Macabre Daily's Matt Orozco beams up 💫, 'Nightbreed' takes centerstage 👹, & more!

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To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Shudder launched a Letterboxd campaign, Favorite Frights on Shudder, featuring actors, directors, journalists and writers to share their 8 favorite films streaming on their platform. The campaign runs through the end of year, which you can follow on their Letterboxd HQ.

No one saw this coming. NO ONE. Ryan Gosling is going to produce a remake of Killer Klowns From Outer Space. [The InSneider]

It looks like we're getting new Gremlins and The Goonies films in 2026. No word yet if they're legacy sequels. [Bloody Disgusting]

After the success of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a third film is currently being developed by Tim Burton. [Deadline]

Matrix: Resurrections didn't do as well as many hoped for, but a fifth film is coming our way via writer and director Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods)

I wasn't a fan of Skinamarink when it came out. I understand it's appeal, but the mostly silent film and still camerawork just didn't do it for me. While watching The House Was Not Hungry Then, I felt like I was watching Skinamarink all over again. It's effective, but very slow, and the ending was just strange altogether. [written by Brett]

I (Bee) recently covered three back-to-back film festivals -- Boston Underground, Unnamed Footage Festival, and Overlook Film Festival -- so I thought this week I'd take a look at my top three picks across the festival circuit. Here are the top indies everyone should keep an eye out for:

Revenge thrillers are as old as time itself. From genre benchmarks Virgin Spring and I Spit on Your Grave to modern fare like Revenge and Violation, revenge has always been an essential storytelling mechanism. To truly stand out, you must do one of two things: perfect conventions or flip the script. Filmmakers Kevin and Matthew McManus position their collaborative release, Redux Redux, which has been making the festival rounds this year, including at this spring’s Overlook Film Festival, firmly in the latter category. With a universe-hopping trick, the film injects revenge with a necessary dose of grief that feels grounded and earnest yet out of this world. [Read Bee's review]

We all know at least one YouTuber or TikTok star who’s been canceled. For whatever reason, their legion of adoring fans turns on them. There’s usually no way coming back from that, but a well-meaning comeback tour typically includes a staged apology. Fans scoff, and the brand goes under. Thistle (Nancy Webb) and her partner Blair (Andi E. McQueen) undergo a similar situation in Kaye Adelaide’s The Rebrand, playing this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival. Adelaide, who co-wrote the script with Webb, manages to craft a glaring glimpse into the lifestyle of fake influencers who’ll do anything for views and likes. It’s most effective in its earnest performances from its central cast, giving way to a character collapse in plain view. [Read Bee's review]

The thing about found footage is that it’s unlike any other genre. You have room to play, experiment, and dabble. While other genres are more tightly confined in style and tone, found footage allows—no, dares—you to push the limit and stretch boundaries until they snap off in your eyes. Any found footage fiend will tell you that the trick to a compelling story is a filmmaker’s ability to deliver thrills and chills with very few resources. From The Blair Witch Project to #MissingCouple, many genre favorites prove that a healthy mix of scares works best to conjure up terrible frights. Ehrland Hollingsworth clearly understands the assignment with his new feature, Dooba Dooba, playing this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival. [Read Bee's review]

Sure, monsters are scary. They're portrayed negatively in almost every film. They also come in many different shapes, colors and sizes... but can also be human. This week's Let's Get Listicle is all about Misunderstood Monsters and includes films that feature monsters in a good light, not as pure evil. Check out our list on Letterboxd.

“To be able to fly, to be smoke, or a wolf? To know the night and live in it forever? That's not so bad. You call us 'monsters,' but when you dream, you dream of flying, and changing, and living without death. You envy us, and what you envy…”

Clive Barker isn’t just a master of horror, he is a master of imagination, and “Cabal” is one of his most profound works because of how layered it is. Barker’s story about a man, Boone, who doesn’t feel like he belongs and seeks out the supposed “monsters in Midian” as his final refuge from a world he doesn’t see himself in. Barker has always been a hero of mine because of how well he weaves his narratives around social constructs and subtext around society without ever bludgeoning you with a message. You can read many of his books and walk away satisfied with just the story and worldbuilding. Still, upon a closer look you can see the depth of his sense of struggle as an out Gay man at a time when persecution and the AIDS epidemic was disproportionately killing people like him all over the world. Not only that, LGBTQIA+ people still haven’t overcome the stigma that was so pervasive in the 80s and 90s despite gains in awareness and acceptance. As a cisgender hetero man, I can’t connect with Barker’s experience or that of the LBTQIA+ in the same way, but as someone who for a long time never felt like they belonged, “Cabal” resonated with me at a young age well after I had seen the film that was based on it, Nightbreed.

As described in my introduction, I grew up being bullied for most of my pre-college life and spent a lot of time with psychiatrists trying to understand myself. I was on various medications, some of which have left me with physical side effects like tics, and while I was able to find a recipe that worked it took me almost 37 years to discover it, and a lot of different doctors with only one truly being effective. Being a fan of horror films at a young age in the late 80s and 90s, I wasn’t like a lot of my peers and found solace with the monsters that I saw in movies. Some of my family worried about me, many of them didn’t understand me, and despite best efforts I went without friends up until mid-way through high school when I found punk rock music and other folks who were at least adjacent to my interests. When I first saw Nightbreed I wasn’t thinking about it at a thematic level, I was drawn to the monsters on the cover of the VHS tape. These weren’t vampires or werewolves, these were creatures that my imagination couldn’t even comprehend. They were so vivid and alive, and when I took the movie home to watch I knew I’d found a movie that would forever be one of my favorites.

However, Nightbreed isn’t a perfect film. It’s been known that Barker had multiple cuts of the film, some of them incomplete and for a long time considered “lost.” For a child at the age 6-8 (I can’t honestly remember the exact age) none of that resonated with me, largely because I was too young to understand and appreciate the difference between a director’s vision and the final cut that is often meddled with by studios and producers. Also, there was no pedestrian internet so there was few ways of knowing some of the backend details of these productions save for Fangoria and, to a lesser extent, Gorezone. Over the years, through a rigorous campaign from a dedicated group of Nightbreed fans the Director’s Cut was eventually released in a small theatrical run and also on Blu-Ray from Scream Factory! I was fortunate enough to be living in LA when the Director’s Cut was shown at a handful of screenings amongst originals of Clive Barker’s concept art, and words cannot describe the sense of joy I had in being privy to this experience. Even more surprising, the mythical workprint of the “Cabal Cut” appeared on Blu-ray and without question I purchased my copy, coincidentally I received the 1/100 copy, although that limitation is somewhat tainted by a minor scandal all too familiar in collectible communities when more copies were made than advertised and being sold after the initial run was gone. I’m not mad about this, because everyone should have a chance to support the art they choose, plus, I never planned on selling it.

Despite not being a perfect film, especially critically, it was perfect for me. It has some of the most creative creature designs ever committed to film, and it has some outstanding performances from folks like David Cronenberg as the despicable Dr. Decker and Craig Schaffer as the lead character, Boone. The Director’s Cut is certainly a more complete film than the theatrical, which flows well but feels like it is missing some significant story beats, and the Cabal Cut is excessive in ways that detract from what makes the film great, but it has it’s own charm. I think I prefer the theatrical, but that could just be nostalgia bias, and I’m happy that multiple versions exist so folks like myself can observe what was intended, what was cut, and what was made widely available. Regardless of the version you choose, the subtext that the book it’s based on reveled in are here, even if it is only in glimpses. Take the aforementioned Dr. Decker, a psychiatrist who masquerades as a serial killer while convincing his vulnerable patient, Boone, that he is the one committing the crimes. Cronenberg has attacked the psychiatric industry before in films like The Brood (check out my review of the Second Sight 4K release) where Oliver Reed’s Dr. Hal Raglan who is using his patient, Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) as a mechanism to push forward a new therapy that literally materializes emotions into mutated progeny that exact Nola’s murderous will. I don’t know if Cronenberg hates psychiatry, but he sure does have a distrust of it as does Barker in this characterization of the manipulative Decker.

To some extent, I can relate. I’ve had more than 5 psychiatrists over the course of my life and multiple therapists. Out of all of them, only one of them was ever able to help me understand myself and grapple with my Generalized Anxiety Disorder and ADHD. She is one of the main reasons I wanted to take ownership of Macabre Daily, but for each one of her there were multiple that were at best drug dispensers, and at worst, uncaring and ineffective pushing medications on me that did me long-term harm. To be fair, when I was under 18 I didn’t have much say, or at least until my teenage years when I could articulate to my mother the adverse experiences with many of the medications I was being prescribed, and has to this day left me with a sense of skepticism around the efficacy of some psychiatrists, but not all. I’ve seen this take shape with family members as well who rely on doctors for medications presuming they are the cure-all without acknowledging that medication is part of a solution, not the only solution.

Back to the monsters in Midian. On the surface they may look scary and even present as such, like Peloquin who threatens Boone during his first encounter by proclaiming one of the most iconic lines in horror cinema, “Everything is true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live... And you came to die.” Peloquin intentions are to not just scare Boone away, but also to possibly eat him thus breaking the “law” that Midian has to avoid drawing attention to their subterranean community. Peloquin isn’t just threating Boone because he’s a monster, he’s doing it to protect himself and those like him. He knows that the human world can’t and won’t understand them, and will treat them based purely by their appearance as something to be killed and gone from this world. Preservation isn’t just about personal resiliance, it’s about having a strong community to support, defend, and uphold each other when threats come their way. I think in our current context, this can’t be understated as in the US there is a wide-range of persistent persecutions againstg LGBTQIA+ people, non-white people, and even religious discrimination. As a person who is of Mexican heritage, not a day goes by that I’m not saddened by how so many of my fellow citizens and government demonize people who speak a different language, look different, and come from different backgrounds. As someone who has to be actively aware of my mental health disorders, I’m terrified by the thought that the government may make medications I need to live a full life could become illegal.

Like the inhabitants of Midian, over the last decade I’ve sought community from people like me with a shared interest in horror movies. One thing that is a constant theme is that many horror fans have felt the experience of being “othered” either because of how they look, how they love, how they speak, and what they believe in among other reasons. There is an almost universal sentiment that horror is for those who don’t fit in, but really, it’s the world that hasn’t made space for us and horror has. It’s why horror fans relate to the Final Girl archetype, the survivor who faces the most traumatic situations, or the misunderstood icons like Frankenstein’s Monster who didn’t ask to be made the way he is, but is judged because of his difference. There is no Midian for societies outliers in the real sense, but it does exist in pockets where you find your “tribe” like those in Nightbreed who align themselves as part of the “tribes of the moon.” We must protect these communities from being uprooted, disrupted, and destroyed by those who seek to harm them for no other logical reason than hatred. Like the police state who descend upon Midian in the final act of the film, with their modern weapons that overpower even the supernatural capabilities of Midian’s citizens, there are genuine threats to those who refuse to accept a world that only looks, acts, and sounds a certain way. On the 35th anniversary of one of my favorite films, I take solace in knowing that there is resistance to these threats, and that the sentiments and themes inherent to Nightbreed will be relevant in perpetuity. We cannot assume that human nature can be stifled to such an extent that it removes free will entirely, but we can make strides in creating a world where a Midian isn’t as necessary. Because Midian isn’t just where the monsters live, it’s an idea for a world where everyone can be their authentic selves free of judgement and supported through the inherent diversity we all exhibit.

The Chattanooga Film Festival makes its triumphant return to the Chattanooga Theatre Center for the 12th edition of what MovieMaker Magazine calls one of The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World! It all goes down in-person June 20-22 with the virtual side of the festival continuing through the 28th.