​7 heart-stopping new horror movies to see this summer

If you love horror movies, you don't need to wait for October to get your fill of frights this year. It's a massive summer of scares at the cinema, with Hollywood leaning hard into the genre currently most locked in to pull in big crowds on a Friday night.
Will we emerge with nerves intact? Will we emerge at all? These seven upcoming releases will be raising heart rates long before Halloween season arrives.
28 Years Later
Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return to the post-apocalyptic landscape of 28 Years Later (also back in cinemas this month) to remind us that, as the tagline goes, time hasn't healed anything. In fact, the infected seem to have the run of the place, leaving the human cast – Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell – fighting for survival. This could be epic.
Anticipation levels: 😱😱😱😱
In cinemas worldwide Jun 20
M3GAN 2.0
The killer doll is back to remind us that AI isn't just going to take our jobs, it's going to do cute, meme-able dances too. If that isn't upsetting enough, this sci-fi-horror sequel will be adding to the giddy shocks of the 2022 hit with more uncanny kills as M3GAN gets retooled to take on a weapons-grade AI called AMELIA.
Anticipation levels: 😱😱😱
In cinemas worldwide Jun 27
I Know What You Did Last Summer
This franchise reboot knows what everyone did in the summers of 1997, 1998 and 2006 and hopes they want to do it all over again. Five friends cover up a deadly car accident, unleashing a malevolent force that survivors of the first movie (Freddie Prinze Jr! Jennifer Love Hewitt!) can maybe help. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson will be hoping to pull off a Final Destination: Bloodlines rather than a Scream VI.
Anticipation levels: 😱😱
In cinemas Jul 18
Bring Her Back
Aussie horror bros Danny and Michael Philippou delivered a breakout horror sensation with 2023's possession horror Talk to Her. They're back with more millennial-friendly frights in a supernatural frightener that might do for Sally Hawkins what Hereditary did for Toni Collette.
Anticipation levels: 😱😱😱
In US and Australian cinemas now. In UK cinemas Aug 1.
Weapons
Zach Cregger, director of 2022's excellent what's-in-the-basement horror Barbarian, looks like he's cranking up the menace a few notches in this modern-day Pied Piper riff about a whole class of kids who disappear one night. Julia Garner is the teacher, Josh Brolin an outspoken dad. The trailer looks terrifying.
Anticipation levels: 😱😱😱😱
In cinemas worldwide Aug 8
Him
Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw production company tosses the ball to debut director Justin Tipping (Dear White People) for a sports-themed horror that channels the obsessive nature of elite athletes into something dark and distressing. Think The Substance with more creatine.
Anticipation levels: 😱😱😱😱
In cinemas Sep 19
Horror not your bag? Check out the other anticipated movies of the summer.
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BBC News

an hour ago

• BBC News

28 Years Later director Danny Boyle's rise from Bury to film visionary

Not many directors can convince a reigning monarch to appear in a comedy skit, but Elizabeth II was said to be "very amused" when invited by Danny Boyle to star in a James Bond sketch for the 2012 London Bury-born filmmaker will add the highly-anticipated 28 Years Later to a back catalogue that includes Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, as the zombie flick screens in cinemas this 68-year-old has always been proud of his hometown of Radcliffe, and fulfilled a promise to mention his local social club during his Academy Awards acceptance speech in family and friends gathered at St Mary's Catholic Social Club which his father used to run and where Boyle drank lemonade as a boy, to watch him on screen that year when Slumdog Millionaire scooped eight Oscars. The Indian-set movie, inspired by the TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, became a runaway global success despite a relatively small $15m it was the latest in a string of unconventional movies that had become unexpected mainstream commercial successes for recently told the Guardian newspaper: "I want to push the boat out, but take the popular audience with me." Boyle became enamoured by cinema at a young age, and graduated with a degree in English and Drama from Bangor University in later worked at the prestigious Royal Court in London, dubbed the "writers theatre", and directed productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. A move into making TV dramas for the BBC in Northern Ireland and ITV's Inspector Morse came drew fame in the mid-1990s when he directed the dark movie comedy Shallow Grave about Edinburgh flatmates who find a large suitcase of money, which starred Christopher Eccleston and Ewan film's modern story telling and visual style was credited with breaking away from the traditional image of British cinema, which had been associated with period dramas. Boyle collaborated again with McGregor for Trainspotting with its gritty and humorous take on heroin addicts in the Scottish the pair fell out when Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio was offered the lead role for Boyle's 2000 movie The director has admitted "we didn't treat [McGregor] very well", while the latter said he had "felt like it was a badge on my sleeve: I am Danny Boyle's actor". They have since made up and reunited with the rest of the Trainspotting cast to make a sequel in 2017. Boyle was chosen to direct a hugely memorable opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympics – dubbed Isles of extravaganza drew more than 20m viewers in the UK, and celebrated British achievements in industry, culture and the then there was the viral moment when the Queen Elizabeth II appeared in a sketch with James Bond star Daniel Craig, where she had requested to utter the unforgettable words: "Good evening, Mr Bond." Boyle was later chosen to direct the most recent 007 film No Time To Die, but he pulled out months before the start of filming due to "creative differences". The filmmaker's risk-taking and creativity has won him not only fans among audiences but actors Comer, who appears in 28 Years Later, recently said to be "led by him and be on one of his sets is a proper dream".A follow-up to the 2002 film 28 Days Later, their new movie marks a return to horror for Boyle, who recently told the BBC he still found "something intangible but amazing about cinema". Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.

