1. So I had a few weeks off between jobs a few years ago so I decided to try Uber. The worst experience was at 3am I picked up 2 couples from the stretch of bars downtown after some big country concert. The guys were super nice, the one in the front seat even had the same 1st name as me and we were chatting. Turns out that the guys met the girls at the bar and they were all heading back to the girls hotel. About halfway through the ride one girl decided she wanted McDonald’s and since it was her Uber (it was the guys) I had to take her to McDonald’s. The other girl said she didn’t want McDonald’s and she just wanted to get laid.

They keep arguing and I keep talking to the guy in the front seat until the guy in the backseat tells me I need to pull over. I look back and see the girls fighting in my backseat. I pullover and we get the girls out, somehow they got loose and started fighting again in the middle of the street. I call the cops and by the time the cop got there we have them separated again (McDonald’s girl tried to bang her friends head against the concrete).

I tell the cop that it’s McDonald’s girl that is the aggressor so he goes to arrest her and she starts resisting so I help the cop restrain her. Once we get her in the backseat she starts trying to kick the windows out so we get her back out of the car because the cop wanted to hog tie her. Finally 2 other cops show up and I’m relieved of my duties. She just kept yelling about how she’s a lawyer and she wasn’t read her Miranda rights.

I turned off the app, took the 2 guys home and never gave another ride.

2. I took a guy to a nearby town across the river at 3am.

When he got out he came to the driver’s window and said “Ever see pure evil? I am the reincarnation of Jeffry Dahmer!”

Then he walked away down the dark street.

3. I drove a cab in the ghetto in the 90s. This stuff doesn’t even rate on a week to week basis.

I had a guy get in my cab once with a large woman’s purse full of crack cocaine. I don’t mean he had a lot of crack, I mean he had 1 gallon ziplock bag full of crack stuffed into a giant women’s handbag. Big spender though, he tipped me in powder cocaine. Do you think I told the police? Hell no because in the 90s in the ghetto that’s how people got murdered.

I had a stripper get into a fight with a prostitute/drug dealer over drug money that the stripper had hidden in her vagina.

I had a passenger that decided my car would look better without its rear windows so he laid down in the back seat and started kicking them out. I had to call the dispatcher on a CB to call the cops because I didn’t have a cell phone and then he attacked me. I had to take off my seatbelt, crawl out of the passenger door to get away from him at which point he climbed over the seat and proceeded to try to hotwire my cab (read: mangle the wiring to the lights and dash controls) until the cops arrived and maced him through the busted out back window. He screamed bloody murder like he was on fire and pissed himself and my drivers’ seat.

I had a drunk try to rob me with a knife for the money his friend, who was in the car, just paid me for the fare. The friend gets upset at knife wielding guy, apologizes and tells me not to mind him because he’s just crazy. The friend manages to talk the guy into getting out of the cab and then begs me not to call the police on them because he can’t afford to go back to jail.

And that’s not even what made me decide to quit. That one was the time a pregnant hooker got in the car, told me she had HIV and that she needed to get away from where she was but had nowhere to go. (not necessarily in that order) I drove to a donut shop, went inside and got a phonebook and called every church listed in the phone book and not a single one of them would do anything for her. That’s the only thing I could think of doing. I quit because I couldn’t handle seeing so much misery every day and really nobody seemed to be doing a damn thing about it.

4. Not Uber but Lyft. Around when I first started doing Lyft full time I decided to try the night scene out in a town that had a bunch of bars. Around 12 AM I ended up getting a ride where the pickup took me 20 minutes away to a bad neighborhood. As soon as I get to the “apartment” complex I call the passenger and tell them I am there because I have a bad feeling about this neighborhood and need to get out ASAP. The passenger answers and tells me they will be right out which relieves me a little but I’m still on edge sitting there in my car. Lyft has a 5 minute timer you have to wait before you can “no-show” the passenger and leave. The timer ends up running out but I usually wait a little longer and give another call. I call a second time but someone else answers the phone this time saying they didn’t order a Lyft. As I hang up I see two guys in hoodies coming toward my car and one seems to be reaching in his waistband for something so I no-show the ride and nope the fuck out of there. I made $10 off the no-show but I was done driving nights for a while after that.

