I was halfway through my coffee when the first headline hit: an animated slasher movie for the whole family. I felt a grin and a small chill at the same time. I want to walk you through why that mix of silly and sinister matters.
Freddy the 13th
On my evening scroll through Deadline, I stopped at a headline that made me grin and grimace at once.
I’ve followed Dan Trachtenberg since 10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey, so the news that he’s attached to direct an animated “horror-based” family comedy for Paramount Animation demands attention. Deadline says the film adapts Yehudi Mercado’s graphic novel Freddy the 13th and follows Freddy Vanwinkle, the thirteenth son of a thirteenth-born son, who inadvertently inherits a slasher mantle and has thirteen nights to break the curse. Paramount is pitching it as PG — scares and laughs aimed at families.
This setup reads like a genre experiment: Trachtenberg steering tonal tightropes between real fright and broad comedy. Freddy inherits the mantle like a cursed birthday cake—sticky, unwanted, and impossible to ignore.
Who is directing Freddy the 13th?
You’re looking at Dan Trachtenberg, director of 10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey, now working with Paramount and Paramount Animation. His background in tense, character-driven genre films gives the project an authority cue that the studio is clearly leaning on.
Is Freddy the 13th a family movie?
Paramount Animation is pitching it PG, which signals child-friendly hooks alongside horror riffs. Think jump-scares swapped for pratfalls and monster-makeup gags, but with a curse ticking like a clock through the plot.
Not Alone
On a press release that landed in my inbox, the cast list read like an indie-turned-event animation roll call.
Illumination is assembling a vocal A-list for Not Alone: Timothée Chalamet plays Joe, an introverted rocket mechanic; Selena Gomez is Fran, an astro-botanist working on a plant-fueled rocket; and a trio of tiny, unruly aliens crash at Joe’s place, sparking both romance and chaos. The cast includes Rob Brydon, Allison Janney, Brett Goldstein and more, which signals Illumination wants broad appeal and adult comedic muscle underneath the family stakes. The aliens and a bumbling officer named Zandro give the film a road-movie energy trapped in a living room—perfect for the studio’s comedy-meets-heart approach.
Seasons
At a writers’ roundtable I attended, someone mentioned a Reddit short story that wouldn’t leave their head.
Amazon MGM Studios has tapped Drew Hancock of Companion to direct Seasons, adapted from a short by Matt and Harrison Query that began life on Reddit. The premise is spare and effective: a couple buys a dream ranch only to find the land hosts ancient spirits, and survival requires performing increasingly disturbing rituals as the seasons rotate. That pitch is pure Southern gothic/folk horror—the kind of slow-tilt dread that builds into moral and bodily cost. Lily James is attached to star, lending the film a mainstream draw while Hancock brings a low-light, intimate sensibility.
Evil Dead Burn
In an interview I read while tracking franchise lore, a cast member dropped a connective thread that will please longtime fans.
Hunter Doohan revealed to Out Magazine that his character Joseph is the grandson of a colleague of Professor Knowby. He’s researching the lore; his grandfather knew Knowby; and the script ties back to Evil Dead Rise while weaving through the series’ mythos. That’s a small, smart signal: the film is courting franchise continuity rather than reboots that ignore lineage. If you care about canonical threads, this one will reward you.
Werwulf
Walking past a Focus Features screening room, I heard studio executives whisper the word “different.”
Peter Kujawski of Focus Features hyped Robert Eggers’ Werwulf as an intimate portrait of a werewolf, a film that interrogates “the horror of living” while offering “weird shafts of light and hope.” Kujawski’s language carries an authority cue—Focus is presenting this as arthouse horror with emotional rigor. If Eggers delivers what Kujawski promises, audiences should expect a character-first approach that treats the curse as existential machinery rather than a surface monster.
Supergirl
At a preview screening, a clip cut to black just before the worst of the chaos.
A new clip shows Supergirl fighting space pirates until Lobo decides to escalate dramatically — explosions, moral friction, and the kind of set-piece destruction that asks characters to choose who they protect. It’s pure comic-book kinetic energy, and the clip teases a collision between heroics and consequences.
The Outer Threat
On a trailer drop I watched with the sound low, the government felt like the real monster.
The trailer for The Outer Threat positions an astrophysicist (Constance Wu) whose discovery of alien life makes her family a target of government forces. With William Fichtner and Mark O’Brien aboard, the film promises paranoid thriller beats—authority vs. family—rather than alien invasion spectacle. The tone lands where political thriller meets speculative dread.
The Bay
At a creature-effects panel I attended, someone passed around stories about animatronics stealing the show.
The trailer for The Bay plays up a practical effect: a genuine animatronic tiger shark from Bischoff’s Taxidermy & Animal FX. A shark sanctuary visit goes very bad, and the decision to use an actual animatronic promises tactile terror—wet, mechanical, and unnervingly real in a way CGI sometimes isn’t. If you care about creature craft, this one will pique your interest.
My Adventures With Green Lantern/Mr. Miracle
At Annecy this year, a window display stopped the room in its tracks.
Festival photos give us our first official looks at new DC Animation entries: My Adventures With Green Lantern and Mr. Miracle. The Mr. Miracle images hit like a neon fist, combining classic Kirby energy with modern motion design. That first visual impression matters: animation festivals are where audience buzz starts, and Annecy’s cachet amplifies whatever momentum these series can build.
First look at the DC Animation slate.
Follow @NexusPointNews for the updates from Annecy Animation Festival panels this week. pic.twitter.com/K5QeJP1WE8
— Nexus Point News (@NexusPointNews) June 22, 2026
Rick and Morty
At the end of a late-night stream I caught the teaser and laughed out loud.
Rick drags Morty and Summer to an all-you-can-eat beer garden in the teaser for next week’s episode. It reads like classic Rick and Morty: a mundane setting twisted into cosmic nonsense, social satire tucked into absurdity.
If you’re tracking Trachtenberg’s move from tense indie thriller director to shepherd of a family-friendly slasher, what does that do to genre boundaries and to the studios that back him — and which of these projects are you placing your early bets on?