Horror Movie Roundup 2025

Patrick Fiorilli

14 Nov 2025 — 8 min read

He sees all.

Salutations from the other side of a not exactly planned hiatus! We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Today, a dispatch from the far flung season of the witch and the werewolf.

October didn't leave me a ton of time to watch my usual slate of horror flicks (and even less time to write a newsletter, but check out the stuff I did indeed write since last time, if you haven't yet!). Still, I managed to slot in six films and want to record my impressions here.

Also included, a scientific scariness scale provided by my wife and begrudging partner in grime during the month of October, Duri.

Up first: John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987). I didn't grow up loving horror movies, but I did grow up watching them because my mom is, well, I'll let Jack explain:

It really wasn't until high school that the genre started to click for me and maybe the thing most responsible for that shift was, well, The Thing (dir. John Carpenter, 1982). I'll say it here, I think that film is perhaps just a hair shy of Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979) when it comes to creature feature perfection, but the competition is neck and neck.

Prince of Darkness, released five years after the initial flop of The Thing and on a fraction of the budget, is not exactly a perfect film. Its pacing drags a bit (wow, this guy's been stuck in a broom closet for a while now, huh), its last act turn toward Night of the Living Dead (dir. George A. Romero, 1968) falls a little flat for me, and while there's not nothing there, the performers' overall chemistry lacks the instant iconicity of The Thing or Alien's respective ensembles of working everymans turned hapless victims.

But when this movie hits it hits. Victor Wong as Professor Howard Birack refines quantum-philosophical babble into captivating oratory, seething with the pathos of a scientist on the verge of learning the answers he only thought he wanted. A recurrent dream motif presages the turn to "analog horror" by several decades. The set design—especially the candlelit reliquary where shadows and silence are broken by the giant vat of swirling green Evil, later littered with all manner of (deliciously chunky) flickering and beeping machines—is sumptuous.

Above all else, the film's premise—that Satan is a material rather than spiritual phenomenon, and that the Catholic Church has ministered a grand conspiracy on the grounds that it's actually easier for humanity to accept the alternative—is just one of the best ever conceived. It's total weird fiction, cosmic horror in its purest form, without a dash of tentacular irony. Excellent stuff.

Duri's Scare Factor: 50%

Duri's Scariest Scene: The darkness on the other side of the mirror.

Next, Altered States (1980), directed by Ken Russell. Without intending to do so, I've made Russell a mainstay of my Halloween season. Last year, I watched The Devils (1971), an outstanding blaspheme; the year before, The Lair of the White Worm (1988), a really fun if not great piece of folk horror; and the neon sizzle of Crimes of Passion (1984) splattered onto my TV sometime in there, too.

At this point, it's fair to say I'm a fan of Russell's take on psychosexual surrealism, which is on full display in the best moments of this film. William Hurt is, as ever (although perhaps especially here, given that it's—though you wouldn't know it—his debut role) a treat to watch, and Russell manages to wring some ingenious imagery from the basic idea of a guy hallucinating in a water tank for several hours.

Sans the extended (and I mean extended) sequence of an acrobatic hominid—played, admittedly, quite well by onetime Alvin Ailey lead dancer Miguel Godreau—screwing around with security guards and rampaging through the zoo, this would be a hell of a film. As it stands: pretty damn good.

Duri's Scare Factor: 25%

Duri's Scariest Scene: When William Hurt looks like he might cannibalize the student he's sleeping with.

Rounding out my unofficial "little known 80s horror flicks by directors better known for other (maybe better) movies" is Michael Mann's sophomore feature, The Keep (1980), which I watched, as far as I can tell, on its only official streaming home, the increasingly AI-generated ad-filled platform PlutoTV.

I mention the ads only to underscore a point, namely, that almost every time one of the seven or eight three-minute ad breaks ended, I would pick up my remote and scan back fifteen seconds into the film, sure that the stream had somehow skipped ahead past whatever natural transition would have gotten us from, say, a wide shot of the impossibly huge cavern at the heart of the titular keep to, uh, this guy waking up halfway across the continent with glowing eyes? Not a single time was this suspicion true. No, the movie—by virtue of a tortuous production—is just that disjointed.

