Reach, the shady entity responsible for organizing these expeditions into the horrific unknown. The third book, Acceptance, has a broader scope, shifting among several different perspectives and timelines to provide deeper character studies, including that of the mercurial Lowry, sole survivor of the original expedition into Area X.

Jeff VanderMeer makes a welcome return to Area X with Absolution. This fourth volume of the series is divided into three parts, each leaning heavily into the cosmic horror aspects of the story...

There are some incredible monster movies that everybody will recognise, such as Alien, Predator, The Thing, and Frankenstein. Should you delve a little deeper, films like Pumpkinhead, Mimic, or Dog Soldiers may spring to mind.

The casual crowd may not have heard of those second batch of films, though any horror veteran worth their salt should be familiar with these classics. Such creature features failed to make a splash at the box office, but have since been elevated to cult status. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it's easier than ever to spread the word on an underrated monster flick to ensure it receives the love it's owed.

And yet, there are plenty of shudder-inducing features involving aliens, zombies, or even alien zombies that remain mostly forgotten. Despite boasting astounding visuals, nightmarish gore, and scares that are bound to last a lifetime, the entries on this list never broke into the mainstream.

However, it's never too late for a movie to develop a cult following. These beast-filled films may not be universally known, but they are overflowing with so much creativity and innovation, it's only a matter of time before they become iconic...

• Cub
• Late Phases
• Tales From The Darkside: The Movie
• Waxwork
• Grabbers
• Silver Bullet
• The Wretched
• Demons
• His House
• Tumbbad

Play as one of Empress Eleanor’s Five Knights investigating reports of a rebellious faction and a missing royal. Will you manage to ward off the Fog? Into the Fray is a fast action-shooter in the vein of Doom and Dark Messiah. The focus is on fast, bloody combat with satisfying feedback and environmental reactivity in a dark Lovecraftian story of civil strife. Into the Fray is part of the Skautfold Series and follows Usurper and Shrouded in Sanity but can be played on its own...

Social media platforms must restrict the use of personal data for targeted advertising, to comply with the bloc's regulatory law, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on Friday. The ruling comes as a blow to social media giant Meta.

Meta collects digital data of users of its social media platform Facebook when they visit other websites and use third-party apps, which allows Meta to personalize advertising.

But under theEU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies are obliged to adhere to the principle of "data minimization," restricting the amount and duration of data used for advertising purposes...

A new ransomware campaign targeting individuals and organizations in the UK and the US has been identified.

The attack, known as the “Prince Ransomware,” utilizes a phishing scam that impersonates the British postal carrier Royal Mail.

This campaign highlights the growing sophistication of cyber threats and the need for heightened vigilance among internet users...

Drew Crecente last spoke to his daughter Jennifer Ann Crecente on February 14, 2006. A day later, Jennifer, a senior in high school who was in an abusive relationship, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, who was later convicted and is serving time in prison. That year, Crescente started a nonprofit in her name to prevent teen dating violence and now routinely monitors any piece of media coverage related to her.

But he was appalled when he received a Google Alert notification at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday that somebody had created a chatbot on popular AI platform Character AI using his daughter’s yearbook photo and name.

“A grieving father should not have to find out that his dead daughter is being used to try and make money as a chatbot on some website,” he told Forbes. “It shocks the conscience, and it’s unacceptable behavior”...

A good scary movie makes us afraid of its ghosts. A great one sees ghosts for what they are—specters of the past. That past can be horrific, filled with darkness we can never quite outrun. Ghosts can also be seductive, drawing us back to a past that we ought to have outgrown, teasing us with the idea that we can visit long-dead people and abandoned places, if only in shadow. We love ghost stories, perhaps, because we love the idea that there’s life beyond the grave, and that the past is never really gone. But the logic of story ensures that the gift of that reassurance comes with a price, and reminds us to be careful what we wish for.

With the caveat that neither The Uninvited nor The Innocents, two of the absolute best of the genre, aren't streaming anywhere, here are a handful of the best and most interesting ghost stories...

• Dead of Night (1945)
• Blithe Spirit (1945)
• Carnival of Souls (1962)
• The Haunting (1963)
• Kwaidan (1964)
• Kuroneko (1968)
• The Stone Tape (1972)
• House (1977)
• The Changeling (1980)
• Beetlejuice (1988)
• Pet Sematary (1989)
• Candyman (1992)
• Ghostwatch (1992)
• Beloved (1998)
• The Sixth Sense (1999)
• The House on Haunted Hill (1999)
• The Others (2001)
• Spirited Away (2001)
• The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
• Session 9 (2001)
• A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
• Lake Mungo (2008)
• The Innkeepers (2011)
• The Conjuring (2013)
• Personal Shopper (2016)
• A Ghost Story (2017)
• La Llorona (2019)
• His House (2020)
• I Was a Simple Man (2021)
• Deadstream (2022)

Now that we're officially in October, horror fans are scouring all of their services to try to find the best movies that will help prepare themselves for Halloween. Between the number of horror services out there and the vastness of these libraries, many of which are underwhelming titles, it can be a bit tricky to find something a subscriber might not actually be familiar with that's worth investing time in. While a variety of services offer up a long list of classic films that are well worth revisiting, some viewers who might be newer to the genre have the opportunity to check out under-seen experiences that are bound to become classics.

It might be hard to find horror titles the horror fanatics haven't already seen, but for anyone who might skip over some lesser-known titles to just look for recognizable experiences, we've got you covered. Whether we're looking at foreign horror, movies that never earned major promotional campaigns, or earlier efforts from filmmakers who have been given exciting opportunities in recent years, we know just what you should check out this October to celebrate some off-the-radar titles that are just as effective as major releases...

• The Autopsy of Jane Doe - Netflix
• Creep and Creep 2 - Netflix
• Drag Me to Hell - Prime Video
• The Eyes of My Mother - Hulu
• Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse - Prime Video
• The House of the Devil - Prime Video
• I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House - Netflix
• I Saw the TV Glow - Max
• Immaculate - Hulu
• The Invitation - Prime Video
• The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Max
• Mandy - Hulu
• Monster Inside: America's Most Extreme Haunted House - Hulu
• Paranormal Activity 3 - Max
• Ready or Not - Hulu
• Saint Maud - Prime Video
• Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark - Netflix
• Trick 'r Treat - Max

Not counting a couple of spin-offs, this is the seventh feature in the V/H/S horror franchise, which since the first edition in 2012 have packaged together short films by different directors to tell creepy tales involving found footage or aliens (or both) as well as lots and lots of gore. Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts. It probably helps that Brad Miska, the producer behind the original concept, is still involved. More importantly, Miska has kept things fresh by finding new directors and writers for each edition, some of whom have gone on to make films on a bigger scale (such as Joe Swanberg, Ti West and Adam Wingard, all of whom contributed to the first V/H/S) or came aboard after having already become relatively successful just for the fun of it (Scott Derrickson).

Naturally, this latest package is a pretty mixed bag...