5. 3am. Drive up to an old bar. Guy and his friend get in and immediately start laughing. I don’t question because I figured they were drunk, and from the smell, stoned too. About half way to their destination, the guys friend asked me for my wallet because he left his driver’s license in it. I started laughing because that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. My friend a few months prior bought a new wallet and left his old one in the my car, so I put a single dollar in it and handed it to him. He hopped out of the car and ran a few feet away before saying “What the hell? 1 dollar? You’re broke as hell!”

6. My second night driving ever. 2am. Pulled up to a clearing in the woods in the middle of Denville, NJ. I had to go partially off road to get to the spot, I don’t even know how it showed up on my map. I pull up to a spot that looks like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Theres a busted old barn thats dry-rotted and falling apart, and there is the rear bucket of a landscaping truck HANGING from a tree FILLED with beer cans, I mean FILLED.

All of a sudden I see my rider come out of the woods, chugging a beer with his other hand in the air signaling to me. He gets in and doesn’t say a word. We start driving and I go

“How was your night man?” just to break the awkwardness. He responded very…normally…”Good man, just hung out with some friends at the bar got really drunk and met some chicks. Then we all went out into the parking lot and dropped acid.”

….”Oh…wow!” Now I’m wondering if this dude is hallucinating that I’m Satan taking him to hell in my Honda Pilot Demon Chariot .

“So..How did you end up in the woods man? There are no bars near where I picked you up…” He was completely silent, didn’t say a word. I glanced into the rear view mirror and he was DEAD STARING INTO MY FUCKING SOUL…

I looked back at the road, at this point we were in a pretty well populated area so I felt safer. He was silent for the remaining 14 minutes of the ride until about 2 minutes from his destination he asked me if we could stop at the convenience store on the way. I obliged and he asked if I wanted anything, I declined and as I dropped him off he gave me a really nice $10 tip and said “Thanks Maria”.. I’m a dude.

The second worst was last year I was borderline sexually assaulted by another dude, but that wasn’t really weird just scary..

7. Picked up a girl at a motel and she was going to another motel (prostitute) she said she wanted me to pull up to the room and she’d give me $10 to wait 5 minutes. If she came up within 5 minutes we’d leave and go somewhere else.

Said she was nervous about this John.

She gives me $10, goes in. Comes out like 2 minutes later and asks me to take her to a waffle house.

She offered me a $20 tip and asked me if I wanted to eat with her.

I said sure since it was like 4 AM and the night was dying down anyway. Left her at the waffle house and went home.

Had some interesting stories.

8. Was driving an afternoon in the late summer. I live in a beach town so it was perfect weather and people everywhere. Went to a pick up and saw a guy and two women. Picked them up and they clearly had been day drinking, just laughing and having a good time.

It was a husband and wife and the wife’s cousin. They all were clearly sexed up a little from the booze, joking about having sex (the husband and wife). The guy makes a joke to his wife’s cousin saying “if I had met you first we’d be married”. Then the wife said to the cousin, “if you weren’t my cousin I’d let you join in when we get home”. The guy and the cousin starting laughing their asses off, and the guy said to the cousin, “ I wouldn’t mind if you didn’t”. They all laughed like crazy until I got to their house a few blocks away.

This was only maybe a 5 minute drive. Between the fare and tip I made about $7. Was definitely worth it, I’ll gladly drive them again if I see them this summer.

