Your Daily Horror Digest for June 18, 2025
“I trust you with my life.” – Portia in Hell Motel
updated on
Welcome to another daily horror digest from Creepy Catalog with movie and TV recommendations, news, trivia, and more. My name is Chris, and I love horror.
What I Watched Last Night
Last night I started my nightly viewing ritual not with a movie, but with a TV show. The first two episodes of Hell Motel landed on Shudder yesterday, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I’ll be honest. When the setup for the series started to develop, I rolled my eyes a bit. After a fun (and very bloody) opening kill, viewers are introduced to a carload of true crime enthusiasts who are heading to a motel where a massacre occurred thirty years ago. They’re there at the request of the owners who are providing a first-class murder-themed experience in exchange for using all the footage from the weekend for promotion on social media. To me, true crime themes and influencers as main characters are overused in the modern era of horror, but we’ll see how they’re used here.
To be fair, not all of the guests are influencers. They all come from different backgrounds, and they each have different reasons for wanting to stay at the site of an infamous murder spree. That part I like because it gives each character an air of mystery. The show is, after all, a whodunit slasher, so the more the show slowly teases out the guests’ motivations, the more potential intrigue there is.
I also really enjoyed a significant twist in the first episode. There is a murder in episode one (in addition to the opening scene), but there is also a reveal that sets up a unique situation for a murder mystery. That’s all I say, but yeah, episode one hooked me. Episode two starts settling into what I feel like the rest of the series will feel like, and it was pretty good. I had a few minor quibbles with a few moments that felt odd from a writing and filmmaking perspective, but nothing major. The show is gory and the characters are interesting, so I’ll keep watching.
If you want to check it out, the first two episodes of Hell Motel are streaming on Shudder and AMC+. The remaining six episodes will stream weekly on Tuesdays.
Events On This Day
Love it or hate it (there seems to be little in-between), High Tension released in French theaters on June 18th, 2003. It took a little while to get to the United States, but when it did in 2005, I saw it in theaters. I’ve always enjoyed the movie, but I remember hearing grumbles from other viewers while walking out of the theater twenty years ago. Personally, I think the first two thirds of the movie are excellent, and even if the twist doesn’t land, it’s still a good movie. I don’t mind the twist though.
Also on June 18th, making its premiere at the 2008 Sydney Film Festival was the popular pseudo-documentary Lake Mungo. I had this one built up too much for me before I saw it, but it’s quite good.
Notable horror birthdays today include Carol Kane, who was born on June 18th in 1952 and starred in the influential When a Stranger Calls (1979).
Also, E.G. Marshall was born on this day in 1914. Marshall had a long career, spanning from 1945 until the year of his death in 1998. His most famous film is probably 12 Angry Men (1957), but I remember him best as the star of my least favorite segment from my favorite horror anthology film, Creepshow (1982). He was the guy in the “They’re Creeping Up On You” story, the one with ALL the roaches. Not for me.
In the News
Deadline reported yesterday that a reimagining of the 1976 film Who Can Kill a Child? is being developed at Paramount Pictures. The movie, titled Suffer Little Children, will be written and directed by Rodrigue Huart, with Walter Hamada producing.
Variety reports that Tom Rhys Harries (White Lines, Suspicion) has been cast in the lead role in the DC Studios film Clayface. From my perspective, DC Studios keeps shaping up nicely, and I’m excited to see what is being described as a body-horror movie within a superhero universe. Plus, I enjoyed Creature Commandos immensely. Clayface was in that series too. Clayface is currently scheduled for release in September of 2026.
If you missed it yesterday, an official viral site for 28 Years Later went online. The site is rageleaks.net (mementomori is the password), and it contains clues about various elements that we’ll surely see in the movie. I won’t spoil the fun of looking through it all yourself, but I’m particularly interested in a “variant” mentioned in a couple of the items on the site. Definitely take a look if you’re at all interested in 28 Years Later.
And finally, with the release of a new trailer for the I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel, we also learned a little more information about the film. In an article posted by Variety, director and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson teased that if you want to know what happened to Brandy Norwood’s character Karla after I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, then you’ll have to go see the new movie. She also suggested seeing during opening weekend, presumably to avoid spoilers that will naturally start popping up immediately.
Well, now I have to be sure to watch the first two Last Summer movies. I’ll probably skip the third one though. And the series.