Telegraph

5 hours ago

• Telegraph

Ian Greaves

In 1974, the 'black magic' of Penda's Fen horrified its audience – but left an extraordinary impression on director Danny Boyle

Telegraph

5 hours ago

• Telegraph

The ‘diabolical' BBC drama that inspired 28 Years Later

Landing in the BBC One schedules one Thursday evening in March 1974, Penda's Fen sat oddly. For those viewers who had earlier watched Tony Blackburn host Top of the Pops, or caught up with Are You Being Served? here was a completely different beast. It was peculiar – even by the standards of the channel's prestigious Play for Today slot, within which it sat. After all, the film set up a battle between the forces of Light and Dark, individualism and conservatism, on the Malvern Hills – all played out through the eyes of a priggish adolescent. Few who saw it would have gone to bed without its succession of extraordinary, terrifying visions haunting their dreams – visions which, if director Danny Boyle is to be believed, 'left an extraordinary impression on me'. At the age of seventeen much of it went over his head but he knew that night it was an 'incredible film' and when he eventually moved into television in the late Eighties, its director Alan Clarke was the first person he contacted. Small wonder, too, that Boyle's latest film, 28 Years Later, a zombie horror set in Northumberland, feels like a direct successor to the eerie rural imagery of Penda's Fen. The film is the story of a vicar's son, Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), a hidebound teenager whose comfortable, complacent assumptions about his world crumble one by one. He is visited by demons and angels, meets the ghost of his idol Edward Elgar, sees a church aisle splitting to reveal a giant bottomless chasm, is spoken to by Jesus on the cross, and witnesses the arrival of the seventh-century King Penda – the last pagan king of Mercia. Like a modern-day Piers Plowman, each visitor tells Franklin a truth that he must assimilate – and which shakes his conservative, little-Englander views. The film's cry of individualism and the radical spirit has reverberated for over 50 years. Long before 'Rooster' Byron, the whirling, maverick force at the heart of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Penda Fen's found uncanny, romantic resistance in the depths of the British countryside. This 'film for television' was created by playwright David Rudkin, who had built his reputation with Afore Night Come for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. This set out his stall as a writer of dark power and originality, depicting fruit-pickers at an orchard descending into savagery after a helicopter sprays them with pesticide. Rudkin himself resisted any connection to the then-burgeoning genre of 'folk horror'. But today it's hard not to view Rudkin's obsession with England's deep past, elemental forces, and his environmental fears as being in the same lineage as The Wicker Man (1973), John Bowen's 1970 film Robin Redbreast (known as 'Britain's Rosemary's Baby') and the occult fiction of Dennis Wheatley. It was the mood of the times. A queasy pastoralism – which looks ever more prescient in our era of climate fears – haunts Penda's Fen. Yet it is more than that: throughout the film, there's a constant sense that some religious, mystical force is about to erupt from the pregnant landscape. The true miracle is that it was ever broadcast at all. By 1971, Rudkin was struggling to get his increasingly difficult work staged; he also felt abandoned by television. That summer, though, producer David Rose came calling. He had enjoyed success with the launch of the police drama Z-Cars in the 1960s and had recently moved to the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. He wanted to put on new stories and Rudkin was high on his list. Penda's Fen was commissioned a year later. Rose, who went on to set up Film on Four, always regarded it as his proudest achievement. 'It's an extraordinary piece of work,' he told me. 'My mother never spoke to me about my programmes, but she was haunted for nights by Penda's Fen.' Spencer Banks – who played the film's adolescent hero – was familiar to many viewers from the hugely successful children's sci-fi series Timeslip. But his step into peak-time 'serious' drama was challenging. When Banks first went up for the part of Stephen, he never saw a script during auditions. He remembers his father sat at the kitchen table, checking over the contract. 'Oh, here's a clause you don't see very often,' he said. 