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Since the early days of Doom and Quake, super-fast FPS games – the now-dubbed boomer shooters – have brought us some of the best PC games of all time. Combine that speed and power with one of the most luridly compelling settings, the eldritch unknown of Lovecraftian horror, brought to life in striking comic-strip style, and you have Forgive Me Father 2. One year since developer Byte Barrel launched it into early access, the full 1.0 release arrives today on Steam, and it’s one you’ll definitely want to see for yourself.

Forgive Me Father 2 ticks all the boxes of a great boomer shooter. It’s fast but slick, driving along its relentless action with a pulse-quickening soundtrack. The Lovecraft-inspired setting brings some fantastic atmosphere and design to the world, continuing the tale of the Priest from the first entry. It boasts a look that could stand out in any crowd; a dark fantasy whirlwind of gloriously vibrant comic book shading, lavished with blood and tentacles aplenty. And then of course there’s the guns, the beating heart of all the best FPS games.

It’s safe to say you’re spoilt for choice in this regard. Forgive Me Father 2 hands you some of the most inventive weapon designs I’ve seen in a long while, each lovingly animated with distinctive and bizarre firing styles. What starts out as your run-of-the-mill handguns, revolvers, and shotguns quickly descends into the realm of the eldritch and surreal...

The manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's classic short story The Call of Cthulhu is now available in English, just in time for Halloween. Written and illustrated by Gou Tanabe and published by Dark Horse, The Call of Cthulhu manga is a 288-page paperback with incredible cover art and a distinctive aesthetic that feels fitting for a Lovecraft story. It's very reasonably priced at $20--though Amazon is selling it for $18. A Kindle edition is available for for $12.

The Call of Cthulhu is the second Lovecraft manga release of 2024. In July, Dark Horse published At the Mountains of Madness Deluxe Edition, a 626-page doorstopper collecting both volumes of the classic Lovecraft tale. At the Mountains of Madness Deluxe Edition manga is on sale for $32.58 (was $50) at Amazon...

‘FILMFEAR’ COLLECTION – STREAMING ON CHANNEL 4 UNTIL 2ND NOVEMBER

• ENYS MEN
• SMILE
• IN THE EARTH
• THE LODGE
• AMULET
• FIRESTARTER
• BULL
• X
• ALONE
• WEREWOLVES WITHIN
• A BANQUET
• THE THING (2011)
• THE INNOCENTS
• FRESH

‘COMPLETELY BEN WHEATLEY’ COLLECTION – STREAMING ON CHANNEL 4 UNTIL 15TH NOVEMBER

• DOWN TERRACE
• KILL LIST
• SIGHTSEERS
• A FIELD IN ENGLAND
• HIGH-RISE
• FREE FIRE
• THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

Is there anything better than a truly terrifying movie? One that gets your heart pounding, makes you jump out of your seat or sleep with the lights on?

We don’t think so, but with streaming services giving us an endless supply of horror films at our fingertips, it can be hard to know which can give you a true fright night, and which are child’s play.

That's why in 2020 we founded the Science of Scare Project, an experiment to categorically find the scariest movies in existence, based on what gets hearts pumping and pulses racing.

Now in its fourth year, the Science of Scare is back and bigger than ever tracking the scariest movies ever made...

Palantir, a controversial US tech firm founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, has secured its first contract with a UK police force, Leicestershire Police, to provide a 'police intelligence and investigation platform,' raising ongoing concerns about data privacy...

Palantir is a controversial choice, as some community leaders, campaign groups and members of Parliament have raised concerns about giving the company access to public data. Aasiya Bora, a former Green party police and crime commissioner candidate, expressed serious concerns: “The idea that Palantir is now extending their reach into police data has to concern us. How will the data be used? Who will keep them accountable?”

... Palantir's tech is already in use in US police forces and has been accused of creating ‘racist’ feedback loops. According to experts, the technology has led to people in already over-policed neighbourhoods becoming targets for police abuse. Palantir has previously refused to comment on software it has provided to US police forces. There is no indication that this is the same tech in use at Leicestershire Police.

