Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i SFX

WHILE THE ASTRONAUT – JESS Varley’s first feature as a solo writer/director – falls definitively into science fiction territory, the idea it sprang from was very much grounded in fact. “It was initially born out of an article about all of the real symptoms that astronauts experience when they come back from space,” Varley tells Red Alert. “I just thought it was such an interesting idea that an astronaut can’t trust themselves when they return from space because they’re hallucinating, they’re getting all sorts of symptoms. So I did a springboard off that.” The pitch for Varley’s sci-fi thriller takes a familiar concept but rehomes it somewhere unique. The Astronaut stars Kate Mara as Sam Walker, who’s just returned from her first space mission. After being retrieved from her landing…

AFTER MORE THAN 30 YEARS shepherding the deep space adventures of Dave Lister, Arnold Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat, Red Dwarf co-creator Doug Naylor is coming back down to Earth. In his debut kids’ novel Sin Bin Island, the students of a very odd boarding school are kept on the straight and narrow via unconventional means – namely the threat of a stay on the spooky, mod-cons-free landmass of the title. “It’s very much based on my feelings about the school I went to,” Naylor tells Red Alert. “It was quite scary for me when I attended at seven, and we did have things like baronial halls and refectories, day boys and boarders. Of course, the book’s highly exaggerated, but I felt the kids would have more of a journey…

ASK MOST SCREENWRITERS about their latest movie and they’ll rarely say the idea arrived fully formed. Yet for Seth Reiss, he remembers distinctly the moment he came up with the concept for his newest film. “I was on Interstate 95 in a rental car,” he recalls, “and I was very depressed and in need of something, and then I was like, ‘What if the GPS said, ‘Would you like to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey?’” Those exact words would come to title Reiss’s follow-up to 2022’s deliciously black satire The Menu. Despite arising from one of the lowest points in the writer’s life, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a radiant, life-affirming blast of positivity, at a time where that seems to be exactly what we need. Best…

IF YOU’VE EVER STRUGGLED TO get along with a sibling, imagine trying to do it when they’re a ghost. That’s where writer Matt Roller’s imagination went while he was working as a story editor/writer on the hit series Rick And Morty. Though he was a big fan of the tone and pace of what his boss Dan Harmon was doing on that adult animated comedy series, Roller tells Red Alert that his heart always drifted towards horror storytelling. “I watch and read all the horror, so I wanted to build something that’s as flexible as Rick And Morty in terms of the ability to riff on a genre, just for horror,” Roller says of what eventually became his original adult animation series for Netflix, Haunted Hotel. Though it’s characterised as…

WHEN SFX LAST SPOKE TO director Renny Harlin, he was gearing up for the release of The Strangers: Chapter 1, his remake of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home invasion horror sleeper hit. Sixteen months later, he concedes that the film struggled to step out from the shadow of its predecessor. “It was frustrating, but it was exactly what we expected,” he says. “I can’t think of any movie ever that’s been remade, and people say, ‘Great thing that you remade it,’ and ‘It’s even better than the original.’ I love the original. We all love the original Bertino movie.” For Harlin, the lure was the opportunity to push the story forward through two more films. “To do what we, as movie fans and filmmakers dreamt of – which is, okay, what…

Step into the SFX interview archives for exclusive, all-new treats from past seasons of Stranger Things. Whether you want behind-the-scenes secrets from the cast and crew, on-set stories from your Hawkins favourites or interviews we’ve never published before, we’ve got you covered. As the final season of Stranger Things draws closer, this is the perfect prep for your upcoming season five binge. ON 4 JULY 2019, SEASON THREE of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix – bringing eight episodes of supernatural scares and Mind Flayer madness to audiences across the globe. For the first time, the story is set in the summer and school’s out for the cool kids of Hawkins – but before the show arrives in Indiana, a sinister new location is revealed in the first episode’s opening scenes.…

IT’S 1975 AND THE MOON, go-to destination of the space age, so recently conquered by the Apollo missions, is about to be torn from orbit by the power of television. A chilly, unsettling, frequently surreal watch, Space: 1999 had a premise as bleak as any lunar landscape. Opening episode “Breakaway” details the catastrophe that serves as the show’s inciting incident: on 13 September 1999 nuclear waste stashed on the far side of the Moon erupts in a massive thermonuclear explosion, sending Earth’s lone satellite hurtling to the stars. Naturally it’s a Monday. Along for the ride are the crew of Moonbase Alpha, a scientific research station nestled in a crater in the northern hemisphere. As the wayward Moon bagatelles through wormholes and hyperspatial byways, our beige-clad heroes discover a universe…

