Horror recommendations are essentially exchanges of fears. Someone gets so frightened or unsettled by a piece of fiction that they want someone else to share in the screams. In doing so, there’s always the chance that one of the movies or books you recommend ends up turning a curious passerby into a lifelong horror hound.
George Romero films, for instance, have that effect. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are such superior works of horror that they also become dam busters for people looking to dive deeper into the genre and its most distinguished auteurs. You’ll want to see what else Romero’s done, which will open up a path towards movies like Martin (1977) and The Crazies (1973), each a different take on classic tropes (vampires and superstition in Martin) and social fears (pandemics and government control in The Crazies).
That said, it’s easy to dig into a bag of legendary films, books, and comics to continue doing the Dark Lord’s work of bringing in new horror converts to the flock. Looking to the present, though, yields its own rewards. I can’t overstate how important it is to have a balanced intake of both old and new horror in your system. Having a foot on each side allows interested parties to better appreciate the breadth, range, and scope of the genre.
So, without further ado, here’s a new movie, a new comic, and a new novel to welcome in the Halloween season. They are fresh off the oven, so to speak, and are well worth the price of admission.
The Movie: The Man with the Black Umbrella, directed by Ricky Umberger (2025)
Generating dread is not an easy thing to do. It requires having an understanding of pacing and atmosphere and how much they can be manipulated to slowly build on that sweet sense of doom and despair. Director Ricky Umberger achieves this in his film The Man with the Black Umbrella, a found footage experience that looks like it was readymade for the Creepypasta/dark web generation.
The movie centers on a grisly murder authored by a mysterious killer that slays his victims with a knife in one hand and a black umbrella in the other. It might sound a bit silly out of the gate, but Umberger finds ways to lean into found footage’s best qualities to build a terrifying slasher that caters to those who scour the web for urban legends and obscure internet myths. A few clever nods to The Blair Witch Project round out what is a genuinely disturbing horror movie that leaves more than enough space for a sequel or two.
The Book: Veil, written by Jonathan Janz (2025)
Invisible monsters are possessed by an enviable kind of terror. They prey on the imagination. Hints of shapes, claws, and fangs turn their stories into ‘fill in the blanks with the worst things you can think of’ affairs. Jonathan Janz plays a lot with this in his new book Veil, but his approach to it centers on buildup. To read Veil is to walk into an unavoidable nightmare that only promises to get uglier each page.
Veil follows John Calhoun, a father of two and with a marriage on rocks that’s just trying to keep it together. One fine day, people simply start vanishing from where they stand, as if snatched out of thin air. Invisible creatures seem to be responsible for this, but their intentions are unknown. John’s son gets taken first. The rest follow soon after.
Some might be reminded of Josh Mallerman’s Bird Box and its invisible threat, but Janz’s prose runs much faster and is infinitely more tense. It hits with the force of a disaster movie and feels just as urgent. The abduction sequences are among the scariest I’ve seen in a long time, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg for the terrors that await further into the book.
The Comic: More Weight: A Salem Story, written and illustrated by Ben Wickey (2025)
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 stand as one of the defining stories of the American experience. It explains the country’s own brand of politics, persecution, and paranoia, especially as it pertains to the social divides that have afflicted the United States throughout all its history. It’s been covered extensively across all media, but few works impress upon their audiences the weight of the event and its consequences as well as Ben Wickey’s More Weight: A Salem Story.
The book takes a look at The Trials across three distinct moments in time: the days of terror leading to the witch hunt and beyond, the days in which writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow walk the streets of Salem contemplating their connection to its dark history, and the present day in which Wickey reckons with the location’s transformation into the tourist-friendly “Witch City.”
The monumentality of Salem’s history and its effects on the American psyche is felt in each page. It’s a dense book that acknowledges the amount of scholarly work already out there to find different ways to express the horror a small town in Massachusetts went through when its residents started accusing fellow neighbors of witchcraft. It deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Alan Moore’s From Hell in terms of scope and vision. You’ll learn a lot, but you’ll also appreciate how good of a horror author history can be.
