2025-2026 Year in Review

Army of Darkness and Evil Dead (2013)

This week on Friday Night Frightfest, our multi-part Evil Dead franchise retrospective marches onward! After surviving the cabin in our last episode, we are taking a wildly divergent double-road trip: first, traveling back in time to the Middle Ages for fantasy-slapstick mayhem, and then leaping forward to 2013 for one of the most unapologetically violent, blood-soaked horror reboots ever committed to film. Grab your boomstick while we discuss Army of Darkness (1992) and Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead (2013)! Army of Darkness (1992) Directed by Sam Raimi, Army of Darkness abandons the cabin setting almost entirely and leans full-tilt into Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion fantasy adventure and screwball comedy. Swallowed by a time-vortex at the end of Evil Dead II, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) finds himself stranded in 1300 AD. To get back home, he must retrieve the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis—but in typical Ash fashion, he mispronounces the magic words (“Klaatu… Barada… N-necktie?”) and accidentally unleashes an army of the dead led by his own skeletal doppelgänger, Evil Ash. Packed with endless iconic one-liners (“Hail to the king, baby”), battle-ready Oldsmobiles, and skeletal slapstick, this entry turned Ash into an immortal pop-culture icon. Evil Dead (2013) Twenty-one years later, director Fede Álvarez took on the seemingly impossible task of rebooting the franchise—and delivered a modern horror triumph. Stripping away the humor entirely, the 2013 reboot grounds the cabin nightmare in a gritty story of addiction and survival, following David (Shiloh Fernandez) and his friends as they gather in the woods to help his sister Mia (Jane Levy) cold-turkey through heroin withdrawal. When the Naturom Demonto is unearthed and read aloud, all hell breaks loose. Driven almost entirely by jaw-dropping practical effects, intense self-mutilation, and a legendary, torrential downpour of blood during the climax, Jane Levy’s Mia delivers a fierce, chainsaw-toting Final Girl performance that earned the respect of diehard fans worldwide. Join us as we explore two radically different directions for the Necronomicon legacy! We’ll break down how Sam Raimi transformed a low-budget horror story into a campy medieval epic, versus how Fede Álvarez proved that a franchise reboot could be terrifying, brutal, and deeply respectful of the source material. Spoilers start around 6:13

Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2

This week on Friday Night Frightfest, we are heading deep into the Tennessee woods to kick off a brand-new multi-part retrospective series dedicated to the ultimate splatter-horror royalty! Over the next few episodes, we’ll be exploring the entire Evil Dead saga—from its scrappy, low-budget origins all the way to its modern reboots. To start our franchise journey, we’re pitting the raw, visceral terror of Sam Raimi’s original cabin-in-the-woods shocker, The Evil Dead (1981), against its legendary, laugh-out-loud slapstick horror-comedy follow-up, Evil Dead II (1987). Strap in as we track Bruce Campbell’s transformation from a mild-mannered victim into the ultimate chainsaw-wielding anti-hero! The Evil Dead (1981) Crafted on a shoestring budget by a group of young, ambitious friends in the woods of Morristown, Tennessee, The Evil Dead remains one of the most relentlessly oppressive and innovative low-budget horror films ever made. Five college students arrive at an isolated cabin where they accidentally play a reel-to-reel recording of ancient Sumerian incantations from the Naturom Demonto (the Book of the Dead). What follows is an unhinged descent into graphic, demonic terror as the unseen Kandarian Demon possesses them one by one. Driven by Raimi’s frantic “shaky-cam” cinematography, Tom Sullivan’s nauseating practical gore effects, and a grim, unrelenting tone, this original nightmare set the benchmark for modern survival horror. Evil Dead II (1987) Six years later, armed with a bigger budget and a wildly anarchic vision, Sam Raimi returned to the cabin to invent a whole new subgenre. Part remake recap, part escalation, Evil Dead II hits the fast-forward button on the original’s setup and throws Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) into a hyper-violent, Three Stooges-style cartoon hallucination. Trapped in the cabin alone with possessed severed hands, laughing furniture, and Deadites lurking in the cellar, Ash loses his mind—and his hand—before strapping a chainsaw to his arm and rising as the “Groovy” action icon we know and love. It is a tour de force of physical comedy, buckets of multi-colored blood, and pure, joyful cinematic chaos. Join us as we dissect this foundational double feature and launch our dive into the Necronomicon lore! Spoilers start around 9:38.

