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Problematic as his views are today, H.P. Lovecraft is still regarded as one of the giants of horror literature, and his stories have been finding their way to the big screen for decades. But equally interesting are the Lovecraft-adjacent works, movies clearly influenced by his vision of an indifferent universe full of monstrous entities, yet not specifically based on anything the man wrote. John Carpenter, for example, has mined this territory with films like The Thing (1982) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995), while Lovecraft Country addressed Lovecraft’s racism within the context of the cosmic horror he made famous.

One of the best films to derive inspiration from Lovecraft’s work is The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers from a script by Eggers and his brother Max, and released on October 18, 2019. The siblings had discussed the idea around the time Robert was seeking funding for his stunning 2016 folk-horror debut, The Witch, with its success allowing them to finally move forward.

The Lighthouse was initially inspired by an unfinished story fragment, “The Light-House,” by that other early titan of horror and mystery, Edgar Allan Poe. Aside from the title and bleak setting, however, The Lighthouse doesn’t really have any connections to Poe’s tale. As the film opens sometime during the 1890s, two lighthouse keepers arrive on a desolate island off the coast of New England for a four-week tour of duty...

... It’s the more mythic and cosmic aspects that are overtly Lovecraftian, along with the constant stream of ichorous fluids, putrefying bodies, barely glimpsed tentacular horrors, panicked sexual tension, and allusions to gods of the sea, where many of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods slumbered. Some of these merge, as when Pattinson’s Winslow (whose real name, it turns out, is also Thomas, adding the loss of identity to the thematic morass) hallucinates himself beating Dafoe’s Thomas Wake, only for the latter to morph into the Greek sea god Proteus. And then there’s the lantern atop the lighthouse, which will likely remind horror veterans of the “unnatural light” of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” or the “deadlights” from Stephen King’s It.

There’s a lot going on under the hood of The Lighthouse; in addition to Poe and Lovecraft, Robert Eggers has cited authors like Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, along with playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as instrumental to the film’s flavor and mood. Yet as an original psychological horror in which reality itself is besieged by unseen forces, it remains a Lovecraftian tone poem, an oppressive yet cosmic study of madness, desire, and ancient terror that, minus the author’s more noxious tendencies, could fit easily alongside his best works.

There’s something so unique about Lovecraft. While classic horror tropes like vampires, werewolves, and psychotic serial killers all feel well within the realms of human understanding, Lovecraft’s twisted gods and grotesque monstrosities feel completely alien – comprehensible, yet incomprehensible. It’s a universe I love to see reimagined in videogames, and RailGods of Hysterra is doing just that. From the ominous shadowy Cthulhu in the key art’s background, to the weird train that sports a glowing orange eye and rows of teeth, I’ve fallen for the survival game’s universe hook, line, and sinker.

RailGods of Hysterra is described as a co-op survival game set in a Lovecraftian hellscape. You are a Dreamer, and you’ve awoken bound to your eerie RailGod – the aforementioned living locomotive. As either a five-man squad or a solo traveler, you’ll venture through nightmarish landscapes, abandoned outposts, and cult hotspots, gathering new gear in order to upgrade your RailGod.

Combat looks a little Diablo-esque, with multiple players slinging spells at a poor, unsuspecting crocodile. You’ll have to take down various terrors to fuel your RailGod (or kidnap them, whatever you prefer), helping it transform into the horrific Eldritch fortress that it’s supposed to be...

BERLIN (AP) — A brand-new fire station in Germany, which was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage and destroyed equipment did not have a fire alarm system, local media reported Thursday.

The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at the Stadtallendorf fire station in Hesse and destroyed, among other things, the equipment hall and almost a dozen emergency vehicles, German news agency dpa reported. Initial estimates put the damage at between 20 million and 24 million euros ($21 million to $26 million). No one was injured.

Local officials told dpa that no fire alarm system was installed in the building because experts had considered it not necessary — much to the astonishment of many observers now that the station has burned down...

The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.

The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos”...

... The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine.

Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.”

... special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used...

The offensive use of this technology by the U.S. would, naturally, spur its proliferation and normalize it as a tool for all governments. “What’s notable about this technology is that it is purely of a deceptive nature,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute. “There are no legitimate use cases besides deception, and it is concerning to see the U.S. military lean into a use of a technology they have themselves warned against. This will only embolden other militaries or adversaries to do the same, leading to a society where it is increasingly difficult to ascertain truth from fiction and muddling the geopolitical sphere.”

Both Russia and China have been caught using deepfaked video and user avatars in their online propaganda efforts, prompting the State Department to announce an international “Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation” in January. “Foreign information manipulation and interference is a national security threat to the United States as well as to its allies and partners,” a State Department press release said. “Authoritarian governments use information manipulation to shred the fabric of free and democratic societies”...

