Young Jason may have started a new retro fashion trend!
Look at this outfit that young has on!! Recognize it?
Crystal Lake is already running up some good reviews from people who have long loved the Friday the 13th franchise, and this time Jason, as a child, has a revealed backstory that we knew existed but until now didn’t quite consider.
The new eight-episode series premiered on Peacock on October 15, 2026, and comes from A24 and creator Brad Caleb Kane, who also worked on IT: Welcome to Derry.
Linda Cardellini stars as Pamela Voorhees, the role made famous by Betsy Palmer in the original 1980 film, while Callum Vinson portrays young Jason. The cast also includes William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins, and Gwendolyn Sundstrom. The series takes us back to the early 1970s and explores the relationship between Pamela and her son, the circumstances surrounding his apparent drowning, and the events that would eventually lead to the horrors at Camp Crystal Lake.
As people watch the show, they’re becoming fans of Jason Voorhees and really upset with anyone who’s not in the Voorhees family itself. It’s an interesting change in perspective, considering that for nearly five decades Jason has been one of the most recognizable villains in horror movie history. Now we’re seeing him as a child, one who was bullied and mistreated, and we’re getting a better understanding of the circumstances that helped shape the monster we would eventually come to know.
The show also gives us a nod to Friday the 13th Part 2, when Jason wore his bluish-gray flannel, a reminder of the days before the hockey mask became his trademark. It’s these little details that longtime fans of the franchise will appreciate, and perhaps the biggest surprise is that after all these years, there’s still a story worth telling about the Voorhees family.
Donnie Darko is a lot of things.. but it takes place in October.. for us it’s also a Halloween movie as well..
On October 2, I turned on Donnie Darko for the first time in quite a while, and I had one of those moments where you suddenly notice something about a movie you have watched before but somehow never really considered. I realized ironically the day I watched the movie was actually she same day the movie begins.. October 2, 1988, with a culmination on October 31..
Obviously, Donnie Darko is a lot of things. It’s science fiction. It’s psychological. It’s a mystery. It’s a time-travel movie, depending on how you interpret it. It’s a movie about alternate realities, fate, death, adolescence, mental illness, God, free will and probably another dozen things people have been arguing about since the movie came out in 2001.
But it’s also very explicitly an October movie. So for that reason, Donnie Darko is a Halloween movie..
The story begins in early October 1988. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. That countdown takes us through October and directly toward Halloween. And when everything finally comes together, it happens on Halloween night.
There’s a Halloween party and there are people walking around in costumes. There are dark streets and autumn leaves. All that visual… And, of course, there is Frank.
Frank is a giant rabbit, which admittedly should make him sound more like something that belongs at Easter. except nobody has ever looked at Frank and thought that guy should be delivering Cadbury eggs.
He’s basically the anti-Easter Bunny.
But when you really consider the time frame of the movie, Frank makes even more sense as a Halloween figure. He’s a man in a grotesque rabbit costume who appears out of the darkness and tells Donnie that the world is going to end. He’s frightening, mysterious and somehow exists in this strange place between the living and the dead.
There’s an old idea associated with Halloween that this is the time of year when the veil becomes thin when the boundary between our world and whatever might exist beyond it isn’t quite as solid as it normally is.
Well, the veil is definitely thin in Donnie Darko. Except Richard Kelly takes that old supernatural idea and essentially gives it a science-fiction vocabulary. Instead of simply having ghosts crossing from the world of the dead into the world of the living, Donnie Darko gives us the Tangent Universe and the Primary Universe. Reality itself has fractured and two things that aren’t supposed to exist together suddenly do. Time becomes unstable while the living and the dead don’t necessarily stay in their proper places..
Donnie Darko also feels like fall.
You can sense it in the bones and roots of the film with fallen leaves and gray skies. The suburban streets and school hallways add to that mix. There is a melancholy running underneath everything that feels like that particular stretch of autumn when summer is definitely gone but winter hasn’t arrived yet.
Even the school scenes feel like October.
And that brings me to something else often almost forgotten about this movie: just how beautifully made its opening sequences are.
In the original theatrical version, Donnie wakes up inexplicably on a mountain and eventually rides his bicycle home while “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen plays.. Donnie wakes up somewhere he shouldn’t be, looks around, smiles, gets on his bicycle and rides home. We don’t know what’s happening yet, but already it feels like we’re somewhere between a dream and reality.
“Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears begins playing. The camera moves through the school, and within the length of essentially one song, Donnie Darko introduces us to an entire little universe of people. The continuous school sequence really does use “Head Over Heels” as we move among Donnie’s classmates, teachers and the different social groups inhabiting the school.