▶ RELEASED 3 OCTOBER 15 | 90 minutes ▶ Director Linus O’Brien ➔ “I loved every minute of it,” says Tim Curry of filming The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1974. Barry Bostwick has another take: “I was wet and miserable most of the time.” The one thing they do agree on, however, is that the result was a milestone in cinema history. This documentary’s focus falls mainly on Rocky Horror’s creator, Richard O’Brien. Made by his son, Linus, it unspools the history of the musical, taking in everything from Richard’s roots in a New Zealand suburb to the uproarious cult showings of his initially unpopular movie, screenings that are still running 50 years on. It’s a sensitive, beautiful documentary – Richard is moved to tears at times, much to his…

UK/US Paramount+, streaming now ▶ Showrunners Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers ▶ Cast Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Rebecca Romijn, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia EPISODES 3.01-3.10 What is Strange New Worlds’ core mission? If the Discovery spin-off’s prime directive is to provide an origin story for James T Kirk’s legendary crew, then season three delivers. But fulfilling those famous promises to seek out new life and new civilisations? Not so much. Based on the evidence presented here, the final frontier is a very small place. During this particular assortment of voyages, Captain Pike and co regularly bump into familiar faces, including the Gorn, chip-off-the-old-Q Trelane and Nurse Chapel’s soon-to-be-late fiancé Roger Korby. Throw in a young Montgomery Scott taking up residence in engineering, and you can’t move for legacy characters. Admittedly,…

As Ed and Lorraine Warren bow out, why not revisit THE CONJURING (out now)? Set in 1971, it sees the paranormal investigators aiding a family whose new home once belonged to a Satan-worshipping witch. We said: “Pretty much every hoary old horror cliché is ticked off… Doesn’t matter one jot, as James Wan and his editor have an impeccable sense of timing.” This Collector’s Edition has two new “looking back” and “reflecting” featurettes. Physical goodies include a poster and 11 art cards. In Tim Burton’s stop-motion flick CORPSE BRIDE (22 September), a young man’s dragged down to the Land of the Dead after accidentally popping a ring on the finger of the titular revenant. We said: “Kooky visual charm, daft puns and great voice work keep it bubbling merrily away.”…

▶ RELEASED 6 OCTOBER 2025 | N/A | Digital ▶ Director Samuel Clemens ▶ Cast Alan Calton, Lily Catalifo, Lara Lemon, Dominic Vulliamy ➔ “We’ve all had a stressful and incredibly life-altering day,” declares a character in Samuel Clemens’s assured debut feature. If only they knew what was yet to come in a movie that slides from grounded, gun-packing crime drama to hallucinatory horror – with a chilling sidestep into antiquity on the way. Charting the aftermath of a high-end art theft, The Drowned finds its increasingly paranoid protagonists hiding out in a coastal bolthole. The dread builds in increments: entrails found on the beach, hinting at the fate of the missing accomplice who was supposed to arrive before them; a vision of blood swirling like a demonic vortex; subliminal flashes…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 |15 | Digital ➔ Cannibals and wild dogs are the threat in this mud-caked British horror, not 14-year-olds. Set a decade post-apocalypse, it’s an exercise in setting limitations: shot all on location, with no dialogue (humanity may have lost the power of speech). We follow Son as he strives to recover meds needed by Girl from a cannibal camp. The situations used to build tension are repetitive (will Son be found?) and the baddies’ observation skills are comically poor, but an oppressive score and absence of longueurs mean you’re sucked in.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1984 | 18 | 4K/Blu-ray ▶ Director Bruno Mattei ▶ Cast Jean-Christophe Brétignière, Geretta Geretta, Fausto Lombardi ➔ This threadbare Italian horror has achieved minor cult classic status in the decades since its release. Following a nuclear holocaust, humanity has split into two distinct tribes, with most fleeing underground while bands of “New Primitives” roam the surface. We follow a squad of these future punks as they investigate an abandoned village, only to be picked off by the titular furry menace. Rats: Night Of Terror has a certain amount of B-movie charm, with an entertainingly clunky English dub and an outrageous final sting. Still, it’s slow and some aspects have aged poorly, notably a racist character name and some real animal cruelty. The new restoration looks…

