Survival of the Dead

The directors of Talk to Me return with a devastating A24 horror about a grieving foster mother, played against type by Sally Hawkins. Streaming on HBO Max.

Guillermo del Toro once again tries to horrify as after a spooky Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - now, with his next horrendous creature Mama (2013). The story of Mama starts from scene where two sisters Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) mysteriously disappear in the nearby forest, after their mother was ferociously killed by their father. Lilly's and Victoria's uncle, Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries his best to investigate this strange disappearing and to find little girls, if it's possible. But days has pass, and his rescue expedition hasn't show any results. In desperation he seeks and seeks his nieces again making it almost the main mission of his life. Finally, when he is about to give it up, he encounters a weird cabin in the forest, where two girls are living on their own, safe and in the good health. And there would be nothing extraordinary, if we talked about days of searching. But, almost five years have passed since, Victoria and Lilly were missed… That asks lots of questions. How little girls survived in the forest alone? Were they alone? And who was welcomed in Uncle Lucas's house alongside with the children? It seems like little girls' mother haunted their minds and what was taken as aftermath of the stress now turns to be a paranormal entity, Mama that has infested Lucas' house. The situation becomes really horrifying when Lucas's girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain) decides to use hidden demonic powers of Mama to resurrect her own children, which died many years ago.

The Fourth Kind's storyline is based on pseudo-real recorded on the home camera by the psychoanalyst during his private practice. This archival video is the basic structural core of the movie, and the plot overlays it. It's quite an unusual approach, both components are so deftly and seamlessly woven together, that it produces a very bright effect. Olatunde Osunsanmi blurs the line between fiction and reality step by step and makes it so efficient that the atmosphere of shock, horror, mind clouding and painful dreaming completely fill the mind.

After her divorce Sarah and her teenage daughter, Elissa move to a small rural town hoping to start their lives anew. The upscale community hides some very scary goings on that evidently occurred in the house next door to theirs and things begin happening very soon. Danger and evil lurk behind this small town's sleepy exterior and both mom and daughter soon find their dream home is haunted and teeming with terror and violence. Evidently years ago a girl killed both her parents as they slept in their beds in the house next door. She disappeared leaving Ryan (her brother) as the lone survivor of the family. When Elissa and Ryan get cozy the dangers grow! Elissa is played by Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games), Sarah is played by Elisabeth Shue (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), and playing Ryan is Max Thieriot (The Family Tree). Small towns seem to have more secrets even than large cities or at least they sure seem to have scarier past histories.

The filming studio of Scream 4 says, "Ten years have passed, and Sidney Prescott, who has put herself back together thanks in part to her writing, is visited by the Ghostface Killer." Until the Scream 4 hits theaters on April 15, 2011, no one reveals anything more than that one cryptic sentence. The trailer does make it clear, however, Wes Craven has no intention of reinventing the formula for fun family fear. Scream movie-series sage Wes Craven says of his genre, "There is something about the Disneyesque [American] dream of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can. [Look at] and the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that's not the truth of the matter--that gives American horror films kind of an additional rage." The Ghostface Killer always has "crawled like a viper through the suburban streets," and the fourth in the series shows lots more of the same; why mess with success? Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette prove you're never two old to feel terrified, but a whole new generation of horrified hotties has learned to scream and scream until goodness prevails. Emma Roberts and Hayden Panettiere lead "a new generation of terror."

Humorous yet gruesome, Warm Bodies is the title of Jonathan Levine's next movie, the title that works on the many levels; all of them are perfectly describing the idea of the film that loosely based on Isaac Marion debut novel of the same name. The story of filmed in 2013 Warm Bodies begins in the post-apocalyptical world where hordes of zombies are in the charge, ruling the Earth, while people are hiding in sporting domes, usually main city stadiums. Such stadiums remain the last refugee camps in the centers of most of the big cities of the destroyed world. Fortified in the manner medieval castles these domed structures hold the small concentrated groups of survivors keeping an endless defense against zombies. The movie follows the zombie named R, who is able to think and empathize: when he eats another portion of human brains it takes him high filling R with emotions and life experience of the victim. The irreversible changes begin when kills a suicidal teenager and eats out his brains. In the moment he immerses in the center of unrequited love of the victim to some girl named Julie. When R's congeners approach to kill the rest of the teenagers, R in the burst of emotions decides to save Julie's life, taking her out of the massacre. This step ignites developing relationship between R and Julie, resulting in the world-change consequence of events.