The company recently faced criticism over a multi-million pound NHS deal to join patient data between different NHS trusts, and was awarded several contracts during the pandemic without tender. Palantir's lack of track record in healthcare and murky links to US and UK spy agencies made it unfit to take on the job, according to campaigners. Palantir maintains that it has never had access to any identifiable medical records.

... More recently, leaked emails revealed that Palantir hired PR firm Topham Guerin to pay influencers to attack the Good Law Project, a not-for-profit campaign organisation, on social media. Good Law Project had been raising concerns about a £330m deal between Palantir and the government to process millions of NHS patient records. Jo Maugham, director at the Good Law Project, said “Palantir, in covertly paying influencers to smear us, ought to have disbarred itself from providing police intelligence services. If it is capable of dishonestly smearing its critics, why is it not capable of manufacturing intelligence about them?”

The manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's classic short story The Call of Cthulhu is now available in English, just in time for Halloween. Written and illustrated by Gou Tanabe and published by Dark Horse, The Call of Cthulhu manga is a 288-page paperback with incredible cover art and a distinctive aesthetic that feels fitting for a Lovecraft story. It's very reasonably priced at $20--though Amazon is selling it for $18. A Kindle edition is available for for $12.

The Call of Cthulhu is the second Lovecraft manga release of 2024. In July, Dark Horse published At the Mountains of Madness Deluxe Edition, a 626-page doorstopper collecting both volumes of the classic Lovecraft tale. At the Mountains of Madness Deluxe Edition manga is on sale for $32.58 (was $50) at Amazon...

There is no greater advertisement for the virtues of patience than No Man’s Sky. The game was an underwhelming fart when it first released back in 2016. Now it’s one of the best titles around, thanks to continuing support by developer Hello Games. The company just dropped a surprise Halloween-themed update and it’s pretty darned cool.

The latest release is called The Cursed and it’s filled to the brim with creepy stuff to experience. There’s a whole new “twilight universe” where “players will fight to keep a grip on reality while haunted by visions and voices from another dimension.” Time can shift unexpectedly and players could encounter “spectral anomalies.” There’s also no FTL in this twisted realm, forcing players to strategically use the ancient portal network.

This kind of reality-bending nonsense seems plucked straight out of the Gamecube classic Eternal Darkness or, more recently, the horror fishing sim Dredge. I’m very much here for it...

Members Club may be the rarest type of comedy horror movie. The plot follows a group of middle aged men who work together in a strip group known as Wet Dreams. Business is not as strong as it once and their manager soon announces he will be selling the company. Just when things are at their worst, the friends are offered a lucrative gig. They soon learn they are part of a bloody scheme to resurrect a centuries old witch.

Folk horror can be difficult to define. It is not as in your face as a slasher or as obvious as a haunted house story. Since it is based in folklore, this makes the definition very broad. It is one of those cases of “I know it when I see it.” However, most people will agree there are not many folk horror comedy movies. (Unless you count ghost stories as folk horror, in which case there are a large number of films that mix folk horror and comedy.)

There are no ghosts in Members Club, but there are witches, books of magic, rituals, sacrifices, and a number of mystical symbols. The creature design is great with the witch being of the old hag variety. She looks suitably disgusting. There are also some great special effects involving missing eyes, body parts being removed, and some gruesome deaths...

... Stanley has confirmed that ‘Dunwich Horror’ is indeed happening. The announcement was made during a ‘Color Out of Space’ retrospective screening of the film at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, where Stanley revealed ‘Dunwich’ to be his next project.

In ‘Dunwich Horror,’ an invisible creature terrorizes the small and isolated village of Dunwich for several days, killing two families and several policemen, until Armitage, Rice, and Morgan arrive with the knowledge and spiritual weapons needed to kill it.