▶ RELEASED 18 SEPTEMBER 224 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author Nicolas Rapold ▶ Publisher Frances Lincoln ➔ Nicolas Rapold, former editor-in-chief of Film Comment, offers an engaging mix of biography, analysis, and illustrated history of the life and works of Studio Ghibli’s creative mastermind Hayao Miyazaki. The book discusses how Miyazaki’s films are shaped by his childhood memories of the Second World War, his environmentalism, his mother’s long-term illness and the animators who served as his mentors and collaborators, particularly Isao Takahata. Rapold brings insightful analysis to everything from the locations in Miyazaki’s films to the influence of Soviet animator Lev Atamanov. The depth of research is impressive. For example, the chapters on the children’s authors who inspired Miyazaki include Hans Christian Andersen and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, plus Japanese novelists…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Bitter Karella ▶ Publisher Run For It ➔ If you go down to the woods today… well, just don’t. Sarah makes her living growing magic mushrooms, so when her best client tells her about a trendy new variant (“The King’s Breakfast”) she’s keen to add them to her catalogue. Thing is, those shrooms only grow in one place, out in the treacherous Pamogo forest. With a park ranger to guide her, Sarah sets out to try to collect the precious spores… and, of course, everything goes horribly wrong. Stripped back to its basic structure, Moonflow sounds kind of like Adam Nevill’s The Ritual: unsuspecting tourists get lost in the woods and fall into the clutches of a creepy cult. However,…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 466 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author Clark Collis ▶ Publisher 1984 Publishing ➔ Clark Collis’s excellent 2021 book You’ve Got Red On You was an absorbing deep dive into the making of Shaun Of The Dead. His follow-up has a far broader remit – and he may have bitten off more than needed chewing. The book focuses on US and UK horror, taking the premiere of Scream as its starting point, and setting The Conjuring as the finish line. This seems somewhat arbitrary – after all, it’s not as if anyone identifies as “a fan of 1997-2013 horror”. An impressive interviewee list ensures most of the longer accounts are not reliant on archival sources – it helps that genre stalwarts like Greg Nicotero and Doug Jones…

▶ RELEASED 11 SEPTEMBER 400 pages | Paperback ▶ Author Doug Naylor ▶ Publisher David Fickling Books ➔ He’s been back to reality and back to Earth. Now Red Dwarf co-creator Doug Naylor goes back to school with this entertaining kids’ novel. Cyril Sniggs’s Correctional Orphanage For Wayward Boys And Girls is an unorthodox educational establishment, working to an ancient curriculum laid down by pirates. Every year its Dickensian disciplinary system punishes four children with a week’s exile on the eponymous Sin Bin Island, a remote, seemingly haunted rock nestled in lamprey-infested waters. It goes without saying that the recently bereaved Jack “Digs” Digby is miffed when his late mum’s will informs him that this is where he’ll be continuing his education. Luckily, it’s also the ideal location for some…

▶ RELEASED 16 SEPTEMBER 422 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Gareth L Powell ▶ Publisher Titan Books ➔ In the tradition of The Twilight Zone, Inside No 9 and all the best anthologies, this tour through Gareth L Powell’s back catalogue is a gloriously eclectic affair. Who Will You Save? features short stories seeing the light of day for the first time, along with tales that previously appeared in the likes of Interzone (simian flight ace short “Ack-Ack Macaque”, for example), and the author’s own collections. There really is a little bit of everything among the 32 titles here. The book covers the extremes of the SF spectrum, from hard space opera to Earth-based alien visitations, via zombies, borderline vampires and close encounters of the romantic kind. Some stories aren’t even…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Marvel Comics ▶ Writers Charles Soule, Steve McNiven ▶ Artist Steve McNiven ISSUES 1-3 With Frank Miller having risen to prominence on Daredevil, it’s apt that Hornhead should receive the Dark Knight Returns treatment in this enthralling three-parter. Indeed, the spirit of Miller – who contributes a couple of pared-back variant covers – looms large over both Charles Soule and Steve McNiven’s story and the latter’s art, which pays direct homage to a few key panels of Miller’s classic ’80s run. It’s set several years in the future, with an elderly, depowered Matt Murdock regaining his abilities for a limited time after being caught in a chemical explosion. Echoing Daredevil: Born Again’s super-soldier subplot, he encounters a dying Captain America, who asks him to save…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Running time 65 minutes ▶ Format CD/download ▶ Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA “And the award for the Most Generic Doctor Who Story Title goes to…” In fact, The Return Of The Doctor has a solid reason for its nondescript name. The story opens with the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) wrapping up an adventure on an alien world. Having teamed up with Talpa (Will Kirk) to save the day, the Doctor is keen to move on. Yaz, however, is starting to question the Doctor’s instinct to keep running, and so the TARDIS returns to Velazaar years later. In the time they’ve been away, things have changed for the worse – and it’s all the Doctor’s fault. Meanwhile, Yaz is haunted by a…

POISED TO BE THE LOCATION OF next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, Battleworld is taking centre stage in a new miniseries, set in an iteration of the patchwork planet that’s drawn from various different timelines. “Some were included just because they’re cool, like Killraven’s War Of The Worlds future when the Martians have conquered Earth,” writer Christos Gage tells Red Alert. “Others are there because of the characters we wanted to use, so with Days Of Future Past Storm, we get the Days Of Future Past New York and Sentinels.” Starting with one of his personal favourite characters, Hank Pym, Gage has assembled a band of disparate heroes including a fugitive Luke Cage, a recently sober Carol Danvers and King Thor, who rules over a dead future Earth, and has also included…

