John Waters picked this as his top film of 2025, telling Vulture that “My favorite movie of the year is a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics with characters nobody could possibly root for. Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you.”

I don’t want John Waters to hate me.

Luckily, this is the second Ari Aster movie in a row that I’ve been challenged by and liked, after Beau Is Afraid, and I think both of those films may not be as popular as Hereditary or Midsommar, but they’re definitely better films.

Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is enacting a mask law in the wake of COVID-19. Yes, this film takes us five years — and another world — back to 2020. Meanwhile, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to believe in the virus, as he’s been living in a steady stream of conspiracy theory talk thanks to his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell).

After they battle over the mask rules, Joe decides to run for mayor, which upsets his wife. But are there any good guys here? Sure, Joe is a jerk, but Ted wants to bring a data center to town. Then again, isn’t it a conflict of interest that Joe gets young cops Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Michael Cooke) to be his campaign aids? And what’s with his patrol car being covered with misspelled conspiracy campaign ads? Is that the result of his wife’s guru, would-be cult messiah Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler)?

In the middle of all of this, even the young folks get in over their heads, trying to navigate Black Lives Matter. Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), his friend Brian (Cameron Mann), and social justice influencer Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) want to get Michael on their side, as they’re all white yet wish to belong.

During a televised campaign stop — how big is Eddington? — Joe remarks that Ted sexually assaulted his wife, who has blamed her father, but then again, Vernon’s cult is based around repressed memories that could be false. She leaves him; Joe goes into a noise complaint at Ted’s house and gets slapped.

This causes Joe to flip out. He starts his rampage with the killing of a homeless man, then works his way to Ted’s house, where he shoots him and his son with a sniper rifle, set up to look like Antifa — remember when they were going to attack the suburbs? — before a private jet of heavily armed Antifa actually does arrive in town.

At the same time, Native American Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) learns that the shots that killed Ted and Eric came from his tribe’s land. He figures that the sheriff did it, just as Joe is framing Michael. The point of all of this is moot, as Antifa — who are really terrorists posing as Antifa — attack the town, killing nearly every cop until Brian saves the sheriff, who had been stabbed in the head while randomly blasting a giant machine gun, even hitting Butterfly with a round, before a terrorist kills him. Brian shows up and faces off with the last gunman, killing him and saving Joe. 

But did he save Joe? 

Joe gets everything he wanted. He’s now the mayor, but he’s a vegetable. He can’t speak or even take care of himself, and every action he takes is dictated by his wife’s mother, who uses his power to push her conspiracy agenda while still allowing the data center to open in town. After a long day — and urinating on himself and needing to be cleaned by a nurse who slaps him — she shows Joe her daughter, now pregnant with the cult leader’s baby. At night, she and the male nurse get into bed with one another — and Joe — and he has everything he wants but has no idea it’s happening. Well, maybe he didn’t want his mother-in-law next to him in bed.

Nobody in this is a hero, like how Brian was only into Sarah, not her politics. And yet he becomes a hero for using a gun to save Joe, whose actions have set the town on fire. He becomes a right-wing hero when all he wanted was to sleep with a liberal girl who thought that his politics were performative because, well, they were. 

Aster told Variety that this movie is about “a conflict between a small-town sheriff and mayor, is partially inspired by a similar stand-off that took place in New Mexico during the COVID-19 era.” That sheriff, David E. Frazee, visited the set, and he and the mayor of Estancia, Nathan Dial, are both thanked in the credits. And while Aster had this film in mind before he made Hereditary, he said the main idea was “How can I make a film about the incoherent miasma we’re living in without the film becoming a message?” 

So many questions: Who sponsored the terrorists, with their logo of a hand squeezing the life out of our planet? Was Vernon really abused? Who abused Lou, Ted or her father? What is the significance of the name Solidgoldmagikarp, the AI data center company?

Actually, I learned what it means from this great article on Jacobin: “It turns out “solidgoldmagikarp” is a reference to an actual AI phenomenon. A couple years ago, ChatGPT users discovered that if they asked the AI to repeat the phrase “solidgoldmagikarp,” it caused the chatbot to fritz out, unable to make sense of the command. Why? Because for years, a Reddit user named “solidgoldmagikarp” would log on to the subreddit r/Counting and simply post ascending numbers. So every instance of that phrase was linked to a string of numbers in order. Because these stupid chatbots can’t reason, the machine just spits out something unintelligible. The error has since become a meme. And by becoming a meme, the chatbot can now only make sense of it. Digital hallucinations, which are not real in any sense, become real by virtue of people talking about them enough.”

