Influencer culture is the new slash-and-burn territory for horror, providing many victims in movies today. It’s the perfect target—vain, desperate, and begging to be offed. Alexander Boyd Watson’s Demonetize takes that premise and runs it through a meat grinder.

A washed-up paranormal investigator, Martin (Sean Carrigan), is desperate to reclaim his glory days. He figures out that if ghosts really are drawn to the energy of smartphones and clout-chasing, the best bait in the world is a house full of insufferable social media influencers.

His plan? A Big Brother-style lockdown in the infamous Blackwood Estate. He rounds up a quintet of absolute bottom-feeders from the influencer sphere to live-stream a 24-hour challenge. The catch: they think it’s a staged reality show with a big monetary reward and the promise of social clicks, likes and clout. Martin locks them in, expecting a ratings bonanza. Instead, he gets a bloodbath.

Once the door locks and the cameras start rolling, the entities inside realize these people are full of the exact kind of hollow vanity they feed on. As the Wi-Fi signal begins to flicker and the influencers realize they’re actually dying, the social media facade drops. It turns into a claustrophobic, survival-of-the-fittest nightmare where the ghosts are just the beginning of their problems.

If you’ve ever sat there watching a TikTok influencer act like a fool and thought, “I really hope something terrible happens to them,” well, consider Demonetize your wish fulfillment for the year. Oh yeah — I loved seeing Doug Jones out of makeup as Hunter Zollinger, the slick, soulless agent behind the scenes. There have been plenty of streamer horror films as of late, but this one has a fun energy.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Alright, I feel seen beyond seen. Uncle Heppy Sloke (Sam Landman) is the crazy relative we all wish we had, someone who has every movie on bootleg, sneaks us beer when we’re in our teens, and stays friends with us when we grow up and grow away from them. 

His niece Maggie (Sammi-Jack Martincak) just wants to unwind with a quick stream, but one text to her uncle brings him over with a DVD. It’s Night of the Lurchers, a fictional horror flick, but instead of just settling in for a movie, Maggie triggers a hidden Easter egg on the disc. Suddenly, the boundary between the movie and reality dissolves. They aren’t just watching the horror; they’re trapped in it. They’re getting pulled into special features, interacting with the director and running for their lives from the titular Lurchers. It’s a meta-horror nightmare that treats the DVD menu screen like a gateway to hell. 

It’s going to put Heppy and Maggie face-to-face with one of his heroes, Dr. Sven Rendall (James Urbaniak), as well as the actor who plays him, Guy Leopold. The movie has some wild rules, as every menu on the DVD becomes another part of reality. 

Director Joseph Scrimshaw—who you might know from his work with RiffTrax and his podcasting history—clearly understands the rituals of the movie-watching experience. The film is a satire of how we let pop culture dictate our lives, but it also genuinely loves movies.

The coolest trick in the bag? The way the film plays with the actual mechanics of a DVD. It’s not just monsters in the house; it’s about the frustration of commentary tracks, the weirdness of behind-the-scenes featurettes and the idea that some movies are just too dead to stay on the shelf. If you’ve ever felt like your collection was starting to stare back at you, Dead Media is for you.

I also enjoyed how it fleshed out Maggie’s friends, Daniel (Antonio Teodoro), and her landlady/potential lover, Brenda (Jessica Fenton). They feel like real people, so when horrifying things happen, we feel for them, unlike so many of the slashers all over my shelves. Obviously, Scrimshaw loves horror, too. There’s a director who locks everyone in the theater and an owl-masked serial killer right out of Stage Fright, a theater set that feels like Demons, and plenty of Romero zombie feel. There’s a push to something beyond, as the Lurchers steal movement, which is a great scientific explanation for why characters in Fulci films just freeze while spiders eat their faces.

Uncle Heppy is someone who makes me look at myself. As someone surrounded by walls of DVDs and missing the past — a 20-minute burst of watching old music videos last night both made me happy and depressed — I know his ending, even if the film doesn’t reveal it to us. 

Other than being a little long, this movie is pretty great. There’s a great twist, decent effects and kills, and Dead Media accomplishes what so many larger movies fail at: mixing funny and frightening. It has heart, which is more than I can say for most movies made after the 1980s.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

The Adams family — John, Tobey Poser, Zelda and Lulu — isn’t your typical suburban clan. They don’t just watch horror movies. They live them, breathing life into a DIY empire of low-budget, high-splatter independent horror. In this 80-minute deep dive, directors Carlye Rubin and Katie Green pull back the curtain on a family where the dinner-table talk is just as likely to be about practical effects and gore gags as about day-to-day life.

At its heart, Blood and Guts explores the blurring of boundaries, both professional and personal. We follow the Adams family as they navigate the relentless grind of indie filmmaking. Their living room is a practical effects workshop, their backyard a soundstage, and their relationships are forged in buckets of fake blood.

