Ah, tradition, late tradition. A tradition of lateness.
Growing up, my family was always a presents at midnight on Xmas Eve family. The idea was, starting at 9-10pm, we’d gather in the living room around the cardboard fireplace and have a little party – snacks and Christmas music and eggnog and such, and wait until the proverbial clock struck twelve before any presents could be exchanged.
At least that was what we told ourselves. In actuality, we had moved about a 5-8 hour drive from my grandmother’s house (traffic dependent and on Dec. 24th, you could be sure there would be traffic), so it was as or more likely that we wouldn’t finish our journey back to the old homestead before 1 or 2 in the morning. When we got there, my grandma might be asleep, and so then we would start preparing snacks and get the decorations up from the basement. I’m sure that there were Christmas Eve’s when we didn’t end up actually opening gifts until well after sunrise on Christmas Day.
Following Vonnegut, so it goes…
And it is no less true here, or in any other aspect of life. In theory, every year, I do an end-of-year summation, and every year, I don’t even start it until January. This year, publishing closer to Valentine’s Day than Christmas, I admit I feel a degree of shame (at this rate, eventually I’ll be publishing a 2028 sum up in 2030).
As always, I’m not the best at keeping up with new releases (though I’ve got a couple), so I make no claim to list the “best of 2025” (I watched about 20 horror flicks released last year, so a “10 best” list doesn’t mean much).
So, this is a list of my ten favorite new watches (from any year) that I haven’t written about yet at length. Some of them, I’d intended to devote a full post to. Some of them I just really liked and would like to promote them to all of you lovely eyeballs out there in the dark.
These come in the order of watching. Some spoilers ahead…
Smile 2 (2024)
I liked but did not love the 2022 predecessor to this. It had elements to appreciate, but didn’t entirely stay with me. But I really got into the sequel. It built on the foundation of the first, delivering solid scares and some cool, creepy stuff, but also grounding itself in a solid story of one person’s very believable struggles. The first was a simple curse movie scare fest that jumped on the ever popular “all modern horror movies have to be about trauma” bandwagon, but the sequel really had its own tale to tell (while, yes, still dealing with a curse, a demon, creepy smiling people, and the oh so common t-word).
We follow Skye Riley, a young pop star trying to re-enter the limelight after falling down a rabbit hole of pain med addiction and self-hatred, following a terrible accident which had resulted in the death of her boyfriend. It’s a familiar vibe and Naomi Scott is great in the part. I believe her drama. But I also believe her pop stardom, which brings some real energy to the proceedings. Given the weight of what she’s already going through, and how hard she’s already pushing back against it to move forward in her life, when she gets cursed, it lands with an extra punch and what happens to her carries additional tragedy. Working so hard to recover, to live, only to succumb to the madness and self-destruction that this demonic entity brings is particularly sad.
But for all of this ‘sadness,’ what I loved here was the vibrancy, the desperate force pushing up against all that is pulling down. It is a fun movie. The music, the dance, the style all energize. The typical “horror movie stuff” (jump scares, creep outs, misdirects, etc.) land pretty well, with a couple of moments successfully getting to me, and I feel it makes some big swings with a strong, feel bad ending that is at once terrible and enjoyable in its ambition, all carried out in a pretty cool, full stadium climax.
But what stands out the most to me was one stellar sequence of Skye’s curse haunting her, pushing her towards madness. As always in these movies, she is regularly beset upon by creepy visions of people smiling menacingly at her, but there is one scene in her apartment when dancers with whom we’d previously seen her rehearsing start appearing and hunting her throughout her home. In the earlier dance scene, they had been very much manipulating her body, making an object of her. Now, their choreography has them moving as one inhuman mass, filling hallways, climbing walls, stopping with sudden, terrifying, smiling stillness, and by the end, still manipulating her body as an object, mirroring the earlier dance. You feel the connection between the movement work that is part of her career, her performance, her art, and this apparition, but it has been repurposed and recontextualized so well and so effectively. It is really scary, and so refreshing in the scare being based in simply well trained bodies performing at a high level, rather than any kind of special effects, computer generated or otherwise. It’s an exceptional scene in a solidly enjoyable horror flick.
Hellbender (2021)
I’d heard for years that this was a good one and I’m really happy to have finally checked it out. A truly independent production, written, acted, and filmed by a family of 4 on their own property during Covid lockdowns, I was genuinely impressed with how well this all came together. This Adams Family is one to watch going forward.
