Horror Obsessive
Look at July’s international horror slate as a group instead of six separate release-date announcements, and a pattern falls out: almost none of these films are selling themselves on a new premise. They are selling pedigree, a director’s last hit, a studio crossover decades in the making, an icon returning to a role he helped define. That is not a knock. It is a genuinely useful read on where distributors think the safest genre bets are right now, and it is not where you would expect.
A Toho Crossover and a Killer Fog
The biggest swing of the month is Human Vapor, Netflix’s first-ever collaboration with Toho, the studio behind Godzilla. An eight-episode Japanese-South Korean limited series based on Toho’s 1960 film of the same name, it folds crime drama and science fiction around a straightforward, almost comic-book premise: a man who can turn himself into gas blows up a guest commentator on live television, then promises to do it again. A detective and a reporter chase a suspect who cannot be handcuffed, which is the kind of high-concept hook that only works if the show commits to it, and a killer who is functionally untouchable is a nastier engine for dread than most stalkers with a physical body.
Nightborn takes the opposite approach entirely. Director Hanna Bergholm follows her Sundance breakout Hatching with a film that trades body horror for something quieter and, on paper, scarier: a new mother in an isolated Finnish forest home who starts to suspect something is wrong with her newborn son. Rupert Grint rounds out the cast. Bergholm has already proven she can make domestic space feel unsafe without a single jump scare, and a story built entirely around maternal dread suggests she is doubling down on that instinct rather than chasing a bigger canvas.
Legacy Names Doing New Work
Robert Englund is the clearest legacy play here, joining Richard Brake in Pinocchio Unstrung, the latest entry in the Twisted Childhood Universe from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Brake plays Gepetto; Englund voices a sinister version of Cricket steering him toward carving Pinocchio into a real boy one piece at a time. The puppet itself is fully practical, built by Todd Masters, and a killer marionette movie lives or dies on whether the puppet reads as a real, physical threat in frame rather than a CG afterthought, so that detail matters more than the casting news around it.
Argentina’s Portraits of the Apocalypse, finally hitting DVD and VOD after playing festivals in 2024, tells a Buenos Aires zombie outbreak through four interconnected perspectives, journalist, soldier, mother, and stranger, a structure that trades a single hero’s survival arc for a wider anxiety about what an outbreak does to a city’s social fabric. Cruel Hands, Croatian-Australian filmmaker Al Kalyk’s feature debut, folds a domestic-violence escape plot into Australia’s 2019 Black Summer bushfires, using a natural disaster as a pressure cooker for a much more intimate threat.
Her Private Hell closes out the batch as the wild card: the first feature from Nicolas Winding Refn since 2016’s The Neon Demon, following women hunted by a mysterious slasher called Leather Man in a future metropolis. A 12-minute Cannes standing ovation followed by a wave of scathing reviews is its own kind of signal, and a Giallo-inflected slasher from the director of Drive is worth seeing regardless of which reaction turns out to be closer to right.
Quick Takes
- Human Vapor, a Netflix and Toho co-production, is an eight-episode limited series based on Toho’s 1960 film about a man who can turn himself into gas.
- Nightborn is director Hanna Bergholm’s follow-up to Hatching, starring Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint, streaming on Shudder from July 31.
- Pinocchio Unstrung stars Robert Englund and Richard Brake in the latest Twisted Childhood Universe film, in theaters July 24.
- Portraits of the Apocalypse, an Argentine zombie film from three directors, arrives on DVD and VOD July 14 after a 2024 festival run.
- Her Private Hell is Nicolas Winding Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, in theaters July 24.
