Grave Tone: Horror Podcast

Clayface review time: DC Studios finally made a real horror movie, and we walked out of it with a 7 and a 4.5. Full spoilers and the ending explained.

James Watkins' Clayface, based on a story by Mike Flanagan, follows Matt Hagen, a rising Hollywood star whose face is carved up by a Gotham mob boss's henchmen. Desperate to get his life back, he signs up for an experimental regenerative treatment that isn't ready for human trials. It works. Then it keeps working. Arthur and Meaghan break down DC Studios' first horror movie, from the plastic surgery and aging...

Woodstake is the vampire graphic novel that sends a Dracula-style predator to Woodstock 1969, and we sat down with the man who made it. Shawn Hainsworth (who writes as Darin S. Cape) joins Meaghan and Arthur to talk about how rereading Bram Stoker's Dracula alongside Michael Lang's The Road to Woodstock turned into a pun, then a screenplay, then five years of work on the Woodstake graphic novel.

The elevator pitch is simple: hippies vs. vampires. What's underneath it is a lot more interesting. Shawn wanted to take one of the most cynical creatures in horror (a centuries-old...

Our Other Mommy review, fresh from the theater: Jessica Chastain plays a mom and the thing wearing her face, and it should have wrecked us. It didn't.

Rob Savage (Host, The Boogeyman) directs this adaptation of Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, produced by James Wan through Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. The cast is stacked: Jessica Chastain, Arabella Olivia Clark, Jay Duplass, Arian Moayed, Dichen Lachman and Karen Allen (yes, Marion from Raiders of the Lost Ark).

Other Mommy Review: Our Verdict and Scare Factor

V/H/S/Mixtape review time, and this one is cuckoo nuts bananas. The ninth V/H/S film turns sound, music and heavy metal into the horror, and we came out of it with our jaws on the floor.

Arthur and Meaghan break down Shudder's newest found footage horror anthology, starting with GWAR's deranged MTV-style wraparound and moving through all four main segments: Renee Zhan's Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance (killer puppets from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, plus Barbara Crampton), David Moreau's Heartbeat (two urban explorers, a soundproof chamber and the sound of your own body), Ernest...

Our Beware Boiúna review is here, and this giant snake movie does not care who it eats. Spoiler-free first, full spoilers after Gary's warning.

Meaghan and Arthur review Beware Boiúna, the new creature feature from director Mike P. Nelson (Wrong Turn, Silent Night, Deadly Night), shot on location in the Amazon rainforest near Leticia, Colombia. A team of doctors on a medical mission heads upriver, an illegal gold mining operation is tearing up the jungle, and the Boiúna (the colossal river serpent of Amazonian folklore) wants every last one of them gone.

Bew...

Beware Boiúna director Mike P. Nelson is back on Grave Tone, and this time he brought stories from the Amazon. Floods, a jungle blessing, a poison dart frog on set, and a giant snake that does not care who you are.

We sat down with Mike P. Nelson ahead of Beware Boiúna hitting theatres October 2 to talk about how this giant snake movie actually got made. He almost turned it down (giant snake movies come with baggage, and he knew it). What changed his mind was finding the link between Titanoboa, the real prehistoric snake di...

The IT 1990 miniseries is the reason Janine of Graeae Horror spent more than a decade unable to look at Tim Curry. She snuck downstairs at six, caught Pennywise taking Georgie through the banister, and the nightmares followed her home from school for years.

Childhood Trauma is back, and this might be the most traumatic entry in the series so far (that is saying something). Janine joins Arthur and Meaghan to revisit the 1990 ABC adaptation of Stephen King's IT, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, and to explain how one TV movie turned into a real phobia, a mid-screening...

Our Resident Evil 2026 review, and the short version is that Zach Cregger cracked the video game movie. Arthur and Meaghan sat down right after seeing Resident Evil in theatres, and this is one of those episodes where the two of us do not land in the same place at all.

Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier taking a package up to Raccoon City General Hospital on a night that goes very wrong. That is basically the whole premise, and it works. No Leon, no Jill, no legacy characters, just an everyman with a handgun and a...

Hope (2026) movie review: Na Hong-jin spent ten years away and came back with a creature feature that is not a creature feature at all. Arthur and Meaghan review Hope, the Korean sci-fi horror epic that premiered at Cannes, opened in South Korea in July, and finally hit North American theatres on September 9 through Neon.

The setup is small. A remote fishing village called Hope Harbor, a police chief who is in way over his head, a dead cow that a bear did not kill. Then the thing in the mountains walks through a concrete wall in broad...

Return to Oz and The Peanut Butter Solution both came out in 1985; both were sold as children's movies, and both are genuinely upsetting. Meaghan and Arthur team up with Annie and Caroline from the Drawn to Darkness podcast for a Childhood Trauma double bill made entirely of films that were technically made for kids.

