¡Hemos vuelto, putas!

Well, folks, it was the last day of August 2025 before you last heard from me. But, I just dropped my first bit of content in almost 10 months – albeit a somewhat dispiriting diatribe on what the hell has happened to From in its fourth season – and, while I’m loath to again suggest that “Talking Terror is Back”, well…Talking Terror is back, baby!

The last few months have been wild. Bought a house – at auction; is there a more stressful experience?! – in August, moved in in September, and had four wisdom removed a couple of weeks after that. Then, my partner Mel and I took on a double bathroom renovation, all while juggling raising a puppy – Pancho, in turns frustrating and delightful, but recently more the latter – on top of a rotating cast of visitors. (Highlights: both sets of parents for a three-week period, respectively – enjoyable and life-affirming, yet bloody exhausting!)

Anyways, what am I doing offering you excuses and life updates, when what you’re really craving is some horror, and what I want to do isn’t just tell you Talking Terror is back – it’s show you. And what better way to do that than to thank the thousands (yes, thousands – I can scarcely believe it myself!) of you that read these articles every month with some horror movie – and in one case, TV – reccos you can take away. To honour the 10 months I’ve been away (and because damn, I’m a sucker for a listicle) are 10 films I’ve watched over the last 10 months. There’s no Obsession, or Backrooms, or Hokum here – even though they’re all brilliant, breathtaking pieces of creative, both as horror films and as art – because you’ve seen those, haven’t you?

I can’t guarantee you haven’t seen everything on this list, but I hope you take away at least one hidden vaguely obscure gem. Read, watch, enjoy, thank me later!

10. Night Bloomers (2023)

2023’s Night Bloomers – an anthology series of five super-short films about the experience of Korean immigrants in Australia, told through a horror-inclined lens – totally passed me by, but I’m so glad I discovered it. (Actually, I came upon this one totally randomly after downloading SBS – a terrestrial platform in Australia that’ll be showing the World Cup in less than a week, hence my sudden interest – where it’s available free on demand.)

Each episode clocks in at around 10 minutes, and draws on different elements of Korean lore and legend. The first, “Striking Hair Pin”, describes the experience of an Australian woman trying to get closer to her Korean roots, with…unintended consequences. The second, “Soul Jackers”, connects Korean death-messenger mythology – the jeoseung saja figure – with the story of a rebellious young man trying to step out of his father’s shadow, while “Friend or Foe” introduces dokkaebi – goblin-like beings or spirits with supernatural powers that manifest in an elderly hoarder’s life through a possessed object. Episode four, “The Second Coming” interposes vampiric mythology on the lived experience of LGBTQIA+ Korean-Australians, while the last episode, “Passing On”, involves the ritual of jesa – the Korean ancestral rite performed to commemorate departed ancestors – gone awry.

Like all anthologies, Night Bloomers is a little patchy, but what’s an hour of your time worth? Get to it!

9. Voces (Eng: Don’t Listen) (2020)

Another one that totally took me by surprise, Voces (2020) looks – to the naked eye – like another Netflix bargain bin. And, while the story (which recounts a family of three moving into an old mansion with a horrifying past) is nothing new, this thing is paced and shot to perfection. And the ending, though terribly bleak, offers just the right amount of gut-punch.

Also, the fact that both Mel and I are brushing up on our Spanish at the moment made this one much easier to get over the line. ¡Gracias a Dios!

8. The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

Look, I know. I know. The original The Strangers is the better film.

But 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night – which landed a decade on from the original, and eight years before the laughable The Strangers: Chapter 1 got a theatrical release – is absolutely worth a watch.

Gone is the creeping, suffocating minimalism of the first film, replaced by something much closer to neon-soaked slasher fun. A family arrives at a secluded trailer park, the masked weirdos show up, and then the whole thing becomes a grimy, synthy, John Carpenter-indebted cat-and-mouse ride that knows exactly what it is and never outstays its welcome.

The pool scene alone – Bonnie Tyler blaring, blood in the water, masked killer looming like some nightmare out of an 80s VHS sleeve – is enough to earn this a spot on the list. Is it as scary as the original? Absolutely not. Is it somehow more rewatchable?

I’ll let you be the judge. Just stay away from that Renny Harlin trilogy, dammit!

7. Beast of War (2025)

Beast of War is, on paper, ludicrous. A group of Australian soldiers are left stranded in shark-infested waters after their boat is destroyed, and what follows is part war film, part creature feature, part sun-blasted nightmare about mateship, masculinity, and the magnificent maw of the titular beast. It’s Jaws by way of Dunkirk, if Dunkirk had more blood, more yelling, and a significantly toothier antagonist.

What surprised me about Kiah Roache-Turner’s film is that it isn’t just a lark. There’s real weight here, particularly in the way the film uses the chaos of war as a backdrop for something more primal and mythic.

Yes, there’s shark carnage – but there’s also dread, panic, exhaustion, and that uniquely Australian ability to make even imminent death feel, somehow, grimly laconic.

6. Sissy (2022)

Sissy is what happens when Instagram wellness culture, unresolved childhood trauma and Australian mean-girl savagery are locked in a holiday home together and handed a blunt object. Aisha Dee is superb as Cecilia – or Sissy, though she’d really rather you didn’t call her that – a mental health influencer whose carefully curated online persona starts to crack when she reconnects with an old childhood friend and is invited away for a hen weekend. Naturally, said weekend also involves someone from her past who remembers her very differently from how she presents herself to the world. And then, well, things get messy.