IN THE EARLY 2000S, MICHAEL Buckley was working intermittently in television when he came up with the idea for an animated series about two orphaned sisters named Sabrina and Daphne Grimm. Descendants of the Brothers Grimm, after their parents disappear, the sisters discover from their grandmother Relda that they’re destined to manage magical beings known as Everafters. While television execs liked the premise, no one bought the idea, so Buckley ended up selling it as a book. The Fairy-Tale Detectives, published in 2005, was the first in what would become nine hugely successful books in YA series The Sisters Grimm. Gen Z kids ate up Buckley’s clever mysteries, but the author tells Red Alert that getting the books adapted wasn’t easy. “A lot of people just didn’t get it, as…

IT STARTED OUT IN 1984 AS A superhero satire, but you could be forgiven for thinking that Don Simpson takes Megaton Man a lot more seriously nowadays. Having previously relied on readers’ familiarity with the genre’s well-worn tropes, he’s since gone back and filled in the details of the carefully constructed world of Megatropolis. Now, after Simpson wrote a short story for the recent Legends Of Indie Comics: Words Only collection, two huge tomes of old and new material are set for release: the 604-page The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume 1: The 1980s and Megaton Man: Multimensions, featuring contributions from 60 different writers and artists. “I left Easter eggs in the very first issue of Megaton Man,” recalls Simpson. “It was a typical megahero adventure – secret identity goes…

AN ALIEN LANGUAGE fills the air. Translated into English it’s saying, “Yautja are prey to no-one, friend to no-one. Predator to all.” At least we know where we stand from the outset. It’s April 2025 and SFX is at a private screening in Burbank, LA, of early footage from Predator: Badlands. The film’s director Dan Trachtenberg tells us it’s “equally terrifying and exciting” for him to give a first look at what he’s been working on. He needn’t be worried – even in a very rough, pre-vis stage the footage looks incredible. The first 20 minutes of the movie – barely glimpsed in either of the first two trailers – takes place on Yautja Prime, homeworld of the Predators. It’s a world of desert plains, rocky crags and dull oceans.…

SFX IS HALFWAY UP a snowy mountain, watching Greta Lee shoot a laser at a tree, and yet that’s far from the strangest thing happening. Behind Lee, the entire mountain range is moving – and not just a little, but a new peak is emerging from the ground. “That looks good,” calls director Joachim Rønning. “Action!” Okay, admittedly, we’re not really on a mountain, despite being just outside of Vancouver, where there are mountains aplenty. We’re actually on a studio lot, witnessing a scene from Tron: Ares being filmed on The Volume, the massive LED screen made famous by The Mandalorian. Watching The Volume in action is an otherworldly experience; an engineer can change what’s appearing on screen at the director’s whim, allowing the background to be customised on the…

FOR ANYONE WHO’S become desperately passionate about something in their life – be it career, improving their physique or just geeky collecting – very often a tipping point is met where the pursuit could easily devolve into obsession. If you’ve ever fallen down your own rabbit hole and maybe break into a cold sweat thinking about it, Justin Tipping wants you to know that he gets it, and he’s got just the movie for you. HIM is Tipping’s second feature film, a psychological horror made in conjunction with Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. It was conceived by screenwriters Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie in their acclaimed script, originally titled Goat, whose premise revolved around a tense sports retreat, with an up-and-coming young athlete invited to train with an American football team’s…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 128 minutes ▶ Director Zach Cregger ▶ Cast Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams ➔ Warner Bros kept Weapons from UK critics until the last moment – hence this belated writeup. Galling though that is, we grudgingly appreciate the motive, because there are so many terrific surprises to spoil, potentially. We’ll do our best to preserve them. The setup is dispensed with in mere moments. In small-town Pennsylvania, 17 children – all from the same class – have disappeared, inexplicably waking at 2.17am and running from their homes. Is some government experiment responsible? Alien interference? Your chances of joining the dots on the seeded clues are slim, as Weapons revives a rarely-explored subgenre. It’s hard to remember the last time it was…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | N/A | Digital ➔ Body swap concepts don’t come much more unlikely: while listening to a livestreamed concert, frustrated musician Mika switches places with a sentient soundwave. This soundwave (named “Sound” by Mika’s pals) is an alien that’s been hanging out listening to broadcasts from Earth. Now Mika is floating in outer space, while Sound discovers burritos, sunshine and drumming. Sound’s wide-eyed wonder will irritate cynics, but this isn’t for them. Quirky and charming, it’s a very sweet reminder to live in the moment.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15 | Digital ➔ This sci-fi thriller makes its small budget and minimalist sets go a long way, as a bunch of test subjects battle to survive a series of sinister experiments. Co-scripted by British horror author Simon Clark, the film’s Cube-meets-Squid Game challenges are inventive enough to keep you guessing about the captors’ motives early on, though it does meander after the big reveal – it feels like an idea for a regular-length Black Mirror episode overstretched to feature length.…

