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H.P. Lovecraft's terrifying tales of madness, ancient deities, and cosmic horror have fascinated readers worldwide for over a century. Lovecraft's profound impact on the horror genre is undeniable, as his unique blend of psychological fear and unsettling explorations of identity loss and existential insignificance continues to resonate. However, translating Lovecraft's eerie visions to the big screen has always proven to be a daunting challenge for filmmakers. Many adaptations have struggled to capture the essence of his work, often relying on excessive gore and visual extravagance at the expense of the profoundly unsettling atmosphere and existential terror that defines Lovecraft's writing. On the other hand, Suitable Flesh stands as a thrilling and successful attempt to bring Lovecraft's nightmarish universe to life. This film expertly delves into the fundamental aspects of Lovecraftian horror, encompassing themes of physical and psychological terror, along with a sense of cosmic unease that is chillingly precise...

The climate is changing British gardens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The Royal Horticultural Society has modelled how global heating will affect its property until 2075 and discovered that summers will be hotter and drier in all its gardens – except in Manchester.

Greater Manchester’s renown as a rain trap – there is even a website tracking rainfall, called Rainchester – means that the RHS Bridgewater garden in Salford is being earmarked for species that thrive in a cooler, wetter climate.

Trees including oaks, birches and beeches that have been part of the British landscape for centuries are starting to suffer in southern England, so are being considered for RHS Bridgewater’s new arboretum, a botanical garden aiming to preserve a wide range of species...

"It’s like something from a horror movie – only it’s not!

Imagine cruising along the River Bann, cleaning up litter, and then coming across a hand poking out of a black bin bag. Honestly, imagine it…

Well, a group of volunteers didn’t have to, as that’s exactly what they encountered in the river on Friday.

‘Oh My God’, were the words uttered by one of the Kingspan team who came across the bag.

Fortunately, what appeared to be something grisly, turned out to be….well, something grisly – a discarded blow-up doll.

Posting a short video on the River Bann Cleanup page, the team described the scenes as “shocking”.

“It’s not something we have come across before, but the team from Kingspan found this on the river today in Portadown while on a clean-up,” they wrote.

“Quite a shocking experience when found floating in the river.

“It seems that this partially clothed, blow-up doll, along with an umbrella and candles had been discarded recently. Maybe a date that didn’t work out, leaving one quite deflated in the process.

“As always, the river is not a place to dump your rubbish….or secrets.”

Well done to the team for the clean-up, as always, and good luck to you as you undergo PTSD treatment over the next few months."

To the outside observer it may seem like every single year is called “one of the best years for horror ever,” but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: It’s never a bad year for horror. The entertainment industry damn near runs on scary movies, which are cheap to produce and able to take artistic risks that bigger budget genre films — the ones that have to sell tickets to everybody just to break in — are too timid to even consider. You can always find great horror movies. The trick is knowing where to look.

And that right there is the trick, because smaller movies don’t have huge advertising budgets, and they don’t drive traffic so publications can’t always allocate the resources to cover them. Great horror movies fall through the cracks all the time. Heck, even major theatrical releases don’t get their just desserts a lot of the time, vanishing from theaters if they’re not hits right away, and getting a bad reputation just because some critics just didn’t get it.

So let’s take a moment to look back at the best horror movies that 2024 has already had to offer, that weren’t huge hits. They may be obscure, they may just be underrated, but one thing’s for sure: They aren’t “Longlegs.” You already know about “Longlegs” — and probably “Immaculate” and “Late Night with the Devil.”

Let’s give these other scary movies some (digital) ink, shall we?

“Abigail”

“Arcadian”

“Cuckoo”

“The Devil’s Bath”

“Exhuma”

“The Front Room”

“I Saw the TV Glow”

“In a Violent Nature”

“Infested”

“Lisa Frankenstein”

“Oddity”

“Red Rooms”

“Stopmotion”

“Strange Darling”

“Under Paris”

The legend of The Brahan Seer, the 17th-century Scottish farmhand who is said to have had powers to predict the future, is set to be brought to life on screen as a Gaelic language horror. Gaelic language folk horror Seaforth will be filmed on Lewis and Harris.

Stories of the so-called “Hebridean Nostradamus”, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, have inspired the project, which will be shot on Lewis and Harris.

The folk horror’s writer and director John Murdo (JM) MacAulay, who is also from Lewis, will be drawing on stories about Coinneach Odhar, whose predictions were written about extensively in Alexander Mackenzie's 1877 book The Prophecies of The Brahan Seer...

... The synopsis states: "The film tells the story of the young Coinneach Odhar, as he was known then, who one day stumbles upon a seeing stone, which gives him the ability to see into the future. Now cursed with second sight, he is left to suffer the knowledge of everydetail of his life and death.

"Set in the Outer Hebrides, the story follows Lady Seaforth, the laird’s wife, who summons the Seer, driven by fears of her husband’s infidelity. This culminates in a fraught interrogation and her quest for the truth leads to broken promises, a struggle for power and a burning body in a whisky barrel."

Ghosts usually come with a fair bit of baggage in the movies: A tragic romance leading to an even more tragic suicide, maybe, or a howl for justice from a murder victim from beyond the grave. The protagonist of “Dead Talents Society” has no such tale attached to her untimely (and embarrassing) death, and this is where her problems begin. John Hsu’s frightfully entertaining Taiwanese horror-comedy imagines a world where the dead are just as beholden to the pressures of fame as the living, and an industry has grown around ambitious apparitions building their personal brands. Urban legends live forever, and forgotten ghosts literally disappear — so get out there and scare ‘em good, kid!

Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), the male half of the married couple at the center of the devious horror comedy Sleep, suffers from a seriously disturbing case of somnambulism. But he otherwise enjoys the blissful slumber typically reserved for holy innocents. He drifts off easily and sleeps deeply, even when encased in the mummy bag and oven gloves meant to prevent him from unconsciously hurting himself. Sometimes, there’s even a hint of a smile on his dozing face, which starts to seem like more and more like an affront to his wife, Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), when she stays up watching him with a mixture of concern and fear. You can be in lockstep in every other area of your relationship, and still, sleep remains a kingdom that can only be entered alone. And when there, Hyun-su has a tendency to do upsetting things he has no memory of later, like stare into the darkness while muttering “Someone’s inside” or stand in front of the fridge eating raw meat. One night, he scratches his cheek until it’s gouged open, and that’s before the situation gets really dark — like, don’t get too attached to the pair’s little Pomeranian dark. Sleep is a film about parasomnia that’s really more about marriage — in particular, the idea that any relationship challenge can be overcome with enough dedication, even one that leaves you afraid that your partner is going to unwittingly do something terrible to your newborn daughter...

... The pleasures of Sleep come from the turns it takes but also from the deftness of Yu’s approach. The film is unpredictable because it feels like it’s formulating its journey in real time. And despite that, there’s care in its every intimate detail. Sleep may be modest, taking place largely in the one-bedroom Hyun-su and Soo-jin share, but that modesty is a strength, with every well-loved detail of the set reflecting the relationship the couple assumed was unshakably solid. Yu uses each foot of the confined space to his full advantage — a scene in which blood has been tracked across this place of cozy domesticity plays like a defilement — and shows how an intimate home can become a threateningly claustrophobic arrangement in a sequence in which Soo-jin seeks refuge in the bathroom, the camera mirroring her wary gaze. But it’s the sly way that the film starts off lodged in one character’s perspective, and makes its way to the other’s, that enables its rollicking final act to work as well as it does. Sleep is a wild ride, but it refuses to lose sight of the emotional state of the people it puts onscreen, even as they fall apart.

Recently, as we featured when it was revealed, Titan Comics released a first look at the first issue of Minky Woodcock: The Girl Called Cthulhu, which is the third Minky Woodcock series by writer/artist Cynthia von Buhler, following The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini and The Girl Who Electrified Tesla. Now, Titan Comics is also releasing an animated trailer to spotlight the new series.

The series will follow in the path of von Buhler's previous Minky Woodcock stories, in that the titular heroine will interact with real life historical figures in otherwise outlandish scenarios, and in this series, she crosses paths with H.P. Lovecraft and famed occultist, Aleister Crowley...

The Amazon River has seen its levels in Colombia reduced by as much as 90 percent, a government agency said Thursday, as South America faces a severe and widespread drought.

The river—the world's biggest by volume and which also flows through parts of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname—has been hard hit by the drought that has seen wildfires spread across the continent.

"The water level has decreased between 80 and 90 percent in the last three months due to drought caused by climate change," Colombia's National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) said in a statement...

Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.

Autumn has offered little reprieve for cities that have already spent months mired in triple-digit temperatures. This week, Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; and Palm Springs, California, are all grappling with severe weather, with highs that have pushed over 100F (38C). More than 16 million people in the US were under heat alerts on Friday, according to the National Weather Service, mostly clustered in the southern tips of Nevada, Arizona and California.

“Late-season heat is dangerous because people are fatigued from fighting heat all summer,” the NWS forecast office in Las Vegas cautioned in an alert, which warned of extreme weather expected to last through the weekend and into next week. “This is especially true this year,” it added, “as 2024 continues to break all-time heat records.”

Fueled by the climate crisis, and often exacerbated by concrete cityscapes that cook when temperatures rise, heatwaves are getting longer, larger and more intense...

Newly restored in 4k and available for the first time in North America, Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner radically upends genre tropes and preempts the resurgence of folk horror with her second and most formally audacious feature, HOTEL. The deceptively simple premise of a young woman who takes on a job as a night porter at a remote Austrian hotel and encounters unexplained phenomena amounts to a grand treatise on the inhibiting potential of imagination, the fine line between banality and terror and the looming specter of fate.

Allusions to local myth, mysterious disappearances and haunted forests eschew generic conclusions and serve to illustrate and complicate the inner life of a young woman reckoning with the essential ambiguities of defining one’s life. “An intelligent fable about fear and desire,” (Time Out) Hausner’s sophomore feature is a haunting metaphysical horror film unlike any other...

Falling Stars: A Deconstruction of Folk Horror Witch Tales

Falling Stars is about folk horror and a deconstruction of the classic witch mythos. In an alternate reality where witches are very real, the night of the first harvest is when harmless traditional rituals are performed to placate witches in the sky. For the three brothers in the American Southwest, this year's event will be different. When they discover their friend has killed and buried a witch, they venture out into the desert to witness it for themselves. Whilst encountering the scene, they accidentally desecrate the body, setting in motion a sequence of perilous events. The only way they can put a stop to the curse set upon their family is to burn the corpse before sunrise. Accidentally desecrating a witch's body tends to happen in supernatural thrillers since nothing should ever go right in a horror movie. The only way to stop the curse on their family is a race against time, where the idiot brothers have to burn the body before sunrise. It's always a hassle when you have to rush to burn a body before sundown in the California desert. Care to bet whether they do it in time? That's the thrust of the movie...