What To Get Excited About In 2026

It’s barely 2026 and I’m already champing at the bit for a few horror movies coming out this month. And then there’s the rest of the year.

Brad Anderson’s Session 9 (2001) is one of my favorite movies. It’s truly scary, and unnerves through unsettling atmosphere, where the action on the periphery, or the idea of the periphery, is as scary as what’s happening in the frame. It’s a smart, concise, brilliant horror movie.

So I was excited to see he has a new movie coming out in 2026.

World Breaker is a creature feature, that most tempting of horror tropes. Milla Jovovich continues a run of badass women with swords fighting monsters. Apparently beasts called Breakers are erupting from The Stitch, another one of those portals to another dimension where infinite wee beasties come from.

But while I was digging around for info about this one, I found out Anderson has been working on the final film in George A Romero’s Living Dead series, Twilight of the Dead. Principal photography wrapped mid-last year and it was for sale at the American Film Market.

Milla Jovovich leads this one as well, cementing her role as the industry’s only choice of sword- and gun-fu leading ladies, unless Kate Beckinsale is available.

The film was based on Romero’s final script and written with his widow’s oversight to preserve Romero’s spirited social commentary.

After Romero’s underwhelming Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009), putting a strong auteur at the helm of the franchise isn’t the worst idea. Still, I saw Diary of the Dead here in Austin at the Paramount with Romero introducing it, and it’s the closest I ever came to meeting the man, so all things are relative.

Speaking of Milla Jovovich and monsters — do you sense a theme? — Weapons’ Zach Cregger has taken over the Resident Evil movie franchise with a reinvention / reboot.

I’m not sure replacing Milla Jovovich with Paul Walter Houser —the plump gentleman everyone loves casting these days, as Superman’s weepy dad or the Fantastic Four’s late game assist, Mole Man— is an upgrade, but Cregger’s on a roll, and the RE film series most definitely is not.

I’m not a fan of video game adaptations. The video game is already a movie. You’re just stealing the parts that made it different and fun, like agency, and the ability to shoot things.

(I haven’t watched The Last of Us – I played both games and that was plenty, although this may be the exception.)

But the idea of Cregger’s smart, savvy, slightly irreverent yet also emotionally grounded approach to the zombies and monsters universe of Resident Evil does give me pause. In a good way.

Sam Raimi is back on very firmly established territory with Send Help, which sees the Asshole Boss and Downtrodden Employee get their just desserts (or at least, he does) when a plane crash strands them and the wimpy worker proves to be a sociopathic survivalist. In true Raimi fashion, while it’s cartoonish, it also appears to have a heart and genuine love for its characters — unless Raimi wants to beat them up for a while.

And because nothing stays dead and everything is connected, we’re also getting yet another Evil Dead movie this year, with Evil Dead Burn.

This time out, on the heels of the very fun Evil Dead Rise, we get Sébastien Vaniček’s standalone creeper Evil Dead Burn. Vanicek’s last film, Infested, was a Shudder pickup with a reproducing spider infestation. From the French Premiere, January 2026:

PREMIÈRE: How would you define Evil Dead Burn?
SÉBASTIEN VANICEK: It's a horror and survival film on a very reduced timeline, with a race against time aspect. Which doesn't prevent moments of relief: there is probably more humor than in the Fede Álvarez remake [released in 2013]. However, it gets close to it on the horror side. It's perhaps the least bloody of the Evil Dead films, but undoubtedly the most violent and brutal. Let's say I'm aiming more for the discomfort of the famous teeth on the sidewalk scene from American History X than excessive gore.

Meanwhile, Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin had shot a remake of the 1932 Universal The Mummy for Blumhouse, but after test screenings, it has been retitled The Resurrected. No trailer or release date is available, other than a pre-existing date of April 17, 2026.

Werwulf is Robert Eggers’ latest filthy, obsessive, aesthetically rich horror pic, on the heels of Nosferatu and The Witch and The Lighthouse. For god’s sake, do not click on the Werwulf trailer on YouTube, I won’t subject you to it here. It’s someone’s idea of a joke, a thinly strung together bit of scenes from Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, some bad CGI and what looks like Willem Dafoe Sora videos.

This particular film claims to be spoken in middle English, making it yet another nearly incomprehensible film in an increasingly long line of audibly incomprehensible Eggers films.

In Nosferatu we got Bill Skarsgaard as the bony-assed skeletal vampire, here we get Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead, a choice which I questioned initially, knowing him mostly as the featherweight human element of Gareth Edwards’ no-show Godzilla. But having seen him as the raging father in 28 Years Later, it seems there’s a lot more to bring to bear under the right director.

To be honest, I hadn’t spent much energy thinking about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple because I’d not seen the latest Danny Boyle infected nee zombie thriller. Having remedied that this past week, hoo-boy am I excited.

Without giving away too much, 28 Years Later ended on a motherfucker of an ending that simply makes you want to watch the sequel as soon as possible. Not a cliffhanger so much as a new story thread that desperately needs unraveling.

Alas, it appears we will have to endure more of giant infected zombie Samson’s enormous cock and balls, which are a hallmark of the first film. Aside from enlarged nether regions, it’s an otherwise gorgeous and elegiac zombie movie that also looks like it was shot on an iPhone.

They Will Kill You, from It director Andy Muschietti as producer, looks to be spectacular fun. This red band trailer is full of spoilers and cleaved heads and furiously powerful shotgun blasts, but it’s a real hoot. This kind of Peter Jackson-esque cartoonish horror has been sidelined by A24 “elevated horror” for the past few years, so I appreciate the return to form. Trailer below (or at least a link to it.)

The Backrooms is the feature film debut of Kane Parsons, whose 9 minute “found footage” liminal space horror short made waves a few years ago. Here’s that film:

Much like Anderson’s Session 9, Backrooms gets its unsettling nature from audio design and peripheral images that should not be there, as well as a deliciously infinite location. It works right on the amygdala, placing pins there for later pressure.

Hokum looks to be supernatural fun set in Ireland, led by Adam Scott. The horse/donkey lady gets my vote.

There aren’t trailers yet for Clayface, the James Gunn produced and Mike Flanagan scripted DC universe horror film, but I have high hopes based on a love of all the above. Clayface is a Batman nemesis and sometime ally, but I’m guessing the movie will play more to the actor turned shit-heap. Shades of Rita Farr on Doom Patrol, who was constantly turning from a gorgeous actress to a melting pile of gooey flesh.

While the trailer basically gives the entire movie away, I’m still intrigued by Killer Whale, the latest high concept 2 girls one whale movie, complete with flaccid dorsal fin.

Luc Besson’s Dracula feels like a concept that’s already been done. Besson can’t tell a story to save his life, but that’s beside the point when it appears he is essentially remaking Francis Ford Coppola’s tribute to early cinema and Gary Oldman, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Here we get Christoph Walz as Van Helsing and a lot of pretty cinematography. Your mileage may vary.

Thanks for visiting with Ghosts in the Machine. I’m Nick Tangborn and you can reach me at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co

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