Filmmaker Barry Mahon primarily dealt in two genres: sexploitation and kiddie matinees. The Dead One is one of his few standing somewhere in the middle. Shot in New Orleans, it’s a Bourbon Street bouillabaisse of zombies and voodoo.

In the last of three movies he made with Mahon (or anyone), John McKay stars as Johnny, who takes his freshly minted bride, Linda (one-timer Linda Ormond), from the altar to a strip club, because women love that shit. As Johnny explains to a cocktail waitress, they’re combining their honeymoon with business, because women love that shit. He’s inherited a working slave plantation (!) from his grandfather, so they’re gonna go check it out.

En route, they pass a stranded motorist who happens to be Bella Bella (Darlene Myrick of Mahon’s Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas), whose strip act they just peeped. Because Johnny’s not mechanical, he invites Bella to join them on their honeymoon, because women that love shit.

At the manse, Johnny’s ice-veined cousin Monica (Monica Davis of Mahon’s Rocket Attack U.S.A.) isn’t keen on the unplanned visitor — or the whole thing, really, because Johnny’s marriage triggered a loophole in Gramps’ will that transferred the deed out of her clutches.

In fact, only in Linda’s death can Monica regain full ownership, so she rounds up all the Black people in her employ to play the drums while she conducts a voodoo ritual. This prompts her dead brother (one-and-doner Clyde Kelly) to rise from his coffin as a lumbering zombie. He sports a mullet, a prom tux and a skin tone somewhere between jaundice and guacamole.

Barely over an hour — and even then only because Mahon shows that ritual twice — The Dead One is no classic of the undead, but bears interest for leveraging the voodoo angle all but forgotten once George A. Romero came into the picture. Plus, how else will you hear Mahon’s gripping newlywed dialogue like:

Johnny: “She’s dead.”
Linda: “Can we help her?”

Being made to look stupid onscreen? Women love that shit. —Rod Lott

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While it might be one of the most recent examples, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was hardly the first film to use bizarre and outlandish horror to earn critical acclaim. Possession isn’t necessarily the first, either, but you’d be hard-pressed to call 100-plus-year-old flicks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu even remotely as jarring Andrzej Zulawski’s plunge into one of the worst breakups imaginable.

That’s not hyperbole, either: Like, have you lost a spouse to a free-loving German karate expert, only to find out later your ex also left him for — spoiler — a primordial, tentacled man-beast that feeds on human flesh? (If you have, please contact us.)

After wrapping his latest mission and coming home to West Berlin, Mark (Sam Neill, Event Horizon), likely the most mundane international man of mystery, is greeted by his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani, 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre), with the news she wants a divorce. Mark naturally goes on a skin-crawling bender, but snaps back to reality after realizing Anna has left Bob, their young son, by himself and on the verge of neglect.

They loosely attempt to mend things for Bob’s sake, but they mostly just harm themselves with an electric meat carver instead. Mark tries to move on with the help of Helen, Bob’s schoolteacher who suspiciously looks like Anna (and is also played by Adjani), except for her lighter hair and greener eyes. Meanwhile, Anna rents a dilapidated apartment that practically pushes against the Berlin Wall to look after her latest, more monstrous lover.

Dichotomies define Possession. Anna and Mark both vie for better versions of themselves. The former struggles with trying to reconcile her “Faith” and her “Chance” before “Faith” violently ejects itself from her uterus in an empty subway. The latter, however, forces himself to step up as a more present father, only to inevitably devolve into a self-destructive lunatic. All of which, appropriately, takes place in a physically and politically divided city. If Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is an examination of how to potentially heal Berlin’s scar tissue, Possession is a nosedive into its festering wound.

What grounds the film is a pair of performances that shift on a dime. Adjani absolutely outshines Neill, but both show a physical and emotional toll from filming that rivals — and even matches — the very real distress seen from Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson just a year earlier in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Most will point to Adjani’s subway sequence, where Zulawski simply told her to “fuck the air,” as one of the main justifications for her Best Actress win at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but the scene just before that, where she whimpers and whines at a statue of Christ, might be even more telling of her character’s condition. Anna essentially begs for some answer to chaos, for some cosmic force to “fix” the calamity that’s tearing her and every relationship she has apart. But all she’ll ever get is a stone-cold stare from yet another man (or even a symbol of a man) who has no chance of understanding her. And no chance of helping, either.

Scholars have managed to dissect almost everything about Possession, and yet it still persists as a bizarre, mysterious and even schlocky horror drama. Maybe that’s what makes it so challenging. Even as touching and shocking as movies can be, this feels like something different and perhaps more intrusive. It’s like putting the saddest song you can think of from The Cure or Nine Inch Nails on loop, with every iteration getting a few seconds slower until it’s incomprehensible two hours later.