RETURN TO OZ: THE DISNEY SEQUEL THAT STARTS IN AN ASYLUM

Jonathan Janz on Marla, the horror novel that sold out before it went on sale and then spent four years being the book nobody could find. Now it is everywhere, and he came back to Grave Tone to explain how that actually happened.

Marla was published in 2022 by Earthling Publications as a 500-copy limited edition hardcover. That was the whole run. Paul Miller told Janz it was the most requested post-sellout book he has ever had. Four years, one agent change, one manager change, and a three-book deal later, Weird Tales and Blackstone Publishing gave Marla a...

Daniel Barnett built a horror epic out of eternal night, and the Nightmareland omnibus is only the halfway point. Twelve volumes are planned.

We sit down with horror author Daniel Barnett to talk about the Nightmareland Chronicles, the horror fantasy series he pitches as The Dark Tower meets The Last of Us (the games, and he is a purist about that). John Hawthorne is crossing a darkened America to reach his daughter's blue house by the Atlantic Ocean, with Mariah Nowak and thirteen-year-old Marcos Walker beside him. Marcos is deaf, and in this world, that turns out...

Buddy (2026) review: Casper Kelly's killer unicorn horror comedy is the most unhinged thing in theaters this week, and we are fully on board.

Meaghan and Arthur caught Buddy at its international premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, about a month before the wide theatrical release, and walked out of that screening loud about it. Casper Kelly (the Too Many Cooks guy, the Adult Swim Yule Log guy) built a pitch-perfect recreation of a 1990s children's television show called It's Buddy!, then let the giant orange unicorn at the center of it start turning on the kids...

Colony (2026) review: Yeon Sang-ho went back to zombies and made them learn. Meaghan and Arthur break down the Train to Busan director's newest outbreak.

Colony traps biotechnology professor Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun, credited internationally as Gianna Jun) inside a mixed-use Seoul high-rise when disgraced scientist Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan) releases an engineered virus at a biotech conference and announces that he is the only vaccine. The infected do not just bite. They share a hive mind, they trade information, and they get better at hunting you every hour.### Colony 2026 Review: Yeon Sang-ho Returns to the Zombie Movie<...

Insidious: Out of the Further review, and we did the homework first. We rewatched all five previous Insidious films in one week, then walked into the sixth one with fresh eyes and a much better understanding of what this franchise is actually building.

Vote for us at the Sacred Crypt Awards for the Rising Star category! Vote here, thank you!

Insidious: Out of the Further Review and Our Rating

Fantasia Film Festival 2026 is over, and we saw more than 20 films between us. These are the six that stuck.

Meaghan and Arthur close out Grave Tone's Fantasia Film Festival 2026 coverage with a mini wrap-up of their best horror films of the fest. No ranking (Meaghan ranked hers anyway). Just the movies that are still living in our heads two weeks later, plus honorable mentions and the release dates you actually need.

Fantasia Film Festival 2026 wrapped, and we saw more than 20 films between us. No ranking, just the six that stuck, plus when you can watch...

Junction Row review time, and this Fantasia 2026 world premiere is the one that split us right down the middle.

Meaghan and Arthur close out their Fantasia International Film Festival minisodes with Ashlea Wessel's feature debut, a Canadian sci-fi horror creature feature starring Katharine Isabelle as Juno, an army veteran in recovery who returns to the housing compound she walked away from. Her friend Ruby is missing. A new drug called The Link is tearing through the place. And something underneath Junction Row is a lot worse than the dealers running it.

Junction Row Review: Ashlea...

The Glorious Dead review: the Adams Family wake a small town to blood in the taps and dead that will not stay buried.

Meaghan and Arthur close out their Fantasia 2026 coverage with a mini review of The Glorious Dead, the sixth consecutive film from the Adams Family to world premiere at Fantasia. John Adams and Toby Poser wrote and directed it. Poser stars as Sheriff Deb McCloud, who wakes up on her day off to a total blackout, blood coming out of faucets, missing people, holes in the ground that should not be there, and creatures in...

Home Bodies review time. Casey Walker's Canadian sci-fi horror had its world premiere at Fantasia 2026, and it left us with a lot to chew on.

Two children, Red and Blue, have been raised in total isolation by an automated house. The fridge restocks itself the second you close it. The dishes vanish into the trash. A disembodied voice they call Papa runs the whole operation. Then a stranger arrives as a Christmas gift, the kids name it Pal, and twelve years of routine come apart.

Home Bodies Fantasia 2026 World Premiere

Los Vampires review, plus The Leader, both caught at Fantasia 2026 and both built on things that actually happened. Meaghan went to these two solo (Arthur could not get into either screening) so this one runs as a spoiler-free double feature.

