ScreamWire Daily

TriStar has secured feature rights to Trevor Henderson’s viral horror property Cartoon Cat and is already searching for a filmmaker; Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Scott Glassgold and J. Todd Harris are producing.

Warner Bros./New Line has cameras rolling on The Conjuring: First Communion; Garrett Wareing and Amanda Fix board as young Ed and Lorraine Warren, with Rodrigue Huart directing and a Sept. 10, 2027 theatrical date locked.

Fantasia opens its 30th edition with 119 features, 400 shorts and an expanded Frontières market rollout into Tokyo and Toronto; Nicolas Winding Refn collects the Cheval Noir award while Neon, MUBI and other genre titles anchor the slate.

Hotel Transylvania 5 is set for Oct. 8, 2027 theatrical release; Sony Pictures will handle North America and Amazon MGM will oversee international distribution, keeping the franchise on the big screen after its Prime Video detour.

Ian Tuason has parlayed Undertone into a bigger studio assignment, landing the next Paranormal Activity installment for 2027. The review also pegs Undertone at roughly $500,000 to make and about $22 million at the box office, underscoring Tuason’s breakout as a low-budget horror director.

Oskar Lehemaa’s first English-language body horror Birth lands Tallifornia Film Fund support after its Frontières market presentation; Stellar Film is packaging Scandinavian and Irish partners around a festival-to-global-distribution play.

Prague-based Apoorva Satish’s zombie romcom Cold Feet adds Telemark, Ici et Là Productions and LaSutra Pictures as co-pro partners; Falcon takes Czech distribution as the project eyes a late-2027 or early-2028 shoot.

Netflix sets an Oct. 8 debut for Below, its six-episode Newfoundland creature thriller starring Josh Hartnett, Charlie Heaton, and Mackenzie Davis; Jesse McKeown frames the series around local legend and isolation.

Abramorama takes North American rights to Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, with a Sept. 17 IFC Center launch before a theatrical rollout. Dogwoof has already lined up international sales across Australia/New Zealand, CEE, Spain, Portugal, the Nordics, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

Massachusetts cameras are rolling on The Hours That Keep Us; the psychological horror feature moves into production this month.

Alia Bhatt boards Tumbbad 2, giving Sohum Shah’s sequel a marquee cast boost ahead of its Dec. 3, 2027 theatrical release; original director Rahi Anil Barve exits and Adesh Prasad takes over directing duties.

Don Mancini is scripting a new Chucky movie with a fresh angle; Brad Dourif says it won't pick up where the series ended. The move keeps the killer-doll franchise active on the feature side with a standalone reset in development.

Miracle Media and Shogun Films set UK occult horror Harbinger for U.S. digital on Aug. 11; the supernatural feature follows a PTSD-haunted survivor pulled back into a killer's legacy through a fortune-telling machine.

Netflix lines up a global August 28, 2026 launch for James Ashcroft’s adaptation of Alex North’s novel; Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan and Adam Scott headline the serial-killer horror-thriller.

BBC Studios says it will bid for the next Doctor Who producer tender as the BBC weighs a new post-Bad Wolf setup; the commercial arm also flagged £2.2B revenue and a 17% EBITDA jump, with the sci-fi franchise’s return still years out.

FX has put Ryan Murphy’s horror series The Beauty on hold and released the cast, forcing the project back into retooling mode before it can move toward production.

Former Wheelhouse exec tapped CEO of Wonderloom Media; acquired YouTube channel Dr. Insanity tallies 5.3M subscribers and 1.3B total views, founder Jared West; flagship clips hit roughly 30M views each. Simpson exited Calabasas Confidential after 15 years working with Brent Montgomery; Content Partners, founded 2005 and owner of rights including Forensic Files and Black Swan, closed a new capital round with Carlyle Global Credit.

Disney’s Moana opens to $95m worldwide as the summer family-franchise pileup bites; Universal’s Obsession and A24’s Backrooms have now cleared $800m combined at the global box office.

Netflix is using Unhinged to prove out short-form narrative games built for TV, laptop and phone, with Sean Krankel pitching the format to a non-gamer audience that still wants horror-thriller tension. The streamer says the bet is on accessible mechanics, fast pacing and interactive storytelling as a broader platform extension.

Canadian psychological horror feature Ancestral Beasts lands its world premiere at Fantasia’s 30th edition in Montreal; Métis filmmaker Tim Riedel directs, with an Indigenous-led cast and Edmon Rotea exec producing after a prior Frontières platform slot at Cannes 2025.

Fandango Sales has boarded Sergio Castro-San Martín’s 1976-set thriller The Chilean ahead of its Locarno world premiere in Piazza Grande. Camilo Arancibia stars as Chilean exile Aldo Marín, with Sara Serraiocco, Gaetano Bruno, Andrew Bargsted and Lorenzo Richelmy.

8-episode Friday the 13th prequel lands on Peacock Oct. 15, 2026; Brad Caleb Kane showruns with Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, marking the franchise’s first live-action expansion in over a decade.

Netflix’s new six-part mystery thriller is already cracking the platform’s most-watched ranks, giving the streamer an early genre win to point at in its limited-series slate. The performance strengthens Netflix’s leverage around how aggressively it packages and prioritizes thriller programming.

Alliance of Women Directors named mentors for its 2026 Rising Director Fellowship: Zach Cregger, Issa López, Jay Duplass, Andrew Ahn, Valerie Faris and Josephine Decker, plus first-time producing mentors Barbara Muschietti, Emily V. Gordon, Win Rosenfeld, Andrea Sperling, Julia Hammer and Tony Yang.

Janus Films opens a July 31 theatrical rollout for a new 4K restoration of Welcome II the Terrordome, beginning at BAM in New York before a national expansion. The 1995 Afrofuturist dystopian feature is being repositioned as a historical genre landmark from Ngozi Onwurah.

Red Barrels has released Season 7, “Project Boneyard,” for The Outlast Trials; it’s free for all current owners on PC and consoles. The update sends Reagents back into Murkoff’s correctional nightmare and brings back Sergeant Leland Coyle.

Tubi horror title Dark Places adds five Obscure Obsidian Film Awards wins after a prior Ideal International Film Festival sweep; Cinema Epoch and Cineridge Entertainment are pushing the Satanic-cult pic across Tubi and Fawesome as viewership builds.

Peacock has locked a 10/15/26 launch for Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel series, with all eight 60-minute episodes dropping at once. Linda Cardellini leads the A24 series from creator-showrunner Brad Caleb Kane; the cast also includes William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins, and Gwendolyn Sundstrom.

Jordan Downey’s The Cycle lands as a Shudder exclusive on Oct. 23, 2026; Deborah Ann Woll leads the crime-scene-to-creature horror with a dark cold-case hook.

20th Century’s survival horror thriller sends Austin Abrams into a 60-ton sperm whale; Brian Duffield adapts Daniel Kraus’ novel, with Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, Jane Levy, John Ortiz, and Emily Rudd in the cast.