A group of five adolescent friends living in a housing development in a small French provincial town decides to enter an abandoned house: the experience will be the starting point of a nightmare that will change their lives. This is the premise that floats on the surface of the plot of La nit devastada, the first novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) that we can read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Oriol Vaqué for Proa. Behind this horror premise lie family conflicts, abuse, and disappointments, but also the discovery of desire and the strength of friendship. After establishing himself before the age of 30 thanks to Una educación libertina (2008) and La sal (2010), both in Spanish published by Cabaret Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo once again focuses on the chiaroscuro of intimacy and social inequalities through a powerful story that pays homage to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven with a powerful, rich, and sensory literary style.

Fish, the fifth novel that Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978), published by Club Editor, tells the passionate yet destructive love story of two women. The first is a writer who narrates her journey of fascination, anguish, fear, and escape from her lover. The second, named Victoria, sells paper cones of fish at street markets and lives in a house reminiscent of those Gothic mansions where anything is possible. Translated into some twenty languages ​​and a Booker Prize finalist with BoulderBaltasar is one of the most internationally renowned authors of Catalan literature. Fish It confirms, once again, the singularity, power, and lyricism of his proposal.

Darkness. Lightning and thunder. Screams. With just these ingredients, it begins The big house, the new play written and directed by Sergi Belbel (Terrassa, 1963), which can be seen from January 20 to February 22 at the Teatre Gaudí in Barcelona. The stage, located in the middle of the auditorium, promises an experience for the most daring spectators, who, if they dare to leave the stands and sit in the front row, will have the opportunity to literally enter the mansion where two sisters, played by Anna Carreño and Gemma Deusedas, "switch each other." The actresses will walk past them and behind them—they are in their own home—and shake them with some of the many shudders and howls they unleash during the play, a "disturbing and immersive" experience with which Belbel, author of works such as After the rain (1993), In Tuscany (2007) and Lali Symon (2023), has set itself the challenge of "truly scaring" the audience.

It was February when The monkey It arrived in our theaters to invite us to a wild party of chain deaths: for fans of Final destination It served as the perfect prelude to the final installment of the saga, which would arrive three months later. With this new film—the third in less than a year and a half—director Osgood Perkins doesn't abandon the supernatural horror that characterizes his work, but he does move away from the comedic tone of his previous film, inhabiting a chilling setting that will appeal to fans of the genre. folk horror as to those who enjoy stories about witches.

When in 2019 Disney bought 21st Century Fox studio for more than 60 billion euros He not only acquired the superhero trading cards he was missing from his Marvel collection (the franchises X-Men, Deadpool, Fantastic Four...) but iconic sagas like Alien and PredatorThese films, which blended science fiction, horror, and action, naturally raised questions about how they fit into the completely accessible and uncomplicated approach that defines Disney's corporate identity. Six years later, perhaps the answer is... Predator: Badlands, which arrives in theaters this Friday and is a strange hybrid between one of Hollywood's most hyper-violent sagas and cinema family-friendly from Disney.

As October 31st approaches, two camps emerge: those who are dying to pull their costumes out of the closet to celebrate Halloween, and those who prefer to stay home eating panellets, chestnuts, and sweet potatoes. In Montcada i Reixac, there are all sorts of people, but it seems the scales tip towards the spooky celebrations: when Halloween arrives, an entire neighborhood transforms into a movie set worthy of... Nightmare on Elm StreetThe houses in the Terra Nostra neighborhood are filled with pumpkins, haunted tunnels, door-to-door screams and sugared almonds, and above all, a chilling atmosphere.

While they were filming It: Episode 2The second part of the diptych adapting one of Stephen King's most important novels for the screen saw Argentine director Andy Muschietti and Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård begin toying with the idea of exploring the origins of the monster Skarsgård portrays in the film, the child-eating clown Pennywise. "We were particularly interested in his human side," Muschietti explained during the recent Sitges Film Festival. "The book mentions a man named Bob Gray, who would dress up as a clown and become Pennywise. At some point, It decided to take this form to wreak havoc, and that fascinated us." This fascination has now taken the form of a series on HBO Max. It: Welcome to Derry ((available with Catalan subtitles), in which he travels to the 1960s in the small town of Derry to expand the universe of the novel, but starting from "the crumbs that Stephen King leaves in the book for readers to pick up," explains Muschietti. The script is also inspired by "the interludes" written by one of the novel's protagonists, Mike Hanlon, who investigates Derry's history of violence and terror. "They are very enigmatic quests, questions that lead nowhere, but we use them to tell a new, secret story told in reverse," says Muschietti.

