The Rotting Zombie's Round-up of Horror News for April 2026

You know you've been spending too much time on your own when you have to double check to make sure what year it currently is! The monthly news round-up for April is a week late, mainly due to feeling a bit fed up last week and not in the mood to blog; something I can do if my schedule isn't too stuffed. My bloody news sack on the other hand is indeed too stuffed; over 200 emails about potential news bursting to get out. I will siphon some of that here. Onwards to the news.

Take From Me comes from first-time filmmaker, West Eldredge. It looks at themes of longing and addiction using vampiric motifs, I imagine in a similar way that cult horror The Addiction did back in the nineties. This horror has been picked up by BayView Entertainment, and has won awards on the festival circuit, including 'Best Feature Film' at the Red Rose Film Festival, 'Best Actor' at the Romford Horror Festival, and the 'Audience Award' at the Alexandria Film Festival. Take From Me is available to rent or buy on streaming services worldwide, and also out on region-free Blu-ray.

Also from Bayview Entertainment is Jason Pitts' The Forest Through The Trees. This cult-based indie horror has a trio out in woodland searching for a missing woman, who then stumble across a demon worshipping cult. This too is out now on streaming platforms worldwide.

Shane Aquino's horror - Blackout has been acquired by Uncork'd Entertainment, with the film having its digital and streaming premiere on May 5th. The film takes place in a world where the sun has inexplicably vanished, along with a global power outage. In this dark new world, the survivors are hunted by 'The Ushers' - entities who haunt the living. This does sound interesting to my rotted ears.

Sasquatch Within is a psychological horror film coming from Gregory Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance). From the title alone, this sounded like a werewolf film but with a bigfoot instead. A slightly deeper look suggests it might be a film about a secret villain locked in a room with innocents. If that sounds like something you would want to watch, then you're in luck. The full film is currently streaming for free on Cinema Epoch's YouTube channel, with additional releases planned for Tubi and Fawesome.

Staying on the bigfoot theme, Freestyle Digital Media have acquired Squatch, an adventure horror that comes to VOD platforms on March 10th in North America. After a man inherits his father's estate that includes a remote woodland cabin, he travels there to spend the weekend with a potential love interest. Instead they come face-to-face with the titular creature, and so begins a desperate fight for survival. This is directed by Tom Chaney, and written by him and Bill Conger.

The official trailer for found-footage feature length horror, Last Look has been released. The film's intriguing premise has a high-profile social media influencer who discovers a unique deck of battle-style collectible cards. When he begins the game, he realises too late that each card summons a new monster into reality, and that, while streaming the whole thing, he must win the game to end the nightmare. Likened to a horror based Jumanji, this was directed by A.J Bennett.

The Plague was released on streaming platforms, including Amazon, Apple TV, Sky Store, YouTube Movies, EE TV and Rakuten from April 20th. Written and directed by Charlie Polinger in his feature length debut, and starring Joel Edgerton (The Gift), this had its debut at the Cannes Film Festival where it received an apparent 11 minute standing ovation and won 'Best Sound Creation Award'. This has been described as 'a tense, darkly humourous coming-of-age story about masculinity, peer pressure, and the horrors that fester when cruelty masquerades as a game'.

Finally for today, crowd-funded indie horror adventure Echoes of Dread arrives on Blu-ray and DVD this month thanks to Eagle Films, with a streaming release later this summer. This comes from filmmaker Philip Cook, described as a '...contemporary supernatural thriller rooted in digital-age terror'. The story follows a digital creator who discovers a cursed film that had been hidden for over a century. Sharing it online, she unknowingly spreads the curse to all who watch the film.

Trepang2 (2023) - Horror Video Game Review (Xbox Series X)

Originally released in 2023, but only very recently added to Xbox Game Pass, Trepang2; (despite the title this is a first instalment, the original one had you playing as a sea cucumber!?) published by Team17, is a Hell of a weird game to play. This first person military shooter/horror mash-up is pure schizophrenia, the quality going up and down like a yo-yo during the roughly 10 hour campaign. When it's bad it's really bad, but when it's at its peak - it can reach levels of near perfection.

You play as Subject 106 - a super soldier who at the start of the game is being held captive and brainwashed by the shady all-powerful global entity, Horizon. Broken out of your confinement by an equally shady mercenary group called Task Force 27, you are given an offer to join up with them once you have escaped the prison facility and transported to their secretive HQ. Task Force 27 really have it in for Horizon, and so your goals align, with each mission taking you to a different Horizon facility dotted around the world for you to attack and expose its secrets. At each place you uncover sinister experiments that the entity had secretly been performing on volunteers, with this information then published by the mercenary group in an effort to weaken the companies global reach, enough that a full frontal assault on their main HQ can then be initiated.

