Just because December is a time to celebrate festive movies, that doesn’t mean horror needs to take a back seat, and this month will be full of new genre offerings for fans to dig into.
Already available is Icelandic vampire film Thirst, where an addict accused of murdering her brother turns to an ancient vampire to bring him back, and Anything for Jackson, which sees an elderly couple kidnap a young pregnant woman to fuse the spirit of their dead grandson with the unborn child.
Out today, meanwhile, is Freaky – on VOD, at least, as it had a very limited theatrical run last month – a horror comedy where a high school girl and a serial killer swap bodies, Castle Freak, which follows a young woman who inherits a creepy old castle with connections to an ancient cult worshipping alien deities, What Lies Below, where a teenage girl comes to suspect that her mother’s insanely hot and impossible perfect new fiancé is a disguised aquatic monster, and Smiley Face Killers, a fictionalized story of a serial murder conspiracy theory.
Asian horror also gets a look in with Detention (December 5th), a Taiwanese series where a ghost recounts the horrific past of a high school, the final season of Attack on Titan (December 6th), which sees the last remnants of humanity battle man-eating giants, and Alice in Borderland (December 10th), finding a group of delinquents transported to an alt-reality Tokyo for a Wonderland-themed survival game.
December 11th then debuts Joe Bob Saves Christmas, a festive special of The Last Drive-In highlighting holiday horrors, Don’t Click, seeing two young men becoming trapped in a dungeon after accessing the wrong porn site, the painfully topical Songbird, exploring a world destroyed by a pandemic and controlled by martial law and quarantines, and the far less bleak Wolfwalkers, an animated fantasy centered on the hunt for a tribe who transform into wolves as they sleep
December 12th, meanwhile, brings us Breaking Surface, a thriller where two sisters diving in Norway’s fjords are blindsided by a rockslide and one becomes trapped underwater with her air gradually running out, and documentary The Ripper, another exploration into the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer who terrorized the English county in the mid-to-late ‘70s.
December 17th is the big TV release, as we get the new adaptation of Stephen King’s sprawling epic The Stand, where survivors in a post-apocalyptic world accumulate into two ideological factions and prepare to face off.
December 18th then has A Creepshow Holiday Special, which follows a man who joins a support group after fearing he’s a serial killer, Skylines, the Skyline trilogy’s concluding chapter that takes the fight to the invading aliens’ homeworld, Hunter Hunter, where a fur trapper must defend his family from a lone wolf, and Breach, in which an interstellar ark becomes the target of an alien who plans to weaponize the craft.
Christmas Day, meanwhile, brings Monster Hunter, where a military unit must survive on an alien world populated by giant beasts, and Promising Young Woman, a revenge thriller where a traumatized woman hunts sexual predators. And finally, the year is closed out with Equinox, seeing a radio host investigate the disappearance of a group of schoolchildren 20 years previously, and the last episodes of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, bringing the teenage witch’s journey to an end.
Tell us, though, which of these horror titles are you most looking forward to? As always, sound off down below.