Fittingly for such a small film (but it feels bigger) made by blood relatives, this is really all about family. Izzy lives with her mother in a remote house in the woods, and has always been told that she has very serious medical conditions that preclude her from being anywhere near other people. Home schooled, she has lived her whole young life in a state of quarantine lockdown, alone with her mom. But until the events of the film, it doesn’t seem that she’s felt particularly restricted. The two of them have a warm, loving relationship, and they have fun together, notably in the form of their two woman metal band which regularly practices, but never gets to play a gig.
The music plays a huge role in the film. When they don their corpse paint and rock out, it sounds cool and sets an atmosphere, but more importantly, I felt connected to the depth of their relationship – the ways they can play together, create together, be expressive together. It feels rich and meaningful, and in the music, powerfully freeing. Izzy’s mom seems cool – not like some sort of religious extremist trying to protect her delicate daughter from the corruptions of the world.
Thus (significant spoiler coming), when a tragic penny drops and we come to understand that its actually the other way around and that she, a witch, is in fact trying to protect the world (and herself) from the potential danger her daughter poses, it makes sense and the film and their relationship is pushed into a new conflict, crisis, and dark potential.
It is all folksy and witchy as all get out, and I loved its magic. It felt specific and unique – all to do with blood and earth and life and power. It is messy hedge craft, but it felt grounded in internal logic. Furthermore, the film reveals by slow drips a really interesting and novel mythology, and I enjoyed watching that click into place, particularly given how tied it is to the emotional arc of the story. It is exciting to see Izzy grow into what she can be, but there is also a horror to it. Everything has a cost in this life. Nothing is free. It is impossible to claim power without doing harm, and there is no going back. Great little movie and I really look forward to seeing more from the Adams’s. I know they’ve got a couple other flicks. I should give them a try.
(edit: I just watched their new release on Shudder – Mother of Flies – I appreciated it more than I loved it, but there’s still a lot to recommend, and it gets major extra points for its truly independent nature and knockout production design – check it out!)
Dead Talents Society (2024)
This was one that I’d thought I’d write a full post about, but somehow just never found the time. What a hoot! So fresh and fun – rooted in horror movie conventions and tropes, but ultimately deeply moving, with something to say. I think I first heard about it on the Colors of the Dark podcast, with co-host Elric Kane likening it to One Cut of the Dead (2017) in its balance of being set around “horror” stuff, but really being more about a very warm hearted emotional core; I think quite an apt comparison.
From writer-director John Hsu, who had previously delivered the worthy but (in my opinion) not entirely satisfying Detention (2019) (a fascinating film in its own right, based on a popular video game and detailing a particularly dark and surprisingly long period in Taiwan’s history through the lens of a creepy ghost story), this is a terrifically entertaining story of a newly dead girl who’d never excelled in life now trying to find success as a ghost.
The conceit of the film is that once the survivors of one dead stop thinking of them and leaving out offerings, the ghost begin to fade, but if they can establish themselves as a ghost story that people know and are frightened of, they can persist. Thus there is a whole dead society, essentially ghostly influencers chasing scares, fighting for the best spots to haunt, fighting to be remembered and known.
It’s a device that allows for endless play with the tropes of Asian ghost cinema – lots of elements of J-horror and K-horror. So many ghosts take on the personas and tricks of apparitions that might be familiar from Ringu, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, or Noroi: The Curse, among many others, and there’s a great deal of fun to be had with the behind the scenes comedy of how they create their best scares, all of the top ghosts having their own support teams that serve as costumers, stagehands, and technicians. These elements aren’t really scary for the viewer cause it’s all seen from backstage, but there is great horror movie fun to be had in seeing it all created. I think a bit of watching the technicians in Cabin in the Woods manipulating the young sacrifices into splitting up or dropping a knife they clearly shouldn’t so the horror tropes play out as they must.
But the problem for our young protagonist is that she’s just not particularly good at it all. I read an interview with Hsu where he described his inspiration for the film. He’d been watching a horror movie that didn’t really work for him. He could see some ghost working so hard to scare, but he wasn’t reacting, and it just made him cry. It was so sad to see this apparition giving it all to no effect. So it is with the unnamed rookie at the center of the film. She is doing everything she can, but just can’t get there, though it is in a moment of crying out her frustration at her own failure that she comes the closest.
