The shape of the month
Shudder’s August slate has a Yeti picture, a body horror road trip, a comedy built out of fake local TV commercials, and an Australian revenge story set on a hot night in 1986. Four new films with almost nothing in common, which is either a programming philosophy or the absence of one. Either way it makes for a strange month.
The repertory side is where August gets heavy. Twelve titles land on the first alone, including two George A. Romero entries, both Tales from the Crypt features, and The Frighteners. The catalog then turns toward possession on August 3, Spanish genre cinema on August 10, and the end of the world on August 17. Nobody at Shudder has called those groupings themes, and I am not putting words in their mouths, but the clustering is hard to miss.
One warning before we start. Two of the four new films are limited to the United States and Canada, so if you are reading from outside North America, check the availability lines before you plan a month around a Yeti.
The Yeti
Shudder Exclusive. Streaming August 7. Available in the United States and Canada. Directed by Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta.
An oil tycoon played by Corbin Bernsen and a famous adventurer played by William Sadler vanish into the winter wilderness of remote northern Alaska. A rescue team goes in after them, unaware they have crossed into the territory of a Yeti, where the weather is the smaller problem.
Cryptid horror lives or dies on how much the movie is willing to show you, and Bernsen and Sadler on the marquee suggests a film that knows exactly who it is courting. Snowbound monster pictures also have a built in advantage in August, when watching people freeze is its own form of air conditioning.
Hellcat
Shudder Original. Streaming August 14. Available in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Directed by Brock Bodell.
Lena, played by Dakota Gorman, wakes inside a moving camper trailer with a horrifying wound. The driver gives her one hour to reach a doctor before something unimaginable happens. The pain builds, reality starts coming apart, and the question of who should actually be afraid gets complicated.
A ticking clock in a confined space puts everything on the lead performance. It is also the only new film available across all of Shudder’s major territories this month, which makes it the safest bet if your group chat spans a few countries.
Buffet Infinity
Shudder Exclusive. Streaming August 21. Available in the United States and Canada. Directed by Simon Glassman.
Two restaurants in the fictional Westridge County go to war, and the whole story is told through original low budget television advertisements. The comparison offered in the film’s own materials is SCTV, which tells you the register even if it does not tell you where the horror comes from.
When this format works, the ad break structure does something no conventional narrative can, letting you watch a place curdle in thirty second increments. Easily the month’s biggest swing.
Penny Lane Is Dead
Shudder Original. Streaming August 28. Available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Directed by Mia Kate Russell.
On a hot Australian summer night in 1986, seventeen year old Penny Lane celebrates her college acceptance with her longtime friends. A cruel prank involving a spiked cupcake turns into a night of violence and revenge. With Bailey Spalding, Alexandra Jensen, and Ben O’Toole.
Australian horror has spent a decade turning small social cruelties into genuinely upsetting cinema, and 1986 gives Russell a world with no phones to call for help and no way to undo a rumor before morning.
Shudder TV watch parties
Every Friday at 9 p.m. Eastern, with a new premiere paired against a curated second feature.
- August 7, Creature Features: The Yeti and Monster Island
- August 14, Trapped: Hellcat and Hush
- August 21, Modern Japanese Terrors: New Group and Exit 8
- August 28, Summer Heat: Penny Lane Is Dead and Find Your Friends
The Trapped pairing is the one to circle. A one hour countdown in a camper against a home invasion built around silence makes an actual argument rather than just filling two hours.
Shudder Resurrected: August 1
George A. Romero’s Resident Evil is a documentary about the adaptation Romero planned and never made, built from newly filmed interviews with people who were there and an investigation into why the project died. For anyone who has spent years hearing secondhand versions of that story, this is the month’s most anticipated catalog title.
The Frighteners, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Michael J. Fox, gives a widower who can talk to ghosts a lucrative scam and then drops a murderous supernatural force into it. Romero’s Bruiser from 2000 follows a man walked on for years who wakes to find his face replaced by a blank white mask.
Baxter from 1989 is told from the perspective of a dog passed between owners, never quite fitting anywhere. It is not an animal attack movie and will not scratch that itch. What it actually does is much colder, so go in prepared.
Also arriving August 1:
- And Soon the Darkness (1970): two English women cycle through the French countryside, one disappears, and the other has to work out who can be trusted.