Brian De Palma’s insouciantly horrible masterpiece from 1976, adapted from the novel by Stephen King, and mixing in tropes and tricks from Hitchcock’s Psycho, is now rereleased. This is the extraordinary exploitation shocker that also conveyed – or anyway fabricated – an impassioned sympathy for a bullied teenage girl with learning disabilities and telekinetic powers. It was a horror classic that didn’t conform to the narrative beats of the genre; it was a scary movie in which the terrifying demon was also the final girl.

Sissy Spacek gives an amazing performance as Carrie, a shy high school student and put-upon daughter of Margaret (Piper Laurie), whose fanatical religious devotion and fear of sex – and fear of Carrie having sex – stems from having been seduced and abandoned by Carrie’s now absent father many years previously. Poor, innocent Carrie still has not started her period, and when this happens in the showers after a volleyball game, she panics uncomprehendingly and the mean girls humiliate her by throwing tampons and chanting: “Plug it up!” Gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) is outraged and – angrily smoking a cigarette and still wearing her PE shorts in the principal’s office – decides to hand out exemplary punishments to this crowd of bullies. This takes the form of a mortifying workout session which so enrages the queen-bee bully Chris (Nancy Allen) that she resolves to take a satanically wicked revenge on Carrie at the prom...

Skyrim, but heavy metal horror. That's how (mostly) solo developer Nate Purkeypile has been pitching The Axis Unseen. And after spending a couple of hours in its Steam Next Fest demo exploring a vast, creepy forest dotted with gargantuan skeletons, while also being hunted down by packs of Werewolves to intense guitar riffs, I can confirm that The Axis Unseen ticks the Skyrim, heavy metal, and horror boxes with ease.

Skyrim's inspiration is immediately obvious when you're first thrust into this mystical open-world, with a trusty bow in hand and the promise of magical powers to come. These similarities perhaps aren't surprising when you learn that Purkeypile is also an ex-Bethesda developer who has worked on the Fallout series, Starfield, and Skyrim itself. While this can make the game look like an ambitious mod for Skyrim at first glance, it doesn't take long for The Axis Unseen's Next Fest demo to unleash its unique folklore-based cosmic horror on you - to terrifying effect...

Back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2019, the University of Minnesota-Duluth held a two-day conference with a timely theme: “Our Climate Futures: Meeting the Challenges in Duluth.” The keynote was delivered by Jesse M. Keenan, an urban planner whose research focuses on climate adaptation and the built environment. Keenan had been crunching the numbers and studying the projections on future climate migration — or “climigration” — in the United States; and he had begun speculating about where climate migrants would go. One place they might go, he told the audience, is Duluth. Yes, the city had suffered decades of post-industrial decline in the late 20th century, but what matters now, as the country adapts to new climate realities, is that Duluth is an upper Midwestern city, far from the eroding coastlines of the Southeast and the blistering heatwaves of the Southwest. The cost of living is relatively low, the education and healthcare sectors robust. Perhaps most important of all, the city is located at a latitude of 46° north on the western shores of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes and one of the largest sources of freshwater on the planet...

Other northern cities have been making similar cases. The mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the former industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie — a sort of easterly twin to Duluth— will be a “climate refuge.” The chief sustainability officer of Cleveland, also on Lake Erie, described the Ohio city as a “haven,” where the “climate refugee crisis is bound to catalyze further growth.” And a Milwaukee public radio reporter asked, “Could Wisconsin become a climate haven?” America’s Rust Belt has emerged as the geographic focal point in a growing conversation about how the nation’s demography will shift as places like Phoenix, Dallas, and Miami — Sunbelt cities that are still some of the fastest-growing in the country — experience ever deadlier weather that threatens to destabilize housing markets and jeopardize entire industries, such as agriculture and real estate development.

The questions raised by such a reversal of migratory patterns are as complex as they are urgent. In the coming decades, as rising seas and rising temperatures drive large-scale domestic migration, which places will lose population, and which places will see sizable gains? Which groups will be the first to flee, and which will struggle to find safety? America’s political leaders and policy makers ought to be grappling with these questions right now...

... Already, inaction on the part of governments and industries has foreclosed the most optimistic climate adaptation scenarios; several years ago, as Lustgarten writes, leading scientists came to the gloomy consensus that the world was “hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected.” In his 2019 talk, Jesse Keenan qualified his optimism about “climate-proof Duluth” by conceding that no place will ever be immune from the impacts of a changing climate; too much has changed already. But if the challenges are immense, even historically unprecedented, we still have the ability to respond, to shape our future. At the end of his sobering book, Jake Bittle offers this hope:

"The world is already being remade, but its future shape is far from set in stone. The next century may usher us into a brutal and unpredictable world, a world in which only the wealthiest and most privileged can protect themselves from dispossession, or it may usher us into a fairer world — a world where one’s home may not be impregnable, but where one’s right to shelter is guaranteed. Both worlds are possible. We still have time to choose between them.”

