News

Inside The Gorehound’s Playground in Fort Collins, Colorado

Published

4 years ago

February 21, 2022

It’s a simple storefront in a shopping center in Fort Collins, Colorado that looks almost like any other.

Once you open the door and step inside, however, it’s a bit like being transported back in time. There are racks of movies that you can rent stacked next to DVDs and Blu Rays to buy, and every title is either horror, sci-fi, or one of the countless cult classics we fans have embraced over the decades.

Most likely, you’ll find Jeff Abbott, the store’s owner, waiting to fill you in on everything the store he has patiently and meticulously curated has to offer.

“Everything on the racks can be rented,” he explains. “Even the titles that we have for sale because some of them are a bit pricey and I know you don’t want to be stuck with a movie you don’t like AND be out the cash you spent on it at the same time.”

So, if you find a film that interests you, but you’re not ready to commit, all you have to do is pay down a deposit for the total cost of the DVD or Blu Ray.

If you take it home and love it, call Jeff and let him know and you’ve just added a new film to your collection. If however, you decide it just isn’t for you, you can take the video back to the store for a full refund on your deposit, no questions asked.

He’ll also sell you any of his rentals that he has in stock if you find something you just can’t live without. He’ll look it up on Amazon and all you’ll pay is the cost to have it replaced in his stacks.

It’s the kind of sweet deal you just don’t hear about anymore, but it’s just one of the perks of shopping at The Gorehound’s Playground. Aside from movies, they have a host of t-shirts, posters, and various collectibles to fit every genre fan’s wish list.

Once he’s shown you around the store, Jeff will point you through a curtain that separates the front of the shop from the back, and that’s when this place goes from cool to awesome.

The theater area of The Gorehound’s Playground

Jeff has set up a small theater area that seats about 25 people on a variety of comfortable couches. Films play every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night and the cost of admission is only $8, a small price to pay to hang out with fellow fans to watch your favorite films.

“Thursday night, we do sci-fi and fantasy films; Fridays are for cult classics, and Saturday nights we do a horror double feature,” Abbott says. “We’re trying to build a community around what we’re doing, and we’re reaching out to artists and independent filmmakers, as well, to give them a place to show their work to the public.”

On the day we were there, they were getting ready for a Re-Animator double feature. Taking a look at their upcoming scheduled double features you’ll find Deep Red playing alongside The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deathgasm teamed with Evils of the Night.

In addition to the theater, the back area of the store also has a section set aside for playing various themed board and card games.

“Everything on the racks is a demo, so if you want to come in a play a round or two before you decide to buy, I’m all about that,” he points out, following the theme of his video rentals. “We also have kids who come in from the local high school to play Magic: The Gathering after school, and it’s really cool to be able to provide a place for that.”

What is apparent from beginning to end as Jeff shows you around the store is that he is passionate about what he’s doing, and he believes it fills a real void for genre fans.

“I wanted a place where people who loves these movies can get together and watch them,” he says. “These movies are meant to be seen with other fans and we’re providing a place for that to happen.”

Artwork by local artists fill the shelves and decorate the walls of the theater area of The Gorehound’s Playground

The store is doing well after three years in business, and while Abbott is enjoying the success of his location, he does have bigger long-term goals.

“I think every college town in the country would support an establishment like this,” he says. “I think there’s a place for this kind of business everywhere and hopefully we will be able to see that happen in the future.”

As I walked out of his store with shopping bags filled with movies, t-shirts, and even a Clive Barker tarot deck, I couldn’t help but think that he was absolutely right.

For more information on The Gorehound’s Playground you can follow them on Facebook and check out their website. And, if you should find yourself in Fort Collins, Colorado, head to 1125 W. Drake Road Unit B-6, and check it out in person!

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

You must be logged in to post a comment.

News

This Week in Horror: CinemaCon Delivered, Nicolas Cage Is Coming Back, and Someone Let Ti West Near a Christmas Story

Published

2 days ago

April 17, 2026

Luna Gray

It was a big week. CinemaCon happened, a Longlegs sequel got announced, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opened today, which we already covered but deserves to be in the roundup anyway because it is the biggest horror release of the month, and you should go see it. Here is everything else.

CinemaCon: The Horror Stuff

CinemaCon ran April 13 through 16 in Las Vegas and there was a lot. Here is what matters to us.

Werwulf got a real trailer, and it looks unhinged in the best way.