What’s so sharp about Sissy is that it understands the particular horror of being perceived. Not stalked, not haunted, not chased by a masked maniac – perceived. Seen by someone who remembers the worst version of you. Seen without filters, captions, ring lights or affirmations. The film is funny, vicious and gloriously uncomfortable, with a pastel-coloured nastiness that makes the bloodshed feel almost rude. And honestly, any horror film willing to take the wellness-industrial complex down a peg or two has my vote.

5. Mutant (a.k.a. Night Shadows) (1984)

Mutant – originally released as Night Shadows, because apparently even the title was mutating, amirite – follows two brothers who roll into a small Southern town and quickly discover that something is very, very wrong. Toxic waste is involved. Locals are behaving suspiciously. People are getting infected with…something.

Before long, we’re in full backwoods sci-fi horror territory, complete with ooze, paranoia, nonsense, sweaty interiors, and the general feeling that absolutely nobody on screen has washed their hands in several days.

Is it polished? Not remotely. Does every single plot beat make sense? Good heavens, no. But there’s something wonderfully tactile about it: the kind of film where the atmosphere is doing at least half the heavy lifting, and the other half is being carried by the sheer pleasure of watching an 80s horror movie commit to being disgusting. It’s not a lost masterpiece – even by the lofty retrospective standards of the 80s – and I won’t pretend it is.

But if you’re partial to small-town infection horror, practical effects and the particular joy of films that feel like they were discovered on a dusty video shop shelf, Mutant is absolutely worth your time.

4. Alison’s Birthday (1981)

Australia has a knack for making horror that feels slightly sun-damaged.

Even when nothing obviously frightening is happening, there’s often this weird, dry, oppressive energy – as though the landscape itself knows something you don’t. Alison’s Birthday has that in spades. This 1981 supernatural horror follows Alison, who, after messing about with a Ouija board as a teenager, receives a warning about her 19th birthday. Years later, she’s invited to spend that birthday with relatives, and, shock horror, the whole thing turns out not to be a wholesome family get-together involving cake, balloons and awkward small talk. Instead, what you get is folk horror with an Australian accent: strange relatives, ritualistic dread, a creeping sense of inevitability, and the very specific anxiety of realising that the people who are supposed to love and protect you might actually have deeply unpleasant plans for your body and soul. Yikes.

It’s a slow burn, absolutely, and modern viewers may find it a little stiff around the edges. But stick with it. The final stretch is bleak, bizarre and properly haunting – the kind of ending that makes the whole film feel nastier in retrospect.

3. He Knows You’re Alone (1980)

Here’s one for the true slasher completists.

He Knows You’re Alone is not, by any reasonable measure, one of the great slashers. It doesn’t have the mythic force of Halloween, the sleazy summer-camp energy of Friday the 13th, or the giallo-adjacent weirdness of some of its more stylish contemporaries. What it does have, though, is a killer targeting brides-to-be, a gloriously early-80s sense of suburban panic, and – trivia klaxon – Tom Hanks in his first feature film role.

That alone makes it worth a watch, but there’s more here than pub-quiz value. The film has that peculiar slasher-era charm where every scene feels like it might have been assembled from fog machines, suspicious phone calls and women looking nervously over their shoulders in empty rooms. It’s a tad derivative, yes, but derivative in the way a cover band can still absolutely nail the chorus.

There’s something oddly comforting about it, too. Not cosy, exactly – people are being murdered, after all – but familiar. It’s a time capsule from the moment when slashers were multiplying like gremlins in bathwater, and even the lesser-known entries had a certain blunt, unpretentious appeal.

2. Little Bites (2024)

Little Bites has one of those premises that makes you sit up immediately: a mother allows a monster to feed on her, little by little, in order to keep it away from her daughter.

I mean, come on. That’s horror-as-metaphor with a capital H, but the metaphor is so potent – motherhood as self-erasure, sacrifice as bodily horror, love as something that quite literally consumes you – that it’s hard not to be hooked. Krsy Fox plays Mindy, a mother trapped in a grotesque arrangement with the thing in her basement, and the film is at its best when it lets that dynamic breathe: the bell, the dread, the awful bargain of giving another piece of yourself away because the alternative is worse.

1. Killing Ground (2016)

And finally: Killing Ground. The best film on this list, and also the one I’m least likely to casually recommend to someone over dinner unless I’m absolutely sure they know what they’re getting into. Damien Power’s Australian survival thriller is lean, brutal and almost unbearably tense. A young couple go camping at a remote spot in the bush, find an abandoned tent, then discover a toddler wandering alone. From there, the film begins tightening its grip, cross-cutting between timelines until the full shape of what has happened – and what is still happening – comes into focus.

What makes Killing Ground so effective is how plausible it feels. There’s no supernatural escape hatch here, no monster, no folklore, no campfire legend made flesh. Just people, isolation, bad luck and violence that feels sickeningly possible.

The Australian bush, as it so often does in this country’s horror cinema, becomes both beautiful and indifferent: not evil, exactly, but vast enough to swallow the screams of the people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (If you’ve ever been camping in said bush, as I have, you’ll know that creeping feeling – just another reason why this film felt so gruesomely plausible.)

It’s a nasty film, but not a stupidly nasty one – there's genuine craft here, along with a level of restraint and a stomach-turning sense of consequence. It also understands that the most frightening horror often comes not from what’s lurking in the dark, but from what ordinary human beings are capable of doing in broad daylight.

So yes, Talking Terror is back. And if you take just one recommendation from this whole rambling, renovation-delayed, puppy-interrupted comeback list, make it Killing Ground.

Just maybe don’t watch it before going camping.

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