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See - Sada Elbalad
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- See - Sada Elbalad
Olivia Cooke Replaces Maika Monroe in Movie "Brides"
Yara Sameh Olivia Cooke is set to star in the Neon thriller "Brides" from Watcher director Chloe Okuno, who will direct from a script she wrote. It will be produced by Anthony Bregman and Stefanie Azpiazu through Likely Story. Neon will release "Brides" theatrically. The pic follows Sally Bishop (Cooke) and her husband, who travel to a remote Italian villa whose owner, a mysterious count, takes a peculiar interest in Sally. Cooke steps in for Maika Monroe, who had scheduling issues with her Universal film "Reminders of Him". As a filmmaker, Okuno's feature debut was the psychological thriller "Watcher", starring Monroe and Burn Gorman, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and went on to play several other festivals. Drawn to genre-based material that aims to excite and unsettle, her other works include writing and directing the 'Storm Drain' segment of the anthology series "V/H/S/94", as well as directing episodes from Showtime's "Let the Right One In" and the James Wan-produced series "Teacup". Best known for her roles in "Ready Player One", "Me, Earl", and "The Dying Girl," Cooke is coming off the second season of HBO's "Game of Thrones" prequel series "House of the Dragon". She recently wrapped production on the Amazon series "The Girlfriend" opposite Robin Wright. read more New Tourism Route To Launch in Old Cairo Ahmed El Sakka-Led Play 'Sayidati Al Jamila' to Be Staged in KSA on Dec. 6 Mandy Moore Joins Season 2 of "Dr. Death" Anthology Series Don't Miss These Movies at 44th Cairo Int'l Film Festival Today Amr Diab to Headline KSA's MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2022 Festival Arts & Culture Mai Omar Stuns in Latest Instagram Photos Arts & Culture "The Flash" to End with Season 9 Arts & Culture Ministry of Culture Organizes four day Children's Film Festival Arts & Culture Canadian PM wishes Muslims Eid-al-Adha News Egypt confirms denial of airspace access to US B-52 bombers News Ayat Khaddoura's Final Video Captures Bombardment of Beit Lahia News Australia Fines Telegram $600,000 Over Terrorism, Child Abuse Content Arts & Culture Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's $4.7M LA Home Burglarized Sports Former Al Zamalek Player Ibrahim Shika Passes away after Long Battle with Cancer Sports Neymar Announced for Brazil's Preliminary List for 2026 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers News Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly Inaugurates Two Indian Companies Arts & Culture New Archaeological Discovery from 26th Dynasty Uncovered in Karnak Temple Business Fear & Greed Index Plummets to Lowest Level Ever Recorded amid Global Trade War Arts & Culture Zahi Hawass: Claims of Columns Beneath the Pyramid of Khafre Are Lies
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Watcher 'Ending Explained: Is Julia Actually Being Stalked — and Who Is the Serial Killer?
2022's Watcher arrived on Netflix on Feb. 25 and quickly shot to the streamer's top 10. The film stars Maika Monroe (who fans will recognize from other horror hits like It Follows and Longlegs) as Julia, an American expat who moves to Bucharest to live with her boyfriend, Francis. Shortly after arriving, she notices that a man who lives in an apartment across the street seems to watch her from his window every night. Even weirder, she starts seeing him all over town. Julia tries to tell her boyfriend and even the police that she is being stalked, but no one believes her. Even scarier, a serial killer known as the Spider is on the loose in Bucharest. His M.O. is to stalk women and then eventually sneak into their homes and decapitate them. Julia feels like this can't be a coincidence, but without help from anyone else, she's left feeling scared and isolated. Adding to Julia's worry, one night, she hears her next-door neighbor Irina scream, followed by a loud thud and then silence. Julia causes a scene among her neighbors and demands that someone open Irina's door so she can check on her. When Julia finally gets into her apartment, Irina is nowhere to be found. The final moments of Watcher reveals the true identity of the infamous killer and Julia as his next target. But what happens leading up to the finale, and does Julia survive? Here is everything to know about the shocking ending of Watcher. In the moments leading up to the movie's finale, Julia joins her boyfriend Francis at a fancy work event, and the town is abuzz with news that the Spider has supposedly been caught. But Julia, knowing what she's experienced with their neighbor, isn't so convinced. She still feels like someone is watching her. Trying to lighten the mood, Francis jokes with his colleagues in Romanian and makes a nasty comment about Julia. She isn't fluent in Romanian but understands enough to know he essentially said it's all in her head. Angry, she walks out and heads home. Julia gets on the subway, and once again sees her neighbor, revealing that he's still following her. Then, for the first time in the movie, he speaks to her, saying her concerns have all been a big misunderstanding