How A Cursed Videotape Changed The Face of Horror

1998’s Ringu was a box office phenomenon, to this day one of the highest-grossing Japanese horror films ever made, and the spark that ignited what became known as the J-Horror boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. What followed was a wave: sequels, imitators, international co-productions and, inevitably, Hollywood remakes!

So how exactly did Ringu pull that off? What inspired it, how was it made, and what was it about this new wave of Japanese horror that permanently changed the way the world watches scary movies?

Every Twilight Sword Campaign Needs A Box of Monsters

Probably the highlight, so far, of the forthcoming Backerkit campaign to crowdfund the Monster Book supplement for Twilight Sword is the recently teased Battle Chest.

Every Monster and Boss from Twilight Sword, Lands of Radia and the upcoming Monster Book, turned into standees and stored in a majestic cubic box.

These economical and easily-stored, high quality standees have really caught my attention of late, as they feature in a lot of Free League's other offerings - and were actually something I was going to suggest to Two Little Mice as an add-on for Twilight Sword.

It seems - unsurprisingly - they were already way ahead of me.

The crowdfunding campaign, which kicks off next month, is also offering (as well as the main Monster Book) another box of cards to assist gamesmasters and players:

A new cubic chest packed with Monster Cards, Unique Items and Champion Feats, all wrapped in a purple, monstrous box designed by Daniela Giubellini.

As well as a horde of new monsters, a new playable kin (the rabbit-like Tamotta), and a new Way (Way of The Beast), the supplement will provide rules for harvesting parts of defeated monster foes to create fresh gear.

The Backerkit crowdfunder launches on November 17 - Life Day in the Star Wars Universe and the anniversary of this blog going live.

I now just have to decide if, having reached the grand old age of 60, I still want to keep investing money into roleplaying games as my grand aspirations for a sprawling, living world campaign are clearly never going to come to fruition. 

There's plenty of other things I could be spending my increasingly limited funds on.

One of the main motivations for my doomed PROJECT 60 was to focus my gaming fandoms into specific systems and settings that I could run with. But that got totally derailed and reached no solid conclusions (except possibly a determination to stick with my Dead Man's Hand wild west skirmish miniatures game).

When it comes to a "forever campaign" roleplaying setting (and system) I am still none the wiser, with far fewer gaming years ahead of me than behind. Perhaps Twilight Sword is the answer? I guess I can give myself until November 17 to make some kind of decision.

Portal to Hell (2025)

Writer/director/cinematographer Woody Bess's debut feature film, Portal to Hell, is an easily overlooked gem: a surprisingly surreal, silly, and sweet - yet dark - comedy about a literal "portal to hell" suddenly opening up inside a drier in a Californian strip mall laundromat.

Our protagonist, Dunn (Trey Holland) works from home as a freelance debt chaser, calling people with outstanding medical bills to try and talk them into payment plans. He seems to be a decent guy doing an awful job to make ends meet.

He also wants to do something to help his neighbour, Mr Bobshank (Keith David aka the voice of President Curtis, Childs in The Thing etc), who is dying of cancer, but is at a loss to think of anything concrete.

Visiting his local laundromat, Dunn notices the flaming portal in the drier and points it out to the manager, Ed (Romina D'Ugo). She doesn't want to make an issue of it as she has reasons for not wanting the management or the authorities coming round to check it out.

So Dunn and Ed agree to keep an eye on the portal.

One night, they realise something has come out of the portal, leaving a trail of sulphurous footprints burnt into the ground.

Dunn follows the prints and discovers the demon Chip (voiced by Richard Kind) taking a fiery piss in a dark alley.

Chip explains that he is waiting for Mr Bobshank to die, so he can drag him off to Hell because of something very bad that the seemingly kindly old man did in the past.

The incredulous Dunn strikes a deal with the demon that the debt could be wiped if Dunn delivers three souls to the portal.

Despite its potentially horrific backdrop, Portal to Hell is more a leisurely meditation on the nature of debt and "good people doing bad things".

Tonally, it reminds me of my Hal Hartley phase in the 1990s when I used to devour that auteur's highly stylized, existential, dialogue-driven comedy-dramas and wish I could write eccentric characters like that.

Woody Bess's world is similarly deadpan, boasting a small ensemble of complex, rounded characters, but with added demons, casually accepted portals to hell, and drug dealers whose business cards say "drug dealer".

