Magui Bravi leads the cast as Malena, a cabaret dancer who also works as an erotic hotline operator. The film’s premise unfolds when she receives a call from a man who calmly claims responsibility for a string of murders across the city. As the conversations continue, the caller begins to describe his crimes in detail before warning that she will be his next target. What begins as an unsettling exchange escalates into a pursuit that unfolds across both physical and psychological space.

Hotline positions itself within a lineage of stylised thrillers, with clear visual references to the colour-driven aesthetic associated with 1970s European horror cinema. At the same time, the film integrates contemporary pacing and structure, building tension through repeated interactions between Malena and the unseen voice on the line. The narrative framework hinges on surveillance, performance and vulnerability, placing the protagonist in a role where communication itself becomes a point of danger.

Loreti, whose previous credits include Diablo and Kryptonite, brings experience from Argentina’s genre scene, while the film’s cast includes performers associated with recent international successes such as When Evil Lurks. Demián Salomón and María Eugenia Rigon appear alongside Bravi, contributing to a production that blends established talent with emerging voices from the region.

The film’s setting plays a central role in shaping its tone. Buenos Aires is depicted through a stylised lens that emphasises nightlife, isolation and shifting identities, with the hotline concept anchoring the story in a pre-digital era of communication. This choice reinforces the immediacy of each interaction, where every call narrows the distance between predator and target.

We’ll share more news on the release as it comes.

Hotline trailer

The trailer introduces a premise rooted in disappearance and spatial distortion. A furniture store owner vanishes after uncovering a hidden doorway in his basement, leading to an endless labyrinth of interconnected rooms. The footage leans heavily on the unsettling familiarity of empty, repetitive spaces, reflecting the concept’s origins in online creepypasta culture and its association with liminal environments.

Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with supporting roles from Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell. Ejiofor plays a central figure connected to the disappearance, while Reinsve portrays a therapist drawn into the investigation. The film’s structure expands on the original web series by introducing a character-led perspective, while retaining the core idea of an inescapable, shifting interior world.

The project is produced by James Wan, whose involvement places the film within a broader context of contemporary studio-backed horror, while A24 continues its investment in distinctive genre properties. The adaptation represents a notable instance of a viral online concept evolving into a large-scale production, with Parsons’ original videos having accumulated millions of views since their debut in 2022.

Filming took place in Vancouver during summer 2025 under the working title Effigy, with production wrapping in August. The screenplay, credited to Will Soodik, builds on earlier drafts developed during the project’s initial announcement phase. Music for the film is composed by Edo Van Breemen in collaboration with Parsons, extending the director’s involvement into the film’s sound design.

A24 will release Backrooms exclusively in cinemas on 29 May.

Backrooms trailer

It was also a decade where mid-budget thrillers could just exist. No franchise pressure, no cinematic universe obligations, just a strong hook, a couple of big performances, and a director allowed to get a little weird with it.

Some of them stuck around. A lot didn’t. Not because they failed, necessarily. More because they didn’t quite attach themselves to the culture in a way that made them unavoidable.

Here’s a list of 90s thriller movies that may have slipped your net the first time round, but are definitely worth watching.

10 Great 90s Thrillers

10. The River Wild

There’s something deceptive about The River Wild. It presents itself like a prestige-leaning adventure drama, all sweeping landscapes and family bonding, before tightening the screws into something much more controlled and tense.

Meryl Streep is doing quietly brilliant work here as a former river guide who finds herself navigating both literal rapids and the increasingly volatile presence of Kevin Bacon’s charming-until-he’s-not criminal. The shift in tone is gradual enough that you don’t quite clock when the film stops being scenic and starts being threatening.

And the river itself really matters. It’s not just a backdrop for danger, it dictates it. Movement, timing, control. Every choice is shaped by the environment, which gives the film a kind of natural tension a lot of thrillers have to manufacture.

9. Pacific Heights

This is one of those thrillers that becomes more stressful the older you get, which is not a comforting realisation.

A couple rents out part of their home. Their new tenant, played with unnerving precision by Michael Keaton, proceeds to dismantle their lives using patience, loopholes, and a very calm understanding of how systems can be bent.

It’s not flashy. That’s what makes it work. The horror comes from watching control slip away in small, incremental ways. Legal processes stall. Authority figures shrug. And suddenly the home, which should be the safest space, becomes something else entirely.

I don’t know if it’s aged well or just become more relevant, which might be the same thing.

8. Breakdown

Breakdown is almost aggressively efficient.

