A hedonistic heir loses his hands, so his mother buys him new ones wired to his subconscious. Big mistake: his subconscious is a nasty place. The Restoration at Grayson Manor (2025), Glenn McQuaid's new Irish horror film, premiered at Fantastic Fest and pits Chris Colfer against Alice Krige, the Borg Queen herself, in a crumbling estate where mother and son know exactly where to cut. McQuaid, a Glass Eye Pix veteran and the director of I Sell the Dead (2008), tells Mike how a YouTube video of an amputee moving a prosthetic with his mind sparked the idea, and how The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), watched with his dad, kept a creepy hand on his tail all through childhood. He and co-writer Clay McLeod Chapman turned the killer-hand movie queer, a story of bodily autonomy and the paranoia of growing up in a straight world, and kept the family's cruelty fun with cues from Tennessee Williams, The Lion in Winter (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971), and one rule: say the nastiest lines deadpan. Krige thanked him afterward; nobody had ever asked her to do comedy before. And the young local hired to play the hands? He ended up co-writing the score. Catch it in US theaters from Chroma or on Shudder from December 1.

Follow Glenn McQuaid on Instagram and find screenings on the film's official page.

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Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny (Steven He) and Frank (Michael Tient), after a swarm of jiangshi, with Lian (Gemma Chua-Tran) as their reluctant ally. Writer-producer Paddy McDonald, who produced Predestination (2014), needed 12 and a half years and roughly 30 drafts to get it made; BAFTA-winning director Fergal Costello finally cracked it.

Mike talks with both about the Mr. Vampire (1985) and Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) obsessions behind the monsters, a Zoom chemistry read that made two leads click instantly, iPhone previs for the fight scenes, John Carpenter widescreen framing from Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Costello's next film, a vampire movie shooting in November.

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At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Josh Hadley and Heather Drain follow Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell into a New Orleans thick with humidity, incest and a Giorgio Moroder score. They set Alan Ormsby's very different script against what reached the screen, dig into Ferdinando Scarfiotti's Italian look, the dubbed dialogue and the mountain lions dyed black, and measure it all against Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton's Cat People (1942). Then Schrader himself explains the burning-house ending he threw out, why Bowie's song waits for the end credits, why he wishes he had changed the title, and how falling for his star ended his studio days.

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What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of Madame Dolly, a sorceress who has lived for two millennia, and a house full of dolls. Seven YCH directs with Rady Fu and Tree Muta, blending live-action motion capture with 2D animation.

Mike talks with Seven about the ancient Chinese anthology Taiping Guangji that inspired the sorceress, an idea 25 years in the making that moved from live action to animation when costs soared, how rotoscoping cut time by half and expenses by 30 percent, actors performing every role twice, once on a bare warehouse stage and again in the dubbing booth, Taipei landmarks that became Dolly's house, and a sequel following the mysterious Catherine.

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Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets, built in a family garage in Belleville, Ontario. Director Mason Newton DeRushie's feature debut had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest before heading to Australia's Monster Fest. Mason and his father, production designer Jason Derushie, join Mike to tell how a family raised on special makeup effects set out to bring back the '80s barbarian movie. They explain why a pandemic and a crowdfunding campaign pointed them toward puppets, how a list of ten creatures they wanted to see wrote the story, and how couch foam, chicken wire, old bedsheets and about $6,000 in spray foam became the caves. The puppet cast runs past 60 characters, from tiny insects to huge beasts, and the voice cast, led by Timothy Paul McCarthy and Ry Barrett of In a Violent Nature (2024), never saw one of them: the puppets were shot first and the voices recorded in two days afterward. Their touchstones run from Meet the Feebles (1989) to The Dark Crystal (1982). And the surviving puppets? Wet mattress foam is hard to dry, so they live in an airtight container, where nobody has to smell them.