Within just two minutes, we don’t need long introductions to learn who our lead characters are.. this musical moment brings us a visual version of their collective stories without any dialogue to interrupt it..
There are movies that spend twenty minutes introducing their characters. Donnie Darko somehow introduces an entire world in the length of a Tears for Fears song.
The movie basically tells us: Just watch these people. You’ll understand.
“Head Over Heels” isn’t a Halloween song and it isn’t even really an autumn song. Yet somehow, when we hear it in Donnie Darko, it feels like October and the song kind of stayed a honorary tune of this time of year since being in the movie..
Halloween is about masks, and almost everyone in Donnie Darko is wearing one even before anybody puts on a costume.
Jim Cunningham presents himself as a wholesome motivational speaker preaching about fear and love while hiding something horrific. Kitty Farmer presents her worldview with absolute moral certainty. The school itself appears orderly while underneath that order are frightened, confused, angry, lonely kids trying to understand themselves and each other. Donnie’s neighborhood looks like an ordinary, comfortable American suburb while the universe itself is quietly coming apart.
Then Halloween arrives and everybody finally puts on actual masks.
A part of the reason we don’t normally put Donnie Darko alongside Halloween movies is because we’ve spent the last 25 years trying to figure out what the hell Donnie Darko actually means.
People have debated Frank… debated whether Donnie understands what’s happening to him. and everything else including Frank.. The Director’s Cut even brought The Philosophy of Time Travel material more directly into the movie, explaining concepts such as the Tangent Universe, the Artifact, the Living Receiver and the Manipulated Dead, although Kelly himself described those pages as something to be interpreted rather than simply treated as unquestionable canon.
We’ve spent so much time trying to solve this movie that we’ve overlooked something sitting right there on the calendar.
It’s October.
It’s Halloween, and a Halloween movie doesn’t necessarily need Michael Myers, witches, or trick-or-treaters ..
Donnie Darko understands that peculiar feeling that there might be certain nights when ordinary reality isn’t quite as solid as we think it is when the veil gets thin.
Or, in this case, when the Tangent Universe and the Primary Universe collide.
SO THAT’S THE ARGUMENT.. underneath all of it is an October story and really a melancholy autumn story about masks, death, fate, strange things appearing in the darkness and a world in which the boundary between realities has suddenly become dangerously thin.
Donnie Darko is a Halloween movie.
And maybe Frank isn’t the Easter Bunny after all. Maybe he’s been a Halloween rabbit the entire time.
Lots of urban legends exist about things that can be easily researched and answered…
A lot of people have beliefs as to where Freddy Krueger originated and where Wes Craven’s inspiration for the classic horror movie icon came from. Recently, across TikTok and other social platforms, people have said that Craven got the inspiration for Freddy from an encounter he had with the infamous “Hat Man.”
That’s not really true.
The inspiration for Freddy Krueger came from a lot of different places. The central idea behind A Nightmare on Elm Street came in part from newspaper stories Craven had read about people, including Southeast Asian refugees, suffering terrifying nightmares and then mysteriously dying in their sleep. Craven became fascinated by the idea of something happening to someone where it wasn’t clear whether the danger came from a dream or from reality.
The name had another origin entirely. Craven said that Fred was the name of his “worst enemy” in junior high school, a kid he regularly fought with while the two had paper routes. “Fred became my least favorite name,” Craven recalled. Krueger evolved partly from Krug, the villain in Craven’s earlier The Last House on the Left.
And then there’s the part of the story that has apparently evolved into the Hat Man claim.
When Craven was in sixth grade, he remembered hearing a strange noise outside his second-floor bedroom window. He looked outside and saw a man walking along the sidewalk who reminded him of what Freddy would eventually become. According to Craven, the stranger realized the young Craven was watching him and stared directly back.
“When I looked down there was a man very much like Freddy walking along the sidewalk,” Craven recalled. “He must have sensed that someone was looking at him and stopped and looked right into my face.”
Craven hid and eventually returned to the window, only to discover that the man was still looking at him. Even more frighteningly, the stranger began walking toward the entrance of Craven’s apartment building. Craven’s older brother grabbed a baseball bat and went looking for him, but the man was gone.
Years later, Craven still remembered the encounter as one of the most frightening experiences of his childhood. He believed the stranger was probably simply a drunk, but the idea of an adult who seemed to enjoy frightening a child stayed with him and became part of Freddy. The man’s hat also helped inspire Freddy’s familiar fedora.
And that’s apparently where the modern Hat Man connection comes from.
