A 2026 gift guide for the horror movie buff

Obsession was made for under $750,000 by Curry Barker, one half of the YouTube sketch duo That's a Bad Idea, and went on to make more than $500 million. Kane Parsons started Backrooms as a YouTube series in 2022, and the movie version had the biggest opening weekend A24 has ever had. And on TV, Matthew Rhys spent the spring as the mayor of a cursed island town in Apple's Widow's Bay.

Here's a wishlist for the person who saw all of it. Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

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Backrooms at home

A24 sells the Backrooms disc only through its own shop. The 4K and Blu-ray editions include the "Everything Must Go" footage that had been promoted as a theatrical exclusive, a commentary with Parsons and his VFX, sound and music leads, a 26-minute making-of and six collectible postcards.

Something to read

Fangoria started in 1979 as Fantastica, a fantasy film magazine meant as a companion to Starlog. The early issues didn't sell, and it switched to horror with issue 7. The print edition stopped in 2015, came back as a quarterly in 2018, and is still edited by Phil Nobile Jr. The gift subscription is four issues of about 100 pages each, it starts with the winter issue in January 2027, and it doesn't auto-renew.

Shock Value is by Jason Zinoman, a New York Times critic. It covers the stretch from 1968 to 1979 when Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Roman Polanski and George Romero took horror from the drive-in to the mainstream, with interviews with almost all of the people involved.

Something to watch it on

Shudder is AMC's horror streaming service. The annual plan works out to about $7.50 a month, paid up front.

Widow's Bay was created by Katie Dippold and mostly directed by Hiro Murai of Atlanta and Station Eleven. It's set on an island 40 miles off the New England coast, where the locals believe in a curse and the mayor wants tourists, and it ran 10 episodes from April 29 to June 17.

Something to play

Horrified is a cooperative board game from Ravensburger. One to five players work together to save a village from the Universal monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and his Bride, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Invisible Man. Each monster has to be beaten a different way, and a game takes about an hour.

Popcorn

The Whirley Pop is made by Wabash Valley Farms, a popcorn farm in Indiana. The current owner's dad, who liked to tinker, invented it, and it was patented in 1980. A crank on the lid turns a stirring arm along the bottom of the pot, so the kernels keep moving and don't burn.

Posters

Mondo is an Austin company that grew out of the Alamo Drafthouse. Its idea was to take the gig-poster style from the rock world and use it for movies. The posters are screen printed in small, numbered editions by outside artists, and the drops sell out in anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

A night at the Overlook

Stephen King and his wife stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, in 1974. They were in Room 217, and the stay became the seed of The Shining. The room can still be booked. The hotel's night ghost tour is $35 a person, runs an hour, takes groups of up to 20, and never goes into guest rooms or onto guest floors.

In conclusion

The list above copies straight into a new WishPoster list with the Trick or Treat theme. Or start one from scratch and let them fill in the rest.