August is going out with a split personality. Netflix and Shudder are both dropping major new genre premieres on Friday, one a starry serial-killer thriller and the other a very mean Australian slasher, and either one could carry your whole weekend.
Then there is Screambox, which has apparently decided to celebrate the end of summer by opening a crate nobody has looked in since the Clinton administration. Screambox drops seven additions Friday, and four of the strangest are worth pulling out of the pile: German splatter, forgotten Italian television horror, and two Rolfe Kanefsky movies for reasons known only to Screambox. Here is what is worth your Friday night.
The Whisper Man
Where to Watch: Netflix Available: August 28, 2026 (new film)
Adam Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a widowed crime writer whose eight-year-old son vanishes. Tom turns to his estranged father, a retired police detective played by Robert De Niro, and the search starts pulling in a decades-old case built around a convicted killer called the Whisper Man. There is a children’s rhyme involved, which is exactly as reassuring as it sounds.
Netflix is selling this as a thriller rather than horror, and that is fair, but the ingredients are ours. Serial-killer mythology, a missing kid, a family that already had problems before any of this started. The reason to trust it is James Ashcroft, who made Coming Home in the Dark and The Rule of Jenny Pen and has yet to make anything you would call gentle. Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer adapted Alex North’s novel, and the cast also carries Michelle Monaghan, Michael Keaton, John Carroll Lynch, Hamish Linklater and Owen Teague.
Best for: People who want dread rather than gore, and anyone who read the book.
Penny Lane Is Dead
Where to Watch: Shudder Available: August 28, 2026 (new film)
Australia, 1986, a beach house, three best friends, and a summer hot enough to make everyone stupid. A prank goes wrong. The night gets significantly worse from there.
Mia’Kate Russell wrote and directed, and the film has been picking up attention on the festival circuit for its practical gore and its willingness to be genuinely unpleasant company. Reviews have not been unanimous, and the reactions that praise it and the reactions that flinch from it are describing the same qualities: Ozploitation influence, punk energy, women who are allowed to be difficult, and a tone that does not want you comfortable. Bailey Spalding, Tahlee Fereday, Alexandra Jensen and Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn lead the younger cast, with Ben O’Toole and Steve Le Marquand among the adults making the night considerably worse.
Best for: Anyone whose ideal Friday is a bad decision escalating for ninety minutes. This is the bloodiest new thing on streaming this weekend.
The Burning Moon
Where to Watch: Screambox Available: Added August 28, 2026 (originally released 1992)
Now we go into the crate. Olaf Ittenbach directed, wrote and starred in this German underground splatter film, in which a troubled young man tells his little sister two bedtime stories. One is about a serial killer. The other involves a murderous priest and then keeps going well past the point where you assumed it would stop.
Nobody is going to tell you this is a polished piece of filmmaking. Its reputation rests entirely on how far the practical effects are willing to go, and the answer is genuinely further than most people expect. Consider this a warning rather than a tease. This is nasty DIY extremity, not mainstream horror with a hard edge.
Best for: Viewers who hear “too much gore” and take it as a personal recommendation.
There’s Nothing Out There
Where to Watch: Screambox Available: Added August 28, 2026 (originally released 1991)
Rolfe Kanefsky made this as a very young man, and it is the weekend’s best discovery. Young people go to a house in the woods. One of them is a horror-movie obsessive who clocks every warning sign, recognizes the shape of the situation immediately, and tries to tell the others they are behaving like characters in a slasher. Nobody listens. Then a frog-like alien creature shows up and complicates his argument.
The historical interest here is real. This was playing with characters who understand horror rules years before Scream turned that idea into a cultural event. It did not invent self-aware horror and it is not trying to claim otherwise, but it is an interesting early data point, and it is funnier than its budget suggests.
Best for: Horror-comedy people, creature-feature people, and anybody who can forgive monster effects made for roughly the price of a used car.
Nightmare Man
Where to Watch: Screambox Available: Added August 28, 2026 (originally released 2006)
Screambox is adding two Kanefsky films on the same day, which is either a curatorial decision or an accident, and honestly both are funny.
This one is the mid-2000s entry. Ellen is convinced a creature she calls the Nightmare Man wants to kill her. Her husband and her doctors are convinced the problem is inside her head. While she is being transported for psychiatric treatment, she ends up isolated, and the thing that may or may not be imaginary starts hunting her. The film keeps the question live for a while, which is the most interesting thing about it. Contemporary reactions treated it as knowing B-horror with more twists than it strictly needed. Blythe Metz, Luciano Szafir, Tiffany Shepis and Richard Moll star.
Best for: Direct-to-video nostalgists, Tiffany Shepis completists, and anyone who wants something cheap and strange on in the background.
Closed Circuit
Where to Watch: Screambox Available: Added August 28, 2026 (originally released 1978)
The deepest cut on the list by a wide margin. Giuliano Montaldo directed this Italian made-for-television mystery, in which an audience is watching a Spaghetti Western and one of them is apparently shot dead in his seat. Police seal the theater, start working through the audience and staff, and run into a question that gets less answerable the longer they look at it: where did the bullet come from?
The film plays with the boundary between the image on screen and the room watching it, which puts it in conversation with a lot of haunted-media horror that came much later. The film has a documented connection to Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” though it is not an adaptation of the story. Italian television horror is a genuinely under-explored corner of the genre, and this is a good doorway into it.
Best for: Euro-genre obsessives, movies-about-movies people, and anyone who likes a supernatural mystery that refuses to explain itself quickly.