9. About a year ago I was driving a little before midnight and picked up someone in a somewhat run down part of town. The guy gets in the back, and didn’t respond to my greeting. He was wearing a really awkward black coat of some sort which had pink fuzz lined on the shoulders and arms. The first thing I noticed was an absolutely overbearing stench of straight up shit. I started to sniff and cough because it was so powerful and rancid. He began to quietly snicker, and I could see a grin form on his face with the little lights I had in the back of the car. He had a massive nose, and very ‘rubbery’ features. I said “hey man, whats with that smell? Its making me sick” He looked up into the rear view mirror and I could see his eyes were bloodshot. He was staring at me in the mirror with this creepy smile. He softly said “just open a window and keep driving.” He began digging in his backpack and pulled a phone out, turned the flash light on and pointed it at his chest. He opened his coat, and I saw what looked like some type of writing and symbols of mud all over his chest. He was holding his phone with one hand and picking this ‘mud’ off his chest. Then he loudly barked “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A SCAT PARTY? IF NOT THEN SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH!” Just then we rolled up to a red light, he cackled loudly and ran out of the car into the woods. I was completely dumbfounded in disbelief. I got out and looked in the back seat, where I found his backpack and this dried shit he had picked off his chest. I opened the backpack and there it was full of shit covered clothes. I immediately went home,cleaned my car, got super drunk and took a shower trying to forget everything that just happened.

10. Picked up a couple from a wedding reception for a long trip. One rule I had was to let the passenger(s) initiate conversation.

So besides the usual pleasantries, nothing, which is unusual for a couple.

I heard some kissing, pretty common, then some movement, and before long I realized these two were fucking. I recall there being an old towel in the boot (don’t ask, I was the driver not the owner) I said “uh, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but if I pull over and stop the meter, I can get you both a towel” and they’re like “why? We aren’t doing anything?” so I said “ok, well i’m pretty relaxed with what goes on here, legally you cant drink in a cab, but I allow it as long as the person takes the empties, and if you wanted to continue with your activities, i’m going to need to give you guys a towel. If theres any mess, I have to charge a cleaning fee on top of whats already going to be a long fare otherwise”. After a few seconds I hear “alright then”.

So I get it out the boot, pass it over, and get driving again. $120 fare, the guy gives me $150 and tells me to keep it. They weren’t nasty, I think they just thought they were being secretive.

11. Picked up a dude and his girlfriend in a well known bar district early evening during the summer. Dude is fine but gf is fucking wasted. I’m talking slurring speech, can’t walk, etc. Dude tells me where he’s going and I start the trip. As soon as a I take off she says she wants to go back. Dude keeps telling her that they’re going home but she keeps saying “go back go back go back.” Then she starts saying she doesn’t feel well. I tell her that if she feels like she is going to throw up, let me know so I can pull over and let her out. She says pull over so I do. She gets out and then just starts cussing me out for no reason and kicks at my door and the side of the car all while the dude is trying to hold her back. I take off and leave them there. First 1 star review I ever gave a passenger.

12. Picked up 2 passengers from a Halloween party after midnight in Hollywood. One wearing a full Batman costume and the other wearing a full Spider-Man costume, masks included. They didn’t say a word and just pointed to the GPS on where to take them. The ride went all the way to Palm Springs (2+ hours), not one word.

The entire ride he said was scared for his life. They didn’t even put in the address of a house, he just dropped them off on a random side street of a neighborhood. They got out when they arrived, said nothing, tipped $200 and that was the end of it. After thinking about it once they left, his conclusion is that they must have been somewhat famous as he picked them up at a large house in a gated neighborhood and dropped them off outside a gated neighborhood.

13. I have a female cousin who very briefly drove for Uber and she said one large male passenger smelled her hair by leaning into the front seat, called her “little girl” the whole ride and tried to convince her to change the destination from a bar to the middle of the goddamn woods.

She no longer drives for Uber.

14. I picked up a guy who wouldn’t stop talking to himself and kept mentioning he had taken a bunch of unknown pills earlier. He wasn’t aware of reality at all and would randomly get angry at me, screaming that I should be telling him jokes and entertaining him since I am his driver. When we were almost to his destination, he opened the door and jumped out of my car while it was still moving. Luckily I was near stopping and only going around 5mph when he did. He didn’t get hurt.

