Last Thanksgiving, a movie came out that united both audiences and critics alike in mutual enjoyment. No, it wasn’t Disney’s G-rated Wish,– it was Eli Roth’s very R-rated horror movie Thanksgiving. First born as a fake trailer in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, Thanksgiving was fleshed out by Roth as a full feature with a cast that includes Patrick Dempsey, Gina Gershon, and Addison Rae.
Thanksgiving is now on Netflix and is currently one of the most popular movies on the streamer. If you’re craving more frights, here are three movies also streaming on Netflix that should satisfy your bloodlust.
Based on the popular R.L. Stine book series of the same name, the Netflix adaptation from 2021 encompasses three films, but the 1978 entry is the best of the bunch and the most like Thanksgiving due to its time period and adherence to the slasher genre. In other words, there’s lots of gory murders, and a killer with an ax to boot.
The movie stars Stranger Things actress Sadie Sink as Ziggy, a misfit teenager stuck at a summer camp. Bullied by her peers, Ziggy withdraws and doesn’t pay attention to others, but she does notice strange occurrences like the camp nurse randomly attacking a kid and other people acting oddly. Along with her older sister, Cindy, and counselor Nick, Ziggy discovers something supernatural has taken over their camp. It’s not a classic, but Fear Street: 1978 gets the job done with grisly death scenes and some genuinely scary moments.
There are some horror movies that are classics right out of the gate while there are others that take a while to find the appreciation they deserves. The Strangers falls into the latter category. Released in 2008, the movie’s reputation has grown, and with good reason- – it’s one of the most terrifying horror movies of the last 20 years. Lord of the Rings star Liv Tyler and Felicity hunk Scott Speedman star as a couple fighting for their lives against three masked attackers while at their vacation home.
Featuring three creepy antagonists, two great performances from Tyler and Speedman, and an ending that will haunt you for some time, The Strangers is effective because it knows that there’s nothing scarier than the unknown. Nothing is explained, and the violence is random and shocking. The movie is leaving Netflix at the end of the month, so now’s the time to watch it if you haven’t yet.
One of the best movies of 2022, Ti West’s X shares Thanksgiving‘s love for retro-1970s horror. With an ensemble led by the charismatic Mia Goth in a dual role, the plot centers on a ragtag crew of amateur pornographers wanting to shoot a film at an elderly couple’s secluded Texas farmhouse. It soon becomes apparent they are being picked off one by one by an unknown murderer.
Doubling as a commentary on aging and an ode to horror classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, X is an entertaining horror movie that you won’t soon forget. It’s also pretty scary, with several death scenes that will make the most jaded horror fan jump in their seat.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?