It’s certainly eerie. A kid wakes up at night, looks outside and encounters a frightening stranger wearing a distinctive hat who somehow seems to know he’s being watched. You don’t have to work very hard to see why people today make the connection to stories of the Hat Man.
But Craven never said he saw the Hat Man. He didn’t describe the encounter as paranormal, and he actually offered a very ordinary explanation for it: the guy was probably drunk.
So there is a strange man in a hat buried somewhere in Freddy Krueger’s DNA. But turning that man into the Hat Man appears to be something the internet did later.
Yet again, horror is going out of its way to surprise people in 2026, with another movie that seemingly no one expected to make much money suddenly having a legitimate chance at becoming a success. The movie is called Buddy.
And if you haven’t heard of Buddy, the premise alone should get your attention. Written and directed by Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly, the movie takes the relentlessly cheerful world of a 1990s children’s television program and turns it into a nightmare. At the center of the fictional show It’s Buddy! is Buddy, a giant bright-orange unicorn voiced by Keegan-Michael Key who sings songs, plays games and teaches children wholesome life lessons. Think Barney & Friends, Blue’s Clues and Pee-wee’s Playhouse thrown into a blender — and then turned into a horror movie. When one of the children refuses to participate in Buddy’s activities and subsequently disappears, the other kids begin to realize that their colorful television world isn’t quite what it seems, and neither is their supposedly lovable host. The film also stars Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Delaney Quinn, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt.
And apparently audiences were willing to take a chance on something this bizarre.
Buddy has emerged as the latest independent horror success story, grossing an estimated $5,363,827 from only 1,258 theaters during its opening weekend. That’s roughly double the early projections of $2.5 million to $3 million. The Roadside Attractions and Saban Films release now holds the biggest opening weekend of 2026 for a movie released on fewer than 1,800 screens. It’s also reportedly the second-biggest opening in Roadside Attractions’ history and the largest opening ever for Saban Films.
THE END OF OAK STREET REVIEW: Dinosaurs, Marriage Problems, Wormholes and One Very Uncomfortable Prehistoric Sex Scene
The End of Oak Street, and I have some mixed feelings…
4 out of 10.. we will justify why..
First things first: SPOILERS. Lots of them. We’re basically going to spoil the entire movie here, so read at your own peril.
I went into this movie expecting something closer to a horror comedy. Instead, the comedic value was surprisingly low, the suspense was actually pretty high, and at certain points the whole thing somehow felt more like a really expensive direct-to-streaming movie than a major summer theatrical release.
I will say a plus here: JJ Abrams and company allowed us to really enter a world where it seemed feasible that dinosaurs would attack humans, and how they would be without mercy in their eating habits..
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the cast, alongside Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. Hathaway has been a star in huge movies.. McGregor as well.. .
JJ Abrams is one of the producers through Bad Robot, the company behind projects connected to Lost, Cloverfield, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. And the movie was actually written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the filmmaker behind It Follows. So there are a lot of people involved here who know how to make a movie.
All of that is star-studded..
Which makes some of the decisions in The End of Oak Street even stranger.
x x x
SPOILER ALERT
Let’s start with what I liked most: the dinosaurs.
The violence of the T-Rex was fantastic, and there was something genuinely frightening about the quiet surveillance of the Titanboa stalking Anne Hathaway’s character until eventually it is almost right behind her. For real–this may have actually been the scene of the film with tension and silence. It worked perfect..
The dinosaurs, for the most part, looked shockingly good. I actually thought the visual effects were one of the strongest parts of the movie.
Except the dog.
I don’t know what happened with that dog. Maybe they couldn’t put an actual dog through everything required for the scene, but whatever combination of CGI or digital effects they settled on looked amateur compared to the eloquence of the dinosaurs..
And now let’s just cut to the biggest spoiler of all:
They kill Dad.
Of course they kill Dad. They kill Dad in pretty much every movie anymore, so why not this one too?
Except there’s a twist. And if you really want to know the ending, everything ultimately turns out okay.
Happy ending, I guess?
The basic concept is actually pretty interesting. We’re in 1982, meaning there are no cell phones, no internet and very limited ways of figuring out what is happening. When things start going wrong, you’re relying on radios .. and during this movie even the radio isn’t picking anything up, of course.
Eventually we learn that some sort of cosmic event or wormhole has essentially ripped Oak Street out of 1982 and thrown the neighborhood into a prehistoric world.. At least soon to be dead-dad theorizes this and his son agrees while the others doubt.. It turns out it was true. They knew a light was from something, so it HAS TO BE the wormhole..
Despite dad nailing it, the dinosaur also bit his leg off and devoured him in front of his shocked family.. as a dad I guess I take personal offense to this death scene.
There are also a lot of references to Cornell University and Carl Sagan through the daughter, Audrey. Eventually she gets her happy ending too, complete with the Cornell shirt. Of course, before getting there she has to experience the minor inconvenience of watching her entire town get destroyed and her father get eaten by a dinosaur.
College admissions essays should practically write themselves after that. But here’s where I had one of my biggest problems with the movie: the marriage.
Dad is certainly flawed. He’s secretly lost his main job, he’s working side jobs trying to keep the family afloat, he’s hiding things from his wife, and he’s taking a sips of whiskey and apparently reeks of alcohol when dinosaurs attack–mom decides to ask during the end of the world why he drank..
Meanwhile, Mom has apparently written an entire manuscript about leaving him and leaving the family.
And when the basement floods and the manuscript is destroyed, her misery factor goes through the roof.
Lady, DINOSAURS ARE EATING YOUR NEIGHBORS.
Your husband and children could die at any moment. Your entire neighborhood has apparently been sucked through some sort of cosmic wormhole and deposited into prehistoric hell, and we’re having an existential crisis over the manuscript about abandoning the family?
It just felt incredibly self-centered. That’s why I had trouble liking Anne Hathaway’s character for a large portion of the movie.
The film seems to want us to understand the breakdown of this marriage, but sometimes it felt as though the marriage problems mattered more to these people than the impending extinction of everyone around them.
Eventually she gets her redemption, realizes she can save everybody through a phone booth, and things improve considerably for her husband’s fate..
And somehow we’re eventually going to have to explain to Dad why there’s photographic evidence of him standing there giving a thumbs-up in front of two dinosaurs having sex.
Which brings us to THAT scene.
This is a PG-13 movie, so apparently we’re not going to have sex scenes between humans.
The dinosaurs, however?
The dinosaurs got it on. And they didn’t just give us a quick two-second visual joke and move along.
Oh no. We got angles, movement, and noises..
We got considerably more information about prehistoric reproductive behavior than I was expecting when I bought my ticket to the point where I felt somewhat vile afterward.
There are other moments that help redeem the movie. The crazy loon neighbor swinging a gun around and indiscriminately shooting before eventually being attacked by pterodactyls was entertaining. He kind of a Murray-ish role from Stranger Things. So was the surprise attack involving the librarian blowing away the prehistoric alligator-like creatures before they could devour him.
When The End of Oak Street embraces the insanity of its premise, it’s actually great.
It’s when it tries to make the collapsing marriage the emotional center of everything that I started checking out.
And then there’s the son. This poor kid gets the shaft.
The girl he’s apparently in love with ends up being interested in his sister instead. That angle gets thrown into the story too, and considering we’re talking about 1982, good luck to everybody involved navigating that situation once they get home.
But here’s where I think the movie missed its biggest opportunity.
I wanted a crazier ending.
Imagine they finally go through the wormhole except instead of simply restoring everything, Oak Street lands in 2026.
These people walk outside dressed like it’s 1982, completely bewildered by what they’re seeing, while everyone standing around the neighborhood immediately pulls out a cell phone and starts recording them.
Or go even further.
What if they arrived in 2026 and discovered that their older selves already existed there? Suddenly you’ve got this bizarre Back to the Future situation where the younger versions of these people are meeting the lives they were supposed to have.
Or, better yet, give us one final shot.
Everything is fixed.
Everyone is safe.
The portal closes.
Happy music.
Camera pans toward the trees.
ROAR.
One dinosaur made it through.
CUT TO BLACK.
That’s the ending I wanted.
Instead, J.J. Abrams, David Robert Mitchell and company decided to send us home feeling reasonably good about everything. Dad’s okay. The family apparently has another chance. The daughter has her Cornell future. Oak Street survives.
Happiness somehow pervades the bleak landscape of this once dinosaur-infested town.
And that’s fine.
I just wanted something a little more daring.
So all in all, I’m going 4 out of 10 for The End of Oak Street.
It’s not terrible. There are actually some really good suspense sequences, the dinosaurs look surprisingly fantastic, and there are enough completely insane moments to keep you entertained. But the plot is goofy, the emotional center didn’t work for me, some of the characters came across as bizarrely self-absorbed considering DINOSAURS WERE ACTIVELY EATING PEOPLE, and for a movie with this cast, this budget and this much talent behind the scenes, it sometimes strangely felt like something made for streaming.
Still, this is one I’d say you should see once in a theater, because the dinosaur sequences and visual effects benefit from the big screen.