15. I was an Uber driver for about a year. Picked up a drunk younger guy at one bar to take him to another bar. We pull up to said bar and it is closed. Instead of staying logged in the app, the drunk slams a $100 bill on my dashboard and asks me to take him home. I actually attempt to do the right thing, but he insisted. I take his $100 and proceed to his house. On the way, he tells me how he is a R & D scientist in the medical field, and this is where the story gets odd. He also goes on to tell me how he’s in the mafia and killed me a man by stabbing him in the stomach. He then proceeds to slam another $100 bill on my dash and asks if I’ll hang out with him for a little while. The guy was smaller then I was and he was quite drunk so I figured “what the hell”. We get to the guys house, which is a mansion, and then sat in the car for about an hour shooting the shit. I then took my $200 and went home left to ponder if I had just become a prostitute and hope to god that was the guys actual house and that he wasn’t currently skinning the actual occupants.

16. Went to pick up an Austin in NJ. It was about 2am, so it’s my last ride. He’s a little far out, but not awful (I’m pretty rural anyway). I meet him at his spot near the woods and he’s in some sort of gown. Almost like a graduation gown, but it wasn’t black. He then waves and four fucking kids (around ten?) come out in solid white with another person in a gown just like his and they all climb in.

They are all silent other than Austin, who is giving a monologue on the importance of some animal they were with. After about ten minutes, I look back, and I shit you not, every single kid was glaring at me in my rear view mirror. All. Frickin. Four. Immediately Austin asks to halt the ride and asks for a new drop off, about two minutes away. Pretty confident the other gent in the gown was staring at me too, but I couldn’t see his eyes. I tremble and ask him to update the app. He says he won’t, as it’s a discrete location. I’m shivering and do that trick where you call a friend and let them listen in. I get to the location and they all pile out, except for that Austin guy, who looks at me dead in the eyes, then at my upside-down phone, then back at my eyes. He then got out and went into the woods.

Wtf man.

17. I was driving in Virginia Beach late one night and I get a ride that I have to pick up from the busiest bar and intersection on the beach. So I get there, call the guy to let him know he’ll have to cross the street because it’s shut down for some kind of event. He doesn’t answer. We get paid for the time we wait, so I just sit there calling and texting him over and over. After about 25 minutes I ended the ride because it had kicked me out of the waiting screen after a while. As I’m stopping for gas 20 minutes later, he starts blowing up my phone asking where I am and telling me to come back. He was super drunk and told me it was my fault because he didn’t hear his phone ring. I reported it to Lyft since I’m sure it gave him the option to one star me because the ride had technically started. Best part: his destination was over 2 hours away in the middle of a snowy December. He got really aggressive on the phone so it was a little rattling.

18. In-app tipping became a thing in Australia a couple of months ago, and keep in mind that tipping isn’t a thing in Australia. This story involves an American , who I guess was a tourist or here on business.

A few weeks back I picked up this guy in the city, and his pickup location was somewhere I couldn’t get to (closed to traffic). So I send him a message saying this, and I’m maybe 100m away on a side street, he’ll need to come to me as I can’t do any better.

He walks around to me, and it’s pretty obvious he’s pissed at me. Starts a rant about how bad my service is and it’s pretty terrible that I made him walk to me. Try to tell him that where he was is not a street I can actually drive down, but he goes on and on about not understanding the service business and all this shit. Gave up and just wrote him off as an arrogant yank cunt.

Drop him off at his hotel, 1-star him and move on. Look later and he tipped me $10 on a $5 ride. No idea if he felt bad afterwards and it was his way of saying sorry, or just the American tipping thing kicked in.

19. Not really creepy or weird but definitely unexpected and a bit bizarre at the time. Three older women paid me to take them an hour ride to a casino and then by the hour to hang out and give them a safe ride once they were done gambling. I was in school at the time and one of the ladies ended up helping me restructure my resume and this Monday I’ll be starting me new job as a Data Engineer.

20. Just for a positive weird one, ended up becoming a close family friend to three generations of an immigrant family. Grandpa was the only one to order a ride through Uber proper, enjoyed talking to me and decided he’d rather just pay cash to have me come get him to run errands. Not that weird of a request and it was Summer in a college town, not a bad deal.