At the heart of this all is a deeply sympathetic and heartfelt tribute to the ordinary. Most people will never be exceptional – it’s mathematically impossible. And yet we are all instilled with the dream that we might be, and therefore, the burden that we must be, and that if we aren’t, we’re failures, losers – worthless disappointments. Furthermore, I don’t want to make uninformed cultural leaps, but (based on cultural stereotypes and my experiences teaching English in mainland China) I’m guessing that in Hsu’s native Taiwan, parents can be particularly demanding when it comes to expectations of their children’s success, potentially rooting this all in Hsu’s own emotional, personal experience.
There is endless heart to this deeply funny movie about ghosts making gory spectacles of themselves to frighten the living, but more than anything else, I feel it carries a moving, grounded message of self-acceptance, of loving yourself even if you never rise above the crowd. A person still has value, even if they’ll never be a star. I laughed, I cried. It was better than Cats (not difficult, but still).
The Exorcism (2024)
This is an interesting case. I understand that of the two films released in 2024 in which Russell Crowe played an exorcist, this was the one not particularly well received (I still haven’t seen The Pope’s Exorcist, but I’ve heard it’s good, goofy fun). Furthermore, I’m on the record on this here blog as not being much of a fan of exorcism films – in fact, I tend to actively dislike them, turned off by the extent to which they often come across as propaganda for Christianity, or at least religiosity.
But I really loved this. Was it a perfect movie? Not at all. Was it even a good movie? Maybe not. But I was utterly pulled in by it, and genuinely moved on both dramatic and horror levels by its story of a down on his luck actor struggling with substance abuse issues trying to repair a relationship with his estranged daughter as he takes on the role of a priest in an exorcism film, the set of which might be possessed itself – in the process of filming, he starts to unravel, and for his daughter it’s unclear if he’s simply relapsing or if there is an actual supernatural threat. I was captivated from the drop and found it consistently interesting and emotionally stirring. But I think for the film to fully connect and feel more meaningful, some meta-information is necessary.
The Exorcism is directed by Joshua John Miller and was co-written by he and his partner, M.A. Fortin, and I couldn’t help but read it as a deeply personal movie. Miller’s father was Jason Miller, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and most notably as pertains to this flick, the actor who portrayed the troubled Father Karras in The Exorcist (1973). He also, as I have heard, struggled with alcohol throughout much of his adult life. Honestly, that’s everything I know of his biography, but with that seed planted in my brain, even though I heard an interview where Miller claimed this was not about his father, it just felt so autobiographical, so real and raw.
In this story that does ultimately become supernatural, the substance abusing parent tries so hard to do right by his child and carries such shame when he so consistently fails her. On the surface, this is a fairly tropey little scare flick that has some ideas but rarely surprises. But for me, it was so infused with love and regret and a kind of wish fulfillment – by the end, the troubled parent does rise to the challenge. I do not actually know anything about Miller’s relationship with his father, and I could simply be projecting, but I was hit hard by how confessional and revealing and loving it seemed to be.
Also, I really enjoyed David Hyde Pierce in a supporting role as a consulting priest working on the movie. He’s pretty intense here and it was something I hadn’t seen from him before.
Mute Witness (1995)
Speaking of intense – who boy, was this a ride. More a thriller than straight horror, this story of a mute practical effects makeup artist working on a horror film being cheaply produced in newly open for business early 90s Russia, who accidentally witnesses a snuff film being shot on set after hours and gets caught up in a twisty tale of murder and the mob and art and commerce, is just non-stop tense excitement, the action running as endlessly as this very sentence, which is topping out at about 100 words – yeesh (laconic I am not). Probably half of the run time consists in a single near wordless chase scene as she evades capture by the killers. It is cleverly plotted, thrillingly shot, and had me holding my breath for minutes at a time.
A real calling card for first time director (he also wrote and produced), Anthony Waller, you’d expect him to really professionally thrive after this. Unfortunately, his next effort was 1997’s An American Werewolf in Paris, a follow up to the classic John Landis flick – Sadly though, I remember this sequel being – how can I put this politely – abysmal. But based on the strength of his first movie, which was just so well put together and exciting and smart, perhaps I ought to give his second film another chance. Perhaps at this point I could look past the ugly 90s CGI and see a hidden gem beneath. We’ll see.
