The worst nightmares are the ones you can believe in. They feature the people you love in your life—and sometimes the people you fear. And no matter how weird or unforgiving they become, the reason they linger into your waking life is because you recognize the truth beneath the unreality. Nine years after a similarly merciless feature debut, Under the Shadow, director Babak Anvari has again crafted exactly such a torment in Hallow Road, a relentless 80-minute nerve-gnasher that sets out from a parent’s worst fear before driving toward a destination far stranger and crueler than its already-grim premise suggests.…

Many years before co-founding Colossal Biosciences, future entrepreneur and champion of genetic research Ben Lamm was just a child growing up in the 1990s. And like any ‘90s era kid, this meant he absolutely loved Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. “I was probably scared at the time, but it was inspiring too,” Lamm says decades later while visiting the Den of Geek Studio ahead of his SXSW keynote talk. “I think all sci-fi has inspired me to be in tech. I’m not a biologist, I’m not from this world. But I just like to build teams of people that are much…

When people talk about their favorite parts of the Star Wars franchise, the first images that come up are often the epic lightsaber duels, the jaw-dropping space battles, and the cute little aliens that are always in ample supply. Of course, these are all important aspects of this franchise. Star Wars wouldn’t be what it is without them. But there is one thing that Daisy Ridley thinks more people should talk about when it comes to this popular space opera – the performances. While in the Den of Geek studio promoting her film We Bury the Dead at SXSW, we…

Robin Hood is a folk hero. If there was a real Robin Hood, he might have been from Nottingham, or he might have been from Yorkshire (the earliest stories feature both). He might have lived in the reign of King Richard, or King John, or even later. Centuries after he might have lived, he gained a noble background as the Earl of either Locksley or Huntingdon, though of course he always ends up living as an outlaw in Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men. His stories survive because while they can be dramatic, tragic, and meaningful, they are also fun,…

At first glance, you might not think that an indie horror movie that explores grief, loss, and our relationships with our parents would have much in common with the gory, satirical superhero show The Boys, aside from the fact that they both star Colby Minifie. However, The Surrender does have an unexpected bullet point to add to the Venn diagram of these two projects – characters pulling their own hair out, root and stem. In The Boys, Minifie’s character Ashley Barrett works for a company known as Vought International that has essentially manufactured superheroes and made them a commodity in…

Early in The Electric State, inventor and Stanley Tucci paycheck role, Ethan Skate, sits at his mother’s kitchen table. With a loving smile, she sets baklava before her son, which Skate accepts warmly. “It’s good to see you like this, mom,” he says, trying to hold back the sadness creeping in. But no sooner does Skate settle into enjoying the experience than her apartment begins to flicker, her speech start to stutter. In the very next shot, we see Skate sitting at his shiny office desk, wearing a headset. With a frown, he pulls off the headset and smashes it…

It’s out there now. As all the rades are reporting, Sadie Sink, best known for her breakout role as Max Mayfield in Stranger Things, will join the cast of Spider-Man 4. While Marvel Studios has yet to confirm the news, fans are already speculating about which character Sink might portray in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next Spider-Man story. Admittedly, just about every detail of Spider-Man 4 is anyone’s best guess at this time. Still, Sink’s acting style, look, and Spider-Man’s current status in the MCU do suggest some intriguing possibilities. With all things considered, and all disclaimers applied, here are…

Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch knows exactly what to say when people ask what his next film, We Bury the Dead, is about. “Oh, it’s a Daisy Ridley zombie movie,” he laughs while in an exclusive conversation at our SXSW studio. But Hilditch also knows there’s a lot more to his new film than that. “There are many ways you could sell this movie,” he observes. “It’s about grief and it happens to have zombies in it; it’s a movie about isolation; it’s a movie about guilt and redemption. It just happens to be set against this canvas of a larger…

Looney Tunes is an American institution. Everybody and their mother—and likely their mother’s mother—knows who Bugs Bunny, Marvin the Martian, and Taz are. The franchise has been going strong for nearly a century, but recent events have resulted in their cache getting stuck in limbo. The heavily maligned cancellation of the Coyote vs. Acme flick and the bleak effect of LeBron James’ Space Jam sequel have left devotees wondering if there was even a place for these characters in the modern marketplace?  Inherently, Looney Tunes is an animated franchise. However, the series has lost track of that in recent years,…

Screenlife films have become a genre of their own in recent years – the premise being that a story is told almost entirely through the lens of a phone, tablet, or computer screen. We’ve seen screenlife horror films like Unfriended and Host, and screenlife thrillers like Searching and Missing, but LifeHack is taking the genre in a new direction by giving us what very well may be the first screenlife heist movie. LifeHack isn’t your typical heist movie. There’s no forbidden jewel or vault of cash that this group of teens are after, instead they decide to steal millions of…

