A scuba diver goes into the water looking for his father’s remains and gets swallowed by a sperm whale with one hour of oxygen left in his tank. That’s the premise of Whalefall, and it’s not even the strangest thing opening this month.
Horror has had a loud year. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple came and went without the attention it deserved, Obsession turned into a hit nobody saw coming, and Backrooms looks like the opening move of a franchise that’s going to be with us for a while.
Now comes October, which horror studios have treated as home turf for decades. Thirteen movies are arriving over the next few weeks, in theaters and on streaming, and 10 of them are worth walking you through.
Oct. 2 is a traffic jam
Five releases land on the same day, which tells you how confident everyone is feeling.
Beware Boiúna is the monster movie of the bunch. Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe and Logan Marshall-Green play young doctors on a medical outreach mission deep in the Amazonian rainforest, where the locals aren’t happy to see them and the vibes are off from the jump.
What they eventually run into is Boiúna, an enormous mythological snake that prowls the area. A group of people fighting a creature from the depths of the Amazon sounds like a fine way to spend a night out.
Colleen Hoover goes dark
Verity takes a different route entirely. It’s an erotic thriller adapted from a novel by Colleen Hoover, the author behind the box-office romantic hit It Ends With Us, and Michael Showalter directs.
Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling ghostwriter who gets handed a dream job. Josh Hartnett’s Jeremy Crawford hires her to finish the last novel of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a beloved mystery author who can’t write following a terrible accident.
Lowen moves into the Crawfords’ home. Then she develops a fixation with Verity and starts slowly taking over her life.
The Influencer Project points found footage at influencer culture. Chiara King plays herself, traveling to Copenhagen with a documentary crew to shoot something that promises her followers an unvarnished look at her life. A local stalker takes notice.
Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale are producing, which matters here. They made The Blair Witch Project, so they know exactly how much a shaky camera can do.
A horror anthology about generative AI
Appofeniacs comes from director Chris Marrs Piliero, with an ensemble cast that includes Sean Gunn, and it takes a stab at generative AI and the chaos it can be used to cause.
The film runs as vignettes that get woven together by the end. One follows a ride-share driver who crosses paths with an unstable individual. Another follows a girl who becomes the subject of an online smear campaign.
And then there’s Other Mommy, which went viral off a trailer that premiered alongside The Odyssey. People online fixated on roughly a second of footage showing some very creepy contortions.
Jessica Chastain stars, and she looks poised for a comeback after a stretch of steady but under-the-radar work. Rob Savage directs, adapting the book Incidents Around the House. A little girl (Arabella Olivia Clarke) is haunted by a supernatural presence that looks exactly like her mother.
Oct. 16 brings a 1971 scandal back
The Devils is one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it movies. Ken Russell’s film arrived in 1971 to fierce controversy, censorship and criticism, and now it’s getting a 4K director’s cut that shows his full vision, 15 years after his death.
The story draws on Aldous Huxley’s novel The Devils of Loudun, about a priest from the 1600s who was burned at the stake after being accused of seducing an entire convent. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave give two of the best performances of their careers.
If you’d rather have creatures, Crawlers has spiders. Venomous ones, in numbers big enough that police quarantine an entire apartment building.
Ángel Gómez Hernández directs, and Matilda Lutz plays the building’s manager, who knows the layout well enough to help residents survive. She also has arachnophobia. Of course she does.
Two Tribeca premieres, two very bad deals
Breeder gets a limited theatrical release after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. Daniel Doheny plays a broke college student who finds a great deal online and moves onto the remote ranch of a poodle breeder (Dot Marie Jones) who offers to fund his research.
Boarding isn’t free. She needs his help, and she’s moving on from poodles to bigger, more ambitious projects.
Hallowarrior also came out of Tribeca and lands on Shudder. Ben Sottak directs Milly Shapiro, of Hereditary, as Pumpkin, a girl in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who deals with her loneliness by surrounding herself with Halloween paraphernalia.
A group of scavengers turns up promising escape. It goes badly, and Pumpkin ends up fighting for her life.
One hour of air
Which brings us back to Whalefall, adapted by writer-director Brian Duffield from the Daniel Kraus novel. Austin Abrams fans have had this one circled on the fall calendar for months.
Abrams plays the diver hunting for his father’s remains at sea. The whale gets him at the start of the expedition, not the end. Everything after that happens on a timer.