And yet—maybe it's a really cool smoke monster (don't worry about his subsequent appearances), maybe it's Ian McKellen trying out what would become his Gandalf mannerisms or Jürgen Prochnow workshopping the anti-Nazi German soldier persona he'd perfect a year later in Das Boot (dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 1981), or maybe it's just Tangerine fuckin' Dream—The Keep is worth at least one watch.

Duri's Scare Factor: 10%

Duri's Scariest Scene: Before turning her attention to the actually fairly tame movie, Duri thought the soundtrack was sort of unsettling.

I'm usually the one in our house to suggest watching a movie in the evening instead of TV, but every now and then Duri will proclaim that she herself is in the mood for one, which usually means—and maybe this is her way of emphasizing the difference between movies and television—a three-hour odyssey about something like the horrors of industrialized warfare, or the shattering of the American dream, or a sweeping, multi-act musical.

It's how we watched Das Boot (new to us), Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997, new to me), The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise, 1965, a rewatch for both of us), and any day now it's how she'll get me to watch Cold Mountain (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2003, a traumatizing memory from her childhood, apparently).

David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) was also one of these suggestions—a movie she'd seen, but I hadn't. It's real good! I don't need to go on and on here about the formal mastery that Fincher demonstrates, or the strong supporting performances by the likes of Downey and Ruffalo and Sevigny, or even about Gyllenhaal at his most true to form, full of boiling mania, juuuuust barely contained.

What I think is scariest about this not quite proper horror film is its refusal to offer any sense of closure. Answers are earned, at the expense of all humanity, but never paid out. Nor could they be. Inasmuch as the film is a parable of the sensationalism of the American media apparatus, the mundanity of violence, and the layered meanings of truth, it's also, maybe most of all, an astute critique of the value of labor: work and its associated ethics. All the President's Men (dir. Alan J. Pakula, 1976) with no Nixon resignation at the end.

Duri's Scare Factor: 0% until the basement scene, then 100%, then back to 0%

Duri's Scariest Scene: The basement scene.

On Halloween, we didn't get too many trick or treaters, thanks in large part to the obscene, unlawful, and ongoing campaign against undocumented immigrants and American citizens perpetrated across Chicagoland, but visibly and violently on that very day in Evanston, where we live. There's a material evil for you.

On Halloween night, we opted for a double feature. Scream (1996), directed by Wes Craven, was new to both of us—I myself having once been terrified beyond all measure as a toddler by a teenager wearing its Munch-esque mask. So it was something like catharsis to finally confront the film itself.

It's a tough one to watch for the first time in 2025, not because it's aged poorly, but because so much of its meta-cinematic style has been reintegrated into the mainstream. It no longer feels subversive for a character in a movie to talk about their role as a character in a movie. (In fact, this is a convention I'll be eager to see how the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer series intends to update, given that show's own penchant for lampshading its own tropes.)

Of course, one can and probably should perform the not too taxing mental gymnastics required to imagine what the originality of Scream would have looked like back during its initial run—although that's not to say that metafictional horror movies didn't predate it back then, too.

But what saves the film today, regardless of whether its critiques of its own contrivances are seen as clever or conventional is the simple fact that it's a really good, genuinely funny, tightly paced slasher. Everything from the creative kills to the off-kilter characters (shout out to Matthew Lillard, quietly one of the best parts of Twin Peaks: The Return [dir. David Lynch, 2017] and loudly one of the best parts of this film) to the slapstick antics of a killer who keeps getting knocked on his ass, speak to the confidence of a director who knows exactly what he's doing. Because, well, he's done it.

And the reveal? Come on. Ya like Hitchcock's Rope (1948)? So does Wes Craven. But, he asks, don't you wish it had a little more overt penetration?

Duri's Scare Factor: 70%

Duri's Scariest Scene: The iconic home invasion opening scene.

Then it was the end of Spooky Season 2025. I don't know any movie that so consistently gives me as many moments of full body chills as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). It's well established by now that this is really Shelley Duvall's movie (RIP). Without her, Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrence would look like a Loony Tunes character. Set him next to her, though, and the look on Duvall's face convinces you that he's an avatar of evil.

Every time I see the film, I find new layers to her performance, including this time, where I couldn't take my eyes off the nervous fidgeting of her fingers around a cigarette during her conversation with the pediatrician about her son's dislocated shoulder.

This watch was also my first since seeing Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and it hammered home my impression, watching that film, that it's deeply in conversation with this one—maybe more than any two other Kubricks. More on that, perhaps, come Christmastime?