He was there hashing out details for his daughter/granddaughter about to move to town, figured (correctly) I’d get along well with his daughter who didn’t know anyone in the area. Arranged it so I’d get them to/from the airport for cash whenever one flew in, and over time he was right. Friends with her now, dude’s wife loves talking to me to/from the airport, and even the little granddaughter asks about me if she hasn’t seen me for a while. Drove for about a year, and that’s the most interesting story I have from it for sure.

21. Ooh, ohh, got one.

I’d been driving for a little while, few months or so, and pull up to this bar with a man and two obviously inebriated middle-aged women. The guy says hey, it’s my account, but I’m vouching for these two, can you take em home. I’m like sure.

So we’re heading down the road, and they’re shit-faced. I’m talkin, it’s no wonder this guy was kickin them out of the bar, basically; and the one was shittier than the other.

So we’re goin down the road, and the one in the middle back seat starts just asking me all these weird questions like “How do you know the people you pick up aren’t some kinda *weirdo* crazies or something??” And I’m thinkin: “uhhhh… WuT?!” But tryna play it off, you know, by this point I’m driving, going 60 down the freeway, and I just kind of mumble some kind of non-committal answer – but she’s gettin all aggressive like for some reason.

Her friend’s trying to calm her down, while the first one straight-up says something to the effect: “What would you do if someone just *attacked* you while you were driving…?!”

Mind you, at this point, she had also been making numerous physical movements which to me appeared to be either her “mimicing”, or actually *going* for some kind of weapon of some kind or another, like reaching down under her shirt/ belt region and shit. When out of the blue she shouts “What if I just STABBED YOU IN THE NECK RIGHT NOW!!!”

Which is at what point I was like “Whoa!! – That’s it!!”

Her friend by this time was “trying” to half-ass control her wild friend, but again, she was fucked up herself. So I pulled over at the first exit I could see, my heart beating about out of my damn chest, thinking I’m about to get freakin Stabbed in the neck at any moment. Luckily there was a Chevron gas station right there, I Skkrrrrt!!! Stopped and said “This ride ends now!!!!!”

As humorous as it may sound, they actually looked at me dumbfounded, like, “are you really kicking us out?” I said I was serious, ya’ll gotta go. The other woman actually seemed to have sobered up a bit once we pulled over and realized I wasn’t playin around. Her friend looked at me pissed for a second and then was just like “Okay.”

They got out, and I drove off, heart beating fast as fuck..

That shit scared the goddam piss outta me.

I didn’t drive on the clock again for weeks…

Anyway, usually alcohol has something to do with the worst stuff, I’d imagine. Now I try to drive earlier in the day so I don’t have to deal with that.

22. My brother is an Uber driver.

He dropped a guy, dressed up to the nines, with a bouquet of beautiful roses, box of chocolates, at his fiance’s address.

She was utterly surprised that he broke the engagement.

23. This happened to my friend. He drove a drunk girl home and she begged him to walk her to the door. He did then she begged him to walk her to the bed. He did Then she begged him to fuck her. He did. Ever since then I’ve been trying to drive for Uber but I don’t think it’s worth it.

24. I was doing Uber here in Miami, some chick came into my car to be dropped off at work. Asked me if I ever lived anywhere else told her Atlanta, then she says ohh yeah hotlanta, ended up giving me her number. After work she came over, we had sex, she vomited on my bed.

25. Drove for a bit a few years ago and one night I picked up a dude and his buddy around a popular bar area who were pretty drunk. They were going back to a rich part of town so I took the ride hoping for a nice tip. They started talking shit close to home and when we got there they started beating the crap out of each other in the driveway as they got out of the car. I left pretty quick.

26. Pulled up to a hotel and women came to my window. And I said you Tracy she said yeah I am. I said are you going to such and such address and she is like no I’m not going there. Then another women comes to my window knocking on it and says I’m Tracy. I said oh shit well who the fuck is this other lady? Ended up driving the real Tracy to her destination and then dropped off the stranger where she wanted to go for 20 cash. So basically picked up and drove a stranger. Overall bad decision

27. I once picked up two kids from a jewish high school on a wednesday night. They spent the first half of the ride talking about colleges and where they were going to go. Then it got quiet and I was treated to the ambient sounds of face sucking and fucking UNDER THE PANTS FINGER BANGING.

