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Miracle Media has shared a poster and trailer for The Witch Game, an Argentinian folklore horror from director Fabián Forte (La Corporaciòn) which is coming to the UK this October. Check out the trailer...

Mara (Lourdes Mansilla), a moody teenager obsessed with video games and the occult, would rather play than hang out with her family. So, when she unwraps a mysterious virtual reality game on her birthday, promising to teach her real witchcraft, she dives in without hesitation. But this is no ordinary game and what starts as a thrilling adventure quickly turns into a nightmare… Caught in a sinister web of magic, can Mara cast the spell that will set her sister free from The Witch Game?

The thing with Midsommar is that the ending is no mystery. For eagle-eyed viewers, the fate of Florence Pugh’s character, Dani, is revealed from the very beginning. Hiding in plain sight, the ending of Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror is on the screen repeatedly as Easter eggs throughout make it clear how the tale will end...

XYZ Films has shared a poster and trailer for Falling Stars, the upcoming folk horror from directors Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala.

The film follows three brothers as they set off into the desert to take a look at the body of a witch, but after accidentally desecrating the corpse, a terrible curse befalls their family.

The cast includes Rene Leech, Shaun Duke Jr., Andrew Gabriel, Diane Worman, and Greg Poppa. Watch the trailer...

Enys Men is one of those movies that shows a stark contrast between critic and audience scores. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics gave the 2023 film an 86% fresh score, while audiences had a whopping 22% rotten score. This contrast makes sense, as anyone who went into Enys Men assuming it would be a modern, entertaining horror film was about to have their expectations thrown out the window. Enys Men, which is the Cornish translation for "Stone Island," is not fast-paced, nor explicitly horror, and not even a full comprehensive narrative. It’s more so an experience — a portal into a Cornish Island in 1973, witnessing the repeated mundane tasks of a scientist making daily nature observations on an island that becomes stranger each day. Director Mark Jenkin did this intentionally and wanted audiences to view the film and make their own interpretations of the themes, such as manipulating the concept of time and using repetition and nature as pieces to his intricate, unsolvable puzzle.

What makes Enys Men memorable and respected by critics is how well it transports audiences back to the 1970s. Jenkin not only directed the film, but also wrote, edited, and did the cinematography and music. His complete creative control resulted in a strong, unsettling mood and sense of isolation throughout its entirety. The cast is limited, with Mary Woodvine as the lead, only identified in the credits as “The Volunteer.” The only other notable characters are John Woodvine (“The Preacher”), Edward Rowe (“The Boatman”), and Flo Crowe ("The Girl"). The cast is small, the cottage is tiny; hell, even the island itself is minuscule, helping reinforce the theme of isolation, which also limits what the audience has to pay attention to. The characters, everyday items used, clothing, setting, nature, edits, zooms, atmosphere, and sound all contribute to its vintage feel. Enys Men is not as much entertainment as it is a portal to another place at another time that is interchangeably familiar and foreign...

Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and Yoon Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) are a shaman duo that offers their services to those that are plagued by the vengeful spirits of deceased family members… like the one plaguing the wealthy Park family, and let me tell ya, this one’s a fuckin’ doozy of a creepy case.

So complex is the job, that our heroes call in the help of geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and his coroner partner Go Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin) to assist in the exhumation of the relative’s coffin via a traditional ceremony after which the coffin and remains will be cremated.

No matter how seasoned our shamans are, things go tits up with the quickness once a rain delay keeps that corpse from getting crispy (can’t burn ’em on a soggy day… bad luck) and of course some ass just has to go and open the coffin setting the evill spirit free to go on a supernatural bender that spells bad times for the Park’s.

But as horrible as events become, they don’t hold a candle to the hell that’s unleashed from a second, rather large coffin that is found at the exhumation site. Do shamans have health insurance, because these folks are going to need it!

... Bottom line: Exhuma is a fantastic slice of Korean folk horror mixed with the dynamics of the modern world and shouldn’t be missed by lovers of the arcane!

The climate is changing British gardens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The Royal Horticultural Society has modelled how global heating will affect its property until 2075 and discovered that summers will be hotter and drier in all its gardens – except in Manchester.

Greater Manchester’s renown as a rain trap – there is even a website tracking rainfall, called Rainchester – means that the RHS Bridgewater garden in Salford is being earmarked for species that thrive in a cooler, wetter climate.

Trees including oaks, birches and beeches that have been part of the British landscape for centuries are starting to suffer in southern England, so are being considered for RHS Bridgewater’s new arboretum, a botanical garden aiming to preserve a wide range of species...

The legend of The Brahan Seer, the 17th-century Scottish farmhand who is said to have had powers to predict the future, is set to be brought to life on screen as a Gaelic language horror. Gaelic language folk horror Seaforth will be filmed on Lewis and Harris.