Los Vampires is Craig Mitchell's fictionalized account of the 1931 Spanish Dracula, the version George Melford shot overnight on Tod Browning's sets while Bela Lugosi's crew slept. Henry Ian Cusick plays Luis de Ossario, the Spanish actor handed the Count and ordered to copy every mannerism off the dailies of Kürt Orlov (Thomas Kretschmann), his English-language counterpart. T...

No Rest for the Wicked is a queer vampire love story from the 1862 Faroe Islands, and it wrecked us in the best way. This one had our attention before the festival schedule even dropped, and it earned every bit of that hype.

Kasper Kalle's world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival follows Baldur (Egor Venned), a young fisherman stuck caring for his widowed mother on a treeless island in the North Atlantic, and Helge (Pilou Asbaek), the drifting whaler who washes into his life and changes everything. What starts as a reluctant friendship turns passionate, then...

Penny Lane Is Dead review: the 1986 Ozploitation slasher that dropped a Fantasia audience member on the floor, plus the world premiere of Someone's Daughter.

PENNY LANE IS DEAD
The feature debut from Australian writer-director Mia'Kate Russell, and a straight throwback to 1980s Ozploitation. It is 1986, three friends are celebrating at an isolated beach house, and Penny's jealous cousin Kat turns up with a container of spiked cupcakes. What starts as a prank collapses into a home invasion and then into a revenge film. Meaghan covers the content warnings up front, the tonal wobble between d...

Nightborn review time. Hanna Bergholm's Finnish folk horror lands on Shudder July 31, and we caught it at Fantasia first (the North American premiere, no less). This is her follow-up to Hatching, and it takes the motherhood horror thing somewhere darker and a lot more visceral.

The Setup: Hanna Bergholm's Folk Horror Follow-Up

Fantasia 2026 reviews: Tight Lettuce and Attack on Paradise, two world premieres, spoiler free and we loved both!

Tight Lettuce: A Quebec Family Drama Built on a True Story

Her Private Hell is the most beautiful movie we couldn't explain. Nicolas Winding Refn's first film in a decade opened the 30th Fantasia International Film Festival, and we sat on this one for days before we could even record (we needed to).

This is our Her Private Hell review, and honestly? We're still turning it over. Refn's neon fever dream drops Sophie Thatcher's Elle into a futuristic metropolis swallowed by fog, while Charles Melton's soldier hunts for his missing daughter and a masked killer called the Leather Man picks off young women. Two movies in one, a...

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review, spoilers included, straight off its Canadian premiere at Fantasia. Jane Schoenbrun made a queer slasher that loves slashers, and we did not see it coming. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a director handed a dead franchise (a "zombie IP," in her words) to reboot; Gillian Anderson plays Billy, the original final girl who vanished into a reclusive Hollywood mystery. The two of them meet at the abandoned camp where the first film was shot, and things get bloody, horny, and genuinely strange from there.

JANE SCHOENBRUN'S QUEER SLASHER LANDS AT...

Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror is out today, and Alex Grass sat down with us for a horror author interview that went everywhere we hoped it would. He traces his horror education back to a father who took him to see Terminator 2 when he was six, and a mother who kept buying him pulp paperbacks based on how cool the covers looked (she had no idea what was inside). The Fly is the one that did the real damage. The body horror hooked him, but it was the descent into the beast that stuck.

I...

Evil Dead Burn review: Sébastien Vaniček made the nastiest movie in this franchise, and it starts fast and never lets up.

We came home from the theatre and recorded immediately. Evil Dead Burn drops French expat Alice (Souheila Yacoub) into a house full of in-laws who never wanted her there, and then turns them into Deadites one by one. The early hype said you are not ready. Usually, that hype is nothing. This time it is one of the exceptions.

Sébastien Vaniček Brings French Horror to the Evil Dead Franchise

The best Canadian horror movies don't get talked about enough, so for Canada Day we counted down ten we genuinely love (killer jeans included). This is Grave Tone doing what it does when there's no new release to chase: pulling from the deep, weird catalog of Canadian horror films and arguing about them.

Canadian Horror Comedy That Actually Lands

Meaghan and Arthur welcome Eleazar for a Childhood Trauma episode that doubles as one of the deepest Evil Dead franchise dives we've done. They cover the full arc — from Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell's proof-of-concept short film Within the Woods, through the legal chaos that forced Evil Dead II to basically remake the first twenty minutes of its own predecessor, through Army of Darkness and its cursed rights issues, through Ash vs Evil Dead and the weird, wonderful lore that keeps expanding with every entry.

🎙 About Our Guest: Eleazar of Nightmare Echoes

Arthur and Meaghan dig into William Bagley's Hold the Fort (2025), now available on VOD. They saw it first at its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, loved it enough to re-watch it the second it hit digital, and they're still laughing. This is that kind of movie.

