#dread central

[ourslutfactory]

Resting in pieces

[mysharona1987]

A lot of these victims were children.

They buried children alive.

This is so depraved an act even most horror films wouldn’t touch it.

[crashingonneptune]

should I:

a. Ruin my life

or

b. Ruin my life

Hmmmmm decisions decisions 🤔

[iamonlyperson]

Dead Central Interview

Markiplier’s Ladder

Interviewer asks if he’s felt any positive shift in the perception of YouTubers after some of his peers found mainstream success in horror cinemahe’s felt any positive shift in the perception of YouTubers after some of his peers found mainstream success in horror cinema

M: Less than you’d think. It’s hard to gauge because being kind of outside in the first place… it’s probably now something that they can’t ignore.

Mark shares an eye-opening example of how creators like him are treated by the industry

M: I was nominated for an Emmy a little while back. I was at the red carpet—I notoriously hate red carpets—but the publications that were there didn’t want to talk to me, and I’m fine with that. If you don’t want to talk to me, I’m not going to make you talk to me. But in my mind, it’s strange because if you put out a video with me in it, it’s going to be good for you. Not just like an ego trip. I have 38 million subscribers, it's a bad business decision to not want to do it just because I’m a YouTuber and they knew who I was. One of my publicists was there at the time, and they were kind of surprised at the responses because people were just like, "No, we don’t want to talk to that." I’ve had that on other podcasts where they’re like, "I don’t want to talk to that YouTuber," but now it’s getting to the point where I think they can’t really ignore it.

Iron Lung

Is the game known for being especially scary?

M: What this game does really well is it puts a unique perspective on a horror environment that people are not used to. People have seen a lot of horror movies, but being isolated with such a limited view in such a bizarre environment, in a submarine in an ocean of blood, there’s all these questions popping up and you don’t know what’s outside. It’s very audio-based. It’s scary for sure, and a lot of people probably find it one of their scariest games, but it’s interesting. That’s kind of what appealed to me.

There Will Be Blood

M: The record I know of right now is blood. Most fake blood. And that one is, I mean, if you’ve seen it, it’s pretty obvious. Look, it’s an ocean of blood. There’s no way it’s not going to have the record. But it was still a logistics hurdle. That much blood, especially because the set was up on a motion control rig, had weight considerations. I’m a former engineer, so I suddenly had to go back to my days of engineering and thinking about material properties. The liquid weight alone, even partially full, just a foot and a half, was an extra 9,000 pounds. It’s enormous. It boggles the mind. That’s maybe a thousand gallons to that point. When you start to go above that, you can’t really move it much because if you move it too much, it’ll tsunami out the walls of the set. It’ll literally smash because it’s 10,000 pounds of weight hitting the side of the wall. It’ll break anything.

Evil Dead

Interview asks what the previous record holder was, thinking "The Shining" had the record of most blood used in the movie

M: It’s Evil Dead. They say it’s from that blood rain scene. And I’m not throwing shade on them, but they don’t have a verifiable number for that 50,000 gallons someone put out. I think it’s one of those things where someone said it and no one denied it. I know what dealing with that quantity of blood is. We had an industrial dumpster that we used for dunking things in for certain scenes. We couldn’t realistically flood it with me in it, so we had to sink things sometimes. That thing was about 8,000 or 9,000 gallons of blood when it was full. I believe we ordered truckloads of blood. You had semi-trailers with giant, farm-sized industrial chemical containers sloshing down the highway.

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Which horror movie IP would be a dream for him to be part of, he skirts a bit, but Five Nights at Freddy’s sits at the center of it all

M: It was in the lead-up to that. I was supposed to be in it and I wasn’t, because I was working on this, so I just couldn’t spare any time. I was supposed to be the guy that died in the first scene in part two. But they were filming at the same time we were filming this, so I couldn’t leave set to do that.

Event Horizon

Which horror movie ruined his childhood?

M: Event Horizon stuck with me as a horror. Yeah, that gave me nightmares for a long time. A lot of what I’ve done always kind of goes back to those aesthetics. When I did In Space with Markiplier, my last project, the ship design was kind of like Event Horizon. I think about it a lot. It would be cool, but the performances, the set design, the aesthetics are so good. I feel like just a modern reedit for it would be great.

The Mortuary Assistant

Is Mark excited for "The Mortuary Assistant"?

M: It was scary. I think it was very good. I’m interested to see what it’s going to be as a movie. I think it’s a good concept. It’s a very enclosed space. There are a lot of good scares in the game. Even if they just replicated those in the movie, that would work really well. It’s a compelling, haunting kind of story. There’s a lot to it. And the nature of mortuaries anyway, the embalming process. One of the cool things about the game was walking through a semi-realistic version of what you would need to do to prepare a body.