Anyway, Mute Witness is stylish, chilling, and totally worth your time. It’s all about plot and effect in the moment and I can’t say that a lot of its ever twisting story has stayed with me in the half year since I watched it, but I remember being just on the edge of my seat the whole time and having a genuine blast. It could be time for a re-watch.
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)
I just love me a town with a secret. Some traveler comes to a new place where everything just seems off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but things are clearly not right – this is not ok – you are not safe. And in the best cases, you’ll never truly understand why. So it is in this truly creepy Spanish sundrenched horror flick.
A British couple, Tom and Evelyn, who’s in a late stage of pregnancy, book a small boat to go visit the idyllic little Spanish island where Tom had had a great time as a young man. They go to get away from the noise and crowds on the mainland, and at this they do succeed, cause this place just seems deserted at first, and quite recently so. All they can find after a while are a few silent children. Or the children find them.
I feel like there’s a connection between this and The Birds (1963). In Hitchcock’s film, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, we never really learn how this has come to pass – what has made all the avians so homicidal so suddenly. And yet, there is a feeling, maybe more in the story than the film, that it is some kind of revenge of the environment on the polluting, destroying, unthinking human world. So it is, here, but in this case, some switch has flipped in the children and no adult is safe.
We don’t understand how this is happening, but it seems like the bloodlust gets passed almost like a contagion, and (significant spoilers ahead) the film ends with the same apocalyptic satisfaction as many a zombie flick as a couple of tykes hop on a boat and head for the mainland, wondering if kids there will play like they do.
Just as I enjoy the mysterious setting, I also always appreciate a horror film that can maintain success when you can see everything. This is daylight horror, the heat beating down upon everyone, ratcheting up tension. The land is parched and the British couple is in a state of distress before any children start hunting them. It’s a good scary movie. And it goes places – like wow, major points for not holding back. At all. Eventually Tom answers the question of the title, and learns that he will kill a child if he needs to. And it gets brutal.
And then there is one scene, one special scene, that even with spoiler warnings I don’t want to give away, but, oof. When the contagion of killing comes to one particularly young one, it is a bold move on the part of Serrador, the director. Respect.
Finally, while the mystery of this killing is never explained, there is a feeling of an emotional logic behind it. As with the birds in the previously referenced classic, the human world is not kind to children. We hear radio reports of atrocities done. There is abuse and neglect, and harm never ceases. Thus it feels as if this mania for murder is somehow the emotional result of the ways that adults have ever failed the young. This kind of poetic logic is so much more satisfying than a third act info dump about a curse or an experiment or whatever plotting element a lesser film might have introduced.
Only one negative note on this front, the film begins with perhaps a 10 minute sequence of real footage of children as victims of war and poverty and all manner of human evils. I understand what these clips are doing there, but as actual documentary footage, they are a hard watch, and in my opinion, an unnecessary watch. We get it – there are real life horrors being committed and children unfairly get so much of the brunt of it all – but I want to enjoy my horror movie and not just subject myself to raw images of the holocaust and the like. I suggest you do yourself a favor and just skip it. I can pretty much promise sparing yourself that will not detract from your experience of the rest of the film.
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
I’m not sure quite how this happened, but before 2025, I’d never gotten around to watching any of the Final Destination films. But last summer, all but the newest showed up on a streamer I have and I decided to start working my way through the series. And I’m so glad I did. Some of them are pretty great. And the others are movies too. But seriously, the conceit of an unseen, but still personified, willful Death serving as the killer of a slasher-esque body count flick is fun, particularly with the potential for playful creativity in the Rube-Goldberg device accident set pieces, as Death repeatedly sets in motion complicated series of events that kill off his targets in what looks like (fairly extreme, but that’s a lot of the fun too) accidents. And all of the films, this included, are such a hoot in teasing what might be the source of the next mayhem, with lots of false starts and potential danger around every corner to keep you guessing.
Weirdly, I think I particularly enjoyed watching these because at the time, I was doing a lot of carpentry, frequently up on a high ladder, in somewhat precarious positions, with the ever present threat of human error, or just inopportune gusts of wind, looming over my delicate head. Nothing happened. I was fine. Always have been so far. But it somehow made these movies more fun, rather than offputting (which I might have expected them to be, given my circumstances).
So when at the end of the summer, the 6th and latest outing (which sure feels like it should be the final one, but I understand they’ve announced there will be more – not to mention the fact that part 5 had felt even more final than this) came to streaming, I was excited to pop a bag of popcorn and take it in. And I was not disappointed in the least.