- They Came Back (2004): thousands of the recently dead return to a small French town and try to resume the lives they left.
- What Happened to Dorothy Bell?: Ozzie Gray records her investigation into traumatic childhood events involving her late grandmother.
- Salt Along the Tongue: after her mother dies, Mattia moves in with her estranged aunt, her mother’s identical twin. Her dead mother possesses her to protect her from a malevolent spirit, using food as the gateway.
- The Living and the Dead: British aristocrat Donald is losing his money while trying to arrange care for his wife Nancy, who has cancer. Their troubled son James takes over and clashes with her nurse, Mary. With Roger Lloyd Pack, Kate Fahy, Leo Bill, and Sarah Ball.
- The Book of Sijjin and Illiyyin: a woman curses a family with black magic, and its members face escalating danger one by one.
- Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight: demons hunt a key containing the blood of Christ while its immortal guardians try to keep it out of their hands.
- Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood: a private investigator’s search for a missing man leads him to a brothel.
Shudder Resurrected: August 3
Six titles land on the third, and five involve a possessed body and someone credentialed arguing about what to do with it. Call it a coincidence of licensing windows if you like. It still amounts to the best exorcism binge Shudder has offered in a while.
- Devils Stay: a heart specialist refuses to accept his daughter’s death following an exorcism and comes to believe her heart is still beating during her three day funeral.
- Dark Nuns: a boy named Hee-Joon is possessed, and nuns Yunia and Mikaela work to save him while priests Paul and Andrew take opposing medical and religious approaches.
- 13 Exorcisms: teenager Laura Villegas begins behaving strangely and her parents call in a Vatican approved exorcist.
- Exorcismo: a young woman unknowingly takes part in a Satanic ceremony and is possessed by the spirit of her dead father.
- The Devil’s Exorcist: a wealthy boarding school student sees a figure in black and hears sounds nobody else can hear.
- Priest: a warrior priest breaks church law to hunt the vampires who abducted his niece. This is the 2011 Scott Stewart film with Paul Bettany, which is less an exorcism picture than a vampire western wearing a cassock.
Shudder Resurrected: August 10
The tenth is where the month gets genuinely odd. Spanish genre cinema dominates, alongside revenge, apocalypse, and at least one scientist who should have left the dead alone.
- The Bell from Hell: a young man returns from the asylum his relatives put him in to take his money, and starts planning what to do about it.
- The People Who Own the Dark: wealthy partygoers ride out a nuclear war inside a castle, then venture out to find the townspeople blinded and something worse taking shape.
- Morbus: a scientist develops a formula that restores the dead to life. Elsewhere, a sex worker with literary ambitions falls in love with a writer as a Satanic sect moves into their lives.
- Rostros: a disconnected young sculptor starts seeing people without faces and flees to the Canary Islands, where an older woman becomes his muse.
- The House in the Outskirts: a couple rents a house outside Madrid for the final months of her pregnancy, and she realizes it is the same place where she had an illegal abortion years earlier.
- Creation of the Damned: after a nuclear war, two married couples live inside an apartment that is really a fallout shelter, waiting for the radiation outside to fade.
- Supernatural (1981): a dead husband returns in spirit form to keep abusing his wife, and every attempt she makes to get help fails.
- Poppers: Santos leaves prison after killing his best friend, the dead man’s father organizes a manhunt, and Santos starts hunting the hunters.
Shudder Resurrected: August 17
Threads
Threads arrives alone on the seventeenth, which is appropriate, since it pairs well with nothing. It is a fictional film shot in a documentary-like style, following nuclear war and its aftermath through the working class city of Sheffield, England, and outward into what is left of civilization.
Its reputation is not the usual cult film reputation. Threads is remembered less as a favorite than as something people describe having survived, and it has stayed in circulation for decades on that alone. If you have never seen it, do not schedule it for a Friday night with friends. Give it a weekday, in daylight, with something gentle planned afterward.
What August actually offers
The month’s value is in the range. For new work, Hellcat travels furthest and Buffet Infinity is the experiment worth a chance. For a curated run, the August 3 possession block and the August 10 Spanish titles each hold up as a weekend project. The most significant addition is Threads, and that is not a recommendation anyone makes lightly.
August 7 for the Yeti, August 17 for the end of the world. Pace yourself accordingly.