The film captures the chaotic beauty of their creative process, showing that while they might be covered in synthetic gore and tossing profanity around like confetti, they are subject to the same universal pressures as any other family. As the industry changes and its internal dynamics shift, the Adams have to figure out how to keep their unique brand of cinematic terror and their family unit intact.

Much like the legendary family-run operations of exploitation history (think of the communal, all-hands-on-deck nature of early regional horror sets), Blood and Guts suggests that when your work is your life, you never really clock out. And while many documentaries focus on the how-to of filmmaking, this leans heavily into the“why, painting a portrait of a family that has embraced the fringes of cinema not just as a career, but as a way of being together.

I’d recommend watching any of their films, including Hellbender, The Deeper You Dig and Where the Devil Roams. Then come back, watch this and see how much work goes into their art.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

The city is on edge. The Omniball Championship is happening, the streets are a pressure cooker of fanatical sports energy and Boney—who is literally a skeleton—has a stack of pizzas to deliver. That’s it. That’s the setup. But this isn’t your standard slasher or creature feature. This is a journey through the urban underbelly seen entirely from the eye sockets of a guy with no flesh left on his bones.

The entire film is shot in one continuous, unbroken take. You don’t get a break and neither does Boney. Every door he knocks on leads to a new level of surreal insanity, ranging from underground gambling dens run by mimes to a cult worshipping a sentient meat slicer who stab him, exception, you know, he’s a skeleton.

Since the film is a POV experience, the real stars are the various character actors Saunders peppered throughout the delivery stops. It’s a rotating cast of over-the-top tough guys, neon-drenched psychos and people who look like they haven’t seen the sun since ever.

Yet Boney isn’t CGI. Saunders used an old medical school prop skeleton that he reportedly found at a garage sale. Yet he’s been inserted into a combination old school Adult Swim by way of indie video game universe, working for a pizza shop owner who hates him and pining for that man’s daughter.

It moves quick, it’s totally for adults and it showed me something I’ve never seen before: a skeleton BJ. Well done!

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Zach Weintraub is known for hyper-realistic, slice-of-life character studies (The International Sign for Choking, Slackjaw). Assets & Liabilities marks a fascinating pivot where he injects genre-thriller DNA directly into his usual mumblecore-adjacent aesthetics. He plays Zach, who wonders how he went from skating DIY parks and staying up until 4 AM listening to minor-chord punk rock to worrying about mortgage rates, property taxes and the resale value of a suburban investment property. He’s also a dad suffocating under the weight of bourgeois expectation. He’s got the wife, the kid, the house and a piece of real estate he’s desperately trying to flip. He is the definition of a guy who made all the grown-up choices but lost his soul in the process.

When his family packs up for a short weekend trip, Zach doesn’t use the empty house to catch up on sleep or finish chores. Instead, the silence drives him crazy, and he decides to resurrect his ghost. He grabs his old skateboard, hits the pavement and tries to manifest the carefree, middle-finger-to-the-world attitude of his youth.

For a minute, it works. He crosses paths with a younger skater (Arsenio Salvante), and the camaraderie feels like a time machine. Zach is flying high on nostalgia and a cheap sense of victory. But this isn’t a feel-good indie dramedy. An unsettling connection between Zach and this kid comes to light, shattering the illusion of his rebel-without-a-cause afternoon. What started as a desperate grab for youth spirals rapidly into a tense, claustrophobic confrontation with his own class standing, his choices and a pitch-black reality he can’t skate away from.

That’s because this teen is the tenant Zach has been wanting to evict so he can make money off that real estate I wrote about a few paragraphs ago. One curse, and everything bad that can happen seems to happen. Then again, as a protagonist who starts the movie dealing with the massive turds of his cute little baby girl and who only has a moment of affection in this — other than an awkward kiss with his wife, he’s lying in bed watching a JOI ruined orgasm video — and then, basically, eats shit.

Maybe don’t do bong hits with someone you consider your enemy.

See, we all learned some lessons.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

If you ever wondered what happens when the theater world’s hyper-progressive cancel culture collides head-on with MAGA counter-culture in the middle of the Georgia woods, American Theater is the answer. Directed by Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick, this 2025 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize winner plays out like a real-world, bizarro-universe Waiting for Guffman.

The film is a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Brian Clowdus, a real-life, openly gay conservative director who once possessed a massive regional reputation for staging over-the-top, immersive outdoor musicals. After being heavily ousted from the mainstream Atlanta theater circuit in 2020 following a flood of accusations regarding toxic leadership, unsafe sets and bigotry, Clowdus doesn’t apologize. He rebrands.