The initial inciting incident of cheated death on the Sky Needle-esque tower is a big opening (as these films often do quite well – Part 2 might be my least favorite film of the series, but the initial scene on the highway with the log truck cannot be scoffed at). I enjoyed the emotion of it, its stylishness, and the real excitement as it all goes to hell. And following that, there are so many great death scenes pulled off with real verve, real flair. You know things will go poorly for all involved, but the movie is so playful, teasing how it might or might not happen this time, and it really lands some great surprises. At least one sequence I had to immediately rewind and watch a second time, so perfectly had it been executed. It was like a perfect passage in a book that you need to re-read and truly savor before moving on.
So all of that – all of the stuff you go to a Final Destination movie for – is pretty great, but there was one more element that really got me, and stayed with me more than anything else (important spoiler coming). From the beginning, Tony Todd, star of one of my favorite movies of any genre, Candyman (1992), among many many others, had been with the franchise, primarily as a mysterious undertaker who provides ominous expository explanations into Death’s intentions in his rich, gravelly baritone. I think he was in every installment, though in some, they weirdly recast him, as a voice on the phone, or a cinema usher. But here, he reclaims his initial role, with a bit of backstory connecting his character to our opening scene, and, knowing that Death will be coming for him soon, he gives one final gravitas laden speech before he tips his hat and makes his exit: “I intend to enjoy the time I have left. And I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when… Good Luck.”
The thing is, before the film was released, Todd had already died of stomach cancer. That context alone made these lines poignant. I’d come to this movie for a bloody good time, not to find myself weeping, and yet there I was. Later I read that, knowing that he was very sick and wouldn’t get better, he had improvised the line as a final goodbye to his work and his fans and co-workers, and it was all the more moving for it.
The movie is a great Final Destination flick. But it also features a surprisingly powerful little moment of life. As a fan of Todd’s, I am so grateful to have witnessed it.
Hocus Pocus (1993)
So I know this one is beloved of many, a core Halloween movie of their childhoods that helped inculcate in them a love of the macabre and all things witchy. But I just never gave it a chance. I think I was 14 when it came out and I just felt too old for a silly looking Disney kids movie, the trailers of which had done it few favors. Well, shows what I knew, cause now that I’m in my late 40s, I have no qualms about watching a frivolous film for children and I rather loved it.
I can’t say this is a perfect movie. Some of it does really feel a bit more like a made-for-TV Disney channel release than I would have liked (particularly whenever it was exclusively focused on the school bullying/flirtation drama of the young cast). But if you go in ready to sit through some saccharine, you will be rewarded with a terrifically fun kids witch movie, full of energy and humor that lands, and just Halloween vibes out the wazoo. Seriously, I could imagine making this an annual Halloween watch, as I know it is for many folks.
Also, it has horror touches that I was honestly a bit shocked by. For something so sweet, it has no shortage of actual danger: witches that do actually suck the life out of children and kill them, those witches are hanged until they are dead (though of course they come back a couple hundred years later), a whole town is cursed to dance until they die (they are saved, but the curse is seriously meant), a cute talking cat is killed twice (and the second time it sticks), the witches are also killed a second time (in this case, being burned to ash in a pottery kiln), a zombie is raised, children are lured to their intended doom by a sweet song, and by the end the villainous witches, who are solidly, unrepentantly EVIL, but are no less the most fun and lovable part of the movie, meet their third and final deaths in a churchyard. This is a light, fun children’s movie, but it fully commits to its story and is willing to put the kids in serious danger. And it really works.
And I’ve just got to sing the praises of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy as the witchy Sanderson sisters at the center of it all. Their stylized performances are just pitch perfect, walking a delicious line between goofy and dangerous, portraying funny, sinister, child eating monsters, who are just so perfectly wacky and so precisely drawn with real craft and vocal and physical precision. Also, I had no idea Sarah Jessica Parker could be that hilarious. I never got into Sex and the City, but I feel somehow that when she landed that show, and it really made her a star, she missed her calling in drawing room farce.
So yeah, if you’ve never checked out this gloriously Halloweeny flick, do yourself a favor and watch it post haste!
