Jess Peters (Dani Barker, who also wrote the film) is a struggling actress and livestreaing influencer who has been getting somewhat famous answering job listings from creepy men and then sneak filming and either revealing their behavior or kink shaming them.

Now, she’s found a job that asks her to go to a remote cabin and co-write a script with Tom Brady (Luke Cook) — not the athelete — and playact as the two main characters in his psychosexual murder mystery. She finds herself attracted to him but plans on using this as content for her streaming channel. But what if she’s someone else’s content?

Originally known as Classified Killer, this is the full-length debut of director Sylvia Caminer. I really don’t want to get much deeper into the twists and turns of the movie, except to say that the first one actually got me. This film gets more intense as it goes on and it totally took me for a ride. It works hard to get you to like Jess, who has a pretty unlikeable online character, and makes you wonder who is behind the people that you live vicariously through social media.

Follow Her debuts on August 14 at Popcorn Frights and will be available to watch virtually as part of the festival.

Amy (Sarah McGuire, The Stylist) is a young woman on the run with her young son Adrian, trying to stay one step ahead of her abusive ex-girlfriend Judith (Laurie Catherine Winkel). The chase takes them from motel to motel, seeking out people to help them get further away, even sleeping in gas station bathrooms to try to stay as far away as they can.

Yet when they start hiding in a barn in Kansas, some demonic force from Amy’s past begins to take over Adrian, all when Amy’s past — in the form of Judith — gets closer.

From the very real terror of abusive relationships to the supernatural world of possession, They Wait In the Dark is an intense heartpounding thrill ride of a film

Director Patrick Rea has plenty of credits on his directing resume — I Am List is probably the best-known — and has used that experience to put together a unique and tense film.

They Wait In the Dark is playing at Popcorn Frights and will be available to watch virtually as part of the festival.

You may have grown up afraid of Chucky but you didn’t live the life of Kyra Elise Gardner, the director and writer (with Jason Strickland) of this documentary, as she’s the daughter of special effects master Tony Gardner, and in her house were the half-built parts of Chucky and Tiffany from the movie Seed of Chuckie onward.

She told Entertainment Weekly: “My mom said when I was leaving preschool (one) day, I told my teacher that I couldn’t go home because the bad people were there. My teacher almost called CPS on my parents because she thought that they were hitting me. I didn’t understand that it was dolls. It was scared of Chucky, so it was absolutely frightening.”

Building on the short Dollhouse that she made in college, Gardner has filmed moments with her father, as well as interviews with creator Don Mancini; producer David Kirschner; actors Alex Vincent, Lin Shaye, Marlon Wayans, Abigail Breslin and Jennifer Tilly; Chucky’s voice Brad Dourif and his actress daughter Fiona Dourif (who has been in two Child’s Play movies and the new TV show); and even John Waters, who gleefully recalls having his face burned off by acid in Seed of Chucky.

Beyond serving as a much needed documentary about this horror series, it’s interesting to get into the shared experiences and family feeling — Fiona Dourif and Gardner bonded over childhoods with often work-absent fathers — that have grown along the way. I’d also love a doc that tries to get to the bottom of how Jennifer Tilly stays so perfect all these years, if anyone would like to make that.

Living With Chucky makes its world premiere on August 13 at Popcorn Frights festival and is available to watch digitally nationwide during the festival.

The Third Saturday in October is a movie, sure, but it’s also a reference to the rivalry between the Crimson Tide of the University of Alabama and the Volunteers of the University of Tennessee, schools that are located around three hundred miles apart. Alabama leads the series 58–37–8 as of this year. So in case why you wondered, “Why is a slasher based around college football?” you have your answer.

Even wilder, this movie is being released at the very same time as The Third Saturday In October I, which was supposedly made in 1980 as a slasher craze cash-in. This is the fourth sequel — I imagine Dimension got the rights — and it’s some point in the 90s, feeling like the shot in Utah Halloween sequels in that it’s centered around the relationship between PJ (Poppy Cunningham) and her babysitter Maggie (Kansas Bowling, Blue from Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood), which feels very Rachel and Jamie.

Director, writer and editor Jay Burleson also made The Nobodies, a mockumentary about Alabama-based amateur filmmaker Warren Werner, his first SOV film Pumpkin and the Satanic panic in his small town that led to the suicide of him and his girlfriend at the film’s premiere, as well as the fake trailer for Halloween: Harvest of Souls 1985. I get the feel from this movie that Jay really gets what’s at the heart of slashers.

It’s another Third Saturday in October and, as always, the hearse driving all-black — other than his white skull mask — giggling serial killer Jack Harding is back, slicing up toes, throats and more, like killing one girl with a blazing hot pizza to the face. There’s also a wheelchair-bound annoying teen that you can’t wait to see die — the genre lives and breathes by its decimation of the handicapable, I guess — and for some reason, a fully grown adult that dresses as a referee to come watch the game. To be fair, one of my best friends as a kid dressed as an umpire and would count pitches and render safe or out calls for every baseball game we ever watched. He did grow up to be an umpire though.