Robert Eggers’ follow-up to Nosferatu showed up at Universal’s presentation and it sounds like exactly what you want it to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson transforms into a werewolf. Grimy medieval England. Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Ralph Ineson are all in this. Variety called the transformation sequence alone worth the price of admission.

Practical Magic 2 happened and it was genuinely emotional.

Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman walked out together at Warner Bros.’ presentation and the room apparently lost it. The sequel reunites the Owens sisters, brings back Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, and adds Maisie Williams and Xolo Maridueña as the next generation. They rebuilt the original house on the cliff. Sally is single now. If you know the original film you know why.

Ti West and Johnny Depp are making a Christmas horror movie and I have questions.

Paramount showed first footage from Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, directed by Ti West and starring Depp in prosthetics as Scrooge. Ian McKellen is Jacob Marley. The Ghost of Christmas Present apparently shows up with his ribcage open. It is a Ti West film, so presumably this will be deeply upsetting by the end. Filing this under “extremely interested and also a little scared.”

Scary Movie is coming back June 5.

The original cast is back. Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall. The footage shown at Paramount’s panel apparently goes after reboots, remakes, elevated horror, and origin stories. That is a lot of ground to cover.

The Longlegs Universe Is Expanding

Osgood Perkins and Nicolas Cage are doing another Longlegs film, this time at Paramount, which picked it up because the scope was apparently bigger than Neon could handle. Not calling it a sequel exactly, more like something set in the same universe.

The Terror Is Back

The Terror: Devil in Silver drops May 7 on AMC+ and Shudder, and it looks like a proper return for the anthology. Dan Stevens stars as Pepper, a man committed to a psychiatric hospital who starts wondering if what he is experiencing is supernatural or if he is actually losing his mind. Based on Victor LaValle’s novel of the same name, who is also the showrunner. Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Stephen Root, and Marin Ireland are in the cast. Ridley Scott remains an executive producer. The first two seasons of The Terror were genuinely excellent, and this one has the cast to back it up.

Also Worth Knowing

Faces of Death is in theaters now and sitting at 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber, stars Barbie Ferreira as a content moderator who finds what might be real execution videos on a TikTok-style platform. It is a smart premise and the reviews say it mostly delivers.

Passenger got a trailer this week. André Øvredal, who directed The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, is calling it his scariest film yet. A supernatural entity latches onto a couple on a road trip.

The Young People from Osgood Perkins is still coming October 30, which means we are getting two Perkins-adjacent projects in the same year. This one stars Lola Tung, Nico Parker, Tatiana Maslany and Nicole Kidman and follows two school friends whose relationship turns sinister as one starts exhibiting disturbing behavior. Between this, Werwulf, and Other Mommy, fall 2026 is looking very good.

That is the week. Go see The Mummy.

News

The Dark Side of Paradise: Why Tropical Horror Hits Different

Published

2 days ago

April 17, 2026

Luna Gray

There is something specifically wrong about horror that happens in bright sunshine on white sand. It shouldn’t work. Scary things are supposed to happen in the dark, not on a sunny beach. Yet, here we are.

The genre has spent decades training audiences to associate danger with darkness. Shadows, fog, rain, winter, the absence of light. Remove all of those cues and drop the horror into a tropical afternoon and trained horror fans no longer know what to look for.

The Cognitive Dissonance

We are conditioned to believe paradise is safe. Blue water, palm trees, sunlight. These are vacation images. Relaxation images. Nothing bad is supposed to happen here.

Daylight horror is one of the hardest subgenres to execute because there is nowhere to hide the ugliness. In darkness, the imagination fills gaps. In sunlight, everything is visible, and the film has to make that visibility the threat.

What results is a specific kind of dread. The feeling that the pleasant surface of things is a lie, and always has been.

Midsommar and What Daylight Does

Midsommar is the most discussed recent example, a film set almost entirely in golden Swedish summer light where the horror is hyper-visible by design. There is no darkness to retreat into. Every ritual, every atrocity, happens in front of everyone, in full color, in the sun.

The film’s director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski described the approach as weaponizing the light. Making the brightness feel oppressive rather than comforting. There is no relief. The beauty of the setting becomes part of the trap.

The setting promises safety and delivers the opposite.

Key West Was Always Haunted

Key West has a specific advantage for horror that most tropical settings don’t, it’s actually dark underneath. The Spanish named it Cayo Hueso, “island of bones,” for the human remains found scattered on its beaches when they arrived. It has been shaped by disease, hurricanes, shipwrecks, piracy, slavery, and execution.

