News
‘The Sadness’ Trailer Pushes the Limits of Gore and Every Single Other Boundary
I’ve never been in a Q and A following a screening and seen a near riot occur in the audience. The Sadness was exactly that. The film which put everyone on edge managed to piss off a portion of the audience who were so upset that they briefly forgot that art never owes explanations. As I watched a number of audience members turn on this director and nearly all out riot, I realized that The Sadness really did push some buttons effectively. The trailer barely cuts into where this film goes – but it does a good job at giving you a general idea.
The synopsis for The Sadness goes like this:
The city of Taipei suddenly erupts into bloody chaos as ordinary people are compulsively driven to enact the most cruel and ghastly things they can imagine. Murder, torture, and mutilation are only the beginning. A young couple is pushed to the limits of sanity as they try to reunite amid the violence and depravity. The age of civility and order is no more.
I will say that The Sadness is not for everyone. However if you like to push the limits of horror in all sorts of disturbing ways, then this one is specifically for you. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
The film stars Regina Lei (76 Horror Bookstore), Berant Zhu (We Are Champions, How to Train Our Dragon), Tzu-Chiang Wang (It’s Drizzling) and In-Ru Chen in a film by Rob Jabbaz.
The Sadness arrives on Shudder beginning May 12.
Editorial
HHN35, Jack vs Oddfellow: Place Your Bets!
Halloween Horror Nights is back for its 35th installment at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida as the Infernal Carnival of Nightmares!
Over the years HHN has proven original houses draw as much of a crowd, if not more, as the intellectual property (IP) houses based off of established horror movies.
Leading each year of fear and headlining some of these original houses includes some of the most beloved and iconic characters. These icons include; Jack the Clown, The Caretaker, The Director, Chance, Dr. Oddfellow, The Usher, Lady Luck, and The Storyteller.
This year Orlando’s convention MegaCon had a highly anticipated and attended panel focused on Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights 35. The masterminds speaking of the 35th year celebration included Michael Aiello, Lora Sauls, and Charles Gray. The creators teased the landmark year to salivating fans.
Gaged by the audience’s reaction as each icon was reminisced about and displayed on the panel’s screen were Jack and Oddfellow. Here it was announced to the fanatical audience that these two icons will be returning to lead Halloween Horror Nights into its upcoming year!
Bring in the Clown!
Jack the Clown, born Jack Schmidt, is an icon created by Universal Studios for Halloween Horror Nights. Jack made his debut during the Halloween event’s tenth year in 2000. He immediately won over attendees and became a fan favorite. His popularity grew so much that he has reappeared again and again in many of the Halloween Horror Nights events.
Jack has been featured in three of the five Universal parks that have hosted HHN; Orlando, Hollywood, and Singapore. He has even claimed a spot in Universal Horror Unleashed.
Unleashed is a haunted attraction residing in Las Vegas that offers a fully immersive experience for guests. Unlike Halloween Horror Nights, this attraction is open year round! Universal Horror Unleashed features haunted houses, live entertainment, and themed bars and dining.
Here Jack stalks guests year round with his mistress in mayhem, Chance.
Jack’s History
In the late 1800s Jack was born with his brother Eddie inside the walls of Shady Brook Rest Home and Sanitarium. Jack escaped and ran away with the circus, leaving his poor and abusive family behind.
However, it was soon apparent he was not the jolly, entertaining clown he convinced his carnival spectators of.
Jack was a child murderer. As the traveling sideshow made its way through the southern states, a trail of abductions and disappearances followed. This attracted unwanted attention from federal authorities.
As the feds closed in, the clown disclosed his murderous ways to his employer, carnival owner Dr. Oddfellow. As the star attraction of the circus he hoped Oddfellow would hide him. However, the doctor was a man with his own sordid past with the law. He decided the best plan of action would be to cut ties with Jack, for good.
The circus owner had Jack Schmidt murdered, but not before the clown gave Oddfellow his trademark facial scar. A scar none of Oddfellow’s dark magic could erase.
Always the showman, Oddfellow decided Jack’s time in his show had not yet come to an end. Not even in death. The carnival owner hid Jack’s body, in addition to the thirteen children the clown had killed, inside his House of Horrors.
The Doctor is In!
Just like Jack “The Clown” Schmidt, Dr. Rich Oddfellow has a very long and evil history. He was introduced to Halloween Horror Nights in 2000, the same year as Jack. However, unlike the menacing clown, the doctor did not rise to instant fame.
Finally the Doctor found his time in the fog and in 2023 he was established as an icon of HHN.
Oddfellow’s History
Dr. Oddfellow is the notorious, darkly charismatic sideshow owner of Dr. Oddfellow’s Carnival of Thrills. He employed Jack Schmidt, the murderous clown who claimed the lives of at least 13 children. However, the clown was not the only member of the circus who had evil intentions.
Oddfellow was an evil sorcerer, and preyed upon his unsuspecting spectators from town to town. Using the souls of his victims, Oddfellow hoped to gain immortality as well as harness the power of the Dark Zodiac for himself. With this power he would have undying power at his fingertips all harnessed in the skull sitting on top of his trademark cane.
Dr. Oddfellow always left his mark of chaos, destruction and death. From the Jungle of Doom, to the 1939 Dustbowl, and an infamous 1969 Music Festival in upstate New York, Oddfellow reigned down his evil upon the innocent.
A Glimpse of HHN35
Not much has been revealed about how these icons of horror will be intertwined in the upcoming Halloween Horror Nights. However, we do know that despite how much these two despise each other, they will be sharing the spotlight as co-hosts for the much anticipated HHN35.
One of the ten haunted houses will feature the returning duo together. The house is called; Jack and Oddfellow: Chaos and Control.