The house where the game at feels like it has the same level of bed swapping and sexual tension as that cabin in the woods back when Joe Zito directed Jason.

I love the idea that no one remembers the killings or even pays attention because of how important football is to the town. And most importantly, the film knows to set up a sequel before the credits crawl, because Jack Harding is never going to die.

Bonus points to padding the start of the movie with scenes from previous sequels that were never made.

I had an absolute blast with this. And if you have a love for slashers — let’s say you made a Letterboxd list of nearly seven hundred of them — you’re going to go crazy for this. They can make a hundred of these movies and I will watch every single one.

I watched this movie as part of Popcorn Frights.

I went all in on The Third Saturday in October V, loving the way that it had the look and feel of 90s direct to video slasher sequels, so I was beyond excited for the first installment which referenced slashers like Death Screams and Another Son of Sam, I got pretty excited.

Sadly, the final effort doesn’t match the other film. This feels like an approximation of the late 70s and early 80s slasher boom, where The Third Saturday in October V nearly could have arrived in our time via a rip in the time/space paradox and seemed like it really was a product of its era. It was kind of hard reading other reviewers saying how much this seemed like My Bloody Valentine and it felt like a game of, “Tell me that you haven’t really paid attention to slashers other than aping what everyone else writes about them without telling me.”

It’s too bright, too trying to be strange instead of being odd naturally — the endless meow dialogue is grating at best — and the football title feels forced whereas it naturally fits into the other film.

That’s not to say that there’s not some real talent here. Director, writer and editor Jay Burleson gets a lot out of his budget. Darius Willis and K.J. Baker are really good as the parents of victims who just want to put serial killer Harding into the ground once and for all. And there’s a great atmospheric graveyard scene that’s quite evocative of the early scenes of Halloween. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the characters of John Paul (Casey Aud), Denver (Kate Edmonds), Pam (Venna Black), Bobbi Jo (Libby Blake), Uncle Deeter (Richard Garner) and Ned (Dre Bravo) are never funny, constantly drag the film down and just seem like they’ve come out of Tromaville — never a good thing — and take the film from satiric to sophomoric.

It also doesn’t help that Denver’s headphones — the Walkman 2 which popularized the device didn’t come out in the U.S. until 1981, so this feels anachronistic — dancing scene just ended up reminding me of a much better throwback in The House of the Devil.

Creating slasher victims is hard — how much should we care about them? Do we just want them to die? This film never even ponders that, even if at heart it’s either a tribute or a pastiche of the past. That said, Allison Shrum’s Heather is a fine final girl and I enjoyed Lew Temple (31, The Devil’s Rejects) as her father.

I really wish I had liked this more and even after a second viewing, worrying if I’d overhyped myself, I still struggled to finish it. One of the things that took me out of the film was seeing Harding have his mask on near the end with no scene explaining where it came from or why he had a mask, which is always the big moment in any slasher. And yes, I get that we rarely get much character development in these movies, but why is Jakkariah Harding so feared? I can accept The Shape being unkillable, but I also learned that he had the darkest eyes, the devil’s eyes. This film asks us to fill in the knowledge we have of slashers without rewarding us with touching on those moments and treating them in new and unique ways.

The slasher genre is ripe for being made light of but this film sadly doesn’t have much new to add to the conversation, which is a shame, as I can and will extol the virtues of its sequel/companion movie.

I watched this movie as part of Popcorn Frights.

Father David (Graham Skipper, the director of Sequence Break) is a devout priest who has never missed a Mass, never eaten meat on a Good Friday and never misses the opportunity to speak on God’s love, including when he invites Terry (Jeremy Gardner, the director of After Midnight and the man who told his mother not to watch this movie) and Lexi (Taylor Zaudtke, Gardner’s real-life wife) to stay during the holidays.

It starts as a simple act of kindness and nothing can go wrong, right? But throw in a game of never have I ever, then have a good man — in his head if perhaps not as much in his heart — get tempted and things are ready to go off the rails.

Director and writer Eric Pennycoff also made Sadistic Intentions, which starred Gardner and Zaudtke, and he puts together a movie with a small cast, a smart script and a mix of madness and black humor as the priest finds himself in a place — and perhaps a position — that he had never prepared for.

I also loved Rigo Garay, who plays RIgo the organ player, perhaps the only character brave enough to tell Father David that he hasn’t had a parishioner attend Mass in weeks and that he’s just been giving sermons to an empty church. But if that’s true, who are the prophetic — and perhaps Satanic — voices who come to confession? And what’s with the young padre’s frequent confessions of his own to that horrifying painting?

There’s an incredible moment near the end where an off-the-deep-end Father David throws on his vestment and rants on the altar while arguing with a red-lit Terry — or a vision of him — before learning that — and this is the biggest spoiler warning I can give — that the real Terry has beaten his wife and snorted David’s mother’s ashes.

I mean, this is a movie that has a priest with his head wrapped up straight out of Threads losing his mind and a last shot that will make you think long after the Christmas carol-scored credits run out.

The Leech is playing at Popcorn Frights and will be available to watch virtually as part of the festival.