A shark horror with a twist, DANGEROUS ANIMALS (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD) centres on a serial killer who uses the creatures as his weapon of choice: boat trip operator Tucker (Jai Courtney). We said: “Boasts some decent plot twists, and Courtney imbues this land-based predator with a glimmer of roguish charisma.” Meagre extras: a four-minute featurette, and two minutes of Courtney threatening talkative cinemagoers with a violent death… Arthouse musical THE END (29 September, Blu-ray/DVD) centres on a rich family and their servants, who’ve been hunkered down in a luxurious bunker for 20 years. When a survivor from the surface turns up, it shakes things up… We said: “The salt mine location provides an eerily beautiful backdrop, and performances are solid… However, it’s a relentlessly downbeat affair.” Bonuses: interviews with four…

▶ RELEASED 11 SEPTEMBER 320 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Authors Howard Berger, Marshall Julius ▶ Publisher Welbeck ➔ What makes us love monsters? This coffee-table book from the renowned prosthetic makeup artist Howard Berger and journalist Marshall Julius tries to get to the bottom of the mystery by presenting stories from the people who make them. Each of the 16 chapters tackles a different subgenre – kaiju, vampires, zombies, slashers, and so on – with quotes from relevant creatives. There’s no faulting the contributor list: this is a who’s who of horror legends, from creature creator Rick Baker to iconic director John Carpenter, by way of “godfather of gore” Tom Savini and even the legendary Ray Harryhausen. The latter gets a well-deserved chapter dedicated to his incredible contribution to cinema.…

▶ RELEASED 23 SEPTEMBER 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author VL Bovalino ▶ Publisher Orbit ➔ There are many different systems of magic across fantasy, from spells and potions to gestures and intuition. Most involve a sense of power within a user (often inherited), which The Second Death Of Locke plays with in its system of mages and wells. A “well” is the source of power: a human who is “tethered” to a mage, who wields it. But no wells have been born since the island of Locke vanished 16 years ago, and the countries of Idistra have been at war ever since. This isn’t a war novel, however, it’s a romance. The mage and well we follow are Kier and Grey, two soldiers who grew up together after Grey’s…

▶ RELEASED 18 SEPTEMBER 224 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Mason Coile ▶ Publisher Baskerville ➔ When Earth’s first three permanent Mars colonists arrive on the Red Planet, they discover the base that’s been pre-assembled for them by three robots has been partially destroyed. One robot is now missing, and the two remaining robots have different stories about what caused the destruction: one blames the missing robot, the other blames an alien creature. Possibly even stranger than that, the robots have chosen names and sexual identities for themselves. And the “female” robot seems anxious to connect with the female member of the crew. Is it possible some kind of AI sexism is the key to the mystery? A short, sharp shock of a novel that you could probably finish in…

▶ RELEASED 23 SEPTEMBER ▶ Publisher Titan Comics ▶ Writer/artist Ugo Bienvenu COLLECTION “No one creates anymore, they just recycle,” says a character during this original graphic novel from French writer/artist Ugo Bienvenu. It’s a pointed line, and one that could apply to this book too, which feels like a riff on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for the Instagram age. It’s the near future and Yves is an archivist. His department has been tasked with deleting 8,000 teraoctets of data in order to keep the world’s social media running – and so out goes 2001: A Space Odyssey, out goes the works of WH Auden, and so on. Taking files scheduled for deletion home is forbidden, but that’s exactly what Yves is doing – and that puts his family in…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Anderson Entertainment ▶ Writer Unknown ▶ Artists Eric Eden, Frank Bellamy COLLECTION While the Thunderbirds strips from TV Century 21 have been reprinted before, this new anthology is impressively comprehensive. It begins with the Lady Penelope strips that appeared almost a year before Thunderbirds itself arrived on TV, taking up around a third of the book’s 296 pages. Written with pace and panache, the opening storyline chronicles how Lady Penelope first met safecracker and chauffeur Parker. Initially pitting the duo against evil robot Mr Steelman, their adventures have a Steed and Mrs Peel spy-fi air about them. Artist Eric Eden brings a warmth and humour to what were marionette figures, and he draws a mean FAB 1. And unlike Frank Bellamy’s inaugural Thunderbirds strip…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Number of players 3-5 ▶ Publisher Allplay BOARDGAME Merchants Of Andromeda is all about space money, as players attempt to gather as much interstellar cash as they can by spreading influence across several different minigame-like boards – all at the same time, to earn as much as possible during score events. Whether it’s crafting the longest lines on the Station board or casting the most votes in the Senate to trigger a specific ability, three actions per round – Resource, Influence and Auction – enable you to plan out exactly what you want to do before you do it. This is a layered strategy game, and one not best suited to more cautious players. The third action is the most mechanically important, as winning a Dutch…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Format PC ▶ Publisher Pocketpair Publishing VIDEOGAME If you’ve ever wanted to snoop around the many rooms in a film director’s swanky Hollywood mansion while handsome men shout in your face, you’re in luck. Dead Take is a first-person psychological horror game that bridges the space between walking sim, interactive movie and puzzler. Placed in the shoes of wannabe actor Chase Lowry (Neil Newbon), you arrive at the home of legendary director Duke Cain in search of a fellow actor – your younger, far more successful friend, Vinny Monroe (Ben Starr), who’s no longer answering his phone. To figure out what happened to him, you must pick through the messy aftermath of one hell of a party. Flash drives containing snatches of video evidence can…