Trepang2 had the feel of a middle of the road Xbox 360 shooter, albeit, with a nice coat of paint and better quality of life improvements to the gameplay. As the super soldier protagonist, you infiltrate bases over six main missions and an equal amount of side missions (roughly, can't recall the exact amount), with the quality varying wildly throughout. At first this felt like it was going to be an immersive sim in the style of something like F.E.A.R. As you battle through levels, scenery gets blasted apart (reminding me of Black), and you get treated to the increasingly desperate radio chatter of the enemies commanders as you single handily mow down legions of faceless enemy soldiers. There are computers to hack, vents to traverse, key VIP boss-style specialists to defeat, and also...monsters (more on that later). You can hold two weapons at a time, later getting the ability to duel-wield, pick up and throw enemies, as well as use two different recharging super abilities. One of these puts you into a Max Payne style slow-mo/bullet time state, the other makes you briefly invisible. Oddly, you are unable to aim down the sights of your guns (of which I believe there were about 8 different types), instead, the traditional aim down sights button instead throws your grenades. Combat never gets more complicated than that, no upgrades to your abilities, though you are frequently fighting small armies of spawning enemies. Missions, especially the side missions, can become very video game-like in feel, multiple ones being nothing much more than combat arenas where you have to survive against waves of increasingly tougher enemies.

So, at first glance this did feel like it might be an immersive sim in the design of the levels. The places you go to are certainly full of environmental details, but it isn't long before it comes clear (in some of the levels at least) that the actual level layout can leave a lot to be desired. Main missions are typically set in labyrinthian locations, while at the same time also being extremely linear, legions of locked doors funnelling you ever onwards down the only unlocked ones. These missions can be extremely hit and miss, pure joy one moment, screaming frustration the next. Take the second mission that is set in a Horizon medical facility. The first half has you slowly ascending through the facility into the basement lab, where you discover patients had been experimented on and turned into essentially zombie type husks. Sounds cool, but then the second half has you fighting these zombies who really annoyingly explode upon death, leading to lots of swearing on my part as I constantly got swarmed by the blighters. Some of the main missions really do suck, one that sees you assault the mansion based HQ of a group of cultists was once such example that was a real slog to get through. Others though were startingly amazing. One mission sees you exploring a Soviet underground base whose inhabitants had mysteriously all vanished without a trace. From start to finish that level was pure joy to play through; a 10/10 mission stuck in an often middling game. Perfectly designed, atmospheric, and at times transported you ingeniously to Creepypasta 'Backrooms', linear spaces complete with soggy carpet and yellow walls - was so unexpected to discover!
Trepang2 is a crazed mix of military shooter and horror, with roughly 75% of the game the first part, and the remaining 25% when things occasionally gets weird. That other part makes for a real ride, where you are never really sure what to expect next. A moth-man, bio-organic blobs that communicate via computer banks, evil spirits, clones, zombies, and one side mission that sees you on an oil rig battling a giant U.F.O! This felt especially jarring with so much of the rest of the game feeling much more grounded. I was fully on board for the horror of course, a welcome atmospheric break from the pure action of the rest of the game.

Trepang2 was a weird game with a frequently wild and darkly humorous (though somewhat generic) story. At its highs, this has some of the best video game moments I have experienced in years, but it is so hit and miss in quality that the less well designed moments really bring the overall game down to something that at times is very average.
There is DLC in the form of battle arenas and two extra side missions, but I never played those.

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The Whistler (2026) - Horror Film Review

Originally, this review for the Diego Velasco directed folk horror; The Whistler (no, not that The Whistler) was intended to go up roughly a week back. Some personal issues led to me being in a bit of a funk, but after an unexpectedly good Friday, I'm back in business, and finally got around to finishing this horror, the first horror I have seen that was filmed in Colombia to my recollection.

After the death of his father, USA based Sebastian (Juan Pablo Raba - Coyote) and his wife, Nicole (Diane Guerrero - Encanto, Orange Is the New Black), head to his family's farmstead back in his home country of Venezuela (while filmed in Colombia, that isn't the setting for the story). They are there both to attend the funeral of the deceased, but also have come to try and convince Sebastian's mother - Isabel (Laura Garcia Marulanda) to sell the family farm and move to America to be with them. Since he has been gone, life on the farm has became increasingly hard for the people who live and work there. First, a group of squatters who practice a strange religion (the real life cult that worships the Goddess Maria Lionza) have created a commune in their woodland, and then soon after there came rumours of an evil spirit known as 'The Whistler' roaming the farm's vast sugarcane fields, bringing death with it.
Mourning the somewhat recent death of their daughter, Nicole becomes increasingly interested in the squatters when she witnesses a ceremony that briefly allows a dead spirit to inhabit the body of a willing host. She hopes that they might perform this ritual so she can once again speak to her dead child. Even though she is warned this might catch the attention of 'The Whistler', Nicole becomes laser focussed on getting the ritual to happen, unaware of the danger this would cause.

