Bleeding‑edge festival announcements, film drops, submission calls, and backstage dispatches from Dead Northern, everything you need to know to plan, attend, and submit to our next scare.
The kids are back this week - with a twist. Matty, played by Miles Ekhardt, who was traumatised and supposedly killed by Pennywise in Episode One, returns.
We drop straight back in with the kids, who show the cops their photos - only to discover Pennywise, the massive joker, has wiped himself clean off them.
Coming from the 'land down under' is Pelverata, a brand new and indie-made elevated thriller that explores the dark past lurking beneath the Tasmanian wilds
Occult historian and author Gavin Baddeley delivered a lively Dead Talks session at Dead Northern 2025, tracing Dracula’s evolution from Vlad the Impaler to Hammer horror cinema. Mixing folklore, film analysis, and offbeat anecdotes (including a York connection with a ceremonial “Dracula” sword), Baddeley explored how the medieval warlord became a tragic, monstrous, and endlessly adaptable cultural figure. His lecture combined scholarly depth with showman’s flair, making dense history vivid and entertaining
Chris Nials, founder of the Independent Horror Society, talks about building a grassroots horror movement, empowering new filmmakers, and why low-budget horror is the beating heart of genre cinema.
James Button’s The Quackening is a 20‑minute horror‑comedy short about a grumpy Welshman who discovers his grandmother has been cursed by a demon duck. With midnight looming, he must save her, and possibly the world, from feathered doom. Blending surreal comedy, Welsh folklore, and DIY VFX, the film is described as Button’s most audacious project yet, a duck‑driven descent into mutation, chaos, and existential dread
Writer-director Daisy Bata and lead actor Beth Taylor dive into the emotional and physical intensity behind Bloodbuzz a short horror film set during a climate-driven heatwave. From script to screen, they explore fear, vulnerability, and the psychology of possession.
The brand new thriller, Dragonfly, can only be described as integrally raw and honest in its depiction of the hidden awry within the kindest of others. Check out Dead Northern's review of this unmissable feature.
Thrown straight back into the chaos of last week’s episode, we’re immediately shown another harrowing view of the massacre before moving into the following week.
Who took Riley Brennan?
That’s the question on everyone’s mind since the trailer dropped, a promise of answers wrapped in a thrilling scare-fest of tension and fear. “You’d be so proud of her,” said the promotional tagline, yet I left the theatre feeling less proud and more confused by what had unfolded on screen.
This Friday, 7 November, Cinema Mentiré and Category H join forces for the first time to bring a sexy and spooky Latin American horror double bill to London’s iconic Rio Cinema: nunsploitation shocker Satánico Pandemonium (1975) and Argentinian sexploitation fever dream Embrujada (1976), starring the legendary Isabel “Coca” Sarli.