The Witches Darren Scott, Grand High Witch, SFX division Growing up, I was a bit of a bookworm – quelle surprise – and by the time I’d discovered Roald Dahl’s books, there was no stopping me. Quite literally, in fact, as I would skip PE in school just so that I could continue reading whatever had caught my fanciful imagination. The only fond memory I have of football is being sat by the pitch – that’s what they call the grass field, right? – while my classmates did whatever you do in football and I lost myself in the world of The Witches. I absolutely could not put the book down. The idea that there were witches all around the world who hunted down children – who smell like dogs’…

LAST YEAR’S ORIGINAL DISNEY+ animated miniseries Lego Star Wars: Rebuild The Galaxy introduced the trials and tribulations of Lego Star Wars galaxy residents (and warring brothers) Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo) and Dev Greebling (Tony Revolori). Sig’s accidental removal of the all-powerful Cornerstone brick ended up remaking the universe as we know it and introduced them to remixed characters like Darth Jar Jar (Ahmed Best), Darth Rey (Helen Slater), burned-out ex-podracer Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the Landolorian (Billy Dee Williams). This Autumn the brothers, Jedi Bob (Bobby Moynihan), Yesi Scala (Marsai Martin) and many others return for a new miniseries, Lego Star Wars: Rebuild The Galaxy – Pieces Of The Past, where they’re all still dealing with the fallout of that bad decision. And they’ve got a new Big Bad…

“I WANTED THE AUDIENCE ON their toes,” says Samuel Clemens, whose debut feature The Drowned gives a hauntingly offbeat twist to the crime thriller genre. “I thought, ‘I want to be a film director. I’ve got to make a mark.’ I didn’t want to be lost among lots of other movies. As a debut I knew that if I spelled everything out, if I did it as a linear movie, then it might be a good movie but it might just disappear. So there was a conscious decision to do something that left the audience with a real ambiguity, discussing what this or that means. “I just wanted to make something where maybe an image would stay with you, and you might tell someone, ‘Oh, there’s this film I saw…’”…

→ The name’s Knight, Steven Knight… The man behind Peaky Blinders and SAS: Rogue Heroes will write the next James Bond movie, 007’s first mission for new spymasters Amazon. → Matt Smith is heading for that galaxy far, far away… He’s set to play one of the villains in Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter. → Star Trek: Picard’s Orla Brady replaces Kerry Condon as the voice of AI FRIDAY in Marvel’s Vision Quest. → Kristen Wiig will voice Roboto in the live-action Masters Of The Universe movie, due for release 5 June 2026. → Disney+ has greenlit Coven Academy, following the adventures of a group of young witches in New Orleans. It’s created by Tim Federle from High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. → One Piece has been renewed…

STUART ORTIZ HAD LONG BEEN intrigued by the idea of developing a horror film in the style of a true crime documentary. But for years he kept the concept on the back burner, unsure whether audiences would fully grasp what he was aiming for. That changed in 2020 when Netflix’s Tiger King became a cultural phenomenon. “There was a language that now existed,” he tells Red Alert. “I felt like, okay, now is the time. This could work, and people could be into this.” The result is Strange Harvest, a chilling mockumentary that retraces the San Bernardino Major Crimes Unit’s hunt for Mr Shiny, a sadistic serial killer who struck the Inland Empire in the ’90s, vanished without trace and reappeared a decade later to continue his brutal spree. Told…

TERENCE STAMP 1938–2025 WITH EYES LIKE SOULFUL ice and features that appeared to owe more to geometry than genetics, Terence Stamp wasn’t just a defining face of the 1960s but a striking screen presence across the decades. Born in Stepney, East London, the son of a merchant seaman, he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Cast in the title role of 1962’s Billy Budd, he won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Alongside key roles in 1967’s Far From The Madding Crowd and Poor Cow, Stamp’s otherworldly magnetism saw him cast in many genre entries across the years. He was knife-wielding cockney sidekick Willie Garvin in spy-fi spoof Modesty Blaise (1966) and played a film star haunted by the Devil in Edgar Allan Poe anthology Spirits…