We wanted to like The Last House. We wanted it to be great. There’s actually a good movie buried somewhere inside this concept. Instead, what we ended up with was something that should have been completely forgettable.
Except it was so bad that we’re probably never going to forget it.
It was all so promising… until it was released.
I just watched The Last House on Netflix so you don’t have to.
No, really. You don’t have to.
If you want to, that’s fine. We just don’t think you should.
This thing was a total mess.
Don’t get me wrong, it starts with a somewhat interesting concept. These people are all stuck inside their houses, peacefully and happily celebrating Christmas and making little whimsical notes to their neighbors about what’s going on. It actually reminds you of those very innocent first days of COVID, when everybody was locked inside their houses, people were singing from balconies and making all of those ridiculous dance videos because none of us quite realized yet what we were in for.
And maybe that’s actually the best part of the movie.
Because from that point on, things get progressively worse for the family and, unfortunately, progressively worse for us as viewers.
While the premise is unrealistic, the way these characters faced this moment was TOTALLY unrealistic..
Some spoilers are coming, so read at your own demise.
At some point we’re introduced to the concept that these ill-fated homeowners simply cannot get out of their house. Rain constantly falls outside. Everyone in the neighborhood slowly runs out of food except for this particular family because Dad is apparently MacGyver and knows how to do everything, while Mom suddenly becomes capable of creating a vegetable garden inside the house.
The movie itself seems to be aiming for something much bigger than just a family trapped in a house. There are ideas here about isolation, survival, climate change, humanity’s relationship with nature and even the possibility that human beings aren’t necessarily entitled to this planet forever. That could have made for a fascinating movie.
The problem is that The Last House keeps throwing those ideas at you without ever really bringing them together. What begins as an eerie and almost believable story about a family adapting to an impossible situation eventually becomes so bizarre that instead of wondering what’s going to happen to these people, you start wondering what the hell the movie is doing.
The kids, meanwhile, don’t do much of anything to add to life. When they’re young, they basically say the adults will take care of everything, and that seems to remain their philosophy for most of the movie. It isn’t until near the end that they finally get some gumption and decide to actually do something.
And it’s only when they get that gumption that we finally see some form of oceanic monster. But apparently, according to everybody, these creatures were here longer than we were, so really it’s their planet and not ours.
Okay.
Meanwhile, the monsters are apparently content to allow everybody to slowly decay inside their homes while the land floods with salt water. Inside the house, everything is falling apart, but outside bears and other animals are apparently taking the land back again.
At some point we discover the house is sinking.
But don’t worry! The house can apparently keep surviving for years while Dad fixes his car, everybody ages, the world changes and this increasingly impossible structure just keeps hanging in there.
It’s a total mess.
Are there redeeming parts? Maybe here and there, but you have to sustain almost two hours of mostly dialogue, increasingly unrealistic survival techniques and some pretty amazing creativity from this family, including trapping animals through the chimney with what amounts to an automatic animal trap.
Listen, this movie had the complete tone of a Tubi movie that somehow wandered onto Netflix.
And that’s not necessarily an insult to Tubi.
The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are deplorable, and after watching it, we can see why.
We wanted to like The Last House. We wanted it to be great. There’s actually a good movie buried somewhere inside this concept. Instead, what we ended up with was something that should have been completely forgettable.
Except it was so bad that we’re probably never going to forget it.
THE LAST HOUSE is officially now streaming on Netflix, starrimg Greta Lee and Wagner Moura.
The film follows a family that is mysteriously sealed inside their own home with no way out, forcing them to survive on dwindling supplies while an ominous force keeps them trapped.
Directed by Louis Leterrier, THE LAST HOUSE blends supernatural horror, survival thriller and post apocalyptic sci fi, with Netflix positioning it as one of its major August releases.
And the critics claim it is giving Tubi in its appearance and plot..
Paramount is about ready to resuscitate or destroy Freddy once and for all
For better or worse…. The Hollywood Reporter writes that a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie is in the works, with Paramount Pictures having earned the rights to the franchise in order to bring the world of the horror classic to a modern audience.
The new film will be the first under the studio’s new label, Paramount Primal, which will “partner with up-and-coming storytellers as well as established filmmakers to produce smartly budgeted films across a variety of genres, including horror, comedy, action, and grounded science fiction.” (Read: low-budget filmmaking!) This initiative is led by J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, who produced Zach Cregger’s breakout film Barbarian.
There are no details right now so don’t get fooled by internet memes saying that Robert Englund is coming back because we have no idea who will be involved in and what fashion.
But hear us out, if they want to make this successful just hire on Michael Flanagan..