The Thing from another World (1951)
Howard Hawks is one of those old Hollywood names with which I’ve long been familiar without actually seeing any of his work. A prolific director, producer, and screenwriter, as I understand, his films often featured the thrill of no nonsense men working together at a high level to achieve difficult things. He also pioneered the archetype of the “Hawksian Woman,” a tough talking masculine female character who never fails in undercutting those men’s pomposity. That is all on strong display here in this genuinely exciting adaptation of the novella Who Goes There?
I love when I finally get around to a bit of “horror homework” and find that it is totally justified in its acclaim. This 1951 alien invasion flick (the 50s not being famously good for horror, but following this, being full of aliens) was off like a shot from the get go, as a group of journalists, military men, and scientists set off to the arctic circle to investigate what seems to be a spacecraft that’s landed there. The set up is exciting, but so is everything else about this movie. Everyone talks a mile a minute, often over each other in a delirious balance between being absolutely naturalistic and highly stylized – cause it isn’t a mess – but rather a taut violin string being pulled tighter and tighter.
And it isn’t only the way of speaking – the ensemble acting is at such a high level – dynamics between characters in constant flow – everything is received and responded to and just so alive. Small actions, props changing hands, jokes told, friends needled for their foibles, and lovers flirted with through trading of barbs: it is non-stop and breathless, never letting the film’s tension drop, and grounding its sense of adventure and fear in believable relationships. This is effective for the action and the horror, but at the end of the day, it is also just fun, bringing to mind much later scenes of characters shooting the shit such as Vincent and Jules talking about hamburgers in Pulp Fiction, or Laurie and the girls talking about school at the beginning of Halloween. And speaking of “girls,” I just loved Margaret Sheridan’s “Hawksian” brassy broad, Nikki. I didn’t need the romance between her and the Captain, but I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of her sharp, acerbic screen time, and appreciated that she gets to make a real contribution to the action (I can think of other 50s sci fi where the lone woman in the picture is relegated to bringing the men coffee and sandwiches).
But this is a horror blog and this movie gets scary. I was honestly impressed with how intense it can be. The setting is so isolated and the characters are utterly vulnerable in it. The alien itself isn’t a whole lot to look at, but it is big and powerful, and can appear and attack in a burst. There are jump scares and rising dread, and hushed, excited, fearful sequences of hunting and hiding and trying to lay a trap for this danger from another world. And it must be said that this movie contains at least one top shelf scene of terror and action that I just can’t imagine could have been safely executed, however many precautions were taken. Having determined that the alien is susceptible to heat, the men lure it into a closed room where they douse it with kerosene and light it on fire. And then they keep throwing more oil onto the already burning creature. I think there’s one cut in the scene, but mostly, this is done in one take, on a cramped set, with a bunch of actors among the burning crates. It is terrifying and impressive – really something special, and groundbreaking – I’ve read it was the first full body burn effect of its kind.
Finally, I was struck by something in the ethos of this movie. When I think of 50s alien invasion movies, the conventional wisdom that comes to mind is that it’s all a thinly veiled metaphor for creeping communism, during a McCarthy-esque red scare. But in this case, while the cast is predominantly military, you have a sense that they are stuck in a bind between a monster from beyond the stars and their superiors in Washington who want a potential new weapon preserved. One side wants to destroy them and the other will cold-bloodedly use them, sacrificing their lives for “the greater good.” Meanwhile, our protagonists are fighting for their own survival, orders be damned. It gave a very different feeling than I’d expected, both heightening the threat as they have no support, no one in their corner, and freeing the film of what I’d expected to be at least a bit of propagandistic messaging.
This was a great movie that really stands the test of time. I can’t wait to watch it again.
Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)
This was a great surprise. The work of Hammer Studios has long been a blind spot for me. I know that for many Brits of a certain age, Hammer was synonymous with horror, but I’ve still only seen a handful (maybe this will be the year to remedy that), maybe fewer than 10, and while I have loved some of those, they haven’t given me the motivation to run the series, as it were. I’d heard the title of this movie for a while and had expected something quite campy. I knew that by the early 70s, Hammer (and film in England in general) had far greater license for titillation, and I thought this sex swapping iteration of Stevenson’s novel would play more as a bit of a joke, but as directed by Hammer mainstay, Roy Ward Baker (of The Vampire Lovers, among many, many others), it is played absolutely straight, pun intended. And in this, it delivers classic, classy, good old horror style, bubbling over with atmosphere and suspense, as well as a shockingly modern exploration of gender in its narrative, treated with a truly disarming sensitivity and humanity. Shocked, I tells ya, shocked!