Kurt Russell plays a man whose wife vanishes during a roadside stop, and the film wastes no time turning that into a spiralling nightmare of denial, confusion, and mounting desperation. What’s striking is how quickly the situation escalates without ever feeling exaggerated.

There’s a kind of mechanical precision to it. Every interaction pushes things forward, usually in the wrong direction. Russell anchors it with a performance that feels grounded enough to sell the absurdity creeping in around him.

It also taps into that very specific fear of being in the wrong place, surrounded by the wrong people, and realising that the rules you rely on just… don’t apply here.

7. Single White Female

This one lives in that space between psychological thriller and something a bit more heightened, almost camp at times, but never enough to fully undercut the unease.

Jennifer Jason Leigh gives a performance that unfolds in layers, starting from vulnerability and edging steadily into something more invasive and unstable. The film leans heavily into themes of identity and loneliness, though it’s not exactly subtle about it.

Still, there’s an intimacy here that makes it land. The idea of someone inserting themselves into your life so completely that the boundaries start to blur. It’s a very 90s anxiety, that loss of personal space, but it hasn’t exactly gone away.

And yes, the haircut moment still lands. Maybe more than it should.

6. The Game

This is David Fincher in full control mode, constructing a narrative that constantly destabilises both its protagonist and the audience.

Michael Douglas plays a man drawn into an elaborate “game” that begins as a curiosity and gradually consumes his entire reality. What makes it compelling is how thoroughly it commits to disorientation. There’s no stable ground to return to, no clear sense of what’s real or staged.

Fincher leans into that uncertainty with a kind of cold precision. The film looks immaculate, moves deliberately, and keeps pulling the rug just as you start to regain footing.

Although, and I go back and forth on this, the ending either ties it together in a satisfying way or collapses under the weight of its own ambition. I still can’t quite decide which.

5. Copycat

Arriving in the wake of the serial killer boom, Copycat could have easily been lost in the shuffle, but it carves out its own identity through character rather than spectacle.

Sigourney Weaver plays an agoraphobic psychologist whose expertise becomes both her strength and her vulnerability, while Holly Hunter grounds the film with a more pragmatic, procedural presence.

The dynamic between the two gives the film a steady emotional core, which helps balance the darker material. It’s less about shocking the audience and more about sustaining unease, letting the threat linger rather than constantly escalate.

It’s also just… very watchable. In that mid-90s studio thriller way that feels almost engineered for a Sunday evening.

4. Arlington Road

This is one of those films that feels almost too cynical for comfort.

Jeff Bridges plays a man whose suspicions about his neighbours spiral into obsession, and the film carefully walks the line between justified paranoia and personal breakdown. You’re never entirely sure whether to trust his instincts or question them.

Until the film decides for you.

What’s striking is how controlled it all is. There’s no rush to reveal, no big showy twists early on. Just a slow tightening of tension, scene by scene, until the final act lands in a way that feels deliberately, almost cruelly, unresolved.

It’s not a comfortable watch. I’m not even sure it wants to be.

3. A Simple Plan

This is where the list gets a bit bleak.

Sam Raimi strips everything back here, delivering a thriller that’s less about external danger and more about internal collapse. Three men find money. They decide to keep it. And from there, everything unravels with a kind of quiet inevitability.

The brilliance of A Simple Plan is how reasonable every decision feels in the moment. Nothing is framed as obviously catastrophic until it already is. It’s a slow accumulation of compromise, each step justified, each consequence slightly worse than expected.

By the end, it’s not really about the money anymore. It’s about what’s been lost in trying to keep it.

2. Dead Calm

I know. It’s technically not 90s. I’m keeping it anyway.

Dead Calm has that transitional feel, bridging late-80s tension with the cleaner, more character-driven thrillers that would dominate the next decade. Set almost entirely on open water, it traps Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane in a situation that becomes increasingly unstable.

Billy Zane is the standout, shifting between charm and menace in a way that keeps the film off-balance. You’re never quite sure where he sits, which makes every interaction feel slightly dangerous.

There’s also something about the isolation that works in the film’s favour. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, just open space that somehow feels more claustrophobic the longer you’re in it.

1. The Vanishing

This is a difficult one to sit with, which is probably why it doesn’t get revisited as often.

A remake, yes, and often dismissed because of that, but it still delivers a deeply unsettling look at obsession and control. Jeff Bridges again, this time on the other side of things, bringing a kind of calm, methodical presence that’s more disturbing than outright aggression.