With the looming presidential election, a United States Supreme Court majority that is hostile to civil rights, and a conservative effort to rollback AI safeguards, strong state privacy laws have never been more important.

But late last month, efforts to pass a federal comprehensive privacy law died in committee, leaving the future of privacy in the US unclear. Who that future serves largely rests on one crucial issue: the preemption of state law.

On one side, the biggest names in technology are trying to use their might to force Congress to override crucial state-level privacy laws that have protected people for years.

On the other side is the American Civil Liberties Union and 55 other organizations. We explained in our own letter to Congress how a federal bill that preempts state law would leave millions with fewer rights than they had before. It would also forbid state legislatures from passing stronger protections in the future, smothering progress for generations to come.

Preemption has long been the tech industry’s holy grail. But few know its history. It turns out, Big Tech is pulling straight from the toxic strategy that Big Tobacco used in the 1990s...

Are you shocked to learn the author of /Film's three Halloween Horror Nights articles this year is a haunted attraction addict? Invite me to your Halloween mazes, hayrides, docked ocean liners, and Shaqtoberfests. I crave haunt season entertainment. Even better, I crave "Haunt Season Horror" movies. Is that trademarked? Can I coin that terminology?

Haunt Season Horror titles must take place in a Horror Nights-like maze or immersive experience, turning seasonal amusements into slaughterhouse backdrops. Marquee examples would be "Hell Fest," your corporate-branded Six Flags Fright Fest take, or "The Houses October Built," which ventures into the less moderated realm of do-it-yourself haunts. These films prey upon the rational fears of patrons who attend these pop-up "Scarehouses," stripping away the safety of regulated horror experiences. What happens when a killer infiltrates a place where commercial terror is purchased at a premium? It's the ultimate Halloween treat.

Unfortunately, there's a shallow pool of options to bob for, with many poison apples amongst the sweeter treats. My perfect trifecta would be "Hell Fest," "Hell House LLC," and "The Houses October Built," with "The Funhouse Massacre" on standby. You have a supernatural found-footage banger, another found-footage creepshow hinging on spoiled attraction tropes, and then a studio slasher decked out in the holiday spirit. These features indulge horror fans and exploit Halloween's headlining celebrations for relatable scares, proficient in understanding the "possible" risks of attending haunts that fall into the wrong hands (search "McKamey Manor" or watch "Haunters: The Art of the Scare" for the closest real-life instance)...

Oddity has become a major streaming hit after earning 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. Directed by Damian McCarthy, the Irish horror film premiered at SXSW in spring 2024, where it was met with a glowing reception from those in attendance. Starring Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee, Johnny French, Steve Wall, and Caroline Menton, among others, the Shudder original tells the story of a psychic medium as she attempts to uncover the truth about her sister's murder, with Oddity reviews praising the scares, atmosphere, and filmmaking...

... Critics praise Oddity for its inventive scares and haunting horror atmosphere. The film features a persistent sense of dread throughout, that makes even more straightforward dialogue scenes unnerving. This undercurrent of unease culminates in some moments of true terror throughout Oddity's runtime, and these moments are made all the more effective due to the strong performances of cast members like Bracken, Lee, and French, among others.

Another major point of praise is Oddity's ending. While many horrors feature a strong premise and an intriguing mystery to get audiences hooked, critics seem to agree that McCarthy's film sticks the landing. The final moments of the movie, without delving into spoiler territory, ultimately bring the story full circle in an effective way. The ending ultimately means that Oddity isn't a watch-and-forget horror movie, and the experience is sure to stick with viewers even after the credits have finished rolling...

Arriving on the heels of Joker Folie à Deux and Terrifier 3, Smile 2 is the third multiplex offering in as many weeks to boast creepily grinning fiends. And while this latest clown-ish sequel is superior to those recent duds, it remains a small step down from its 2023 predecessor.

Once again charting a woman’s attempts to stave off insanity and death at the hands of an invisible demon that possesses and feeds on its human hosts, writer/director Parker Finn’s follow-up is technically accomplished and ambitiously unconventional, at least insofar as it sets its action in a milieu—the pop stardom universe—that isn’t a natural fit for unholy frights. Alas, that environment, as well as a dearth of genuine surprises, ultimately handicaps this polished thriller, even if it does reconfirm the filmmaker’s standing as a preeminent purveyor of jump scares.

There are two excellent jolts in Smile 2, and the fact that there aren’t more is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this supernatural nightmare. Finn is adept at utilizing silence, empty background space, and slow zooms to create anticipation for disturbing shocks, and he’s just as skilled at supplying startling payoffs...