and that he wants an apology. But as he talks, Julia looks at a grocery bag he has sitting next to him that has the faint outline of a human head inside. At the next stop, Julia runs off the train toward home. In the film's finale, Julia gets back to her apartment and begins packing her suitcases, intending to leave. After seeing the head in her neighbor's bag, she knows she's been right the entire time and is irate that her boyfriend doesn't believe her. As she packs, Julia hears loud music coming from Irina's apartment, even though she's been missing for days. Julia goes to investigate the noise and finds Irina's door is unlocked. When she walks inside, she sees Irina's body collapsed on a chair, missing its head. Before Julia has a chance to escape, her neighbor sneaks up on her and knocks her unconscious. When Julia wakes up, she finds that she's still in Irina's apartment and her neighbor, the Spider, is standing over her. She feels all hope is lost, but then she hears her boyfriend. He's in their bedroom, which shares a wall with Irina's apartment. The scene cuts to Francis seeing the open suitcases and realizing that Julia is planning to leave him. She tries to scream out for Francis but the killer cuts her throat, making her unable to speak. She tries to run away but collapses and starts losing a lot of blood. Julia crawls through the apartment hoping to reach a small coffee table where she knows Irina has hidden a gun. But her crawling slows, and eventually, she stops. The audience then sees Julia's body on the floor surrounded by a pool of blood. After seeing the suitcases on their bed, Francis calls Julia, worried that she's leaving him. He then hears her phone ringing through the wall from Irina's apartment. Francis walks into the hallway and sees the killer emerge from her apartment. Francis shouts at him and begins to chase him, but before he can even get close, a bullet shoots through Irina's doorway, hitting the killer in the chest. The murderer falls into the wall and begins to slide down. Francis stands there in shock looking at him, and then Julia walks out of Irina's apartment, revealing she faked her death to give her time to find Irina's gun. The movie ends with Julia giving Francis a cold stare. Unlike most horror movies, Julia and Francis don't celebrate or feel relieved after surviving the serial killer. Instead, the film ends with her giving him an incredibly icy stare while he stands in complete shock. It appears that Julia has absolutely no intention of staying in a relationship with Francis and feels angry and betrayed that he never believed her. Beyond being a classic serial killer flick, the movie deals with sexism and the familiar pattern of women not being believed. The final moments show that Julia has been the smart, strong one all along. Read the original article on People
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Susan Barker: ‘I started watching horror when I was five years old'
Everyone has a horror film they saw too young. Or perhaps just one disturbing scene that made them too jittery to sleep at night. A set of dining chairs stacking themselves into a table-top pyramid as a housewife's back is turned. A woman's discovery of a neighbour's slumped corpse, his eyes pecked to bloody sockets by murderous birds. A boy on a tricycle seeing twin girls at the end of a corridor, interspersed with flashes of their brutal axe murder … I started watching horror back in the early 80s, when I was five. A mature student, my dad would record late-night Open University lectures on BBC Two, and, once the bearded academics finished scribbling equations on blackboards, the Betamax kept rolling and the melodramatic titles for a Hammer horror would start up. From these tapes I remember hopping plagues of alien locusts from Quatermass and the Pit, Christopher Lee baring his blood-soaked fangs, and young women in Victorian nightgowns, screaming and fleeing or becoming mesmerised. As a five-year-old, could I differentiate between these supernatural fictions and reality? I saw a chiller called The Watcher in the Woods and began to creepily insist that 'the Watcher' was stalking our family, following at a distance, lurking just out of sight. This coincided with the time my parents were separating, and the Watcher now seems to me the exteriorisation of some inner anxiety and sense of threat to the family unit. These films were 'just pretend', I'd been told. But even at a young age the Hammer productions seemed to express to me a fundamental truth: that just beyond the edges of what is safe and known are destabilising forces that can throw everything into chaos. My best friend at primary school saw A Nightmare on Elm Street when we were seven. We gathered around her in the playground to hear about Freddy Krueger slaughtering teenagers in their dreams. I begged permission to watch it too, but, frustratingly, had to wait until I was 'a bit older', which turned out to be 10. How many hours of sleep did I lose to imagining Krueger leering around my bedroom door? The long blades attached to his leather glove tapping on the windowpane? Thanks to lenient parenting, secondary-school sleepovers often featured Puppet Master, Child's Play and other video nasties whose power