Horror spent this week refusing to let anything stay dead. American Horror Story emptied its entire vault of villains onto one soundstage, Lionsgate went digging for a leprechaun it had buried years ago, and a girlfriend from a micro-budget slasher clawed her way out of the movie and into a theme park. Somebody is even building a real Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, which is either a love letter or a lawsuit waiting to happen.
If there is a thread running through all of it, it is the one Bury the Devil put on a title card: nothing stays buried forever. Franchises came back, monsters came back, one very unhinged fictional woman came back, and a couple of trailers showed up to argue that “prestige” and “nasty” were never really opposites. The Verity trailer in particular seems delighted about that.
Here is everything worth your time.
American Horror Story: 13 Empties the Toy Box
Vogue kicked things off with a wave of first-look images, and FX followed with the first official teaser for American Horror Story: 13. This is not a normal anthology year. It is a reunion, and the guest list is basically every monster the show has ever built.
Per our breakdown of the teaser and first-look photos, Jessica Lange is back as Constance Langdon, Sarah Paulson returns as Cordelia Goode, Evan Peters turns up as Kai Anderson, and John Carroll Lynch is under Twisty the Clown’s mask again. Angela Bassett, Mena Suvari, Jamie Brewer and the Rubber Man suit are all in the mix too. Ryan Murphy is calling it a “greatest hits season,” and he means it literally. Lange is reprising all four of her original characters, Peters is playing five, and Paulson is playing six.
The number that made me put my coffee down is Paulson’s. Six. Murphy has been clear this is not just a Coven revival, no matter how hard the witches have carried the marketing, and he has teased a single threat big enough to drag every villain, witch and ghost into the same story. He will not say what it is, only that it outranks the Antichrist from Apocalypse. New blood is here as well, including Joey Pollari as a character named Ben and Paul Anthony Kelly as the season’s supposed linchpin. It premieres September 24 on FX and Hulu, thirteen episodes in all.
The Verity Trailer Drops the Prestige Act
Amazon MGM released the official trailer for Verity, its adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel, and it opens looking like a tasteful Sunday-night limited series right up until it remembers it owns knives.
As we wrote about the trailer, Anne Hathaway plays acclaimed author Verity Crawford as a watchful, seductive presence who may be running the entire situation from what looks like a sickbed, while Dakota Johnson is Lowen Ashleigh, the struggling writer hired to ghostwrite for her and unlucky enough to find Verity’s autobiographical notes. Josh Hartnett sits between them as Verity’s husband, and the trailer refuses to settle whether he is the safest person in that house or the worst one. Michael Showalter directs, which reads as a strange fit until you notice that Nick Antosca, of Hannibal and Antlers, adapted Colleen Hoover’s own novel.
Whether Verity technically belongs in the horror aisle is a fair argument, and I do not especially care how it gets filed. It plays more like an erotic psychological thriller with something rotten in its bloodstream than anything supernatural. Antosca treats grief and appetite and domestic rot as the same subject, and the trailer keeps letting victim and predator swap places depending on which page you stopped reading. It opens in theaters October 2.
Bury the Devil Won’t Let the Camera Blink
We got to debut the new international trailer for Bury the Devil this week, an iHorror exclusive, and it is one of the more stressful ninety-second pitches I have watched in a while.
The hook is formal. Bury the Devil is a real-time possession movie designed to look and feel like one continuous take, a fact the trailer announces with a blunt “REAL-TIME POSSESSION HORROR” card. A nurse named Julia takes an overnight shift with an elderly dementia patient in an old, isolated house, the patient starts behaving very wrong, and the camera simply refuses to cut away from any of it. Adam O’Brien, who made Mom, directs.
The reason the approach is interesting rather than gimmicky is that it surrenders the editing. Most horror scares are assembled in the cutting room, and a film built around the illusion of a continuous take has to build its dread out of staging, sound and whatever it keeps just off the edge of the frame instead. Whether it pulls that off is a question for the film itself. It reaches select theaters and VOD on August 21, and it is apparently the first chapter of a planned trilogy.
Lionsgate Hands Leprechaun to the Saw Writers
Lionsgate is developing a new Leprechaun movie, and it has handed the script to Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the duo who wrote most of the Saw sequels and created The Collector and The Collection.