Over a week ago I first tried to watch this, only managing twenty minutes before I switched it off. I just wasn't feeling it, it felt like (location aside) another of those generic supernatural horrors like The Bye Bye Man. Picking it back up, I was pleasantly surprised to find this was actually a solidly made folk horror. For those wanting high thrills and ghostly horror this might not be the best choice, with the scenes involving the antagonistic force being some of the weaker parts of the movie. It did however have some great lore, both in the origins of the whistling spirit, but also with how it came to be haunting the land around the farmstead. It never really felt like a cohesive threat, despite it existing by possessing the body of a human, this force was seemingly able to travel vast distances in the blink of an eye, likely for pacing reasons than it literally able to move that quickly. This being features in a whole bunch of death scenes, some more entertaining than others, but usually featuring a victim to be wandering around looking scared, before a barely glimpsed figure leaps out the darkness at them.
I did think that everything around these scenes worked much better. I loved the locations this was filmed at, and the squatter's commune in particular stood out, as did the labyrinthian sugarcane fields bringing a bit of a Children of the Corn feel. The ritual scenes were also a joy to watch, well shot, and very folky.

There was an almost Shakespearean quality to the story, with the film beginning with the squatters and farm-hands already in some type of Cold War type situation, that Sebastian and Nicole just happen to have stumbled into. Sebastian, seeing the actions of The Whistler as being perpetrated by the squatters, is determined to get rid of them by any means. Nicole on the other hand falls more into believing it to be an actual supernatural entity, and that the squatters have wisdom to their beliefs. The epilogue in the last five minutes or so of the movie were not particularly inspiring, leading to a finish that was the film at its most generic. 
As a protagonist, Nicole was ok, a bit of a one note character, only seeming to care about her dead child, and not having much more to her personality. She could have been irritating, but, sure her decisions lead to the horror getting worse, but it was already an ongoing problem, and her selfish desires didn't cause most the events of the movie. I thought Isabel was a perfectly fine side character, more likeable than you may expect, and I thought Indhira Serrano as Petra (someone on the farm side of the conflict who also practices rituals) was useful in providing a lot of the explanation for what had been going on for the viewers benefit.

The Whistler was well made, and I enjoyed the rural setting and the more folk-horror feel it brought with it. The antagonist may not have been amazing, but everything around this character was interesting, I liked the back and forth between Sebastian and Nicole's very different plots going on. Occasionally derivative, slightly slow-burn, but always enjoyable to watch, this was better than it initially seemed it would be. The Whistler had its world premiere at Fantaspoa in Brazil on April 11th, and opened in select theatres on April 17th via Vertical.

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The Infestation at Ralls Hall (2013) by Thomas Tessier - Short Horror Story Review

Another really old review of something I should have simply read a long long time ago! Back in 2014, I received a press release about an anthology horror film titled Thomas Tessier's World of Hurt. This was to feature five stories from the author's short stories he had written. Two of those stories included were to be I Remember Me, and The Infestation at Ralls Hall, which I was sent eBook copies of to check out. To be fair, the email I was sent did say to read '...whenever you can...'. So I sat down yesterday (at time of typing but at the time of publishing a long time back) and spent a quarter of an hour reading the latter of the two.

Returning to England, Van Helsing has been asked to stop of at Ralls, where a girl's school is located. One of the students; Miss Emily, has had something strange happen to her. Some days previously, she alleges to have been attacked in her bedroom one night. In the time since she has grown heavily pregnant as if she had been with child for six months or so. Van Helsing suspects something unnatural has occurred.

Originally featured in the 2013 short story collection; Remorseless: Tales of Cruelty, this 24 page story was a period piece, being set in and around the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula (I would imagine). The story covers a lot of ground in a short time, throwing the protagonist into the story as if he were someone we were already familiar with. From the initial investigation, to the later more action packed scenes, this tells the story competently and without seeming like anything has been lost for pacing issues. Throughout, formal language is used, both with how characters speak and with the descriptions used.

A neat little story that deals with an unexpected antagonist threat, blended in with elements of demonic possession and some quite graphic moments. The writing style had me fooled that The Infestation at Ralls Hall was an older story than it actually was.

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