I was dismayed to see a friend of mine who prides himself on being well-read and having good taste dismiss horror as a film genre (aside from Jacques Tourneur and, presumably, one or two other examples that get praised in film classes). The fully sane man knows 90 percent of everything is crap—horror, rock, theatre, painting, political thought—and you have to search a little for the gems, or at least the undigested corn kernels. This autumn’s cinema releases provide a nice array through which to sift.
For starters, the 2026 film version of Resident Evil isn’t only the best entry in that specific zombie franchise (much as we will all miss seeing Milla Jovovich, who isn’t part of this streamlined, present-set reboot) but arguably the best zombie movie of all time. That may not sound like high praise to some. Indeed, I tend to agree the world doesn’t “need” still more movies about animated corpses eating the living. And yet…
As with Westerns or noir crime dramas, a surprisingly large number of talented directors and writers somehow keep finding one more quirky twist on the zombie genre worth exploring, even when the genre as a whole seems surely to be spent by now. In this case, that talent is Zach Cregger, who had a big horror hit just last year with Weapons, a tale of missing kids that was partly influenced by the absence of Cregger’s recently-deceased comedy troupe partner, lanky alcoholic/stoner libertarian Trevor Moore.
Weapons was marked by calm, mysterious lulls during which normal life seemed almost within reach, restorable between bouts of supernatural insanity. Cregger’s Resident Evil, by contrast, is relentless, slowing down only long enough for our comedically hapless protagonist to catch his breath before the next near-fatal eruption of grotesque violence, as in stretches of the videogame series that launched this franchise 30 years ago.
Weapons used moments of humor to underscore the surreal uncertainty of the whole mystery. Resident Evil integrates humor more completely by making it seem a natural, defensive complement to the everyman protagonist’s panic as the zombie-making virus unleashed by the Umbrella Corporation unravels his initially simple world. You too might laugh while on the verge of crying if the dead bodies of your pursuers started knitting themselves back together and rallying for another assault. You hope you’d retain that much composure and perspective—even as you suspect with a sinking heart that you’d be better off dead. I’m not surprised Resident Evil has made over $100 million in its first weekend of release.
But horror gives you far more than just zombies this season, some two dozen films if you count things like the acrophobia-inducing mountain-climbing thriller Fall 2: Deadpoint or the time-travel/dinosaurs adventure The End of Oak Street.
But even if we stick to horror proper, there’s the zombie-adjacent tale Onslaught, in which Adam Wingard, the man behind the (mediocre) two recent Godzilla-fights-King-Kong movies, reveals himself to be capable of lurid, low-budget period genre evocations worthy of Ti West, with 1978-style synthesizer stings and scenery-chewing mad scientist dialogue that would make George Romero blush. Adria Arjona, who may be playing James Gunn’s Wonder Woman beginning next year, is charismatic and tough as a mom in a desert trailer park using her old combat skills to fend off an attack by three hulking, machine-gun-wielding psychopaths escaped from an illegal military experiment.
One of them also wields a chainsaw big enough to assure the informed viewer that Wingard must have seen and loved Panos Cosmatos’s comparably lurid (and comparably beautiful) 2018 film Mandy, in which Nicolas Cage fights a biker gang that may literally be from Hell.
Onslaught at least helps clear up my biggest lingering question from Godzilla vs. Kong, namely whether actress Rebecca Hall fully understood how hilarious she sounded gravely intoning the ominous line “Kong bows to no one.” Now, having seen her play a ruthless, German-accented, kinky Nazi mistress to a mad scientist and do it with superhero-movie-level gusto, I can safely say she knows how funny she is, serious awards notwithstanding.
Just as blatantly self-aware though ultimately perhaps too long for its simple metafictional premise is Buddy, in which children (and eventually one mom) are trapped in a surrealist-hell version of a forgotten children’s TV show hosted by an evil unicorn named Buddy. Picture singalongs punctuated by axe attacks and assume you hear the familiar voices of Patton Oswalt, Keegan-Michael Key, and others, and you probably get the idea. If you’ve had even one nightmare about Barney the Dinosaur in your life, you may feel all too much like you’ve been trapped in Buddy’s tightly-controlled little prison-world before, but if you’re hoping for nothing loftier than an hour-and-and-a-half-long Adult Swim bad trip, you won’t be disappointed.
I assume the enthusiastic reaction of at least some critics to Buddy was caused by the fact they all still find the idea of child-endangerment a subversive and thrilling one, but I don’t know what goes on in their minds.
I bet I know this much about Buddy writer-director Casper Kelly, though: Back in 2009, when he was writing (possibly while stoned) for Adult Swim shows such as the great comedy superhero series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, he must also have been watching the only-slightly-more-serious Batman: The Brave and the Bold because, oh my, what’s this in a late-2009 BB&B episode called “Inside the Outsiders,” written by the underappreciated Alexx Van Dyne, if not a group of teen heroes trapped in a surrealist nightmare controlled by an evil unicorn named Uri from an old kids’ TV show. I hope Van Dyne got a check from the makers of Buddy.
But then, some monstrosities are eternally recurring, like vampires and ghosts, and even if the minds behind them aren’t all that original, we’re allowed to continue enjoying the frightening results.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey