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Three trailers, one lawsuit, one theme park resurrection, and Paul Dano signing up to lose his mind in Cold War Berlin. Horror did not have a loud week. It had a busy one, the kind where nothing blows up but a lot of quiet things get very interesting.
No new masterpiece dropped. What we got instead was a genre spending the slow part of summer sorting out who owns what. Here is everything worth your time.
Hellraiser Opens the Box at Halloween Horror Nights
Universal is bringing Hellraiser to Halloween Horror Nights 2026, and it announced the whole thing with a trailer built around Pinhead and the Cenobites. The haunted house is coming to both coasts. Orlando kicks off Friday, August 28, and Hollywood follows Thursday, September 3.
Clive Barker’s Cenobites were built for exactly this. The Lament Configuration, the hooks, the impossible geometry of a hell you request by accident. A walkthrough maze is the closest most of us will get to solving the box ourselves, which is the entire appeal and also a slightly alarming thing to volunteer for.
They finally built the box. Now they want you to open it while a family of four films it on their phones behind you.
Paul Dano Walks Into the Possession Remake
Paul Dano is joining Parker Finn’s Possession remake at Paramount, starring opposite Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley. Finn, the writer and director behind Smile, is directing from his own script, with a producing team that includes Robert Pattinson. Character details are still locked up.
The film they are remaking is not a small thing to remake. Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 Possession starred Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as a marriage detonating in West Berlin, and it won Adjani Best Actress at Cannes for a performance most people know from a single subway tunnel that they were not ready for. It is revered. It is also considered close to untouchable, which is what makes this interesting rather than routine. Finn has the horror résumé to try. Casting Dano, who does unraveling better than almost anyone working, is the first sign someone knows what movie they are actually stepping into.
Some films are a challenge. This one is a dare.
Somebody Wants to Own Art the Clown
The Terrifier franchise is tangled in a lawsuit over who actually owns Art the Clown. Ruthless Studios filed suit in California federal court against Dark Age Cinema and Art the Clown LLC, alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and unfair competition. The whole thing traces back to a set of 2013 agreements in which, according to the complaint, Damien Leone signed over the original Terrifier and The 9th Circle shorts along with related copyrights, trademarks, sequel rights, and derivative works.
For five thousand dollars.
Ruthless says it financed and produced the 2013 anthology All Hallows’ Eve, helped turn Art into a recognizable icon, then later let Leone make one low budget Terrifier as a one time exception before he built the rest of the empire without them. Now the company is seeking damages, an accounting of profits, and a court declaration that it owns the copyrights to Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3, the merchandise, the games, and the events. It carves out 2016’s Terrifier from the claim. This matters because Terrifier 3 was not a cult curio. It was a legitimate box office event, which means the paperwork underneath it is now worth fighting over in a way it never was when Art was just a guy with a garbage bag and a hacksaw.
Five thousand dollars in 2013. Art the Clown has killed people for less.
Robert Eggers Made a Werewolf Movie, and It Looks Like a Robert Eggers Movie
Focus Features released the first trailer for Werwulf, and it is unmistakably his. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the man at the center of it, reuniting Eggers with Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe. The story is set in England in the 13th century, where folklore about a creature in the fog stops being folklore. It arrives in theaters December 25.
Then there are the Eggers details, the ones that make you either lean in or check the runtime. The dialogue is written in Middle English, reportedly with help from two Oxford professors. The whole thing is shot in grainy 4:3. This is the man who made you read a goat’s dialogue in The VVitch and made a lighthouse feel like a fever, now pointing all of that at lycanthropy. Coming off Nosferatu, he has more than earned the swing.
A werewolf movie in Middle English on Christmas Day. Nobody else gets to do this, and he knows it.
Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man Gets a Green Band Trailer
Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man rolled out a green band trailer and a genuinely nasty new poster this week. Ari Millen stars as the title character, whose frozen treats turn the neighborhood kids into little killers with a very specific target: adults. Charlie Zeltzer plays the boy who figures out what is going on. Roth co-wrote the script with Noah Belson. The film hits US theaters August 7 through The Horror Section, with STUDIOCANAL handling the UK and Ireland.
The pedigree here is where it gets fun. The music comes from Snoop Dogg, and the whole thing is executive produced by Nas. So it is a summer massacre about murderous children scored by two of the most laid back men in music, which tracks with Roth’s entire sensibility. That the studio put out a green band cut at all is its own small joke, given the film is about children slaughtering grown ups by the truckload.
Green band. The safe one. Sure.
The Week in One Line
Pull these five apart and the same thread runs through all of them: ownership. Pinhead gets exhumed for a theme park, Possession gets handed to a new director bold enough to touch it, Art the Clown ends up in a custody battle, Eggers reclaims the werewolf as his own private language, and Roth hands the knife to a bunch of children. The monsters were never the scary part. The scary part is that every one of them belongs to whoever is holding the paperwork. This week, a lot of hands reached for it.
