Eight months of horror releases down, four to go! We’re officially entering the “spooky season” portion of the year, the build-up to our favorite holiday, Halloween, and with our 2024 Fall Horror Movie Preview, we’re looking ahead at some of the horror movies we can’t wait to check out in the remaining months of this year. For now, we’re only including movies that have a known release date, so films like the remakes/reboots of The Toxic Avenger and Witchboard are currently absent because they don’t have a release date yet, even though they might still show up at some point in 2024. Below, you’ll find a list of the movies we’re anxious to see this Halloween season and beyond… so, here we go:
AFRAID – Theatrical, August 30
Originally scheduled to receive a theatrical release in August of 2023, director Chris Weitz’s Blumhouse-produced horror film They Listen was delayed an entire year by Sony and has been renamed Afraid. The cast includes Katherine Waterston, John Cho, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Riki Lindhome, Keith Carradine, Ben Youcef, and Wyatt Linder. Details were being kept under wraps until the unveiling of the trailer, which revealed that this is a story of AI gone wrong. There’s been a surprising lack of promotion for this one, but it’s still scheduled to be released this month.
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE – Theatrical, September 6
Thirty-six years after the classic Beetlejuice was released, we’re finally getting a sequel. Director Tim Burton is back at the helm, Michael Keaton is reprising the role of the title character, and Winona Ryder is back as Lydia Deetz, with Catherine O’Hara returning as her stepmother Delia. Joining the party are Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s wife, Willem Dafoe as a law enforcement officer in the afterlife, Justin Theroux in an unspecified role, and Burton’s Wednesday star Jenna Ortega as Lydia’s daughter. Depending on whether or not Burton and his cast were able to recapture some of the original magic, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could be a blast, and a great way to celebrate Halloween time.
THE FRONT ROOM – Theatrical, September 6
While The Witch director Robert Eggers will be closing out the year with the release of his long-awaited Nosferatu remake, his younger brothers Max and Sam Eggers are bringing us the horror film The Front Room in the build-up to Halloween. An A24 release based on a short story by Susan Hill, this one stars I Still Know What You Did Last Summer‘s Brandy Norwood as a pregnant woman dealing with a diabolical mother-in-law. Max Eggers co-wrote The Lighthouse with his brother Robert and was a production assistant on Robert’s 2008 short film adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story The Tell-Tale Heart. Sam Eggers was also a production assistant on that short film, and on The Witch. Sam also co-wrote and co-edited the 2018 documentary Olympia, about actress Olympia Dukakis.
SPEAK NO EVIL – Theatrical, September 13
Director James Watkins and Blumhouse have teamed up to bring us a remake of the 2022 Danish film Gæsterne, a.k.a. Speak No Evil – and if this is as intense as the original film was, it sounds like it’s going to be a real endurance challenge for a lot of viewers. The story centers on “a family who takes a dream holiday to an idyllic country house, only to have the vacation turn into a psychological nightmare,” and the cast includes James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scott McNairy, Aisling Franciosi, and Alix West Lefler.
THE SUBSTANCE – Theatrical, September 20
Seven years after director Coralie Fargeat made her feature directorial debut with a very cool revenge movie that was appropriately titled Revenge, Fargeat has returned with The Substance, which has been described as an explosive feminist take on body horror. Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a past-her-prime A-lister who takes an injection of a drug called the Substance and is reborn as the gorgeous, twentysomething Sue (Margaret Qualley). Problem is, they have to share equal time, spending one week in the body of Elisabeth, the next in the body of Sue, then back to Elisabeth, etc. Dennis Quaid co-stars as a repellent studio head named Harvey, a role that Ray Liotta had signed on to play right before he passed away.
NEVER LET GO – Theatrical, September 27
The latest film from genre regular Alexandre Aja stars Halle Berry as a mother struggling to raise her two young sons in a world that has been taken over by a mysterious evil. If they even want to step outside, they have to be tethered to each other with ropes… So, of course, this is a situation that’s just waiting to fall apart. Aja’s previous directing credits include High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, Piranha 3D, Horns, The 9th Life of Louis Drax, Crawl, and Oxygen, so there’s no way we’re going to miss Never Let Go.
APARTMENT 7A – Paramount+, September 27
The folks at Platinum Dunes never shied away from the challenge of having their work directly compared to horror classics; this is the company that brought us remakes and reboots of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Now they’ve teamed up with their A Quiet Place director John Krasinski to produce a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby. Natalie Erika James directed the film, which stars Julia Garner as Terry, a struggling young dancer who is taken in by peculiar, well-connected, older couple after she suffers an injury. This couple lives in the luxurious apartment building known as the Bramford… and anyone who has seen Rosemary’s Baby will know that things aren’t going to turn out well in Apartment 7A.
IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE – Netflix, October 4
Executive produced by Fear the Walking Dead cast member Colman Domingo, It’s What’s Inside earned a lot of positive reviews after having its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival at the start of this year. (You can read an 8/10 review from JoBlo’s own Chris Bumbray right HERE.) The Netflix streaming service quickly picked up the distribution rights for $17 million – and their subscribers will be able to celebrate the Halloween season by watching this story of a pre-wedding party that descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend shows up with a mysterious suitcase.
MONSTER SUMMER – Theatrical, October 4
Director David Henrie’s fantasy adventure / family horror film Monster Summer stars Mason Thames of The Black Phone as a young boy who comes to suspect that a supernatural entity is hunting the children of Martha’s Vineyard, so he seeks the help of an aging detective – and for many viewers, the actor playing that aging detective will be the main selling point of the movie. It’s Mel Gibson! Monster Summer may be aimed at a younger audience, but we can’t pass up the opportunity to see Mel Gibson deal with the supernatural.
TERRIFIER 3 – Theatrical, October 11
Terrifier 3 may be reaching theatres in time for Halloween, but unlike its predecessors this one is not set on Halloween. Instead, the setting is moving a couple months, over to Christmastime. Writer/director Damien Leone had a budget of around $55,000 to work with on the first Terrifier movie, and a budget of “a little over” $250,000 for Terrifier 2 – which was so successful, a “couple million” is going into the budget of Terrifier 3. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) will be spilling more blood and facing off against heroine Sienna (Lauren LaVera) again, and Leone said he’s aiming to make this one shorter and less mystical than the second film.
SMILE 2 – Theatrical, October 18
Smile writer/director Parker Finn’s said that if he were to make a sequel to his 2022 horror hit, he would want to make sure it’s “new, exciting, fresh” rather than just a retread of its predecessor. The freshness begins with the casting of Naomi Scott – who was not in Smile – as the lead character in Smile 2, a pop star who begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events while gearing up for her new world tour.
SALEM’S LOT – Max, October
Including this one on the list is a bit of a cheat, as it doesn’t have an official, specific release date as of this writing – but director Gary Dauberman has assured that world that his Stephen King adaptation will be released through the Max streaming service this October, after spending a couple of years sitting on a shelf at Warner Bros., so we’re taking his word for it. For a while, genre fans were worried that Warner Bros. was going to scrap the finished film and make it another one of their tax write-off situations, but it looks like the vampire movie is actually going to be released, unlike Batgirl. This is the third adaptation of Salem’s Lot. The previous two were both mini-series, which aired in 1979 and 2004.
NIGHTBITCH – Theatrical, December 6
Amy Adams stars in this darkly comic “neo-horror” movie, written and directed by Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and based on a novel by Rachel Yoder. The lead character is a stay-at-home suburban mom who begins to suspect that she might be turning into a dog… and that’s about all we know about this one so far. Scott McNairy plays Adams’ “oft-traveling husband,” while Mary Holland takes on an unspecified role.
Y2K – Theatrical, December 6
The feature directorial debut of Saturday Night Live veteran Kyle Mooney, the apocalyptic horror comedy is another A24 release. This one takes us back to the last day of December 1999, when the world was concerned that technology was going to crash when the calendar switched over to 2000. Things do go terribly wrong in Mooney’s movie, but not in the way anyone was expecting back in ’99. Instead, he has his characters – which include the likes of Jaeden Martell (Stephen King’s It), Rachel Zegler (West Side Story), Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst – fighting for their lives against rebellious machines.
NOSFERATU – Theatrical, December 25
Nine years have gone by since it was first announced that The Witch director Robert Eggers was going to be writing and directing a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu. At the end of this year, we’re finally going to be able to see what Eggers – who made The Lighthouse and The Northman in the interim – has done with the concept. Bill Skarsgard (It) plays the title character and is joined in the cast by Lily-Rose Depp (The Idol), Nicholas Hoult (Renfield), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train), Emma Corrin (The Crown), Ralph Ineson (The Witch), Simon McBurney (The Conjuring 2), and the legendary Willem Dafoe, who plays a crazy vampire hunter. Focus Features wanted to give this film “a prime holiday season release”, so they clearly believe Eggers has turned in something special.
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