Our report on the announcement lays out how little is actually confirmed. Melton and Dunstan are writing, Oren and Miles Koules are producing through their Koulest banner, and that is nearly the whole announcement. No director, no cast, no title, no date, and no word on Warwick Davis. Lionsgate tried to get a Leprechaun going once before, in 2023, with a different director and writer, that version stalled, and how this one connects to it is genuinely unclear.
The hire is the interesting part. Leprechaun has exactly one register that works, mean and funny at the same time, and the one time the series tried to play things seriously scary, 2014’s Origins, is the entry nobody defends. Melton and Dunstan spent years designing elaborate, nasty, not-quite-humorless deaths for Saw. Pointing that particular skill set at a murderous rhyming leprechaun is, at minimum, a very specific choice, and possibly the right one.
Freaky Nikki Crashes Halloween Horror Nights
Nikki, the alarmingly clingy girlfriend from the surprise-hit slasher Obsession, is coming to Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights this year, and she is not staying politely inside a maze.
According to our coverage of the announcement, Nikki will be a roaming scare character, which means an actor in full Nikki mode stalking the park and choosing targets rather than a fixed haunted house. HHN creative director John Murdy described it as a “Where’s Waldo” situation, if Waldo wanted to date you against your will. She has been announced for the Hollywood park so far, and was reportedly a last-minute addition after Obsession detonated mid-year.
That last part is the wild bit. iHorror reports that Obsession was made for around $750,000 and went on to gross close to half a billion dollars, which is the kind of number that makes a theme park tear up a lineup it usually locks a year in advance. Curry Barker’s $750,000 supernatural nightmare about a woman magically transformed into an obsessive threat is now a park attraction.
Somebody Is Building an Actual Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza
Filed under “we have learned nothing,” a real, permanent Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza is being built, and it will have working animatronics.
Per iHorror founder Anthony Pernicka’s report, the restaurant opens in 2027 at the American Dream complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in partnership with ScottGames, the studio behind Five Nights at Freddy’s. There will be animatronic stage shows from Freddy and the band, a Pirate Cove for Foxy, an arcade, actual food, and “behind the curtain” multiplayer experiences built on the games’ survival-horror setup. It is being billed as the first permanent immersive FNAF restaurant anywhere.
The pitch from the American Dream side is that they are not building a set that looks like Freddy Fazbear’s, they are building Freddy Fazbear’s, which is a sentence that should unsettle any reasonable adult. This is the same complex that already houses a Nickelodeon theme park and an aquarium, so a haunted animatronic bear pizzeria is somehow the logical next tenant. No exact date beyond 2027, no ticketing yet, and no confirmation that anyone involved has thought through the night shift.
Quick Hits
Netflix finally dated the next Monster. As we covered, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story drops all eight episodes on September 17, with Ella Beatty as Borden and a deep bench that includes Charlie Hunnam, Vicky Krieps, Rebecca Hall, Billie Lourd and Sarah Paulson. Beatty describes the season as the anthology’s first female Monster, one that delves into female rage and repression, and the season leans openly into the charge between Lizzie and the family’s live-in maid. Between this and the AHS reunion, Murphy had a week.
Our interview with the cast of Harbinger is worth a read if you like your horror small, British and built around a genuinely creepy object, here a coin-operated fortune-teller machine that deals you a card with your death on it. Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott and Gary Webster talked practical puppetry and a real, allegedly haunted location, and the film hit US digital on August 11.
Our latest Morgue Files exhumes Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, the crossover that never got made. Fitting company for a week this fixated on monsters sharing a room.
What’s Coming
The immediate action is this weekend. Our guide to the August 14 to 16 releases rounds up five new movies, and the largest is The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell’s dinosaurs-in-the-suburbs picture with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, opening in theaters and IMAX. Hathaway, for the record, is having a week: monstrous author in the Verity trailer, suburban mom fleeing prehistoric wildlife on Friday. If you would rather not put on pants, Hellcat lands on Shudder and AMC+.
After that the calendar fills up fast. Bury the Devil arrives August 21. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story hits Netflix September 17. American Horror Story: 13 opens September 24, and Verity reaches theaters October 2.
So it was a week about things coming back, which is either comforting or a warning depending on how you feel about franchises. I am mostly stuck on the logistics of a functioning Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, and whether the people building it have read to the end of the source material.
If you only have room in your life for one resurrection, which are you trusting: Ryan Murphy’s entire monster roster crammed into one season, or the Saw writers doing something unspeakable to a leprechaun?