Possession is a free fall into an emotional chasm. You’ll catch your head on a protruding rock every few hundred feet. Eventually, you’ll forget that you ever stood on solid ground. —Daniel Bokemper

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Young, timid YouTuber Da-kyung, aka “Horror Queen” (SNL Korea cast member Joo Hyun-young) investigates strange goings-on at a particular subway station. She hopes her snooping will prove fruitful in terms of traffic, views, likes, clout, etc. — all of which I have difficulty feeling empathy for in modern movie characters.

For intel, Da-kyung bribes the station agent (Jeon Bae-soo, The Wailing) with hooch. He feeds her more stories for her channel, including a schoolgirl pursued by a bandaged-face woman clutching a mug of acid, and a beauty influencer who undergoes a trypophobic transformation after touching a handrail ring.

Until this point, I didn’t know Ghost Train was an anthology. More surprising is not a single story fails. Not even the one that sounds stupid on paper: a homeless man harassed by a bullying cop gets revenge with cans of killer soda. Executed with O. Henry twistiness, this morality tale is one of the more creative and original ideas K-horror has offered.

Like a dog with a full bladder, Ghost Train jumps right out there and does its business. That’s especially admirable for Asian horror, which has a tendency to balloon toward two hours or more, including Tak Se-woong’s previous film, Devil in the Lake. I also appreciate how the wraparound story isn’t an afterthought or a device for device’s sake; it’s actual plot and feels like it takes up a third or more of the running time. Se-woong treats Da-kyung’s efforts as every bit as important as any of the five standalone stories.

In efficiency and effectiveness, Ghost Train reminded me of 2021’s Ghost Mansion — only to find out the omnibuses share the screenwriting mind of Jo Ba-reun. Both deliver more chills to the spine than jumps to the heart, and that’s the way to go. But don’t confuse Ghost Train with 2022’s similar-sounding The Ghost Station, which isn’t an anthology, but is also about a female content creator so desperate for a spooky scoop, she turns to the turnstiles. Only one is worth getting your bags together for and bringing your good friends, too.* —Rod Lott

*With apologies to Cat Stevens. #nofatwas

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With Dracula, Luc Besson stakes his claim on the greatest vampire story ever told. Leaning hard on the “romance” angle, much of it plays like a remake of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula with sporadic infusions of French camp.

In a war-torn prologue, Prince Vlad (Caleb Landry Jones, Antiviral) loses his wife (Zoë Bleu, 2017’s The Institute) to enemy Turkish forces. Vlad’s so despondent, he renounces God by plunging the local cardinal’s scepter into the cardinal — thus becoming eternal, I guess? Origins don’t matter here; we know Dracula.

What really matters is four centuries later, a priest (Christoph Waltz, also in 2025’s Frankenstein) investigates the source of female vampires around Paris, while dandy realtor Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid, TV’s Andor) attempts to do business with the owner of a spooky castle. That would be Vlad, of course, looking every bit his age, complete with a Gary Oldman granny updo. And when Vlad meets Harker’s striking fiancée (also Bleu), the blood-spitting image of his late wife … well, you know the rest.

So why watch? Besson, of course. From the slickness of La Femme Nikita to the grit ofThe Professional and beyond, his films shine with lush, visual opulence, regardless of genre. Every detail matters, and when Vlad says, “This battle will be bloody, your eminence,” prior to donning animalistic armor, you know Besson will not cut a corner. His Dracula, like Coppola’s, is an all-out epic, but with squatty stone gargoyles as meal-serving henchmen, Waltz tussling with a beheaded maiden, and a dance number ensuing when Vlad applies the 19th-century version of Sex Panther cologne.

And then there’s Jones. His wispy, near-translucent ginger mustache and pasty white skin don’t exactly scream “irresistible,” yet turns out, his unique look and naturally unnerving presence make him excellent oddball casting. Leather britches, lanky frame and all, he’s the heroin-chic Drac. —Rod Lott

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It’s the first night on the job for Edward (Paul Syre, Chop Chop). The former Marine is pulling late-shift security at Wilshire Infirmary, a former psych hospital set for demolition. And as his supervisor (Mark Anthony Williams, Phat Girlz) informs him, the docs who used to run the place were into some freaky shit.

Like what? Oh, like experimenting with transferring patients’ minds into mannequins. Yep, Edward: Orientation is gonna be quite the bitch.

With that setup, I was game for first-timer Nicholas Pineda’s Infirmary, depicted through surveillance and body cameras. It’s unable to pay off, however. A pulse barely registers.

Hey, I get it: Flickering lights, power outages, creaking doors — they’re used so much in low-budget found footage because they’re cheap, if not free. But outside of middle-school sleepover pranks, they’re just not scary or effective. Plus, when you begin with a title card informing viewers two people were found deceased, and you introduce essentially a cast of three, we don’t exactly have to play Poirot.

Worse, the acting is pretty poor. Out of inexperience rather than incompetence, Syre can’t convincingly act lost in Wilshire’s maze of lookalike hallways, and poor Williams seems to have been told to improv what Samuel L. Jackson might be like if he just wanted to nap. I hate to say it, but I nearly joined him. —Rod Lott