Follow the film on Instagram and North Blood Films on Facebook.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John Joseph Dunn, chases The Farmer (1977) from a Columbia release nobody could find to a gray-market YouTube upload that finally forced Code Red's hand. It had its world premiere at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale. The filmmakers join Mike to talk about a 40-minute YouTube short that grew into a feature, star and producer Gary Conway's stories, George Memmoli's on-set accident, Johnny Popwell's run-in with the law, Paul Schrader's interview after a year of agent runaround, and a cut chapter on the returning-veteran films that ties The Farmer to Rolling Thunder (1977). A bonus conversation recorded years ago adds the hunters' side: John Schuster and John Santo on how a trailer on a Hell's Ground (2007) DVD sent them searching collectors, archives and Columbia's lawyers, down a rights tangle that runs to Sylvester Stallone's Over the Top (1987).

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What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), Francis Galluppi's debut feature, and the years of debt, freak storms and distribution dead ends that came after. It had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Foss and Pickering join Mike to talk about how a behind-the-scenes shoot titled Hire Your Friends became a feature (it took Richard Brake telling Foss to do it), how two filmmakers who have worked together for years edited it with no money and no editor, why Pickering lost a bunch of money for four years, the scene where James walks out of an interview, and why the story cannot end until they find out whether he gets his house back. No spoilers.

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A gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US as Cemetery Man, is a horror comedy that refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the point. To close Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Heather Drain and Rob Spencer take on Michele Soavi's dream-logic zombie romance, starring Rupert Everett. Is it a coma dream, a killer's solipsistic breakdown, or a joke about the death of love? They track how Anna Falchi's returns speed up, how Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog world seeps in, what Soavi's Stage Fright (1987) and The Sect (1991) promise, and the Psychomania (1973) motorcycle that roars out of a grave. They also meet François Hadji-Lazaro, the actor behind Gnaghi, and his band Les Garçons Bouchers.

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Two adult film stars run a cross-country crime spree, robbing porn theaters to fund a getaway to France, and the real question isn't whether they survive but whether they stay together. Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026) is a new Texas-made road romance from writer-director Seth Magana, shot on one lens with his own money and headed for a November 17 premiere at Laemmle NoHo 7 before a theater-by-theater tour. Seth joins Mike to talk about why Bonnie and Clyde (1967), True Romance (1993) and Queen & Slim (2019) left room for a love story, the Warren Oates Dillinger (1973) soundtrack inside the film's theaters, lessons from The American Friend (1977) and Sam Peckinpah, a shootout co-directed by the still photographer, and a two-week editing trip to France.

Follow 42nd Street Pictures on Instagram and get tickets for the November 17 premiere.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

The scariest true-crime documentary is the one that stops being true. The Dark Gets In (2026), which premiered at Beyond Fest and heads to FrightFest in the UK, follows a documentary crew interviewing the parents of a teenage girl who vanished from a locked house, until the case turns somewhere far darker than anyone expected. Writer-director Sean Hogan, who made The Devil's Business (2011), shot it so convincingly in streaming-doc style that you may forget it's fiction.

Mike talks with Hogan about a found-footage video-diary idea that sat for years until a pandemic-era chat about true crime gave it a shape, a script used as a roadmap for actors who improvised in character, an open casting call with roughly 6,000 applicants, a young lead who invented material over email, and the childhood monster books that made him a horror lifer.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A rejected horror-short application turned into a movie about what happens when retirees run the set. Sean Cisterna couldn't find funding for The Rug (2025), so he pitched a New Horizons for Seniors grant, recruited a crew in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and filmed the chaos as Silver Screamers (2025), a Fantastic Fest world premiere reaching U.S. viewers on BloodStream November 6. Cisterna joins Mike to talk about the 96-year-old who raised her hand first, an insurer that refused to cover an 80-year-old camera operator, a rug brought to life by a marionette rig, Super 8 lifer Sonny at last handling an Alexa, and why the short plays free online as the doc's companion piece. His message: imagination doesn't retire.

Follow Silver Screamers at the film's official page.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.