'The actor agrees to be set on fire.' It was daunting for an 18-year-old to communicate this otherworldly journey into adulthood and – as Dennis Potter put it in his review for the New Statesman – 'the images of light and darkness warring in the young man's mind'. In early rehearsals, Banks recalls he was 'confused and a little lost,' but in the end, 'I quite simply put all my faith in the director, Alan Clarke. Which I think is the reason we got the result that we did.' In commissioning the drama, Rose put together a writer and director who were chalk and cheese. Alan Clarke cut his teeth at ITV but was now firmly part of the BBC drama department. Today, his reputation is built on the violent and gritty Scum and Made in Britain – which, in their concern with broken, brutish young men, prefigure shows like Adolescence. But Clarke's early work tended to be naturalistic, contemporary and not as focused on vicious young men. Such a down-to-earth style was at odds with Rudkin's poeticism. At their first meeting, Rudkin was told by the director that this was 'a heavy number. How many books do I have to read to understand this?' 'Just the one,' replied Rudkin, pointing to the script in his hand. In the end, their two visions gelled. The film's fantastic imaginings have their power because they are presented as real, almost ordinary, which makes them all the more disturbing. Achieving this pulsing otherness was the next challenge. The shoot – much of it done outdoors – was an enormous operation, and the weather was a constant challenge. Actor Ian Hogg, who played local firebrand playwright Arne – the man who sparks Stephen's turn towards pastoral deep England – remembers how 'it rained when it shouldn't almost always'. The director began to take it personally. One sodden day, he asked his production manager, 'If I strip to the waist and thrash about in the mud, do you think [God] will forgive me and send some sunshine?' The crew's base camp was Chaceley, a village near Tewkesbury whose population even today is just a little over a hundred. The rectory, which doubled as Stephen's childhood home, was the location for a number of scenes, including the visit of a demon. As Stephen tosses and turns in the throes of an erotic dream about a fellow schoolboy, a terrifying, gargoyle-like incubus kneels on top of Stephen as he sleeps. In another scene straight from William Blake, an angel appears to Stephen on a riverbank. Make-up designer Jan Nethercot recalls having to create a convincing heavenly visitation. Painting the actor gold, there was a worry he would asphyxiate if they failed to leave a small part of the skin uncovered. 'We'd seen Goldfinger,' she recalls. The marshland that day was misty. Jan's assistant, Penny Gough, remembers how the light caused a radiance on the paint: 'The gold from his wingtips went right up into the mist and it was spectacular.' A further unforgettable image is of a man in a dinner jacket and bow-tie, standing by a tree stump on a garden lawn, as he uses a meat cleaver to cut off the hands of children in front of their devout parents. It's a queer, disturbing comment on subjugation – and vividly traumatising. The scene is presented as some ghastly, jubilant ritual, the victims rejoicing in their missing limbs. Filming the scene, Clarke's main worry was whether the BBC would allow a crew to put any child in this situation. Costume designer Joyce Hawkins promptly volunteered her daughter, who is herself now a television producer. 'It's a wonder I wasn't personally traumatised,' says Caroline Hawkins. 'Or maybe I was, who knows?' Almost five million people watched Penda's Fen on its first transmission. Callers to the duty log described it as 'horrific' and 'approaching black magic'. One said it was 'diabolical' and promised they 'will be writing to someone very important', but hadn't decided who it would be. Those making it knew that the film was special – but none would have expected it to become as deeply embedded in the public consciousness. What brought it back from obscurity was a repeat on Channel 4 in 1990, just two days before the director Clarke's death. A new generation taped it and, slowly, Penda's Fen entered the canon, leading to books, music, cinema screenings and even academic conferences. The film also left its mark on English filmmakers like Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) and Ben Wheatley (A Field in England). And, of course, Danny Boyle. At the time, though, the film was too singular to get a common reaction. Like a message in a bottle, it went out into the world and, as with the most lasting works of art, connected to the present moment. It touches on education, defence, the environment, paganism and English traditions – but also has characters who are non-binary. (Indeed, the film's climax sees Stephen proclaim to the Wiltshire downs: 'My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man… I am mud and flame!') Speaking last year, Rudkin recalled a postbag filled with correspondents who said they had 'some inner place it reached that nothing else had.' More than 50 years on, Penda's Fen continues to find viewers' souls – and shake them. Penda's Fen: Scene by Scene by Ian Greaves is published by Ten Acre Films on June 23. Spencer Banks will appear at a screening hosted by the Barbican Centre in London on September 6. The film is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI.