With more than 40 kills, a masked murderer called The Doctor, a mandatory corporate New Year’s Eve party from hell and a surprisingly personal story beating underneath all that blood, filmmakers P.J. Starks and Eric Huskisson have built the kind of independent horror movie that understands exactly why genre fans keep coming back for another kill.
There are plenty of horror movies built around characters making catastrophically bad decisions, but New Fears Eve begins with something that might be even more terrifying to anyone who has ever stared at a corporate calendar invitation they desperately wanted to decline: a mandatory office party.
From there, filmmakers P.J. Starks and Eric Huskisson do what any self-respecting horror obsessives would do with the premise. They add an increasingly gruesome body count, a mysterious killer known as The Doctor, enough practical gore to make old-school slasher devotees lean toward the screen instead of away from it, and an ensemble caught inside a New Year’s Eve celebration that becomes considerably less concerned with champagne once people start dying.
The setup alone would be enough to make New Fears Eve deliciously appealing to those of us who believe holiday horror should be treated as its own sacred subgenre, but talking with Starks and Huskisson reveals something considerably more interesting beneath the film’s blood-soaked surface. What initially presents itself as an outrageous horror-comedy gradually becomes a movie about loss, sudden change, fractured trust and the strange things human beings do to survive pain, all filtered through the language of a slasher movie.
That mixture has carried the Kentucky-made film considerably further than its creators initially knew it would travel. After festivals, theatrical screenings and its digital life through the Cineverse and Screambox ecosystem, New Fears Eve reaches another major milestone on September 15, 2026, when Cineverse releases the film on Blu-ray with an extensive collection of behind-the-scenes material.
For two filmmakers who were initially told that a physical release probably was not happening, being able to put the movie on a shelf feels like something much larger than another distribution window.
The Audience That Terrified the Filmmakers
Horror fans know the feeling of watching a movie with an audience so well that we almost develop another sense for it. We notice the nervous laughter before a kill, the collective inhale when someone walks toward a door they absolutely should not open, and that beautifully uncomfortable silence when a movie has just shown everyone something so deranged that the room needs a few seconds to process it.
For the filmmaker sitting somewhere inside that same theater, however, silence can feel like death.
Starks and Huskisson vividly remember the film’s first official public screening at the Chicago Horror Film Festival, where the packed room became an accidental psychological experiment for the filmmakers. New Fears Eve is deliberately funny, but some of the jokes were not immediately producing the kind of audible response they expected. The kills were landing, but stretches of character development and story were being absorbed much more quietly.
Starks began convincing himself that the movie had completely died in front of him.
He remembered reaching the point where he believed, “These people fucking hated the movie.” After the screening, the Q&A was relatively quiet as well, seemingly confirming every nightmare going through his head.
Then something very horror-movie happened: the apparent ending turned out not to be the ending at all.
Once Starks stepped outside, audience members began approaching the filmmakers to tell them how funny the film was, how much they enjoyed the story and how strongly it had played for them. People wanted photographs and interviews, and before the weekend was over, New Fears Eve had won Best Horror Comedy at the festival.
The film continued traveling through screenings in markets including New York, Indianapolis and New Jersey, while its hometown Owensboro premiere drew more than 600 people according to the filmmakers.
It is one of those stories that perfectly captures the sometimes bizarre relationship between horror creators and horror audiences. We are not always polite viewers. Sometimes a great kill makes us laugh when we probably should not. Sometimes we stare in silence because we are processing something insane. Sometimes the highest compliment a horror filmmaker can receive is an audience member turning to the person beside them with an expression that essentially asks, what the hell did we just watch?
For New Fears Eve, Chicago became proof that silence does not necessarily mean rejection, especially when you have made the kind of movie designed to leave people trying to decide whether they should laugh, recoil or applaud.
Behind the Blood Is a Movie About Surviving Loss
Strip away The Doctor, the office-party nightmare and the outrageous deaths, and the most compelling element of New Fears Eve may be the emotional material Starks buried beneath the carnage.
The screenplay did not begin as a horror-comedy. Starks told New Hollywood Magazine that his original intention was something more atmospheric and straightforward, pointing toward the kind of sustained tension associated with films such as The Strangers. Then real life started finding its way onto the page.
During that period, Starks was processing a series of deeply personal experiences, including divorce, issues of trust and his mother’s battle with cancer. His mother would later pass away after the film had already been completed. Rather than abandoning the darkness surrounding him, Starks processed it through the creative mechanism he says has long helped him navigate serious situations: humor.
That context completely changes the way The Doctor can be read.
Starks explained that the killer was never designed simply as another masked figure whose primary narrative purpose was keeping the audience guessing about the person underneath the costume. Instead, The Doctor functions as an embodiment of sudden disruption, the kind of event that enters a person’s life without permission and instantly divides existence into the period before it happened and everything that follows.
Cancer can do that. Death can do that. Betrayal can do that.
A serial killer obviously represents that disruption in the most exaggerated language possible, but that is exactly what horror has always been uniquely equipped to accomplish. The genre externalizes fears that would otherwise be difficult to touch. Grief becomes a ghost. Trauma becomes a monster. Loss becomes something with a knife that can suddenly enter the room.
“The Doctor represents something very specific,” Starks explained while discussing sudden loss, death and life changes and the way those forces can alter relationships.
That emotional architecture also lives inside the characters. Starks described Moses as an unfiltered extension of himself, while Brian carries a more analytical side of his personality and Leslie draws inspiration from his wife. Those divisions allow the screenplay to explore different reactions to chaos without turning New Fears Eve into a solemn meditation disguised as something else.
Because make no mistake: this movie still wants to get blood everywhere.
The production reportedly worked with a budget of roughly $93,000, supported through crowdfunding and local backing, while packing the film with more than 40 kills that Starks emphasized were achieved practically. Spectrum News reported that festival viewers sometimes estimated a significantly larger production cost after seeing the finished movie.
For horror fans, that practical-effects commitment matters. There is an entire sensory vocabulary to tangible gore that digital blood rarely recreates: the weight of an effect, the messiness of it, the actor physically responding to something occurring in the same space, and that wonderfully disgusting moment when you catch yourself wondering exactly how the effects team accomplished what you just saw.
That puts New Fears Eve in conversation with the very tradition Starks clearly loves. In an essay about his filmmaking journey, he wrote about spending years chasing the lightning captured by Halloween and observing how a newer generation of filmmakers now looks toward movies like Terrifier as evidence that uncompromising independent horror can still explode into the culture.
New Fears Eve does not need to imitate either film to understand their lesson: horror audiences can tell when the people making the movie genuinely love the genre they are playing with.
Two Directors, One Bloody Playground
There is another reason New Fears Eve feels handcrafted rather than assembled by committee, and that is the long creative relationship between Starks and Huskisson.
The two filmmakers co-founded Blood Moon Pictures in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 2015, building the company around regional filmmaking, local and regional talent and collaborations with established genre professionals.
By the time they made New Fears Eve, they had spent years learning not only how the other person works, but also exactly how annoying the other person can probably become when neither wants to concede a creative point.
When New Hollywood Magazine asked what actually happens when the pair disagrees instead of giving them the safer “what is co-directing like?” question, Huskisson admitted that Starks is difficult to outlast in an argument, although experience has also taught him when a creative disagreement is worth pushing and when trusting his collaborator produces the stronger result.
That dynamic does not mean Huskisson simply follows the screenplay. His role includes challenging whether a joke will translate visually, questioning material that may work differently on a page than it does once performers, cameras and timing enter the equation, and proposing physical solutions that make scenes play better on screen. One example involved replacing explanatory dialogue with physical comedy, allowing the joke to become something the audience could actually watch unfold.
Starks, meanwhile, approaches writing with his background as an editor and videographer influencing the construction of a scene before photography begins. He described mentally editing sequences while writing them, already imagining how individual shots and movements will eventually connect, while still leaving room for collaborators such as director of photography Alex Clark to improve those ideas once everyone is on set.
That balance matters enormously in independent horror, where ambition almost always exceeds time, money or both. Filmmakers cannot afford to treat every problem as something that can magically disappear later.
