2018 was a great year for horror movies, but horror fans have even more to look forward
to over the next couple of years.
Intriguing remakes, sequels to smash hits, and awesome original projects from beloved
filmmakers are all making their way to horror fans in 2019.
2017's Happy Death Day was a surprise hit, a slasher-y take on Groundhog Day that cleverly
milked its premise for scares and featured a winning lead performance from Jessica Rothe.
The original film's ending saw our heroine's time loop finally broken, but director Christopher
Landon has teased that he left some important details unanswered for the sequel.
Landon will handle scripting duties in addition to directing this time around, with much of
the cast set to return.
Rothe has confirmed that the sequel will indeed pick up right where the first film left off,
comparing its aesthetic to the Back to the Future series.
Happy Death Day 2U is expected to hit theaters on February 14, 2019.
The directing team of Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer will helm the upcoming remake of one
of Stephen King's scariest stories.
Pet Sematary has a killer creative team lined up, with a script co-written by David Kajganich,
who wrote this year's Suspiria.
Jason Clarke will star as beleaguered father Louis Creed alongside Amy Seimetz as his wife
Rachel, while John Lithgow will play the Creeds' neighbor Jud.
The film is set to spook audiences on April 5, which gives you plenty of time to rewatch
the terrifying 1989 original.
"I finally came back for you Rachel.
I'm going to twist your back like mine so you'll never get out of bed again."
The Curse of La Llorona is an upcoming flick based on a famous Mexican urban legend surrounding
the ghost of a mysterious woman.
Director Michael Chaves makes his feature debut on the film, and early reviews are extremely
positive.
A recent screening at San Diego ComicCon reportedly brought down the house.
The cast is headed up by Linda Cardellini and Raymond Cruz, a veteran actor who made
an indelible impression as the psychotic Tuco Salamanca in Breaking Bad.
"Whoooo!
Damn, man, look at that look!
Hooo!
Ya s'messed up."
Set in the '70s, the film follows Cardellini as a widowed social worker who begins to turn
up unsettling similarities between her family's own tragedy and that of a case she's investigating.
It turns out that both of them may have ties to the vengeful ghost that the movie is named
after.
The legend of La Llarona is well-known in Mexican culture, but it's all set to go mainstream
on April 19, 2019.
2004's The Grudge, based on the 2002 Japanese film Ju-On, didn't exactly wow critics, but
audiences were scared out of their shorts by the film's insanely creepy imagery.
Next year, audiences will once again have a chance to get spooked by the vengeful ghosts
in the upcoming remake.
This revival holds significant promise for one good reason: the involvement of writer-director
Nicolas Pesce, whose 2016 debut feature Eyes of My Mother was a master class in suspense
and atmosphere.
John Cho and Lin Shaye have joined the cast, and Sam Raimi, producing the film through
his Ghost House Pictures imprint, has said that the new adaptation will draw on the source
material rather than the 2004 version.
Grudge is scheduled to arrive on June 21.
The Conjuring universe just can't seem to stop expanding outwards.
As if the recently released The Nun and the newly announced The Crooked Man wasn't enough,
a certain supernaturally possessed porcelain doll will be coming back for Annabelle 3 next
year.
Returning screenwriter Gary Dauberman will be taking over the directing reins as well
in his debut for the as-yet untitled Annabelle sequel.
The film will see the return of The Conjuring's psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren,
played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
The Annabelle sequel will reach the big screen on July 3.
From the moment that 2017's It ended, speculation has been running rampant about a sequel, in
particular, who would fill the roles of the adult versions of the Losers' Club.
Well, wonder no more, since It: Chapter Two has cast a bevy of excellent actors to play
the modern-day version of the Losers' Club.
Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, and Bill Hader will all join the cast, while the extremely
talented child actors that anchored the first It will appear in flashbacks.
And of course, Bill Skarsgard will return as Pennywise, in all of his terrifying glory.
Considering that It shocked everyone by virtue of being one of the best horror films of the
decade, It: Chapter Two is one of the most highly anticipated films of the year in any
genre, but it's got a pretty long wait.
The film is slated to hit theaters on September 6.
Escape rooms, in which people pay to figure out how to liberate themselves from seemingly
escape-proof places, have become all the rage in recent years.
It's anybody's guess what took Hollywood so long to come up with a thriller based on the
claustrophobic premise, but finally, here we are: the aptly titled Escape Room is coming
our way in 2019.
The film brings together six strangers who receive mysterious invitations to participate
in a hardcore escape room which promises a $1 million prize to anyone crafty enough to
complete its challenge.
As seen in the harrowing trailer, this is a room which has ways of making sure nobody
ever leaves.
Director Adam Robitel, responsible for Insidious: The Last Key as well as the underrated The
Taking of Deborah Logan, will be at the helm, with a cast headed up by Deborah Ann Woll,
Taylor Russell, and Logan Miller.
Escape Room will make its debut immediately after the new year, on January 4.