He retreats to an isolated, weathered cabin in rural Georgia and rounds up a dedicated troupe of right-leaning, conservative actors. His grand scheme for artistic vengeance? Staging an original, allegorical, fiercely political musical retelling of the 1692 Salem witch trials, casting himself and his cast as the true victims of a modern-day ideological witch hunt. As if the rehearsals aren’t high-stakes enough, the cameras capture Clowdus simultaneously running a chaotic, real-world campaign for the Florida House of Representatives.

Because this is a slice-of-life verité documentary rather than a scripted production, the actors are real-life historical figures from this specific theater subculture. I couldn’t believe this was real, but there you go. This article — thanks for sharing, Alexei Toliopoulos — goes quite deep into just how wild the star of this movie is. 

Clowdus is the larger-than-life center of gravity around which this movie spirals. Sporting a thick Southern drawl and endless energy, he treats his rehearsals like military operations and religious revivals rolled into one. He fills the screen with the kind of intense, unedited eccentric charisma usually reserved for cult leaders or grindhouse exploitation villains as he leads a collection of conservative-leaning actors who feel completely alienated by the mainstream arts community. The documentary captures them oscillating between intense vulnerability, fierce ideological conviction and genuine panic as they are subjected to Clowdus’s trademark dangerous theatrical choices. These include frighteningly close pyrotechnics, unpadded physical stunts and increasingly unhinged staging demands.

Directors Clark and Frederick use no talking-head interviews or voiceovers to guide your opinion. The camera just sits in the corner of the cabin and lets the madness unfold naturally, all in a literal cabin in the woods, as unsafe stage combat missed cues and show tunes tell the tale. And when the show gets canceled, everyone gets drunk and decides to test out being lynched, well… seriously, this was a real thing, not a script?

Watching this virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival, I wished I had seen it live with an audience, because it’s one of the most uncomfortable movies I’ve seen. It goes from being funny at times to being frankly terrifying, as we’ve all built such walls around ourselves and have chosen such strange bedfellows in these most horrible of times. 

What a movie.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

I should not have seen this movie at nine or ten years of age, nor should I have read the magazine. I should have been blissfully ignorant of the mindblowing nature of what I was about to see and waited until I was ready, but here we are, literally forty years later, and not a day goes by that this movie doesn’t cross my mind.

Directed by animator Gerald Potterton and produced by Ivan Reitman and publisher Leonard Mogel, this movie takes on the near-impossible task of taking the stories of an unwieldy adult science fiction magazine and making them into a coherent story about, well, evil? Or something? Honestly, who cares? There’s animated Roger Corben and zombie bombers and half-nude warrior women riding dinosaurs and stabbing people.

Based on the comic book tale, “Soft Landing” starts the film. Created by Dan O’Bannon and Thomas Warkentin, it has a man flying a car from space to Earth. He’s an astronaut home to see his daughter, but in the next sequence, “Grimaldi,” what he brings back kills him, and his daughter soon learns of a galaxy- and time-spanning evil called the Loc-Nar. That entity is present in every story throughout the film and actually works really well.

Moebius’ “The Long Tomorrow” has become “Harry Canyon,” the story of a film noir detective in a 2031 New York City that looks and feels a lot like Blade Runner, because, well, Blade Runner looked a lot like Moebius. In this installment, the Loc-Nar is a Maltese Falcon-ish McGuffin.

In “Den,” based on the Richard Corben comic of the same name, that ultimate evil is the magical element that everyone in the world of Den wants. Our hero is a nerdy kid who has been transported to another world and has become a superheroic character that everyone wants either in their bed or in the dirt. For me, this is the center of the movie, and, aside from the closing section, it stands hands, shoulders and various nude parts above the other segments. Plus, that’s John Candy as Den.

Bernie Wrightson’s “Captain Sternn” follows, with Eugene Levy as the Sternn and a court trial that shows just how dirty a future spaceman its hero can be. A section called “Neverwhere Land” was deleted from the film, which would have connected these segments and formed a loop set to either Pink Floyd’s “Time” or Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Magnificat: Passacaglia.”

The zombie segment with the haunted “B-17” is next, followed by an adaptation of Angus McKie’s “So Beautiful, So Dangerous,” a tale of alien pilots, Earthwomen and lines of Plutonian Nyborg.

In the last story, based on “Arzach” by Moebius, “Taarna” and her reptile bird battle mutants and the Loc-Nar itself, sacrificing herself to save the world before she is reborn as a young girl in the framing device that began the story. As she walks outside, the reptile bird returns, and the adventure begins all over again.

The soundtrack to this movie — which kept it from being legally released for years — is amazing. There’s everything from Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” and “Prefabricated” by Trust to the theme song by Don Felder and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Veterans of Psychic Wars.” The band originally wrote the song “Vengeance (The Pact),” but the film’s makers thought it told the segment’s story too closely.  Both songs appeared on BÖC’s Fire of Unknown Origin.

For years, there had been talk of a reboot. Whatever ended up airing on Netflix as the series Love, Death & Robots.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.