Mike Flanagan followed up the success of The Haunting franchise with more critically lauded chillers—2021’s Midnight Mass and 2022’s *The Midnight Club—*but his latest, a Gothic love letter to Edgar Allan Poe, deserves a mention for its mind-boggling visuals and delicious performances. The latter come courtesy of many of Flanagan’s regular players (Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli), who populate this disturbing account of two ruthless siblings who gain unimaginable wealth and power through their corrupt pharmaceutical company. But then, the heirs to their fortune start to die under mysterious and increasingly grisly circumstances, and portents of doom, many of which will be familiar to Poe aficionados, begin to surround them. From its opening minutes, the sense of dread is overwhelming.
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The Oscar-winning auteur presents eight unsettling tales—encompassing dormant demons, alien parasites, human taxidermy, and an enormous, fanged rat queen—in this sprawling anthology series, which is every bit as eclectic, experimental, satirical, and socially conscious as the contemporary horror landscape itself. He has overseen their creation and penned two of the stories on which they’re based, but, most of all, has sought to create a platform on which fellow genre veterans and rising stars can shine—The Babadook and The Nightingale’s Jennifer Kent and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’s Ana Lily Amirpour are among the directors who helm these mostly-hour-long nightmares, and in the various acting ensembles, you’ll find everyone from Rupert Grint, Tim Blake Nelson, F. Murray Abraham, and Glynn Turman to Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Córdova, and comedian Eric André. It’s quite the ride.
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