HOLD THE FORT — EPISODE SHOWNOTES

ABOUT THE FILM

▸ Hold the Fort (2025): written and directed by William Bagley, co-written by Scott Hawkins

▸ Distributed by Sunrise Films (North America); available on Digital HD via Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home as of...

Leviticus review: the queer Australian horror film Joe Bird stars in just opened, and we saw it opening night. Here's our raw reaction. Leviticus (2026) — written and directed by Adrian Chiarella — is one of the best horror films of this year so far. It's sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and the praise is not overstated. This is a queer coming-of-age horror film that follows Naim (Joe Bird, Talk to Me) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) — two teenage boys in a small, deeply religious town in rural Australia whose emerging feelings for each other trigger a supernatural entity that stalks anyone who's had a...

Summerween is a real thing (Gravity Falls coined the term back in 2012, and it has only picked up steam since), and this episode is our full lineup of summer horror movie recommendations, vampire picks, slasher books, and the horror TV shows we cannot stop talking about.

On the movie side: The Final Girls, The Vast of Night, the new survival horror film Pitfall, The Lost Boys, Joyride, Sean Byrne's shark thriller Dangerous Animals, the live-action Scooby-Doo, the horror sequel Influencers, The Gift, and The Ruins. For summer horror books, we cover Breathe In, Bleed Out by Brian...

In a Violent Nature 2 is coming, and we got to sit down with the man who makes Johnny tick.

Ry Barrett — actor, stuntman, and the face (well, mask) of one of the most talked-about slasher characters in recent horror memory — joins Arthur and Meaghan for a full conversation about what it takes to play a silent killer, how he prepared for the sequel, and what fans should expect when Johnny hits a summer camp.

We get into the physicality of playing Johnny: the shoulder-first movement system, the checklist Ry ran through before every take, and the...

Backrooms is here, and we went on opening night.

Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old who built the Backrooms universe on YouTube as Kane Pixels and became A24's youngest feature director in the process, delivers something that genuinely holds up. This is slow-burning psychological horror with real atmosphere, a committed lead performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, and a level of visual dread that stays with you well after you leave the theater.

In this episode, Arthur and Meaghan break down the film in full, including the creepypasta and Kane Pixels YouTube lore that started it all, what...

Passenger (2026) review: André Øvredal returns to horror with a supernatural road trip that looks incredible and scares hard, but leaves questions unanswered. In this episode, we dig into the Autopsy of Jane Doe director's latest film, where a young couple's van life adventure turns into a demonic nightmare after they stop at a fatal highway crash.

Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio play Maddie and Tyler, and we talk about what works (the cinematography by Federico Verardi is genuinely stunning), what surprised us (a few jump scares we did not see coming), and where the story falls apart. Th...

Obsession (2026) review: Curry Barker's horror film is terrifying, hilarious, and emotionally devastating. We rate it 9.5/10.

Arthur and Meaghan review Obsession, the new supernatural horror from 26-year-old writer/director Curry Barker. We break down Inde Navarrette's award-worthy performance as Nikki, the be-careful-what-you-wish-for premise powered by the One Wish Willow, Barker's rise from YouTube comedy (That's a Bad Idea, Milk & Serial) to a Focus Features horror classic, and why this might be the best horror movie of 2026.

We cover the cast (Michael Johnston, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter), the TIFF premiere and $15M bidding war, comparisons...

At the Place of Ghosts is the kind of film that stays with you long after the credits. Bretten Hannam's Mi'kmaq supernatural thriller follows two estranged brothers, Mise'l and Antle, who are forced back together when a malevolent spirit from their shared childhood begins poisoning them from the inside out.

Their only option: enter Sk+te'kmujue'katik, the Place of Ghosts, a forest where time folds on itself and the living walk alongside ancestors, future selves, and the traumas they tried to leave behind. Arthur and Meaghan break down everything that makes this Canadian indigenous horror film work...

Annie Neugebauer is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated horror author, and her work gets under your skin the way only the best psychological horror can. In this interview, we sit down with Annie to talk about The Outsiders Sequence, her series of wilderness horror novellas published through Shortwave Publishing, including her debut novella The Extra and the upcoming follow-up The Other, dropping June 9, 2026.

We get into the big questions: what draws a writer to horror fiction in the first place, and why does the genre still carry a stigma when books like Interview with the Vampire and...

Hokum review: Damian McCarthy's new horror movie is a near-perfect Irish folk horror film starring Adam Scott. We break down everything.

Hokum just dropped, and we had to talk about it immediately. Damian McCarthy, the director behind Oddity and Caveat, delivered something special here. Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a horror writer who checks into a remote Irish hotel to scatter his parents' ashes and ends up locked in a haunted honeymoon suite with a witch, a missing woman, and a conspiracy that's entirely human.

This is a full spoiler review (with a warning before...