As you travel through the house the stories of each icon of horror will be unraveled. You’ll wind your way through their evil dimension and see the two battle each other in a deathmatch that has been brewing for decades. However, as you near the end of the house Jack and Oddfellow come to realize that their power is much stronger together than separate. Will the souls of the guests be the fuel to their ultimate evil plan?
Tell us at iHorror who your favorite icon of horror is in the comments! If the two were to face off, who would win?
News
The Severance Writer Found a New Building to Lock People In
Aiyana K. White spent two seasons on Severance working out what happens when a building decides it is done letting people go. Her next project is set in a high school during a zombie outbreak. The architecture is different, but the logic is basically the same. Welcome to ShootAround.
Lion Forge Entertainment and WEBTOON Productions are teaming up for a live-action YA film adaptation of Shoot Around, the zombie horror-comedy webcomic by Suspu (Susanna Nousiainen) with 28 million views on WEBTOON. White, who also served as executive story editor on The Night Agent for Netflix and got her start on Showtime’s Superpumped, is writing the screenplay.
The Premise
When the zombie apocalypse hits Penny Hall High, the state’s best girls’ basketball team is forced to join forces with the boys they cannot stand for 24 hours locked inside their school. You dont even need the zombies, that sounds miserable.
The official description is Zombieland meets Bring It On, which is either the most accurate logline of the year or an extremely specific promise to have to keep. Lets hope ther PR team knew what they were doing when they through that one out there.
The Source Material
The ShootAround webcomic ran 70 chapters across its first season. White has said she devoured all of them in one sitting, which is a better endorsement than anything the studio put in the press release.
Creator Suspu has a decade of comics experience, including WEBTOON Originals Heir’s Game, The Tattletale Fool, and Bad Plan Man. The fanbase already exists, now they just have to know how to use it.
White is rewriting the script from an earlier draft by Mike Dow and Devon Kelly.
The Production
Lion Forge Entertainment, the Oscar-winning studio behind Hair Love, is producing and financing alongside WEBTOON Productions. Founder David Steward II and president Stephanie Sperber are producing for Lion Forge. President David Madden and head of global film Jason Goldberg will executive produce for WEBTOON Productions.
News
Resident Evil Drops First Teaser Trailer
The first teaser for Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil is here, and it does not look like anything this franchise has produced before. It does however, look exactly like what Cregger makes. The film opens September 18, 2026 in theaters and IMAX via Sony.
The Setup
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier who arrives at an empty house in the middle of a snowy night, calls someone to say he may not be able to speak to them again, and then spends the rest of the teaser discovering what he is actually surrounded by.
The film does not use Leon S. Kennedy or Jill Valentine, and it has no connection to the Paul W.S. Anderson films that ran from 2002 to 2016. Cregger has said he deliberately avoided retelling game stories because the fans already have those. He wanted a new entry point: a wrong place, wrong night, no-exit setup, built from inside the mythology rather than around its most familiar edges.
Paul Walter Hauser appears alongside Abrams. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Johnno Wilson round out the cast. The screenplay was co-written with Shay Hatten, who wrote John Wick: Chapters 3 and 4. Resident Evil is a co-production of Constantin Film, Vertigo Entertainment, and PlayStation Productions. Filming took place in Prague.
The Director
Two films in and Cregger has already done more to define the shape of contemporary horror than most directors manage across an entire career. Barbarian (2022) did things with a Detroit Airbnb that nobody saw coming, and its specific talent was making every assumption you walked in with feel like the setup for a trap.
Weapons (2025) followed with a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a story about an entire classroom of children disappearing on the same night that kept moving across genres without losing its grip on any of them. Both films are built around the idea that the most effective horror is structural, arriving through architecture you do not recognize until it is already over your head.
Resident Evil is a franchise built around viral outbreaks, Umbrella Corporation negligence, and the specific horror of institutions doing monstrous things behind clean branding. Cregger makes films about exactly that kind of failure. The overlap is not subtle. It is, in retrospect, the obvious hire.
What This Is
Every previous live action Resident Evil film existed somewhere on a spectrum from stylish action to full camp, with Milla Jovovich carrying most of the weight across a run that lasted fourteen years. That franchise was not trying to be scary. The Cregger teaser is. It is dark and still and operates as if something has already gone wrong before anything has technically happened yet, which is the register that both Barbarian and Weapons lived in and that the games, at their best, have always understood.
Cregger has confirmed this is an original story with no connection to the previous films. That is either a promise or a warning depending on how much you loved the Anderson era. For everyone else it is the best news the franchise has had in a while.
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“It’s My Era. I’m a Rockstar Now.” The Official ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Trailer Is Here
This Week in Horror: DC Goes Full Body Horror, A24 Has Its Chainsaw Man, and The Bone Temple Is Finally Yours
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ShoStak Opens the Door for Filmmakers to Build and Own Their Stories
‘Behind the Mask 2’ Slays Kickstarter
‘Don’t Die’ Is a Good Friday Night Horror Film And That Is Enough.
The Best Possible Person Is Directing A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre
HHN35, Jack vs Oddfellow: Place Your Bets!
The Severance Writer Found a New Building to Lock People In
Resident Evil Drops First Teaser Trailer
The Vampire Lestat Is Playing a Real Concert in NYC — And Yes, It’s Exactly as Wild as It Sounds
The History of Deals with the Devil: From Faust to The Witch
‘ZombieCON Vol. 1’ Gets the Con Right. The Zombies Arrive When They Want To.
Shudder’s May Is the Best Month They’ve Had in a While.
‘Don’t Die’ Is a Good Friday Night Horror Film And That Is Enough.
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