The film avoids spectacle almost entirely. No big flourishes, no dramatic escalation, just a slow, deliberate unfolding of something you already suspect won’t end well.

And when it gets there… it doesn’t soften it. Which I respect, even if I don’t exactly enjoy it.

There’s something slightly sad about revisiting these films now. Not because they’ve aged badly, but because they belong to a moment where thrillers were allowed to be mid-sized, actor-driven, and a little cynical without needing to justify themselves.

I keep thinking about how many films like this just don’t get made anymore, or at least don’t get the same kind of release. Everything now feels either bigger or smaller, louder or quieter, and these sit in that middle space that’s harder to define.

Maybe that’s why they slipped. Or maybe there were just too many of them at the time and something had to give. I don’t know. I do think if Breakdown came out now it’d either be a streaming hit or quietly buried in a content pile within a week, which feels like a different kind of forgetting. What’s your favorite?

From Jess Franco – the filmmaker The Vatican called “the most dangerous director in the world” – comes his legendary “fever dream of blood and lust” (The New York Times), for the first time ever in 4K UHD. The film stars the eternally stunning Soledad Miranda as vixen vampire, Countess Nadine Carody, who lures women to a Mediterranean island to satisfy her insatiable hunger for female flesh in “a distinctive work of art and beautiful must-see” (Classic Horror), that seductively corrupts the Dracula mythos forever. Ewa Strömberg (SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY), Dennis Price (THEATRE OF BLOOD), Paul Muller (COUNT DRACULA) and the director himself co-star in “Franco’s masterpiece” (The Digital Bits).

For the ultimate seduction, sink your teeth into Vampyros Lesbos on 4K UHD and experience it in all its gory glory
courtesy of Severin Films.

VAMPYROS LESBOS 2-DISC 4K UHD / BD Special Features:
DISC ONE: UHD:
• Audio Commentary with Kat Ellinger, author of Daughters of Darkness
• Audio Commentary with film professor Aaron AuBuchon and Oscarbate Film Collective’s John Dickson and Will
Morris
• German Trailer
DISC TWO: Blu-ray:
• Audio Commentary with Kat Ellinger, Author of Daughters of Darkness
• Audio Commentary with Film Professor Aaron AuBuchon and Oscarbate Film Collective’s John Dickson And Will
Morris
• Interlude In Lesbos – Interview with director Jess Franco
• Fever Dracula – Interview with Stephen Thrower, Author of Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús
Franco
• The Red Scarf Diaries – A Jess Franco career appreciation by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Sean Baker
• In The Land Of Franco Part 12
• Sublime Soledad – Interview with Soledad Miranda Historian Amy Brown
• Jess is Yoda
• German Opening Title Sequence
• German Trailer

Shot on a modest budget estimated at $100,000, Street Trash has long held a reputation within cult cinema circles for its distinctive practical effects and its role in shaping what later became known as the “melt movie” subgenre. The film follows a group of individuals living on the margins in Brooklyn, whose lives are disrupted by a contaminated liquor known as Tenafly Viper, triggering grotesque physical consequences for anyone who consumes it.

The new edition has been restored from the original camera negative, presenting the film in 4K UHD for the first time. Lightbulb’s release arrives as part of a broader trend of boutique distributors revisiting cult titles with high-end restorations aimed at collectors and genre enthusiasts. The packaging reflects that positioning, with the Blu-ray housed in a retro-styled VHS box designed to echo the film’s original home video era.

Illustrator Graham Humphreys has created new artwork and printed inserts exclusively for the release, while additional content includes more than five hours of supplementary material. Among the extras are newly recorded audio commentaries and previously unseen featurettes curated for this edition, with contributions from filmmaker Jason Impey.

The release will also be supported by a limited series of theatrical screenings across the UK and Ireland in May, offering audiences the opportunity to revisit the film in a cinema setting. Confirmed venues include the Prince Charles Cinema in London, CultPlex in Manchester and Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, all of which have built reputations for programming repertory and cult screenings.

Street Trash remains a notable example of low-budget genre filmmaking from the late 1980s, with its practical effects work and offbeat tone contributing to its continued visibility within horror retrospectives and midnight movie programming. The upcoming release reflects sustained demand for physical media editions that combine restoration work with curated archival material.

The 4K UHD Collector’s Edition of Street Trash will be available from 27 April, with digital access launching on the same date. Pre-order your copy here: amzn.to/48oz2em

Street Trash trailer