What Could Have Been: It Came from Beneath the Sea

When low budget B movies were produced back in the 1950s, studios (in this case, Columbia) never really expected that much from them... but as you might already know, especially when it came to fun sci-fi horror monster movies, they tended to hit the sweet spot for what movie audiences wanted. One such example is Robert Gordon’s cephalopod-centric It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955).

If someone was told that a movie had earned almost 110 million in just over two weeks at the box office, most people would just shrug it off and say that isn’t all that special... but with this film being made for somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million dollars, that makes it a whole different thing. Utterly impressive in this day and age, the psychological horror film Obsession (released back at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025), written, directed, and edited by Curry Barker, is taking the cinema world by storm. Aptly titled, the rather timid, lonely, and lackluster Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnston) is rather infatuated with coworker and longtime friend Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette). Working in the same music store along with co-friends Ian (a boisterous Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless) – whose father Carter (Andy Richter – yes Conan O’Brien’s longtime sidekick) runs the store, it has become a sort of frustrating groundhog’s day for the man – who has long fretted over making his feelings known to the girl.

Finding an intriguing milieu somewhere between the recent popularity in witch related films over the past decade (think The VVitch, Hereditary, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and Weapons) and a spooky atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of the Stephen King room related 1408, Hokum (2026), written and directed by Damian McCarthy, is another worthy entry in the horror genre. In many ways about battling your own demons, Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a successful writer with a very troubled past – making him a bitter, cantankerous, and bluntly rude human being, he is currently writing the trilogy-ender to his successful Conquistador series (which serves as a bookend for this film). Suddenly haunted by his parents’ ashes sitting upon his mantle (as well as being hit with a form of writer’s block), he decides to fly to Ireland to spread them at one of the places he knows they loved – a kitschy inn called The Bilberry Woods where long ago they honeymooned.

Intriguingly playing like two separate movies, Massimo Pupillo’s Lady Morgan’s Vengeance (1965), opens like a melodramatic romance with a psychologically tinged mystery before its second half genre switch into a much more gothic horror tale. An Italian production, though funnily enough set in Scotland (though that is definitely not English they are speaking), the attractive Lady Susan Morgan (Barbara Nelli), niece of the wealthy aged Sir Neville Blackhouse (Carlo Kechler), finds herself betrothed to Sir Harold Morgan (Paul Muller) when she truly loves the French man who has been hired to restore portions of the massive manor home, Pierre Brissac (Michel Forain).

Ah, Death, sometimes known as the Grim Reaper, has been depicted in so very many unique ways, with the most traditional being of the lineage of Victor Sjöström – who made the silent horror film The Phantom Carriage (1921)... which then inspired his protégée Ingmar Bergman (who watched the feature every year – usually on New Year’s Eve) with making his classic Black Death plague set film The Seventh Seal (1957). Having a laugh at that always winning Reaper, the 2011 horror comedy short The Coldest Caller, written and directed by Joe Tucker, is a four minute humour-filled foray into one such harrowing scenario. Exhuming some fun in a Monty Python-like sketch (specifically Monty Python’s Meaning of Life), when the ominous list-carrying Grim Reaper (Noel Byrne) – your typically towering, hidden gaunt figure dressed in all black, arrives on the cozey doorstep of one Mrs. Evans (Sheila Reid), the punctual old lady almost seems like she has already been waiting for him all day.

It almost felt like Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come – a sequel to the original horror-comedy hit, were playing the very game it references in the title, as it has been a surprisingly long seven years since the original was released in theatres. Despite the wait, this one starts up literally right where the first concluded, with smoking survivor Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) being brought to a hospital, after which the police would like to question her on all the Le Domas carnage. But, unknowingly to anyone except a select few, her defeat of the satanic gaming family has set in motion a most unique event that will bring together the other elite families that are members of the same Council (that, for all intents and purposes, run the world) – who are all called forth by the head of the table, Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg – yes, the famed horror director).