How is it seeing your original 1982 creations rendered in the real world for Ares? We shot the original film on Stage Four on the Disney lot, and there really was nothing there, just black sets. It felt like a stage play. And then to go to Vancouver and see Light Cycles going down the street, it’s quite a shock… Could you ever have imagined Tron becoming this ongoing film franchise? It certainly has all moved past me. I feel that way when I see the Tron ride at Disney World. To have these fantasies manifest in reality to this scale, it makes me glad that the things I was imagining were nice and I wasn’t dreaming of war and carnage, because there are enough people in the world that…

WHEN YOUR INTERVIEW contains – within the first two minutes – the phrase, “If we’re talking about the same anus…” there’s a good chance you’re talking to Eric Kripke about one of the shows in the ever-expanding, ever-grosser, ever-more-MAGA-baiting universe of The Boys. In this case we’re discussing season two of Gen V, the spin-off centring on a bunch of super-powered teens attending the shady Vought-run Godolkin University. As anyone who’s seen the first season knows, this is no cosy Harry Potter for capes – the series is every bit as gory and bitingly satirical as its potty-mouthed progenitor. Hell, one main character, Marie, is basically a blood-themed variation on Magneto, and that’s always going to end quite messily. Kripke, the man overseeing the whole The Boys universe, promises that…

What new sets will we see in season three? ★ There are a lot of new sets and a lot of epic stuff. Stranger Things gets very sci-fi this year. Over on Stage 5, we’ve built an abandoned warehouse basement, which serves as the lair of our main baddie this year. We have a lot of new domestic interiors – but our biggest and most exciting set is the mall. Is the mall where the infamous Ships Ahoy ice-cream shop is located? ★ Yes, that’s a store in the mall. You’ll find Mr Harrington (Steve, played by Joe Keery) working there this year, along with an exciting new character that joins the gang. What ’80s movies inspired the new mall set? ★ We did all of our research watching Bill…

▶ RELEASED 12 SEPTEMBER 15 |108 minutes ▶ Director Francis Lawrence ▶ Cast Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Mark Hamill, Garrett Wareing ➔ A deadly competition that young people compete in yearly to boost morale in a dystopian US… The Hunger Games stalwart Francis Lawrence has been in this ballpark before, but this spare, punishing Stephen King adaptation is worlds away from Panem and its YA worldbuilding. The opening text dump – in the form of a letter sent to Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) – sets out the film’s lean, mean premise. In an alternate timeline, the Long Walk is an annual event that young men volunteer to compete in. The rules are simple: keep walking, on a specified path, and don’t dip below 3mph. You get three brief warnings, and…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 113 minutes ▶ Director Neo Sora ▶ Cast Hayato Kurihara, Yukito Hidaka, Yuta Hayashi, Shina Peng ➔ Titled after a track by his father, renowned musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, Neo Sora’s debut dramatic feature takes us an inch into the future to chart the first stirrings of an Orwellian state. Set in a perversely empty Tokyo – the camera lingers on bridges, walkways and buildings but the streets are barely bothered by people – Happyend follows a free-spirited group of high schoolers as they rub up against authority, both big and small. As the Japanese government issues ever more restrictive emergency decrees, claiming an apocalyptic earthquake is imminent, the school installs state-of-the-art surveillance gear to keep tabs on its prank-loving pupils. Despite the socially-charged subject matter…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15 | Digital ➔ Playing like a dark mumblecore movie, this indie horror finds smalltown ingenue Gemma adrift in LA as she chases stardom. Taking a job at a sleep clinic trading in designer dreams, she finds an abusive secret concealed within its bleak corridors. Chloë Levine is an appealing lead, but while it flirts with Lynchian atmosphere this Tinseltown fable feels muddled, never quite landing its dream factory metaphor. Brilliant creature design, though, enhanced by splendidly sinister movement.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1990 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director JS Cardone ▶ Cast Louise Fletcher, David Beecroft, James Hong BLU-RAY DEBUT One of the earliest releases from Charles Band’s Full Moon stable, this is a generic, low-energy affair that even the presence of Oscar winner Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched) can’t elevate. It’s described as “in the tradition of Alien”, but the HP Lovecraft flick From Beyond seems more of an influence. David Beecroft plays a NASA captain sent to a secret research facility after the death of a subject in the titular project – an ill-defined affair concerning extended deep sleep which somehow opens a gateway to a parallel dimension. Fourteen-year-old boys who haven’t mastered installing a VPN will be delighted that a…

▶ RELEASED 30 SEPTEMBER 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Andrzej Sapkowski ▶ Publisher Gollancz ➔ In all fictional universes, there comes a point when the writer can no longer take a story chronologically forwards. In the case of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher sequence, this moment arrived more than a quarter of a century ago, in 1999, when the Polish edition of The Lady Of The Lake was first published. So if Geralt of Rivia’s story is done, what should we make of Sapkowski’s choice to explore his life in prequels? It’s tempting to be cynical. The final book of the Witcher pentalogy wasn’t translated into English until 2017, the year Netflix commissioned The Witcher. Whisper it, but maybe Sapkowski has given in to the temptation to feed the franchise? Happily,…