Then they had the self-awareness to get out of the car at the end saying thank you and CLEARLY thought they got away with it. I gagged and wiped down the backseat just in case.

28. St. Patrick’s Day, I get a bunch of drunk college ladies in my car. The three in back are cheerful drunks, chatting and laughing. The one riding next to me is motionless. For the first 20 minutes of the trip, this woman doesn’t move a muscle. Her phone is on on her lap, but she isn’t looking at it or touching the screen at all. Having had similar situations before, my concern was that she would revive in a spontaneous shower of vomit.

Instead, as we’re heading into the downtown tunnel, the aforementioned song pops up on my playlist. Dr. Frankenstein would have killed for the resulting resurrection. The previously motionless young lady gasps loudly, shoots forward in her seat, and eagerly asks me to turn it up. I nearly drove into the wall of the tunnel. The rest of the trip was spent telling me how she was a huge fan of Jack Black, and how she recognized the song from School of Rock.

29. I’m pretty sure I picked up a young girl (~19) that was running away from home (or worse)… The entire ride she was talking to some guy on the phone talking about how she was so tired of all the crap she was getting at home, how she hated her parents… She talked about how she wasn’t sure how she was going to support herself and that she only needed this person’s help for a few days…. She wasn’t exactly in very good shape herself (looked a little dirty and not very well kept)…. The whole ride was very weird and then it was made worse by the fact that I was dropping her off at some really rundown motel in the middle of nowhere… Made me feel like she was possibly being abducted… I checked the news for a while to make sure I didn’t see anything… But to this day I wonder what the heck was actually happening.

30. One time I was driving this pregnant lady to a strip club and she said she was looking for her husband. I asked why her husband would be here and she replied saying that this is where she left him last month.

Let me rewind a little, this all started during gym class.

Before that day, I had religiously worn pads during that dreadful time of the month. For some reason, my mom was a stickler about me using tampons, something to do with religion and virginity. I tried to tell her a million times that’s not how it worked, but she refused to budge on the feminine hygiene debate.

So, I reluctantly agreed and wore the pads she bought me, or in her words, sanitary napkins.

On this particular day during gym class, we had a guest speaker come in to talk to us about puberty. I was a freshman in high school, so this information had been ingrained in my memory since I was nine years old. Although it was boring, everyone was excited about getting out of running for the day.

Who could have asked for an easier gym class?

By the end of the talk, we all got little goodie bags with deodorant, face wash, and low and behold – tampons. It would be a lie to say I wasn’t somewhat intrigued to try them out. I knew I had to keep it a secret from my overbearing mom though. If she saw them she would surely take them from me. I could practically hear her voice now, “No, Maria! Your body is a temple! You can’t taint your purity with this!”

If only I had listened to her, oh god, if only I had listened to her…I wouldn’t be in the predicament I’m in now.

The cramps didn’t start right away.

The first time I inserted the tampon, it felt a little uncomfortable, but from what my friends told me, that was normal. The uncomfortable feeling began to get worse though, soon it turned into a constant itch. The itch would leave me squirming in my seat, then racing to the bathroom to repeatedly wipe myself.

My friends told me I probably just had a yeast infection, so I went to my local Walgreens and snatched a box of Monistat over the counter. Except, that didn’t help at all, not even a little bit. The itch started to grow into a sharp pain that wouldn’t go away.

At this point, I decided to stop using the tampons all together, even though my friends swore it wasn’t the tampons causing the harm. I honestly was just too uncomfortable having one in at this point.

Shortly after I stopped using the tampons is when the bleeding started; every day, all day. What was once a four-day, light period, had turned into a heavy, painful period all month long; a period that ceased to end.

I was genuinely starting to worry about my health at this point, but I was too afraid to confess to my mom about using the tampons.

During the presentation in gym class, I remembered the speaker mentioning irregular periods, and that they were normal. I chalked all my odd symptoms up to this and decided to brush it off. Perhaps if I just waited it out, I’d be back to normal in no time.

I was wrong.

The continual bleeding started to get heavier and darker. Eventually, the blood was starting to look like a black tarry substance. Was this normal? It couldn’t be…could it?

I let this continue for 3 months. Yes, I know what you are thinking. How could I be so oblivious that something was wrong? Well, I’ll tell you how I was scared. I was so scared of what my mother and doctor would tell me that I pretended like nothing was wrong.

I couldn’t be abnormal.

Perhaps, if I pretended like everything was ok, it would eventually be ok; that would become my reality.

By now, I had become used to soaking through my pads. I’d carefully wrap them in enough toilet paper so that my mom wouldn’t be suspect to the black tarry substance.

Then out of nowhere, things became worse.

The sharp pains began to radiate down my legs and up my torso into my chest. It felt like lightning was striking my body, and after each strike of pain, these intense cramps would rumble through my uterus, the thunder to my lightning.

At this point, I couldn’t wear the pads anymore. I was soaking through them within the hour, so I started using dish rags to sop up the overflow of blood.

Yeah, it was embarrassing waddling to school with what looked to be a diaper under my jeans, but I couldn’t bear the thought of knowing what was truly wrong. I was petrified of finding out what was going on inside my body. Could it be cancer? Would they take my insides out? Would I be able to have kids one day? Would I…die?

All these thoughts were too much for a 15-year-old to have to handle in her first year of high school. So, I did what teenagers do best, I hid it and kept it a secret for a little bit longer.

The pain grew worse, and the bleeding became heavier. I knew things were bad when it became difficult to walk, it felt like my insides were rotting away. With each step I took, I felt like my uterus would detach from my body and fall out, straight through my legs and into the dish rag.

I had finally had enough when I woke up in the middle of the night in agony. I couldn’t hide the pain or torture I had been going through any longer. I wailed from my bed, hardly able to move when my mom came running in, eyes wide and mouth hanging open.

“Maria, what?! What is wrong?!”

I couldn’t respond to her, all I could do was scream out in agony. The pain was fierce, and I had dealt with it for too long to keep my composure for one more second. My mom’s fingers tips pulled back the comforter on my bed to reveal the black pool I had been swimming in; blood licking the inside of my thighs.

The emergency room didn’t keep us waiting for long. I think the black trail of liquid following my tail end had “urgent” written all over me.

“Ok, sweetheart. I’m going to need you to try and hold still. We can’t get a proper image with you moving around so much. Can you hold still, please?”

I was laying on the hospital bed, curled up in a ball, writhing in agony. Did they really think I could hold still long enough for them to rub their wand over my stomach? I didn’t have time for a test. I wanted them to put me out of my misery. I wanted to go straight into surgery to have my insides gutted out; anything to get me out of this pain.

Three nurses peered in through the doorway, the nurse that held the wand nodded to them, and then they proceeded to circle my bed. I bellowed in pain as they held me down, forcing me to expose my tender stomach to the cold wand. The pain was indescribable. I thought I would surely pass out at any moment if I was forced to endure one more miserable second of this.

After a few minutes, which felt like hours, the nurse that held the wand pointed to the screen on her computer; her mouth gaped open in unison with the other nurses. Nothing was said to me, but I knew things were bad when all four nurses rush out of the room.

It wasn’t long before I saw a herd of white lab coats running into my room. Before I could muster the strength to yell anymore, a plastic cup was placed over my nose, followed by darkness.

So, now here I am sitting on the toilet with a constant stream of blood flowing down my legs. You’re probably wondering what happened next. Well, I was placed in emergency surgery to have a hysterectomy. The doctors concluded that when I had inserted the tampon, there must have been a spider stuck inside the cotton; a manufacturing error. Once the tampon became wet and soggy, the spider came out of the cotton casing, scurrying up into my uterus.