2025-2026 Year in Review

Lock your doors, turn down the lights, and grab a glass of whatever keeps your nerves steady—it is officially time for our Annual Year in Review! We’ve spent the last twelve months tracking the cinematic highs, the baffling lows, and the absolute bloodbaths that have graced both theater screens and streaming platforms. In this episode, we’ll be counting down our official top 10 and bottom 5 films of the entire year! What a wild, terrifying, and hilarious ride it has been! Grab your drinks, settle in, and get ready as we break down our absolute favorites (and our biggest disappointments) of the past year.

Backrooms and Creepypasta

This week on Friday Night Frightfest, we are logging on and diving deep into the dark corners of internet-born folklore! Online urban legends—lovingly dubbed “creepypastas”—have officially conquered the silver screen, moving from text-based forums to major cinematic blockbusters. We are pairing Kane Parsons’ massive, record-breaking summer box office smash Backrooms (2026) with the indie lo-fi horror anthology, Creepypasta (2023). Dust off your old CRT monitors and mind the static—you never know what’s lurking in the digital void. Backrooms (2026) Talk about a viral phenomenon making history. Directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons in his feature-length directorial debut (expanding on his legendary YouTube found-footage universe) and distributed by A24, Backrooms is an absolute triumph of psychological and liminal space horror. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a struggling furniture store owner who discovers a terrifying, glitchy dimensional gateway in his basement that leads into an endless, yellow-wallpapered labyrinth. Alongside his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), they are hunted through the chaotic, disordered halls by a deeply unsettling entity known as “Pirate Clark” (played by the 7-foot-8 Robert Bobroczkyi). It is a gorgeous, suffocating masterpiece that proves internet lore can carry a massive theatrical narrative. Creepypasta (2023) To understand how we got to the big-budget heights of Backrooms, you have to look back at the indie anthology roots of the genre. Released on Screambox, Creepypasta utilizes a gritty, low-fi wrap-around story where an unnamed young man finds himself trapped inside an abandoned house. To figure out how he arrived, he is forced by a menacing presence to sift through a series of viral, dark-web videos. Comprising multiple short segments directed by various indie filmmakers, the movie evokes the early days of internet chain-letters, hidden analog signals, and creepy folklore. It’s a DIY tribute to the era of staying up way too late reading scary stories on message boards. Join us as we analyze the evolution of cyber urban legends. We’ll discuss how Backrooms successfully traded the typical “jump scare” formula for deep, existential dread and surrealist set designs, versus how Creepypasta serves as a raw, analog time capsule of online horror culture. Spoilers start around 7:07.

Scary Movie 5 and Scary Movie (2026)

This week on Friday Night Frightfest, we are wrapping up our epic franchise retrospective with a massive grand finale! While the internet love to debate the ups and downs of parody history, we’re throwing out the critical consensus and embracing the pure, unadulterated fun of the franchise’s later eras. We are looking at an entry that deserve a lot more love: the hyper-chaotic, early-2010s time capsule Scary Movie 5 (2013) and the triumphant, star-studded legacy revival that just crushed the summer box office, Scary Movie (2026). Grab your popcorn—we’re closing this series out with non-stop laughs! Scary Movie 5 (2013) Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, Scary Movie 5 gets a bad rap, but if you look past the critical hate, it is a goldmine of rapid-fire physical comedy and surreal, early-2010s pop culture. Anchored by Ashley Tisdale and Simon Rex, the film skewers hits like Paranormal Activity, Evil Dead, Sinister, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. From Simon Rex’s incredible commitment to getting physically destroyed by the scenery to the utterly bizarre, self-aware opening cameo with Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, this entry runs at a breakneck pace. It’s an absurd, live-action cartoon that understands exactly what it is: pure, unpretentious fun. Scary Movie (2026) Pairing perfectly with the fifth entry is the brand-new 2026 revival, which brought the franchise roaring back into the cultural zeitgeist. Written by the legendary Wayans brothers (Keenen Ivory, Shawn, and Marlon) and bringing back the iconic duo of Anna Faris (Cindy) and Regina Hall (Brenda), this movie is an absolute love letter to the fans. The film brilliantly parodies the modern “elevated horror” and “requel” trends, taking hilarious, no-holds-barred aims at Scream (2022), M3GAN, Smile, and The Substance. It captures the exact same nostalgic magic as the original trilogy while proving that the spoof genre is far from dead. Join us as we celebrate the entire evolution of this comedy empire! We’ll break down why the physical gags in Scary Movie 5 (especially that possessed Roomba sequence) still crack us up, and how the 2026 reunion delivered the ultimate fan-service theater experience of the year. It turns out that when you stop taking things so seriously, both of these films are an absolute blast to watch back-to-back. Spoilers start around 7:15.