Grave Tone: Horror Podcast

Friday the 13th movies ranked worst to best, all 12 of them, and then we get into what Crystal Lake just did to Jason Voorhees. Happy Halloween weekend, campers. Finishing Crystal Lake sent us straight back through the whole Friday the 13th franchise to see if the new lore changes how the movies hold up. Arthur and Meaghan each rank every film, from Friday the 13th (1980) and Friday the 13th Part...

Our Fresh Meat review is in, and honestly? Dead Meat's horror anthology is a lot better than the cranky online ratings say. James A. Janisse and the Dead Meat team took more than 500 short film submissions, whittled them down to 13, and wrapped them in "Sate the Screen," a butcher shop story about a little girl and a TV that has to be fed (fresh meat, get it?). We caught the one-night-only screeni...

Clayface review time: DC Studios finally made a real horror movie, and we walked out of it with a 7 and a 4.5. Full spoilers and the ending explained. James Watkins' Clayface, based on a story by Mike Flanagan, follows Matt Hagen, a rising Hollywood star whose face is carved up by a Gotham mob boss's henchmen. Desperate to get his life back, he signs up for an experimental regenerative treatment t...

Woodstake is the vampire graphic novel that sends a Dracula-style predator to Woodstock 1969, and we sat down with the man who made it. Shawn Hainsworth (who writes as Darin S. Cape) joins Meaghan and Arthur to talk about how rereading Bram Stoker's Dracula alongside Michael Lang's The Road to Woodstock turned into a pun, then a screenplay, then five years of work on the Woodstake graphic novel. T...

Our Other Mommy review, fresh from the theater: Jessica Chastain plays a mom and the thing wearing her face, and it should have wrecked us. It didn't. Rob Savage (Host, The Boogeyman) directs this adaptation of Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, produced by James Wan through Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. The cast is stacked: Jessica Chastain, Arabella Olivia Clark, Jay Duplass, Ari...

V/H/S/Mixtape review time, and this one is cuckoo nuts bananas. The ninth V/H/S film turns sound, music and heavy metal into the horror, and we came out of it with our jaws on the floor. Arthur and Meaghan break down Shudder's newest found footage horror anthology, starting with GWAR's deranged MTV-style wraparound and moving through all four main segments: Renee Zhan's Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance...

Our Beware Boiúna review is here, and this giant snake movie does not care who it eats. Spoiler-free first, full spoilers after Gary's warning. Meaghan and Arthur review Beware Boiúna, the new creature feature from director Mike P. Nelson (Wrong Turn, Silent Night, Deadly Night), shot on location in the Amazon rainforest near Leticia, Colombia. A team of doctors on a medical mission heads upriver,...

Beware Boiúna director Mike P. Nelson is back on Grave Tone, and this time he brought stories from the Amazon. Floods, a jungle blessing, a poison dart frog on set, and a giant snake that does not care who you are. We sat down with Mike P. Nelson ahead of Beware Boiúna hitting theatres October 2 to talk about how this giant snake movie actually got made. He almost turned it down (giant snake movie...

The IT 1990 miniseries is the reason Janine of Graeae Horror spent more than a decade unable to look at Tim Curry. She snuck downstairs at six, caught Pennywise taking Georgie through the banister, and the nightmares followed her home from school for years. Childhood Trauma is back, and this might be the most traumatic entry in the series so far (that is saying something). Janine joins Arthur and...

Our Resident Evil 2026 review, and the short version is that Zach Cregger cracked the video game movie. Arthur and Meaghan sat down right after seeing Resident Evil in theatres, and this is one of those episodes where the two of us do not land in the same place at all. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier taking a package up to Raccoon City General Hospital on a night that goes very wrong....

Hope (2026) movie review: Na Hong-jin spent ten years away and came back with a creature feature that is not a creature feature at all. Arthur and Meaghan review Hope, the Korean sci-fi horror epic that premiered at Cannes, opened in South Korea in July, and finally hit North American theatres on September 9 through Neon. The setup is small. A remote fishing village called Hope Harbor, a police ch...

Return to Oz and The Peanut Butter Solution both came out in 1985; both were sold as children's movies, and both are genuinely upsetting. Meaghan and Arthur team up with Annie and Caroline from the Drawn to Darkness podcast for a Childhood Trauma double bill made entirely of films that were technically made for kids. RETURN TO OZ: THE DISNEY SEQUEL THAT STARTS IN AN ASYLUM The first thirty minutes...

Jonathan Janz on Marla, the horror novel that sold out before it went on sale and then spent four years being the book nobody could find. Now it is everywhere, and he came back to Grave Tone to explain how that actually happened. Marla was published in 2022 by Earthling Publications as a 500-copy limited edition hardcover. That was the whole run. Paul Miller told Janz it was the most requested pos...

Daniel Barnett built a horror epic out of eternal night, and the Nightmareland omnibus is only the halfway point. Twelve volumes are planned. We sit down with horror author Daniel Barnett to talk about the Nightmareland Chronicles, the horror fantasy series he pitches as The Dark Tower meets The Last of Us (the games, and he is a purist about that). John Hawthorne is crossing a darkened America to...

Buddy (2026) review: Casper Kelly's killer unicorn horror comedy is the most unhinged thing in theaters this week, and we are fully on board. Meaghan and Arthur caught Buddy at its international premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, about a month before the wide theatrical release, and walked out of that screening loud about it. Casper Kelly (the Too Many Cooks guy, the Adult Swim...

Colony (2026) review: Yeon Sang-ho went back to zombies and made them learn. Meaghan and Arthur break down the Train to Busan director's newest outbreak. Colony traps biotechnology professor Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun, credited internationally as Gianna Jun) inside a mixed-use Seoul high-rise when disgraced scientist Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan) releases an engineered virus at a biotech conferenc...

Insidious: Out of the Further review, and we did the homework first. We rewatched all five previous Insidious films in one week, then walked into the sixth one with fresh eyes and a much better understanding of what this franchise is actually building. Vote for us at the Sacred Crypt Awards for the Rising Star category! Vote here , thank you! Insidious: Out of the Further Review and Our Rating We...

Fantasia Film Festival 2026 is over, and we saw more than 20 films between us. These are the six that stuck. Meaghan and Arthur close out Grave Tone's Fantasia Film Festival 2026 coverage with a mini wrap-up of their best horror films of the fest. No ranking (Meaghan ranked hers anyway). Just the movies that are still living in our heads two weeks later, plus honorable mentions and the release dat...

Junction Row review time, and this Fantasia 2026 world premiere is the one that split us right down the middle. Meaghan and Arthur close out their Fantasia International Film Festival minisodes with Ashlea Wessel's feature debut, a Canadian sci-fi horror creature feature starring Katharine Isabelle as Juno, an army veteran in recovery who returns to the housing compound she walked away from. Her f...

The Glorious Dead review: the Adams Family wake a small town to blood in the taps and dead that will not stay buried. Meaghan and Arthur close out their Fantasia 2026 coverage with a mini review of The Glorious Dead, the sixth consecutive film from the Adams Family to world premiere at Fantasia. John Adams and Toby Poser wrote and directed it. Poser stars as Sheriff Deb McCloud, who wakes up on he...

Home Bodies review time. Casey Walker's Canadian sci-fi horror had its world premiere at Fantasia 2026, and it left us with a lot to chew on. Two children, Red and Blue, have been raised in total isolation by an automated house. The fridge restocks itself the second you close it. The dishes vanish into the trash. A disembodied voice they call Papa runs the whole operation. Then a stranger arrives...

Los Vampires review, plus The Leader, both caught at Fantasia 2026 and both built on things that actually happened. Meaghan went to these two solo (Arthur could not get into either screening) so this one runs as a spoiler-free double feature. Los Vampires is Craig Mitchell's fictionalized account of the 1931 Spanish Dracula, the version George Melford shot overnight on Tod Browning's sets while Be...

No Rest for the Wicked is a queer vampire love story from the 1862 Faroe Islands, and it wrecked us in the best way. This one had our attention before the festival schedule even dropped, and it earned every bit of that hype. Kasper Kalle's world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival follows Baldur (Egor Venned), a young fisherman stuck caring for his widowed mother on a treeless isl...

Penny Lane Is Dead review: the 1986 Ozploitation slasher that dropped a Fantasia audience member on the floor, plus the world premiere of Someone's Daughter.   PENNY LANE IS DEAD The feature debut from Australian writer-director Mia'Kate Russell, and a straight throwback to 1980s Ozploitation. It is 1986, three friends are celebrating at an isolated beach house, and Penny's jealous cousin Kat turn...

Nightborn review time. Hanna Bergholm's Finnish folk horror lands on Shudder July 31, and we caught it at Fantasia first (the North American premiere, no less). This is her follow-up to Hatching, and it takes the motherhood horror thing somewhere darker and a lot more visceral. The Setup: Hanna Bergholm's Folk Horror Follow-Up - Nightborn is Hanna Bergholm's second feature after Hatching (2022), a...