In 1996, David L. Sloan founded what became the first professional ghost tour operation in the United States, right there in Key West. The island’s paranormal history wasn’t invented for tourism. The tourism caught up with what was already there.

The palm trees and turquoise water are real. So are three centuries of unquiet dead.

Tropical Horror in the Genre

The Ruins, Triangle, and the broader tradition of island and beach horror keep returning to paradise as the place where the worst things happen. The genre returns to these settings because they keep working. The contradiction between beauty and violence never gets old.

The tropical setting also erases the usual horror toolkit. No dark forests, no ruined buildings, no convenient fog. The monster has nowhere to hide. Neither does anyone else.

Which Is Exactly Why We Set Our Horror Movie There

iHorror is making a horror-comedy called Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate, filmed entirely on location in Key West. Not as a backdrop. In Key West specifically, because Key West is not actually paradise. It just looks like it.

News

Thinestra Review: Almost as Sharp as It Thinks It Is

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2026

Luna Gray

No one would blame you for looking at Thinestra and thinking, “oh, it’s The Substance again.” Both films use an underexplained beauty product as a way to navigate how women are treated in entertainment and the pressure to always be beautiful. While The Substance goes after how women are treated in front of the camera, Thinestra gives us a glimpse behind the scenes.

It has things to say. Whether it says them clearly is a different question.

Meet Penny

Our protagonist is Penny, a young visual editor played by Michelle Macedo. Specifically, she edits the photos of paper thin models. She is surrounded by perfection all day and none of it is hers. After asking one of the models what it feels like to be perfect, she is handed a mystery pill with no explanation.

Something in the Ozempic family, as the film frames it, which is a good choice given that we are living through a cultural moment where weight loss drugs are reshaping beauty standards in real time. After struggling with her size for a bit, Penny pops the thing and waits to see what happens. You know, normal Tuesday activity.

What happens is that the weight she loses comes back. As her. Penelope, played by Michelle’s actual identical twin, Melissa Macedo, shows up as the ravenous doppelganger Penny just shed. The twin casting is not a gimmick. It is the smartest thing the film does. There is something genuinely uncanny about watching two identical people share a frame when one of them is supposed to be the literal embodiment of everything the other one is running from.

All of this plays out against a sweltering Los Angeles Christmas, which is its own kind of horror.

The Good Stuff

The first thing that comes to mind when watching Thinestra is odd. This is not a derogatory remark. Odd is always good in horror. The film features a toilet twin, a donut chamber, and a surprising amount of evil food. All of these things work beautifully for the comedy side of the film. Director Nathan Hertz has a clear vision for the film’s more absurdist moments and those moments land.

Hertz has said in press materials that “Penelope is not the villain. She is the symptom. The real antagonist is the voice in Penny’s head that tells her she is not enough.” That is a genuinely good thesis. The film knows what it is trying to do. Whether it follows through is the issue.

Where It Falls Apart

Thinestra never finds its balance between drama and comedy. Some scenes are over the top silly while others go immediately deadpan. The film is engaged in a kind of tonal whiplash that makes it difficult to stay invested in what is actually happening to Penny on an emotional level. You get pulled out right when you should be pulled in.

The special effects have the same problem. The donut dungeon looks disgusting and wonderfully delicious all at once, and it works. Some of the body horror effects do not hold up as well. It is worth noting that this is an indie production and budget has a lot to do with that. But the inconsistency is still noticeable in a way that undercuts the scarier moments.

The Bigger Picture

Thinestra comes from a long line of feminist body horror, and it genuinely tries to tackle heavy subjects. The Ozempic framing is timely in a way that The Ugly Stepsister and The Substance were not quite working with, and that specificity gives the film a sharp cultural edge when it leans into it. The problem is that it does not always lean into it. It gets distracted by its own weirdness, which is charming, but removes the atmosphere that would make the horror actually hurt.

This is not a bad film. Thinestra is funny, gross, and imaginative in ways most Hollywood films are not. It took home the VORTEX Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Award Grand Prize on the festival circuit and screened at Sitges, Raindance, and Screamfest, among others. There is real craft here and real ambition.

But in a genre that is currently producing work as precise as The Ugly Stepsister and as unrelenting as The Substance, Thinestra does not quite make its impression. It has the right ingredients. It just needed a longer cook time.