Horror movies belong on physical media. They belong in theaters, too, obviously, but if any one category of cinema deserves a forever home in a Blu-ray case, it’s horror. Watching your first slasher on VHS, for instance, is a longstanding tradition and rite of passage among dyed in the wool Millennial and Gen X horror fans; we fell in love with the genre through grainy presentations taped off of live broadcasts, in the wee hours of the morn when our parents assumed we were sleeping.
Kids today have it easier. They don’t need tapes or discs; they just need a stable internet connection and a streaming service like Shudder or Tubi, YouTube if they’re desperate, and presto, a world of genre films is ready and waiting for them at their fingertips. Like pirated illicitly recorded Friday the 13th movies, this is a fine (and far more legal) way to consume horror–but even in streaming times, physical media releases remain king in the genre’s realm. As horror’s contemporary golden age continues unabated, physical media likewise is enjoying a new renaissance, consequent to the efforts of such boutique labels as Vinegar Syndrome, Blue Underground, Arrow Video, Ignite Films, Severin, 88 Films, and the list goes on.
As it’s currently spooky season, and you’re probably planning the playlist for your upcoming Halloween party, we’ve picked out a handful of 2025’s best new horror Blu-rays for consideration in your rotation.
Raw Meat (aka Death Line)
If it’s news to you that Edgar Wright holds Gary Sherman’s feature debut in high regard, we recommend specifically watching Don’t, Wright’s short contribution to Grindhouse’s assembly of bogus movie trailers back in 2007; the details of the bit vary, but the texture is very much the same. Raw Meat makes for a more sumptuously gruesome experience, of course, a proto-cannibal horror story about contemporary British history’s literal buried sins emerging from rubble to take a bite out of modern civilization’s ass. When a Conservative minister prowling London’s porno theaters disappears in an Underground station, Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) and Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington) jump on the case, tangling up university students Patricia (Sharon Gurney) and Alex (David Ladd) in their investigation. What they find lurking in London’s bowels is gristly horror and human tragedy, mercifully offset with sprinklings of dry English wit throughout. Come for the flesh-rending, but stick around for a quintessentially British bitch-off between Pleasence and cameoing fellow screen legend Christopher Lee.
The Last Horror Film
Filmmaking is personal. It’s passion. It’s torture. David Winters, Judd Hamilton, and Tom Klassen may not have had in mind such lofty ambitions for The Last Horror Film, which director Winters shot guerilla style on location at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival; note cameos from such stars as Isabelle Huppert and Kris Kristofferson, in attendance at the fest to promote Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. However high or low Winters, who co-wrote The Last Horror Film’s screenplay with Klassen and Hamilton, aimed during production, the movie works, both as a horror story and a meta-reflexive piece: a horror movie about the movies, and specifically horror movies, years ahead of Scream and even Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale, where Cannes likewise serves as a backdrop. It’s a remarkably nimble picture, too; whatever you think The Last Horror Film is going to be, it turns into something else entirely by the end.
The Demon's Rook
We live in such a rich–or, barring that, busy–time for studio horror that one may easily forget how much of the genre comprises regional productions. Genre film preservation outfit Vinegar Syndrome lives in that ballpark, a stroke of luck for diehards with a soft spot for homegrown DIY horror cinema; their recent acquisition and release of James Sizemore’s feature debut The Demon’s Rook, an award winner on the genre film festival circuit in the early 2010s, exemplifies why these movies matter. Sizemore plays Roscoe, spirited away to the underworld as a boy by the elder demon Dimwos (John Chatham), who trains him in dark magics and raises him into a guardian against chaos; on reaching adulthood, Roscoe unwittingly releases a malevolent trio of devils and returns to Earth’s surface to destroy them. The Demon’s Rook embraces goop and gore, briefly adopting an episodic structure for the explicit purpose of racking up kills; at the same time, it’s often strikingly lovely, like if Terrence Malick shot a Tobe Hooper movie on a consumer-grade camera. Seek this one out immediately.
Bring Her Back
If they have enough sense, the brothers Philippou, Michael and Danny, will stay the course on their feature filmmaking career by shooting movies that contrast starkly with their YouTube shorts; the counterbalancing effect of their 2023 debut, Talk to Me, next to videos of, say, Harry Potter dueling with Jedis, or Cookie Monster dismembering the Power Rangers, is an even better twist than the one they wrote into the picture’s climax. Bring Her Back likewise tacks hard against RackaRacka’s hyperactive mayhem, and cuts an even more sober figure than Talk to Me. Here, orphaned siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) relocate from one abusive household to another, though “abuse” scarcely describes the ghastliness their foster parent, Laura (Sally Hawkins), indulged in her garden shed. Here, the Philippous dovetail Talk to Me’s parental loss motif with a child loss motif, complementing toe-curling gore with a depiction of grief, embodied by Hawkins’ extraordinary performance, so deep as to inspire madness.
The Cat
Horror movies with animal protagonists rarely if ever center on cats, because mankind has a conspicuous pooch preference, but when they do, their authors all appear to agree that heroic kitties should be named “General.” Like Lewis Teague’s Cat’s Eye, Lam Ngai Kai’s The Cat is a tender story about the bond between man and feline, where the feline is actually an extraterrestrial, hiding out on Earth with two of his kin; their mission is to recover a pair of artifacts capable of destroying a separate contingent of extraterrestrials who belong to another race, dead-set on eradicating our species by the most disgusting means possible. (Seriously: it’s gross.) If The Thing, The Blob, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers raised a child together, it’d probably look an awful lot like The Cat–which is to say the film makes for one cosmically bizarre experience.