A lot of people didn’t like this, saying that Aster was trying to make them relive the horror of 2020 with no moral center.  Aster replied, “I think that’s a pretty bad-faith read of the film. I’ve heard people say you let the left have it worse than the right. Which, to me, feels like an insane thing to say. Given that the people who represent the left in the film are, at worst, annoying and frustrating, and the people on the right are, at worst, murdering and ruining lives.”

This is a film about division, and I love it for that. It’s also a director using whatever goodwill he has left from two hits to do whatever he wants to, which is how the best movies arrive.

You can get this on Blu-ray from A24.

From the creators of Christmas Lights, Screamityville is an 84-minute tour of some of the creepiest and most creative Halloween decorations. They claim that “It recreates the experience of driving around on a late October evening in search of your favorite decorated homes in your neighborhood.”

With music that gets you in the mood and well-shot footage, this makes the perfect Halloween movie to have running during a party. It’s a fun way to build excitement and create a festive atmosphere. And as we get further from the holiday, I turn to this to rekindle the Halloween spirit and lift my mood. There’s no narration to get in the way. Just gorgeous vistas of terrifying homes, all lit up to scare the neighbors.

If you love driving around and looking at Halloween decorations, this lets you do it anytime. It’s a convenient way to enjoy spooky sights whenever you want, making it perfect for year-round viewing.

You can get this on Blu-ray or DVD from MVD. You can learn more at the official site.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: A black bounty hunter moves into a rundown apartment complex, but finds herself forced to protect an orphaned boy from the white vampire landlord.

Writer/director Remington Smith’s LandLord is a gripping debut feature that blends social commentary with genre-film thrills. Although set in the present day, it has the urgency and feel of gritty 1970s drive-in features that packed a wallop of criticism along with their action and shocks. 

Adama Abramson gives an intriguing lead performance as a bounty hunter who unwillingly becomes involved in a vampire conspiracy. Cohen Cooper is solid in the second lead role as a young boy whose mother was killed by vampire John William Lawrence (William McKinney) who owns the shabby apartment building around which the film largely revolves. McKinney gives a truly chilling performance as a supernatural villain who exploits his poverty-stricken renters both financially and for their blood, draining them dry in more ways than one. 

Smith paces LandLord well, balancing the social bite and the crime and vampire themes winningly. This well-acted and well-directed feature has something to say, while always keeping the genre-cinema elements at the forefront.  

LandLord screened as part of Nightmares Film Festival, which took place October 16–19, 2025, at the Gateway Film Center in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, visit https://nightmaresfest.com/.

“In October 2006, the community of Briar, Alabama, was terrorized by a series of gruesome killings. This film is an account of the horrors that unfolded during that fateful autumn.”

That’s all that Joe Meredith is telling you about his latest film.

At times, this feels like a true doc. At others, a slasher. And then it feels like nothing else —a movie that approaches the SOV fuzz haze I love, a town filled with darkness, conspiracies, lost in a world that believes in nothing but decay.

There’s a moment when the strange mutant children of Briar are shown in artwork form, and it’s more frightening than any big-budget CGI that you will see this year. And now, there’s also an axe killer, heads getting sliced clean off their bodies and just a sense of dread in every frame. 

People always ask, “What movies scare you?” Joe Meredith’s movies scare me in the best of ways. Instead of falling back on his video game-infused future splatterpunk explorations, this is a totally different tone for him. There’s a final girl named Jax (Cidney Meredith) who is absolutely perfect here; I feel like Chris Farley reviewing this movie. “Remember when you cut off that head, Joe? Yeah? That was awesome.”

This begins and ends with video-distorted Halloween imagery, yet even in those, an evil baby is crying. It’s funny, because in so much horror, I see people walk toward monsters, and I never want them — or the camera — to stop getting closer. In Meredith’s films, I want a distance. I want to stay away, and yet I keep creeping closer, and when that little girl screams upon confronting the cojoined twin baby doll carrying a mutant, I feel like crying too, and the catharsis reminds me why I keep watching movies.

This is pure SOV black tar movie drugs, the kind that I wake up in another room, in the dark, thinking I’m back at my parents’ house, but no, I’m just high in the basement and don’t know how to get back upstairs. Thanks for dosing me, Joe.

You can watch this on YouTube.