So like… a unicorn is just a horse with a horn, right? Sure, the mythical beasts are often associated with other supernatural features in the cryptozoological canon. In some stories, they soar through the sky via the power of friendship and rainbows. In others, they grant extended (if cursed) life to the drinker of their sparkly blood. But at the end of the day it’s really all about that horn, baby. Death of a Unicorn, the A24-produced horror-comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, understands the horn’s importance as well as any other film in the hallowed unicorn monster movie…

Michael. Freddy. Chucky. Jason. These icons of horror defined the genre and set the standard for a good horror movie. They taught the world that monsters needed a signature look, a strange backstory, and a set of rules for defeating them. Moreover, they established that monsters needed a gimmick, some specific manner for taking out victims. Then, in 2000, came a different kind of slasher icon, one who defied expectations. The killer in Final Destination is Death itself. Although personified with its own set of rules, Death in Final Destination returned mystery to horror, putting elaborate kills before recognizable character…

Bong Joon-ho has not only never made a bad movie; he has delivered eight feature-length films separated only by degrees of brilliance and your personal preferences. Trying to rank them in any definitive way involves heartbreak and folly, but this is the internet, the home of heartbreak and folly, so here goes. Like many great artists, director Bong Joon-ho’s accomplishments extend beyond the boundaries of his work. He not only helped lead a cinematic revolution in South Korea but inspired audiences across the world to celebrate and engage with “international” films in ways that wonderfully contradict so much else that…

Anyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that shocking images are nothing new to cinema. But anyone who has been on the internet for more than a day also realizes that art and curated choices have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the film American Sweatshop, in which Riverdale star Lili Reinhart plays a content moderator, portray a video so shocking that it leaves her character Daisy visibly shaken? By emphasizing the human aspect. “There’s a shot of my character’s eyes, with the image being burned into her brain and retinas,” Reinhart…

For most older Millennials, your scariest movie theater experience wasn’t seeing Casey Becker get stabbed in Scream, it wasn’t Samara coming out of the TV in The Ring, and it wasn’t even when the Borg came back for Picard in Star Trek: First Contact. It was feeling your parents tense up with shock when Raphael said “Damn” in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After all, you came to the theater in 1990 after falling in love with the cartoon series and toy line that launched in 1987, all kid-friendly adventures in which sais and katanas were mostly for show. Nobody got…

With a career that stretches back to 1984, Keanu Reeves has had many iconic roles. He was the warm-hearted doofus Ted “Theodore” Logan in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He was Neo, the would-be One who knows Kung Fu from The Matrix. He was the Baba Yaga in John Wick. But Reeves’ most defining role was also his most controversial, one for which he seemed wholly unsuited. When he played the towheaded Brit John Constantine in 2005’s Constantine, he finally found a role that fully suited the second half of his career, setting the stage for his transition from spaced-out…

A film festival without documentaries is like a day without sunshine. Thankfully, South by Southwest has always brought the goods when it comes to non-fiction filmmaking. The 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival is filled with compelling documentary features receiving their World, North American, or U.S. premieres. From the pastoral and thought-provoking Arrest the Midwife to the chilling Age of Disclosure to a Marc Maron project that asks Are We Good? – here are the docs to watch this year in Austin. Naiti Gámez Arrest the Midwife What does it fully mean to have the freedom of choice when it…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. In 2016’s The Accountant, Ben Affleck played Christian Wolff, a man on the spectrum whose genius with numbers made him the go-to “accountant” for criminal organizations looking to launder money or find out who’s stealing from them. Hired by a seemingly legitimate company to audit their books, Chris found himself drawn into a web of intrigue that involved an innocent bookkeeper (Anna Kendrick), a U.S. Treasury agent named Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), her own slippery boss (J.K. Simmons), and ultimately Chris’ estranged…

Spring has sprung in Austin, which can mean only one thing: it’s time for the many-hyphenated SXSW Festival! A strange, wonderful, and wholly Austin intersection of music, technology, games, and of course film and television, this festival in many ways kicks off the next year’s itinerary in culture and fun. But there is so much to do down Texas’ way that it can be a bit overwhelming to know what to see and look out for. For that reason, we’ve assembled this preview for some of the films you should probably have on your radar for the festivities. Enjoy! Amazon…

Late last year, it was reported that director Luca Guadagnino is developing a new film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel, American Psycho. Ellis has cast doubts on that report by suggesting it’s more of an idea than a committed project, but the news sparked mixed reactions. Guadagnino tackling this relevant text through a modern lens seems appealing, but many argue that director Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho film doesn’t need a companion.  While Harron’s film has aged incredibly well, a strange cloud looms over its legacy. For 25 years, conversations about Harron’s adaptation have been dominated by a…