2017's Split was a triumphant return to form for M. Night Shyamalan, following years of
questionable choices and poor reviews.
Telling the story of Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with 24 distinct personalities, the
film was a lean, triumphant piece of horror filmmaking.
It also had the old patented Shyamalan twist: Split revealed itself at the end, via a well-placed
Bruce Willis cameo, as a stealth sequel to Shyamalan's 2000 hit Unbreakable.
"They gave him a funny name, too.
What was it?"
"Mr. Glass."
"Oh yeah."
Speculation immediately started running rampant that a third installment was forthcoming,
and it didn't take Shyamalan long to confirm that Glass, named for Samuel L. Jackson's
villainous Unbreakable character, would reach theaters in 2019.
Jackson himself didn't realize there'd be a need for him to reprise his role until he
saw Split, but as he told a CinemaCon audience, he's thrilled about it for a specific reason:
"It's about time I got the title role in my own motherf—-ing movie."
The trailer features Sarah Paulson as a psychiatrist specializing in patients who think they're
superheroes, and considering the superpowered denizens of the Glass universe, she's probably
bitten off more than she can chew.
It appears Jackson's Mr. Glass will once again be pulling strings, manipulating Willis' David
Dunn into a confrontation with the Beast; McAvoy also returns, as does Split's Anya
Taylor-Joy.
Glass premieres on January 18.
Ever since MGM quietly resurrected the long-defunct Orion Pictures imprint in 2014, the studio
has struggled to find an identity.
Once responsible for classics such as First Blood, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,
and Silence of the Lambs, Orion has spent the last four years cranking out films which
have gone largely unnoticed by the general public, with a couple of exceptions like The
Town that Dreaded Sundown and James Gunn's 2017 thriller The Belko Experiment.
These films were fairly well-received and enjoyed relatively high profiles, and they
had something else in common, they're among the studio's only horror pictures making up
their post-2014 output.
Perhaps MGM execs finally noticed the extreme profitability of the genre in recent years,
because Orion's first effort of 2019, The Prodigy, looks suitably terrifying.
Nicholas McCarthy will direct the film which looks to bring us a new spin on the Creepy
Child subgenre.
Plot details are thin, but the trailer looks atmospheric as all get-out, and the films
boasts a pretty stellar cast.
We may have an Omen for a new generation on our hands.
Fox Studios' New Mutants, part of its Marvel/X-Men universe, has had a troubled history.
Originally scheduled for release in April 2018, it was first pushed back ten months
to February 2019, and then an additional six months to August, after a series of test screenings
didn't produce the reaction the studio had hoped for.
Audiences responded well to the film, but Fox had been shooting for stellar scores,
and decided to take extra time to make New Mutants as good as it could be.
Since it will be the first true horror film of the X-Men franchise, this seems like a
reasonable approach.
The trailer released ahead of the film's initial release date promised a claustrophobic, creepy
good time, but this is a film in which tone will be everything.
The recent deal between Fox and Disney, which will likely see the X-Men, Fantastic Four,
and Deadpool end up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some point, doesn't seem to have
affected Fox's plans for New Mutants.
The film will appear in theaters too soon for any cross-pollination to take place, even
if any was planned.
Despite rumors that the long delay and Disney deal meant the project might be shelved, it's
been confirmed that New Mutants will arrive in theaters on August 2.
Followed may sound a bit familiar at first, it's part of the new breed of found footage
flick known as "Screen Life," in which all of the action takes place within the confines
of computer and smartphone screens.
If it seems like a cheap gimmick, consider that the well-received Unfriended and its
sequel established the viability of the device as an effective storytelling tool, and the
John Cho-led Searching did even better critically.
And despite its similarly tech-y title, Followed doesn't appear to be simply capitalizing on
this trend, but expanding on it.
The film stars Matthew Solomon as a controversial vlogger who specializes in the "sick and twisted,"
who must up the ante after a benefactor promises a huge influx of cash if he can pump up his
subscriber base by Halloween.
He plans to get a subscriber bump by livestreaming his stay in a haunted hotel, which of course
does not go according to plan.
Aside from its Unfriended-meets-1408 premise, the film innovates by periodically breaking
the immersion to take on the first-person viewpoint of whoever is watching the video
clips, adding to the growing mystery of just what exactly is going on here.
Followed made its debut in 2018 at the Burbank International Film Festival, where it took
home the prize for Best Horror Feature, making it among one of the more intriguing horror
films to watch once an official release date gets announced.
2017's 47 Meters Down was a tense nail-biter of a deep-sea thriller, featuring Mandy Moore
and Claire Holt as sisters who get way more than they bargained for on a shark watching
adventure in Mexico.
The modestly budgeted production turned a respectable profit, so in 2019 Entertainment
Studios will bring us 47 Meters Down: The Next Chapter.
The sequel will feature an all-new group of characters in a Brazilian locale who run into
some serious shark-based problems while searching for a lost underground city.