Grave Tone: Horror Podcast

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

• The first thirty minutes are a straight horror film. Doro...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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Insidious: Out of the Further Review and Our Rating

• We rewatched all five pr...

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...

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 c...

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 black...

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 k...

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 C...

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 Helg...

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...

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

• - Nightborn is Hanna Bergholm's second feature after Hatching (2022), and it pushes deeper into body...

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

• Harrison Houde's debut feature had its world premiere at Fantasia on July 18, and his co-writer Dakota Daulby stars as Joel.
• Emmanuel Bilodeau plays Bodo, a father who moved from heroin to fentanyl about five years back. That performance is the w...

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...

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...

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 h...

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...