So, Stanley’s exoneration in French court seems to have helped him in turning his proposed Lovecraft trilogy into a reality. Production List has ‘Dunwich Horror’ now eyeing a June 2, 2025 shoot on the film.

“The Dunwich Horror” will be produced by Ace Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with Side Street Studios, continuing Stanley’s deep dive into the enigmatic world of Lovecraft. In a rather ambitious move, Stanley also revealed that ‘Dunwich Horror’ will be adapted into a two-part film, allowing for a “more expansive and detailed exploration of the story's complex themes and haunting atmosphere”...

It's natural to feel some trepidation about darkness. It's a survival instinct, rooted in the need to protect ourselves from very real predators. Cosmic horror is a little different: The only present danger the blackness of space presents is its inhospitable nature, and that only matters to the scientists (and billionaires) going up there. And yet, we still look at the blackness of space and find things to be afraid of. That's where cosmic horror, the genre pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft, comes from.

We like to think of humanity as being the center of the universe. As far as we can tell thus far, we are. Not in that the Earth is the center around which the universe spins, but in that we haven't yet found any confirmed signs of life and, thus, can really only worry about ourselves. Cosmic horror wonders at our insignificance against the vastness of space--millions of stars, billions of planets, and an almost infinite opportunity for other life to thrive. That life could be larger, older, and more powerful than us. It could be so large, so unfathomably ancient to our comparatively short-lived civilization, that we're as significant to it as ants are to us.

Cosmic horror is also equal parts fascinated and terrified by scientific discovery and the curse of knowledge. It fears the potential of knowing the unknowable and being unable to forget it, and what that can do to the human mind. It's fascinated with madness, superstition, and existential dread.

• Alien (1979)
• Stalker (1979)
• The Thing (1982)
• In The Mouth of Madness (1994)
• Event Horizon (1997)
• Call of Cthulhu (2005)
• The Mist (2007)
• Cabin in the Woods (2011)
• Under the Skin (2013)
• Black Mountain Side (2014)
• Annihilation (2018)
• Color Out of Space (2019)
• The Lighthouse (2019)
• Underwater (2020)
• Glorious (2020)
• The Empty Man (2020)

Making a feature-length film is so unbelievably complicated, it's amazing that anybody manages to do it at all, let alone well.

Rather than jump straight in at the deep end, most directors begin their careers with short films. Ranging anywhere in length between five and 40 minutes and made on a significantly smaller budget than a full-length movie, these petite pictures are a great way to learn the fundamentals of filmmaking without descending into a full-on stress spiral.

Some really famous movies started out life as shorter projects, including the likes of District 9, Fatal Attraction, Napoleon Dynamite, and Whiplash. The horror genre is also full of examples like this, with some making the transition to feature-length pictures more capably than others.

These short films (which are usually always made by the eventual directors of the feature) were the perfect proof of concept - a short extract that could prove their work was destined for something bigger.

While not every short film is guaranteed to translate to a longer running time, the following 10 examples all proved that great horror films can have small beginnings...

• When A Stranger Calls
• Willy’s Wonderland
• Trick 'R Treat
• Lights Out
• What We Do In The Shadows
• Smile
• The Babadook
• Terrifier
• Saw
• The Evil Dead

EXCLUSIVE: After scoring the big deal at the Toronto Film Festival with Neon for TIFF’s People’s Choice Award winner The Life of Chuck, director Mike Flanagan and Stephen King are right back at it. The Dish hears their next collaboration will be Carrie, this time in an eight-episode series for Amazon. Flanagan will be the showrunner...

... This would be the second recent deal in which one of King’s treasures would be given a longer storytelling road. A24 has Paul Greegrass and JH Wyman adapting King’s Fairy Tale into a series, after an earlier attempt to mount it as a movie at Universal made them realize there was just too much story to pack into one feature. The Gary Dauberman-directed Salem’s Lot was just released for Halloween...

... They’re opening a writers room, so this one’s happening quickly.