For those of us who wish Halloween’s eerie, wicked atmosphere lasted year-round, summer feels like one long tease towards a single month of horror delights. The sun assaults us daily, no one is planning their costumes, and megaplexes prioritize family-friendly programming to cash in on the school break. If you’re lucky, you’ll stumble onto a Friday the 13th marathon while channel surfing (censored for cable television, of course). Where is an adrenaline junkie left to go for their midsummer scream?
Well, Film at Lincoln Center may just have the solution in their annual Scary Movies series, returning this year for its fourteenth edition. From August 12-20, the event showcased twelve new horror releases and four restorations, adding up to nine days of nonstop blood, sweat, and fears. Wrapped in the chilly air conditioning of the Walter Reade Theater, I sat through a few of these selections that were often thrilling but sometimes felt… dead on arrival.
Buddy
Following its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year, Buddy (2026) finally made its way to the East Coast as the opening night film for this series. With his debut feature film, Casper Kelly brings all of his signature Adult Swim elements to the big screen, as well as his devoted fanbase to prop up his comedic chops. As someone who was not privy to Kelly’s previous work, it was amazing to see a festival screening packed to the brim with enthusiastic patrons fighting to find an open seat seconds before the lights went down. His Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks definitely propelled him towards making Buddy, with that short’s influence smattered across most of this film.
Buddy is obviously a parody of the hit children’s show Barney & Friends, but it is also equal parts Hip Hop Harry and Teletubbies in its production design, original songs, and earnest life lessons geared towards kids. So, what happens when such beloved titular characters make a homicidal turn? The result is an absurd and hilarious murder spree with child actors holding down most of the film’s comedy. Although Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace are the biggest stars here, newcomers Delaney Quinn and Caleb Williams steal the show as they try to escape Buddy’s wrath. Keegan-Michael Key has never been more committed to the bit than he is as the voice of Buddy, and so it’s refreshing to watch something where the whole cast is operating on the same wavelength until the bitter end.
Does the logic of how reality and Buddy’s world collide raise some questions? Absolutely. However, Kelly’s mischief is the real draw here and not some high-brow commentary on the state of children’s programming.
The Peril at Pincer Point
Every so often, you catch a filmmaker (or filmmaking duo) at the start of their career that convinces you they have been working for years. Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine are this exact type of partnership, and The Peril at Pincer Point (2026) is a different kind of homage to the medium they unabashedly adore. The film originally premiered at SXSW this past March, which makes sense for the hyper-specific aesthetic and strange dialogue found here.
At first, the film seems like a total bro-fest with the premise that our lead character, sound engineer Teddie Drunch, must embark on a quest to record sounds for his unhinged arthouse director. Kuhn and Stratton-Twine amusingly point the finger at A24 loyalists with how his male characters discuss cinema, but the excellent parts of The Peril at Pincer Point lie in Teddie’s solo moments at Pincer Point, meandering the nautical environment with surprises around every turn.
For those in the cult following for films like Hundreds of Beavers (2022), you’ll be delighted by the ways Kuhn and Stratton-Twine employ silent film styles over slapstick situations, all while crafting genuinely beautiful shots of the sea and its mystical creatures luring Teddie to its depths. The film is not just a love letter to the history and labor of cinema—it is a product of two artists entrenched in an art form reliant on craft and passion to exist. Sometimes, peeking behind the curtain to see how the sausage is made can be an unexpected adventure all on its own.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Forty years since its release, John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) persists as a prescient dissection of how serial killers operate as they camouflage themselves amongst us. In this rich 4K restoration, McNaughton’s cinematography bleeds brighter than ever, allowing the gritty urban scenery and Henry’s dilapidated home base to look and feel like a murderer’s hunting grounds. Aside from the restoration’s stunning quality, the themes and violence strewn across the film still shock in their unflinching truths about one man’s propensity for darkness, with Michael Rooker giving a restrained performance as Henry Lee Lucas.
Henry has long been a cult classic in the horror canon, but it has never really had its time in the spotlight because it does not fit neatly into the slasher subgenre: there is no mask, there are no signature kills, and there is no congruous chain of victims in his wake. Yet, Henry still taps into the sick fascination that twenty-first century crime junkies have to crack a case and explain the “why” behind why someone kills. It dares you to watch Henry slowly assault and kill his victims, witnessing whatever ounce of humanity left drain from his face by the time a body takes its last breath. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is haunting in every sense of the word.
Bodyhackers
Much like the plastic surgery the characters in Carlos Conceição’s Bodyhackers (2026) undergo, it pains me to report that his first stab at horror is half a decade too late. Before the screening, Conceição introduced the film and explained that they actually wrapped production and post-production years ago, but the movie never hit the festival circuit until this year. With such a massive body horror revival in popular cinema these past few years, it’s a shame that Bodyhackers could not arrive sooner. Although, I do not think it would have made the same splash as The Substance (2024) or Together (2025) because the film juggles too many half-baked narratives to create one engaging story.
The main plot revolves around an activist trying to expose a medical corporation conducting plastic surgery experiments on willing participants; the catch with this company is that they require their patients to stay under observation until they feel they have gathered enough research to improve their surgical capabilities. The few surgery scenes we do witness look gnarly enough to parallel that of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), but beyond the operating table, you feel sedated watching the rest of the feature. Perhaps Bodyhackers is just a victim of circumstance, or maybe the consistent walk-outs from the festival crowd speak to something fundamentally broken in the film’s construction. Hopefully, Conceição can sew a scarier movie for us in the near future.