Story wise, this is an amalgamation of Jekyll & Hyde, the murders of Jack the Ripper, and the historical case of the grave robbers/killers, Burke and Hare, all with a gender bending twist. Seeking to create an elixir of life, Dr. Jekyll starts sourcing female bodies to harvest their hormones, convinced that the secrets of life lie in their mysterious endocrinology; at first from the morgue, later from the shady resurrection men, and finally taking matters into his own bloodied hands, from the streets. But what he hadn’t expected was that while the elixir could, in fact, extend life, it would also change the sex of any male subject to female in the process.
In the beginning, he is tortured by the cost of his experiments, but bolsters his will, knowing that the scientific benefits are worth the cost, but once he becomes his own subject, unleashing his feminine side, the seductive Edwige Hyde, it becomes more a matter of Hyde killing to prolong her own existence. She’s a killer to be sure, but like a vampire, we understand this bloodshed is necessary for her to go on. Also, like a vampire, she is just sexy and cool, unhampered by “morality” – like a Disney villainesse who takes her top off and stabs prostitutes. But I think a really interesting detail in all this is that once Hyde first comes into existence, the line between her and Jekyll is blurred. Are they totally separate consciousnesses? We have reason to doubt that. When first transformed, are we watching a brand new person discover herself, or are we watching the same person as before rediscover themselves after a profound transition? It’s not entirely clear. Is he fighting to remain himself and not let this discreet personality overwhelm him, or has he discovered that he prefers life as Edwige and is in crisis about what that means for him, the importance of his own sex and gender cast into a destabilizing doubt? What I feel we do know is that she is not his “evil” side, the killer within. He’d already been a killer, and before that, complicit in killings. She is simply his feminine side, and in that femininity, she comes across as more confident, more bold, more free. And he can’t handle it or her.
Past all that, it is really solid, classic horror on a budget. Foggy old London town, a scream in the night, blood splattered across an alley wall. Baker does so much with quite little and I was utterly taken in by the vibes and the style. And there are a couple of just tremendous sequences of clever, effective filmmaking. Late in the film, Hyde has decided to take the blood of the young ingénue that gives Jekyll some reason to continue as a man, and she follows the young girl through the darkened, murky alleys, gleaming blade brandished in her fist. Throughout the hunt, the soundtrack drops out and we are left with only footsteps and the swish of Hyde’s crinoline petticoat. It is a quiet, gendered sound and it grows more and more threatening as Hyde nears on her target, its feminine delicacy much scarier than something more bombastic. It’s a simple choice, but so effective.
But I think the centerpiece of the film has to be the first transformation from Jekyll to Hyde, featuring the kind of in-camera movie magic that I just adore. He drinks the formula and starts to react, and then in one long shot we watch him approach the mirror, looking into it and seeing himself. The camera moves between him and the mirror to watch him fall back into a chair, head in hands, lingering there for a while before finally coming behind him, looking over his shoulder into the mirror once more. But now, as thinner, less hairy knuckled fingers drop from the face, we see Hyde’s feminine features looking back from the glass. The change has been worked. Edwige, in all her glory, is here, and she is bad! It’s a great trick of the camera, I assume carried out, by virtue of a team of grips moving the real mirror out of the way and replacing it with essentially a window onto an identical room where the actress playing Hyde (Martine Beswick, who’s great) is now seen. But it all happens in one take and the first time I watched it, I just bought the magic of what I was seeing without question. It was only later that I went back and was astounded at how seamlessly it had been pulled off. Now it would so easily be done with computers, but Baker’s simply designed (though probably quite difficult to actually do) mechanical illusion just amazes. I recommend watching the whole movie – it’s great. But if not, at least do yourself the favor of checking out this one bit of exemplary cinematic trickery.
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So that was 2025. I watched 121 horror flicks, 86 of which were new for me. These were the ten best of those, not counting the 18 new watches I already wrote about last year. I managed 11 posts through the year. I would have liked to do more, but life is hard, you know, and as an exercise that largely feels like throwing carefully chosen words into an uncaring void, let’s say this is good enough. But every year, I hope to do better, so it’s 2026 now. Let’s see what’s coming.
Wherever and whoever you are out there in the darkness, thanks for being here with me and giving your time and attention. I wish you all the best in the year to come. Unless you’re a jerk. Try not to be a jerk.