Huskisson offered perhaps the best filmmaking advice to emerge from the entire conversation when the dreaded phrase “fix it in post” came up: do not rely on fixing everything in post, especially when the person making that promise is also going to be the person sitting at the computer dealing with it afterward.
For all their disagreements, there is obvious creative shorthand between the pair, and that history is part of why the excess in New Fears Eve feels deliberate. These are filmmakers who understand what movie they made, what kind of audience they made it for and, perhaps most importantly, that they are not required to sand down every strange edge in pursuit of universal approval.
As Starks joked about their approach to humor, “If they don’t laugh, they’re not our demographic.”
Any longtime horror fan should understand the philosophy immediately.
The genre would be considerably less interesting if every horror film tried to be for everybody.
The Doctor Is Coming Home
The latest chapter in New Fears Eve may be particularly satisfying for collectors because it almost did not happen.
Starks and Huskisson told New Hollywood Magazine that when the film initially went to Cineverse, they understood that a physical release was unlikely. As people who still value physical media, that was disappointing, but distribution required making practical decisions.
Then the conversation unexpectedly reopened.
After months of uncertainty and follow-up, confirmation finally arrived that the Blu-ray was moving forward.
Now the countdown is almost over.
Cineverse releases New Fears Eve on Blu-ray September 15, 2026, with a widescreen presentation, 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio and 13 bonus featurettes covering casting, screenwriting, practical effects, the creation of The Doctor, a chase sequence, the supporting cast and other corners of the production that horror collectors actually want to see when they buy physical media.
Among the extras are Drafting Death: Scripting the Screams, Silent But Deadly: Creating a New Slasher Icon, Hippocratic Hurt: A PhD in Torture, New Year, New Fear: A Killer Creation and The Great Escape: Anatomy of a Chase Scene.
That release lands after the movie established a broader life through festivals and streaming. As of September 2026, the film is also listed as available through platforms including Amazon Prime Video, the Screambox Amazon Channel and other digital services, giving audiences several ways to enter The Doctor’s increasingly unpleasant New Year’s celebration.
The cast gives longtime genre watchers even more reason to clock in for the party, with Felissa Rose, Dave Sheridan, Hannah Fierman and Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick appearing alongside Lily-Claire Harvey, Turner Vaughn, Matthew Tichenor, Jay Woolston, Alyssa Rhoads, Sonya Delormier, Cody Webb and Jesse McDonald as The Doctor.
For me, the enduring appeal of New Fears Eve comes down to something more fundamental than counting kills, even though any movie boasting north of 40 practical ones certainly knows how to get my attention. What makes independent horror exciting is watching filmmakers take the things they have actually lived through, the movies that made them fall in love with the genre and whatever resources they can pull together, then transform all of it into something unmistakably theirs.
Starks and Huskisson made a movie where grief can wear a mask, trauma can interrupt an office party and emotional survival can coexist with a kill outrageous enough to have a theater simultaneously laughing and recoiling.
That is horror.
Not because the movie is interested only in frightening us, but because horror has always given filmmakers permission to take the ugliest, strangest and most uncomfortable pieces of being alive and turn them into entertainment we somehow experience together.
At midnight, New Fears Eve may be counting bodies, but underneath all that blood, it is also counting the things we survive.
And now The Doctor is officially making house calls on Blu-ray.
Where to Follow and Watch
Fans can follow Blood Moon Pictures on Instagram at @bloodmoonpictures15 and their official SITE for updates from Starks, Huskisson and the company’s continuing slate of independent horror projects. The account is consistently identified by the filmmakers and Blood Moon coverage as the company’s official Instagram presence.
New Fears Eve arrives on Blu-ray September 15, 2026, through Cineverse and is currently available through multiple digital and streaming outlets.
If slashers, practical effects, emerging filmmakers, horror icons and the next generation of genre storytelling are your kind of obsession too, stay with New Hollywood Magazine as we continue spotlighting the filmmakers, performers and creatives pushing entertainment forward rather than simply repeating what has already been done.
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