Despite what the poster (above) and trailer may suggest, Portal to Hell isn't really a horror movie, with the supernatural elements being as much metaphorical as real. Ultimately, this is set-dressing for the Faustian deal Dunn finds himself entangled in.

The film isn't aiming to scare anyone, but instead make them smile and think (the two reactions are not mutually exclusive) for the movie's 90-minute duration... and beyond.

As a low-budget, indie project, Portal To Hell doesn't have the finances to splash out on massive special effects anyway and works all the better for it, finding alternate ways to get its point across.

Beautifully - and humorously - written, this 90-minute treat caught me off guard, stirred old memories, and, unexpectedly, turned out to be one of the best new movies I've seen this year.

The Grand Finale of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Trilogy

Ice Cream Man (2026)

An ice cream van rolls into the idyllic-looking American town of of Bayleen Bay, driven by the titular creepily polite, but mute, Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen).

The night after consuming his wares, the children of the town turn into psychotic monsters and start killing and dismembering adults... starting with their parents and then, the next day at school, their teachers and so on.

Only a handful of youngsters are unaffected, for various reasons, such as lactose-intolerant Jared Mayfair (Charlie Zeltzer) and a couple of his classmates, Tommy (Shiloh O'Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman).

Once they figure out what's going on, they then have to find a way to stop it, while avoiding the hordes of possessed kids who are trying to convert them to their 'cause'.

There's a lot of running about as gruesome things are going around our protagonists and I suspect the child actors were having a field day with all those gnarly prosthetics, rubbery internal organs and fake blood.

For those triggered by the thought of awful things being inflicted on minors, have no fear: the children are doing all the inflicting and one of the 'superpowers' the ice cream appears to gift them is a form of immortality anyway.

Neither a remake of the cult 1995 Clint Howard film of the same name nor an adaptation of the popular horror comic book series of the same name, Ice Cream Man was writer/director Eli Roth's first offering through his new production company, The Horror Section, and is apparently an idea he's been mulling over for years and could never get other film studios interested in. 

And I can see why. And it's not because of the gross-out gore and tasteless humour, it's simply because there isn't enough story on the page to merit an hour and a half offering.

Ice Cream Man is sprinkled with obvious homages to Romero zombie flicks, Hitchcock's The Birds, Stephen King and Goosebumps-style child-centric horror and even Nightmare on Elm Street (during the expositional info dump that takes the story into its final act).

However, there isn't really anything narratively original enough in this film to make it memorable if you take away the intricately detailed carnage.

Given that everything hinges on a big twist in the dying moments of the movie, the film really could have been drastically cut down - even from its minimalist 86 minute runtime - to a short film or a TV episode.

In all honesty, it's a 45-minute Eerie, Indiana plot padded with a lot of blood and guts that gets kinda repetitive the longer the yarn takes to unravel.

That said, I think, at its core, the meat of the script by Roth and Noah Belson is probably sharper than most people would give it credit for, and I really appreciated the unexpectedly dark, nihilistic ending.

Another aspect of Ice Cream Man that really worked for me was the fact that much of the action takes place in broad daylight. Not enough horror films have the chutzpah to do that and I applaud Roth for that creative choice.

I also cannot deny that everyone onscreen does a damn fine job - the young actors in particular are surprisingly engaging - but the bulk of the script is infuriatingly insubstantial, relying, instead, on how much viscera Roth can splatter across each scene.

The casual brutality makes The Sadness look like an episode of Teletubbies.

This kind of exploitative horror gore usually doesn't bother me but more than once it felt as through an unfettered Roth was striving to be the next Herschell Gordon Lewis. This seems a backwards aspiration for an already established and respected 'name' in the modern horror genre.

Part of the backlash against Ice Cream Man upon its release was the revelation that Roth had used generative AI during the making of this work. Reading up on this, I get the impression that he used this to manipulate the Ice Cream Man's animated cartoon that infects the mobile phones - and ultimately the dreams - of the children.

Bizarrely, though, this is a spurious detail that has little-to-no effect on the plot. It appears briefly, early on in the film, giving the impression that it's going to be a key detail in the story, but is then totally forgotten about and never referenced again. It could have been excised from the movie and no one would have been any the wiser.

Hopefully, now Eli Roth's got the Ice Cream Man out of his system, he can return with something more on a par with his previous Thanksgiving.