▶ RELEASED 17 SEPTEMBER 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author A Rushby ▶ Publisher Verve Books ➔ There are some intriguing ideas in this horror novel about three mysterious dolls and the antique dealer hunting them down, but none of them sink their teeth in deep enough to make an impact. Jumping between two time periods, the book follows a young woman in the 1700s who’s lured into working in a brothel, and three “Venus” dolls in the modern day that come alive to murder the men who have wronged them. There are some effectively eerie sequences in the way the anatomical Venuses are described, bringing to mind both the creepy dolls of classic horror films and the porcelain monstrosities found in the houses of grandmothers. There are also neat…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 192 pages | Hardback ▶ Authors John Tenuto, Maria Jose Tenuto ▶ Publisher Titan Books ➔ If any film’s ill-served by the “even numbered Trek movies good…” theory, it’s The Search For Spock. Though restricted by having to tidy up the aftermath of The Wrath Of Khan, it combines a touching portrait of the lengths people will go to for friendship with some gut-punch surprises. Understandably, as key players are no longer with us, husband-and-wife team John and Maria Jose Tenuto’s coffee table book draws heavily on archival sources, but these are broad in scope and meticulously footnoted. They’ve also conducted 17 new interviews (including one with William Shatner). Second Saavik Robin Curtis is a valuable contributor, and it’s touching to have the son of Phillip…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Jordan Prosser ▶ Publisher Dead Ink ➔ Anyone who’s spent time in or around bands will get a few chuckles of recognition from this terrific debut novel. Somewhere between a disquieting dystopian thriller and a bleakly amusing rock comedy, Big Time follows The Acceptables, a punk band suffering from difficult second album syndrome. Singer Ash wants to push the group in a politically-charged direction, but in an authoritarian future Australia, that carries real risks. Meanwhile, a new drug has hit the streets. F allows its users brief glimpses into the future. It’s not long before The Acceptables are hooked on the drug, with bassist Julian Ferryman seeing further than anyone has before – and that changes everything. Jordan Prosser’s novel…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 640 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Tim Greiving ▶ Publisher Oxford University Press ➔ A Composer’s Life, it’s called, but even the briefest glance at John Williams’s resume reminds you that his music is all our lives. From Jaws to Star Wars, Jurassic Park to Schindler’s List, his scores are ingrained in our memories as much as the movies elevated by his talent. This weighty biography has a challenge on its hands. Williams is famously guarded, content to be a familiar thumbnail sketch: the beard and dome, the baton, the jazzer’s black rollneck. He resisted this writer’s overtures until finally thawing, making this the first authorised life story of the man Superman director Richard Donner said “took these popcorn myths as seriously as church”. Using new…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher DC Comics ▶ Writer Tom King ▶ Artist Belén Ortega ISSUES 1-3 First introduced as part of writer Tom King’s current run on Wonder Woman, Trinity is the Amazon heroine’s daughter. This six-issue miniseries is the first time she’s headlined her own title. It’s a tale that broadcasts its status as a deeply silly time travel comedy within the first few pages. The plot focuses on three different incarnations of Trinity – child, teenager, and grown-up – as they come together to fix some accidental damage to the space-time continuum (and maybe reverse the death of their father, Steve Trevor, at the same time). Most of King’s previous comic work has been bracingly dark and adult, so it’s easy to be thrown by the incredibly…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ 182 minutes | Download ▶ Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA With a vinyl soundtrack recently released and now this revival from Big Finish, 2025 is unexpectedly turning into the summer of Sky! The brilliantly spooky 1975 British TV serial, by K-9 creators Bob Baker and Dave Martin, starred Marc Harrison as an alien who materialises on Earth and then spends seven episodes titting about in the woods. It was cryptic, unsettling – and largely incomprehensible. Big Finish’s Sky is a sequel to the show, rather than a remake, and features an entirely new cast, with Cloud Quinn replacing Harrison (who appears to have dropped off the acting map) in the title role. It’s the present day and Arby Vennor (Edwin Flay), who once saved the world…

Circular Thinking 2 AUGUST 2002 In 1996, Independence Day made a global spectacle of alien invasion, unleashing widescreen violence on the world’s famous landmarks. Six years later, M Night Shyamalan’s Signs offered an altogether more focused take. “This movie is all on a farm, all one family, in one place,” said Hollywood’s newly crowned king of rug pulls as he jumped genres from the postmodern ghost story of The Sixth Sense and the comic book fable of Unbreakable to this nervy, UFO-themed chiller. “And so when you leave it you’ll know what it felt like to be on this farm, and be with this family, during this very horrific time.” Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood were both approached to play lapsed priest Graham Hess before the part went to Mel Gibson.…