Welcome back to Creepy Catalog’s daily digest of horror musings, news, and notes. My name is Chris, and I love horror.
What I Watched (aka Streaming Recommendations)
Last night I watched a couple of new horror movies released on streaming this month. I liked one more than I expected, and I didn’t like the other one as much as I hoped. Let’s start with the good news.
Morgan: Killer Doll is from The Asylum, and if you know The Asylum, you’ll know they’re fond of their mockbusters (I reviewed another of theirs from earlier this year, The Jolly Monkey). M3GAN 2.0 comes out next Friday, so yeah, now is the right time for a micro-budget movie about a killer doll named Morgan. I didn’t expect much, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The setup for Morgan: Killer Doll involves a troubled young woman, Darcy, who gives her childhood best friend Astrid a life-sized doll before self-immolating. After Darcy’s death, the doll begins killing people around Astrid. The story is mostly well done, and the slashing is decent for something with this low of a budget. The end drags a bit, but I liked it.
The other movie I watched was Marshmallow. The descriptions found online for the movie are all very vague, so I expected some sort of a twist in this one. Twists do occur, but they aren’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. The beginning is also too hammy and melodramatic for what I was expecting.
Marshmallow is about a boy, Morgan, who goes to summer camp. While there, he believes a boogeyman from a spooky campfire story is real and… well, I can’t say anymore. This is one of those movies where everything feels off for the longest time, then when it’s all explained it doesn’t make what came before it any better. It’s okay though.
Both Marshmallow and Morgan: Killer Doll are streaming as digital rentals on platforms including Amazon Prime Video. Morgan is a bargain at only $2.99 for a rental, so I recommend that first. But only if you enjoy super-low-budget slashers. On the other hand, I saw lots of good reviews on Letterboxd for Marshmallow, so I do recommend at least checking out the trailer since I’m probably on the lower end of the people who enjoyed it.
Events On This Day
On this day in 1988, the movie Waxwork received a limited theatrical release in the United States. Waxwork is about friends who go to a wax museum late at night for a private viewing. The place is filled with horror displays, and whenever they walk into a display they’re transported to a dimension where the wax scene plays out for real. I saw it for the first time as a child, and some of the gore always stuck with me. For example, it’s the movie where I learned what steak tartare is, but the source of the “steak” in the movie isn’t what you might expect. Or maybe it is if you watch a lot of horror movies.
Birthdays for June 17th include Jason Patric (born 1966) whose career in horror so far spans from The Lost Boys (1987) to Terrifier 3 (2024). Sharing the same birth date, but born in 2000, is Odessa A’zion who is most recognizable to horror fans for her lead role in Hellraiser (2022) and as Nina in Until Dawn (2025).
Also born today, all the way back in 1927, was the godfather of gore, Lucio Fulci. Fulci sadly passed away in 1996, but his legacy lives on. If I had to pick my favorite movie of his, it has to be Zombie (1979). The Beyond (1981) is a close second place.
In the News
Some exciting news for Mike Flanagan fans happened yesterday. He posted an image on Instagram of a slate from the set of his Carrie series, announcing that filming has officially begun! Flanagan will produce, showrun, and write the Carrie series for Prime Video, and he’s directing a few episodes.
Summer H. Howell, whose first credit in a film was as Alice in Curse of Chucky (2013), is playing Carrie White. Samantha Sloyan is playing Carrie’s mother Margaret. Sloyan has worked with Flanagan before, dating back to a role in Hush (2016) and appearing in every Netflix series Flanagan created except for The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Ending today’s brief on a fun note, in an interview posted by Jake’s Takes on YouTube, Alex Garland reaffirmed his stance that the 28 Days/Years Later movies are, in fact, zombie films. I wrote a whole article about this a couple of years ago, laying out exactly why the infected are zombies. It’s always fun to watch people debate when the topic comes up though.
In the interview, Alex Garland was responding to a question about the word “zombie” being used in 28 Years Later. Garland seemed surprised because he couldn’t recall if he wrote it into the script or if it was improvised. But he also said that he’s never been afraid of the z-word since he considers his movies to be a twist on the zombie genre. Which, of course, is quite clear, but it’s nice to hear him say it.
With that, I’m off to watch 28 Days Later in preparation for this Friday’s release of 28 Years Later!