wasn't diminished by their low-budget awfulness. Nor did the regular exposure desensitise me; it only made the monsters more persistent in my consciousness. Then I got into Stephen King novels, which were no reprieve. I was often awake until 2am with a spine-cracked paperback of Pet Sematary or It, too scared to go to the toilet, in case Pennywise was waiting to pounce down the hall. Have I mentioned yet, that this was exhilarating? Fun? It's what film theorist Noël Carroll calls the 'paradox of horror' – the enjoyment of fear and disgust, the thrilling of the sensation-seeking parts of the psyche as we vicariously experience horrifying situations and confrontations with entities both evil and grotesque. And there are none more evil and grotesque than Pipes of the infamous Ghostwatch, which I saw with my younger sister when it was broadcast on Halloween 1992. Like most of the audience of 11 million, we fell for the mockumentary hoax, and, like approximately 1 million viewers, we called the phone lines to tell the BBC we'd spotted the ghoulish Pipes fleetingly in shot, in the corner of a bedroom. Too petrified to go to bed, we stayed up until dawn, under a duvet on the sofa, watching the Halloween programming on BBC Two – Creepshow 2, The Curse of the Werewolf, The Bride of Frankenstein, Death Line – until exhaustion finally overrode our fear. As well as its ingenuity and authentic script, maybe another reason Ghostwatch was so real to us was because the setting was so close to home: the London suburb, the frazzled working-class single mother, the two highly strung adolescent daughters. I've always had the irrational sense that my Essex childhood home is a haunted place. It's familiar at the level of nook and cranny yet can sometimes be unheimlich and strange. If the house is haunted, perhaps it's by ghosts of our former selves: by second-generation teenagers clashing explosively with the first generation's authoritarian parenting style. Recently, I came across the word 'transliminal' to describe someone swayed by the supernatural. People high in transliminality tend to be introspective and fantasy-prone – the boundaries between the mental and the external world more porous, so the imaginary has a stronger grip on 'reality' and emotional states. The way terrifying scenes lingered in my mind and contaminated my post-film reality when I was younger suggest this trait in me. It suggests why, as a teenager, rain tapping my windowpane in the night became Danny Glick from Salem's Lot, hovering vampirishly outside. Why bin bags heaped in an alleyway, glimpsed walking home from a late-night screening of Scream, became the masked slasher, crouched with a 10in knife. The psychological disturbance of a film used to stay with me, rippling out into subsequent days, filling my head with imaginings of the Blair Witch or the serial killer from The Poughkeepsie Tapes, creeping about my flat at 3am. Ridiculous, my rational mind scolds. But on some more visceral, irrational level, I am spooked. And I enjoy being spooked. It's part of the draw of the genre for me. Fear heightening my senses, so I am hypervigilant and alert. Fear waking me up. Since I began writing 23 years ago, my fiction has always contained elements of the supernatural, and my latest novel, Old Soul, is an out-and-out horror: my monstrous female protagonist must make human sacrifices or she literally begins to rot. Her internal organs putrefy. Her hair falls out. Her fingernails falls off. She becomes the walking undead – all my fears of evil, ageing and mortality, rolled into one. My north star while writing Old Soul was to make readers feel the way I did when first turning the pages of The Shining or Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves: frightened, disturbed and utterly beguiled. The experience of reading horror is vastly different from watching a film. Books can't do jump scares the way films and TV can. But they are more adept at inhabiting a character's interiority – their fear and confusion as they mentally scramble to make sense of the door slamming in the night or the shadow flitting down the hall. A horror novel is a collaboration between author and reader; the words on the page are stage directions for the reader's imagination. The monsters are unique to every reader, too, constructed in part from your own mental archive of terrifying images and experiences. The horror I saw too young definitely had some warping influence on my growing mind. For me, the genre will always represent the disintegration of the safe, known world: the threats that lurk at its periphery metamorphosed into the poltergeist smashing vases in a suburban home, the witch cackling in the woods, the demon-possessed little girl … Horror became linked to unhappy events in my life, a grotesquely distorting mirror held up to my childhood, somehow reflecting a greater truth. But this is by no means a wholly bad thing. In fact, I feel a strange kind of gratitude for all I was exposed to at an early age. For, amid the heart-thudding terror, I've been comforted, too, by horror's metaphorical powers, and the dark recognition of all the ordinary horrors in an ordinary life. Old Soul by Susan Barker is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