[911onabcbts]

Jennifer is on the cover of Dread Central’s July 2025 issue for ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer.’

Jennifer Love Hewitt on the Legacy of Julie James and 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' [July Cover Story]

For our July digital cover story, we speak with the legendary Jennifer Love Hewitt on her return to 'I Know What You Did Last Summer.'

[alienace]

I've been feeling a light sense of dread in my chest for a while now and its all because i cant listen to music (lost my earphones)

[actingjunkie]

'The Restoration at Grayson Manor' Review: A Haunting, Hilarious Queer Melodrama [Fantastic Fest 2025]

‘The Restoration at Grayson Manor’ emerges from this festival season as a raucous, beautifully paced, horror-comedy romp.

The Restoration at Grayson Manor’ Review: A Haunting, Hilarious Queer Melodrama [Fantastic Fest 2025]

Matthew Jackson

A movie like The Restoration at Grayson Manor relies heavily on a delicate tonal balance, not just between comedy and horror, but between a dozen smaller explorations of subgenres and emotional resonances. Get it wrong, even for a second, and the film’s darkly comic tone will topple over one edge or another, giving you a film that’s either too nasty to be relatable, or too sympathetic to be scary.

That Grayson Manor manages to keep its tone on track at all, amid two very strong performances from lead actors Chris Colfer and Alice Krige, is in itself something of a miracle. That it does it while also delivering one of the most entertaining horror films you’ll find on the festival circuit this year is something extraordinary.

Grayson Manor was once a proud family estate home to great men and the women who supported them, generations of Graysons dominating the Irish countryside. Now, the slightly decrepit house is home to only two, matriarch Jacqueline (Krige) and her queer piano playing son Boyd (Colfer). The surviving Graysons absolutely hate each other, because Jacqueline believes her sole remaining purpose is to preserve the family legacy, and her son is too interested in bringing men home for sex to care at all about giving her an heir.

It’s a recipe for venomous disaster, and sure enough, just as Boyd’s about to flee Grayson Manor for good, an accident leaves him without his hands. Jacqueline, devoted mom-ster that she is, pours all of the family’s resources into drafting doctors to give Boyd the latest and greatest in prosthetics, so advanced that they’ll bond with his system and move with a thought, just like real hands. So, we’ve got a mother and son who hate each other, experimental medical technology, and theoretically detachable hands that can probe the son’s spite-filled subconscious. What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, this is a killer hand movie in the proud tradition of The Beast With Five Fingers, and director Glenn McQuaid (who also co-wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman) is absolutely in tune with that kind of old-school, supernatural thriller vibe. It’s all a bit of fun, but it’s played deadly serious for everyone involved, giving the film an earnest boost amid the camp and the more over-the-top visual effects. The longer the film goes, the more you start to feel you’re watching one of those classic Amicus Productions British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s, a film devoted to atmosphere and Technicolor shocks above all else.

But The Restoration at Grayson Manor is not just a throwback. By positioning Boyd as a piano player who hopes his talent might help him escape his family one day, then taking away his hands, the film immediately calls up questions of agency, power dynamics, how the world works when your parents control the purse and your literal physical wellbeing. In giving us the story of a young queer man desperate to find his own place in the world, then ripping all sense of power away from him, the film asks us to consider our own place in heteronormative balances at a time when queer kids the world over are deprived of owning their narrative. Once disaster strikes and the plot kicks in, it’s a literal fight for survival for Boyd, and that adds a layer of gravity to the whole narrative.

Thematic weight aside, though, the true main attraction of this film is the dynamic between Colfer and Krige, and their grasp of the melodrama at the heart of this story means that The Restoration at Grayson Manor soars. Colfer, seething throughout yet desperate to be vulnerable and open with someone, can break your heart and make you cackle over bitchy dialogue in the span of the same scene, going toe-to-toe even with Krige’s seasoned might.

One of our finest genre actresses who’s turned in some of the best horror performances of the past decade with films like Gretel and Hansel and She Will, Krige channels Katharine Hepburn, Delphine Seyrig, and Bette Davis into one unforgettable villainess. Yet even when she’s at her most arch, communing with the mansion as though it’s the only child she has left, Krige finds space for tenderness, for grief, for shadows of the person she once was. It’s a masterful performance, and it makes everything else in the film work.

The Restoration at Grayson Manor emerges from this festival season as a raucous, beautifully paced, horror-comedy romp. Once this film gets its hands around you, it won’t let go, and I can’t wait for a wider audience to find it.

[redlettermediathings]