The big star of this year's Sitges Festival is Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever who, unfortunately, didn't make it to the festival. "He stayed at my parents' house and is very happy playing with their dog," explains Ben Leonberg, the director of Good boy. Indy, of course, is his dog, who appears in almost every scene of a film that subverts the conventions of horror cinema by adopting the point of view of the typical quisso who, in these films, smells from an hour away that there is something evil in the basement or a spirit running around the attic. In Good boyIndy senses a supernatural presence that threatens his master and is consuming his health, but he has no way of telling him. Through his worried gaze, his alert expression, or his perked ears, we read all the emotions of an animal: loyalty, helplessness, anguish, and, above all, the fear of losing what you love most.

"Are we together because we love each other or because we have become accustomed to each other?" he asks. Together the teacher played by Alison Brie, who is increasingly having doubts about her boyfriend, a musician reluctant to commit, with no professional prospects and, lately, with little desire to make love. Added to their marital crisis is another problem: the supernatural phenomenon that makes it impossible for them to stray too far from each other and, when they touch, their flesh fuses. The perfect nightmare or the solution to marital problems?

With four films and two spin-offs (those dedicated to the Annabelle doll already The nun) which, in turn, have generated multiple sequels, The Warren File has become the dominant franchise in horror cinema of the last decade. A success underpinned by the artisanal craftsmanship of its scares, and also by a classic conception of horror, which presents an Absolute Evil with diabolical roots facing the forces of Christian good. This conservatism is the result of the debt the films owe to their source of inspiration: the couple formed by Lorraine and Ed Warren, pioneering researchers of the paranormal and practicing Catholics.

Another spin-off returns to theaters Shark? Not exactly. In Dangerous animals, the sharks are the special guests, the icing on the cake of a disturbing party in which the dangerous animals are humans. The whole thing is about a serial killer in a tour guide suit who shows sharks too closely and justifies his crimes with disbelievable discursive contortions (remember the antagonist ofHeretic?). One of his potential victims resists being so much that he becomes the protagonist of the story.

On a starless night, a crowd of children leave their homes, running until they disappear into the darkness, while the comforting voice of George Harrison sings Beware of darknessThis is the disturbing starting point of Weapons, the film with which Zach Cregger continues the surprise success of Barbarian, and which expands and refines the taste for surprise and the grotesque that his solo debut exhibited, which meant a (unreliable) turning point in a career until then linked to comedy with the group The Whitest Kids U' Know. If that film was structured in two stories connected by an underground corridor of horrors, Weapons atomizes the points of view to give a choral structure to the story of a small community traumatized by the inexplicable escape of its children.

David Zimmerman, a Parisian photographer who has just broken up with his partner, is dragged by his insistent best friend to a New Year's Eve party. The presence of his ex doesn't bode well for a memorable evening, but he suddenly discovers among the guests the face of a girl he photographed months earlier: mesmerized, he follows her, and without exchanging a word, they make passionate love. The next day, when he wakes up at home, still dazed, he discovers that his body has transformed into that of the girl and that she has disappeared without a trace. In a strange body, terribly confused and frightened, David asks himself many questions. What exactly happened? Who was the girl? How can he get his body back? And, above all, is he still the same person?

At the time of its release in 1997, I know what you did last summer It was understood as the functional reverse of Scream. An exercise in credibility by the screenwriter-ideologist of both, Kevin Williamson, who perhaps wanted to demonstrate that he knew how to tell a horror story without using winks or metalinguistic twists, adapting a Louis Duncan novel about a group of young people who lose their innocence the night they run over a stranger and from the future... although, evidently, this sin will not allow them to get away with it so easily. Williamson is not participating in the sequel-revival of the franchise that is now hitting the screens, and which is left in the hands of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, director and co-writer, who did want to resort to referentiality to idealize the original film as the classic that never was.

The film director's signature Boyle Damage (Trainspotting) and that of the screenwriter Alex Garland (Civil War) arrive in theaters hand in hand with a genre that, in Boyle's own words, "continues to work and has its audience": horror. Starting this Friday, viewers will be able to transport themselves once again to an inhospitable England ravaged by a virus that has infected the citizens and transformed them into zombies,

The master of French criticism André Bazin always defended the sequence shot as the cinematic resource that, by maintaining the continuity of space-time without the intervention of editing, could bring a film closest to reality. What would the co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, of the twistedly exhibitionist drift that this technique would be taking and, above all, of how contemporary cinema has contaminated it with digital effects until it has taken it to the realm of the impossible? Surely he would turn in his grave if he heard echoes of a title like MadS, which tells the story of the emergence of a potentially apocalyptic epidemic outbreak live, through a single, hour-and-a-half-long sequence shot.