Lenore (2026)

        After its UK premiere at Horror On Sea last January, this intriguing ultra low budget Australian attempt at giving us a variation on ‘Poe for the internet age’ is getting a digital release from Seven Tales.

In a grim basement room filled with monitors, computers and recording equipment Max Wren (Nicolas Jaquinot) is putting together a documentary on Lenore. Up until recently Lenore, whose real name is Victoria Brand (Ruby Duncan), has been an online phenomenon and internet personality, with millions of followers thanks to her variety of chat, music videos and immense number of costume changes. 

But Lenore has disappeared after what seems to have been a controversial publicity stunt where seven minutes of her having a miscarriage in the bath was edited into prime time children’s TV show Play School (a real Australian show and, of course a major one in the UK from 1964 - 1988). Max intends the documentary as a tribute but strange things start to happen. Someone visits with a tape that reveals part of Victoria’s early life and other messages start to appear on Max’s monitor. Is he going insane or is something else going on?

The surnames of the protagonists (Wren and Brand) are steals from David Cronenber’s VIDEODROME, but the aesthetic here is closer to Poe in its conceit. LENORE is ultra low budget but opens very well indeed and also has a banger of an ending, to the extent that it can be forgiven for a middle sequence that drags and feels garbled and confusing. Performances are all absolutely fine and if you fancy a low budget tale of incipient claustrophobic madness, LENORE is worth a watch.

LENORE is out on Digital from Seven Tales on Monday 21st September 2026

 

Where Darkness Dwells (2025)

         Following its UK premiere at Grimmfest’s digital festival last December, director, co-writer and actor Michael May’s low budget piece of cosmic horror is getting a digital release from GrimmVision.

Trish Bostwick (Tara Perry) works for an online magazine where she spends her days compiling top tens and then posting inflammatory remarks in the comments under an alias in order to help drum up traffic. When she latches on to the report of a recently missing hiker that may be connected to other disappearances she convinces her editor to let her pursue the story.

Her investigations take her to a remote hospital in New Hampshire where the inmates all take part in strange art therapies and where the doctors seem to be distinctly odd. Driving away she encounters a man armed with a knife who is trying to escape the place, after which she wakes up in one of the hospital beds, herself now a patient. What exactly is going on and is the whole thing the front for some esoteric cult?

You can probably guess the answer to that one. WHERE DARKNESS DWELLS is half a reasonably decent ultra low-budget film, but once things start to get strange the movie doesn’t really know what to do with itself. The “ancient book” of magic that is all of “two hundred years old” will raise a smile from many reading this who no doubt have older and better behaved books on their own shelves, although I suppose these things have to be written sometime. Unfortunately the whole thing is all just a little bit too homemade and just not sufficiently odd enough for that to count in its favour. 

WHERE DARKNESS DWELLS is out on GrimmVision on Monday 21st September 2026

Obsession (2026)

 

“Great Horror from a Grand Tradition”

After its phenomenally successful theatrical run, during which it became one of the top ten moneymakers of the year, writer-director Curry Barker’s debut feature is now on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD from Universal.

Bear (Michael Johnston) is hopelessly in love with long-term friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) but has no idea how to explain how he feels. When she drops he crystal necklace down the sink Bear sees it as an ideal opportunity to get her a new one with the plan of using it as an inroad to telling her everything. However, instead he comes out of the necklace shop with a ‘One Wish Willow’ - a piece of wood which the instructions claim will grant you a single wish, and that it will be forever. Bear makes the wish, snaps the wood, and his world changes.

Everything is okay for a bit, but then it becomes obvious that instead of just being the lover and friend Bear craves, his wish has turned Nikki into a pathologically (and homicidally) jealous monster, one that will stop at nothing to have her Bear with her all the time and forever. Is there any way the wish can be broken?

OBSESSION belongs to a very long tradition of horror based around the simple premise of ‘Clueless individual does something without thinking it through properly and disaster ensues’. Examples include everything from W W Jacobs’ classic tale The Monkey’s Paw through the tales of EC comics and Robert Bloch to mad scientist movies and more. What Barker’s film cleverly taps into is the very real concerns modern audiences have about loneliness, relationships, abuse and sexual politics. Nikki becomes a monster but Bear is very much the creator of that monster and, in that great horror tradition, he, and everyone around him including Nikki herself, suffer accordingly.

Add in the fact that Barker has hit the ground running in terms of his ability to create extremely effective, shocking and often violent moments of horror, and that he has the skill to sometimes have you laughing at the proceedings, and it’s not surprising that the film has done so well. Johnston is excellent as the bumbling, socially hopeless Bear but the breakout star of OBSESSION is Inde Navarrette who has quite justifiably received high praise for her interpretation of the role of Nikki. Navarrette evinces audience sympathy while at the same time terrifying them, while also possessing the skill to make the laugh out loud moments work deliciously well.

Universal’s disc comes with a 19 minute extra that features the main stars (Johnston, Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless) and Curry Barker discussing the film, while Barker returns for a feature length commentary track. As you might expect for a horror fan who has got to direct his first feature, he’s bursting with enthusiasm while at the same time extremely grateful to the talented newcomers who sound as if they gave their all to make OBSESSION as good as it is. A deserved hit, a future classic and an essential movie for every serious disc collector's library. 

Curry Barker’s OBSESSION is out from Universal on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD now

Marshmallow (2026)

“Refreshingly Different Summer Camp Horror”

Director Daniel Purgatorio’s MARSHMALLOW has been available on Shudder in the US for a while, and now it’s finally getting a UK release on Blu-ray courtesy of new label Toy Robot Video.

12 year old Morgan (Kue Lawrence) is about to attend his first summer camp, which will hopefully provide a distraction from his recurring dreams of drowning. He finds the camp to be the usual movie mix of bullies and nerds but soon makes some friends, including Pilar (Kai Cech). One night, around the campfire, the counsellors tell the made-up tale of The Doctor, apparently a lunatic who lived near the camp and stitched his victims’ bodies together. But for Morgan and his friends (and the rest of the camp’s attendees) The Doctor is about to become frighteningly real.

And that’s all that can be safely said about MARSHMALLOW, a film that plays with expectations, suffice to say if you’re expecting a generic slasher piece (and the film spends a good half an hour convincing you that’s what this is going to be) then you’ll be very pleasantly surprised at how things pan out. It also gives you pause to think about the long-term implications of its central concept, something we see all-too rarely in low budget horror films.

Toy Robot’s Blu-ray includes a commentary track from Purgatorio, Lawrence and Cech. There’s also a one minute deleted scene, three minutes on the filming of the dream sequences which look as if it was shot on a phone, as well as three video podcast interviews: director Purgatorio (10 minutes), writer Andy Gresgoviak (1o minutes) and Purgatorio and actor Dylan Friedman, who plays one of the kids. 

You also get two Purgatorio-directed short films: Other (15 minutes) and Body(s) (18 minutes), as well as storyboards, a behind the scenes gallery, three trailers and what looks like the entire screenplay. 

Daniel Purgatorio’s MARSHMALLOW is out on Blu-ray from Toy Robot Video on Monday 14th September 2026

 

The Spirit Lock (2026)

 

        Seven Tales are releasing new British horror film THE SPIRIT LOCK on digital. It’s directed by Steven Fierberg who has a stack of cinematographer credits but will probably be best known to readers here as being the DP of Renny Harlin’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 4: THE DREAM MASTER. 

Karl Mellor (Joe Anderson) and his wife Vanessa (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi) are convinced there is something horribly wrong with their son Kit (Stefanos Paraskevopoulos), to the point where they believe he may be possessed. They turn to the church but Father Bailey (Tim Downie) can find no evidence for concern, in fact the boy can handle a Bible and quote from it better than most children his age.

Karl isn’t reassured, and turns to a dodgy bloke in a pub car park from whom he buys the Spirit Lock of the title - a device that can apparently draw a demon out of someone and cause its destruction. But Karl is also warned that the device may not work in the way he wants.

Director Fierberg isn’t the only one with genre credentials in THE SPIRIT LOCK. Star Joe Anderson was also in 2008’s THE RUINS (“I can’t feel my legs!”), the remake of THE CRAZIES and Darren Lynn Bousman’s ABATTOIR (2016), and look down the crew list and you'll find one of the first assistant directors is Peter Manoogian - the same Peter Manoogian who directed the Empire classic ELIMINATORS. The location - a gloomy old country house in Norfolk - and the Spirit Lock device itself all add to the atmosphere, but the script is very slight, such that you quickly get the feeling this would have worked better as a 30 minute segment in an anthology movie, or TV show like Tom De Ville’s Urban Gothic or even Night Gallery. But if you’re looking for something creepy that might remind you of the kind of thing Dan Curtis used to put in his anthology movies then you might want to give THE SPIRIT LOCK a look.

Steven Fierberg’s THE SPIRIT LOCK is out on digital from Seven Tales on Monday 7th September 2026

Mockbuster (2026)

“Hugely Entertaining Look at Making Movies for The Asylum”

It’s highly likely that everyone visiting this site will have seen at least one movie made by American ultra low budget exploitation outfit The Asylum (“We make shitty movies for people with bad taste. And alcoholics.”). Highlights include ABRAHAM LINCOLN VS ZOMBIES, MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS and the entire SHARKNADO series. But what’s it like to direct one of these hastily shot, cobbled together pieces of trashy cinema? To work with stars like Michael Paré or Eric Roberts? And to do it all within the allotted shooting schedule of six days?

Well that’s what MOCKBUSTER, which is getting a Digital release from Miracle Media, is all about. Film-maker Anthony Frith, who up until the point of starting this project had basically only made corporate training films and silly YouTube videos, decided to film his journey when he applied to The Asylum to direct a movie. And they said yes.

The extra element here is that Anthony wasn’t based in Hollywood but in Australia, and when the studio okayed his project it was up to him to find a cast and crew all by himself while still waiting for a script to turn up and with very little prep time. What MOCKBUSTER does is follow his progress through production ‘conferences’ (often taking place on a park bench), casting, script read throughs and the shooting of the movie - an extremely loose and not at all faithful version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT. 

Full marks are due to Mr Frith who, as well as weathering the storm of insane low budget film-making, also managed to make an impressively entertaining documentary about the whole experience. Even of you’ve never seen an Asylum movie, and if you never have any intention of doing so, MOCKBUSTER provides a fascinating, valuable and above all highly enjoyable look at movie-making that’s decidedly outside the mainstream. Absolutely worth a look if you have any interest in how movies are made. Here’s the trailer:

Anthony Frith’s MOCKBUSTER is out on Digital from Miracle Media on Monday 27th July 2026

The Curse (2026)

“Splatter-Filled J-Horror”

After its UK premiere at Glasgow Frightfest (and its world premiere at Fantastic Fest), Blue Finch are releasing director Kenichi Ugana’s new J-Horror picture THE CURSE on digital. 

Riko works at a hair salon. Scrolling through her social media one morning she comes across a photograph of one of her  friends that shows an unnerving spectre in the background. When she tries to contact the friend it turns out the girl died months ago. Her flatmate presumes it’s someone impersonating her and puts a post on the picture, only to be rewarded with a string of insults and a video showing someone smashing a bleeding doll with a hammer while chanting a curse.

Riko’s flatmate starts bleeding from the eyes and soon she’s committing violent acts upon herself, as well as eating a local dog. Eventually she kills herself (very graphically) by stabbing herself in the throat. It’s not long before Riko realises she’s the next target of the curse and, together with three friends, tries to find a way to stop it.

THE CURSE is low budget but does its damnedest to keep you interested with over the top gore, some eye-catching special effects and, most important of all, a climax that could stand alongside some of the crazier Italian giallos for the amount of mayhem that ensues. Anyone expecting the ‘quiet horror’ of RINGU or JU-ON should be warned that THE CURSE gets pretty noisy pretty quickly, and as such it makes for a highly entertaining, of not exactly subtle, modern entry in the J-Horror subgenre. Here’s the trailer:

THE CURSE is out on Digital platforms from Blue Finch Releasing on Monday 13th July 2026

The Morrigan (2026)

“Reminiscent of Late 1980s Italian Horror”

That is not a recommendation by the way, unless you are a fan of a very particular type of exploitation cinema. Marcello Avallone’s SPECTERS (1987), the films Lucio Fulci made when he wasn’t very well, and pretty much the entire oeuvre of Claudio Fragasso (MONSTER DOG, TROLL 2) will all occur to fans of a certain age if they watch THE MORRIGAN, a film filled with non-sequiturs, name actors uttering nonsensical dialogue, and a complete lack of understanding of how radios and telephones work.

Archaeologist Fiona Scott (Saffron Burrows) wants to go to a remote island off the coast of Ireland to excavate the site where she believes The Morrigan is buried. Folklore suggests it’s an ancient and powerful demon but she thinks it’s probably just a powerful female chieftain who got a bad press. She gets to go but because of The Patriarchy her horrible boss Dr Jonathan (Jonathan Forbes) gets to lead the expedition.

To cheer herself up Fiona takes her whiny, petulant, vodka-swilling recently-expelled reprobate of a teenaged daughter Lily (Emily Flain) with her to a place with no internet or mobile phone signal. But it does have priest James Cosmo who can be contacted by radio (although he answers the phone when contacted which suggests some novel wiring, or possibly editing) as well as hotel owner Toby Stephens.

The excavations proceed! They dig a tiny tunnel. Fiona crawls to its end. The tunnel collapses. Fiona finds herself in a cavern with a sarcophagus, In the next scene this extremely heavy-looking object that could not possibly fit down a tiny Saffron Burrows-sized tunnel is back at the hotel. Lily opens it, turns into a monster and goes on the rampage.

THE MORRIGAN wastes a bunch of good actors and some decent locations. Credit is due to Emily Flain who really lets rip with her transformation into the title creature, but overall the execution is all too ramshackle, careless and clumsy, making you think of a bad Jess Franco film in its ‘couldn’t be bothered’ lack of attention to things that repeatedly draw you out of the action. One only for obsessive fans of the leads, and those of us who have to watch everything. Here’s a trailer to help you make up your mind if you want to:

THE MORRIGAN is out on Digital from Thunderbird Releasing on Monday 29th June 2026