Stories of the so-called “Hebridean Nostradamus”, who was born on the Isle of Lewis, have inspired the project, which will be shot on Lewis and Harris.

The folk horror’s writer and director John Murdo (JM) MacAulay, who is also from Lewis, will be drawing on stories about Coinneach Odhar, whose predictions were written about extensively in Alexander Mackenzie's 1877 book The Prophecies of The Brahan Seer...

... The synopsis states: "The film tells the story of the young Coinneach Odhar, as he was known then, who one day stumbles upon a seeing stone, which gives him the ability to see into the future. Now cursed with second sight, he is left to suffer the knowledge of everydetail of his life and death.

"Set in the Outer Hebrides, the story follows Lady Seaforth, the laird’s wife, who summons the Seer, driven by fears of her husband’s infidelity. This culminates in a fraught interrogation and her quest for the truth leads to broken promises, a struggle for power and a burning body in a whisky barrel."

The Amazon River has seen its levels in Colombia reduced by as much as 90 percent, a government agency said Thursday, as South America faces a severe and widespread drought.

The river—the world's biggest by volume and which also flows through parts of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname—has been hard hit by the drought that has seen wildfires spread across the continent.

"The water level has decreased between 80 and 90 percent in the last three months due to drought caused by climate change," Colombia's National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) said in a statement...

Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.

Autumn has offered little reprieve for cities that have already spent months mired in triple-digit temperatures. This week, Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; and Palm Springs, California, are all grappling with severe weather, with highs that have pushed over 100F (38C). More than 16 million people in the US were under heat alerts on Friday, according to the National Weather Service, mostly clustered in the southern tips of Nevada, Arizona and California.

“Late-season heat is dangerous because people are fatigued from fighting heat all summer,” the NWS forecast office in Las Vegas cautioned in an alert, which warned of extreme weather expected to last through the weekend and into next week. “This is especially true this year,” it added, “as 2024 continues to break all-time heat records.”

Fueled by the climate crisis, and often exacerbated by concrete cityscapes that cook when temperatures rise, heatwaves are getting longer, larger and more intense...

Newly restored in 4k and available for the first time in North America, Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner radically upends genre tropes and preempts the resurgence of folk horror with her second and most formally audacious feature, HOTEL. The deceptively simple premise of a young woman who takes on a job as a night porter at a remote Austrian hotel and encounters unexplained phenomena amounts to a grand treatise on the inhibiting potential of imagination, the fine line between banality and terror and the looming specter of fate.

Allusions to local myth, mysterious disappearances and haunted forests eschew generic conclusions and serve to illustrate and complicate the inner life of a young woman reckoning with the essential ambiguities of defining one’s life. “An intelligent fable about fear and desire,” (Time Out) Hausner’s sophomore feature is a haunting metaphysical horror film unlike any other...

Falling Stars: A Deconstruction of Folk Horror Witch Tales

Falling Stars is about folk horror and a deconstruction of the classic witch mythos. In an alternate reality where witches are very real, the night of the first harvest is when harmless traditional rituals are performed to placate witches in the sky. For the three brothers in the American Southwest, this year's event will be different. When they discover their friend has killed and buried a witch, they venture out into the desert to witness it for themselves. Whilst encountering the scene, they accidentally desecrate the body, setting in motion a sequence of perilous events. The only way they can put a stop to the curse set upon their family is to burn the corpse before sunrise. Accidentally desecrating a witch's body tends to happen in supernatural thrillers since nothing should ever go right in a horror movie. The only way to stop the curse on their family is a race against time, where the idiot brothers have to burn the body before sunrise. It's always a hassle when you have to rush to burn a body before sundown in the California desert. Care to bet whether they do it in time? That's the thrust of the movie...

"The wi-fi has been hacked at 19 UK railway stations to display a message about terror attacks.

Network Rail confirmed that the wi-fi systems at stations including London Euston, Manchester Piccadilly, Liverpool Lime Street, Birmingham New Street, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central were affected.

People reported logging on to the wi-fi at the stations on Wednesday and being met with a screen about terror attacks in Europe.

A Network Rail spokesperson confirmed the wi-fi was still down and said: "We are currently dealing with a cyber-security incident affecting the public wi-fi at Network Rail’s managed stations."

The affected stations include:

In London, London Cannon Street, London Bridge, Charing Cross, Clapham Junction, Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Victoria and Waterloo

In the South East, Reading and Guildford

In the North West, Manchester Piccadilly and Liverpool Lime Street

In the West Midlands, Birmingham New Street

In West Yorkshire, Leeds

In the West and South West, Bristol Temple Meads

In Scotland, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central

British Transport Police was investigating, Network Rail said.

The rail provider said it believed other organisations, not just railway stations, had also been affected..."