Dead Media
With Dead Media, writer/director Joseph Scrimshaw crafts both a love letter to and a cautionary fable about nostalgia, outdated media, and video store-era fright fare. Maggie (Sammi-Jack Martincak) and her stuck in the past, nineties-obsessed Uncle Heppy (Sam Landman) talk Maggie’s friends Daniel (Antonio Teodoro) and Brenda (Jessica Fenton) into watching a DVD copy of a 1999 horror movie reputed to be cursed if viewers find the correct Easter egg on the DVD. Guess which foursome does just that? Each door in Maggie’s house now becomes a time portal to the sound stage where the film was shot, and the creatures from the film manifest into reality.
Dead Media obviously has a big heart behind it and it has good technical aspects, fine performances, and cool monster makeup, but it can feel a bit corny at times. It fared well as a potential film festival crowd pleaser, though, and should also find a good run with its current wider release.
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The Weird Kidz
Winner of the Bronze Audience Award at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, animated horror comedy The Weird Kidz is writer/director Zach Passero’s passion project. He worked on the animation for eight years, and the result is a winning effort that boasts strong character arcs missing from many live-action horror films. Starting out with some crude and non-PC humor, the story transitions into scare-fare territory as high school rebel Wyatt (Ellar Coltrane) and his girlfriend Mary (Sydney O’Donnell) take Wyatt’s younger brother Dug (Tess Passero) and Dug’s friends Fatt (Brian Ceely) and Mel (Glenn Bolton) on an overnight camping trip to Jerusalem National Park. Plans were merely shooting beer, eating s’mores, and lighting fireworks for the group, with a little private time for Wyatt and Mary, but things go awry as the five find out that the urban legend of The Night Child — a murderous monster that lives in the park — is more fact than fiction.
The Weird Kidz serves up some fun creature feature action, but it also offers some other horror genre surprises that I won’t spoil here. The animation is on the simpler side but solid enough to stand alongside cable-TV quality fare. Passero does a terrific job of making his characters likable and giving them depth, and the film delivers a nice amount of poignancy and nostalgia along with its spookier elements.
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Antenna presents Dead Media and The Weird Kidz nationwide on VOD from October 27, 2026.