The thing had camped out in my uterus for a while and eventually grew, feeding on my womanly flow once a month. The doctors measured the thing to be 8 inches when stretched from limb to limb; a huntsman spider.

My reproductive system eventually became infected from the foreign intruder, leaving my insides inflamed and sore; pelvic inflammatory disease.

This story is absolutely embarrassing and disgusting to tell, but I can’t bear the thought of another woman going through what I went through. The doctor said if I hadn’t waited so long, they could have salvaged my uterus before it completely rotted out, but it’s too late. I won’t be able to have my own kids, all because I was too scared to get help.

The recovery has been going smoothly as of now. Once the draining stops, I at least won’t have to worry about having a period ever again, and tampons will just be a distant memory for me.

If there is anything you take away from this story, just promise me one thing – check your tampons before you use them.

Montauk is a real town at the very tip of Long Island, New York. For decades, it’s carried a creepy rumor: that secret government experiments happened at an abandoned military base, involving psychic kids, mind control, and even missing children. None of it is proven — but the vibes line up hard with Eleven, the lab, and that “the government opened a door it couldn’t close” feeling.

Stranger Things was originally pitched under the title “Montauk.” The story was set on Long Island with the same foggy, coastal unease. Netflix asked for a new name, and “Stranger Things” replaced “Montauk” during development.

The conspiracy itself is called the Montauk Project. It’s tied to Camp Hero, a decommissioned radar base in Montauk. The myth claims the government ran extreme experiments there: teleportation, psychological warfare, and children with psychic abilities.

Most of what people “know” about the Montauk Project comes from Preston Nichols’ books. He said he was working on secret tech and later regained “recovered memories.” But there’s never been solid evidence — no verified documents, no physical proof, no confirmed witnesses.

What Camp Hero actually was is much more ordinary. It started as a WWII coastal defense site, then became a Cold War radar station. It shut down in 1981. A real program from that era did exist — MKUltra — but there’s no documented link between MKUltra and Montauk.

The Duffer Brothers have openly said Montauk conspiracies fascinated them and shaped the show’s mood. They moved the setting to Hawkins, Indiana so they could create their own world without tying the chaos to a real town.

Verdict: Montauk is the inspiration and the myth behind the myth, not a confirmed true story. But as a piece of American folklore that casts a long shadow over Stranger Things, it’s creepy either way.

The latest trailer gives viewers a much clearer look at Skarsgård reprising his role as the clown than any previous moment in the series. In one shot, Pennywise issues a simple-yet-menacing promise: “I’ve always wondered how you’d taste.” The line, following weeks of poke and prod behavior, signals an end to the teaser and the beginning of the nightmare. After establishing alternate forms of the creature and the cast during earlier episodes, the latter half of the season focuses on making Pennywise the main antagonist. The trailer also sets a few Easter eggs for fans of the franchise, with rolling mist engulfing Derry and ominous imagery both fresh and reminiscent of both IT: Chapter One and Chapter Two. Notable details like the Shawshank State Prison bus make the connection to the King universe even more clear.

This is especially true given the series’s connections to the history of Derry, Maine. Set in 1962, many years before the film adaptation of IT: Chapter One, the series serves as an extension of Andy Muschietti’s work while also drawing from Mike Hanlon’s historical digressions in the book. Those chapters take readers back through the town’s violent history in the weeks leading up to the main story, suggesting that the series is ramping up to a few of the book’s biggest tragedies.

An interview with Chris Chalk, who stars as a young Dick Halloran, reveals a new layer to the character when the audience first encounters him. According to Chalk, Halloran is at the point where his nascent mind-reading powers leave him more alienated from the world around him than other characters have been to this point, and also, he “always has a very solipsistic view” of the world around him. In Halloran’s case, that’s because “he’s hearing people’s thoughts all the time,” which has an effect on his ability to connect with others. Chalk also details a contrast that exists between the newfound bravado he has in his own abilities and the reality of the world around him, a disparity that he admits will cause friction later on, especially as Halloran becomes aware of the entity that haunts Derry.

With Season 1, Episode 5, “Neibolt Street,” on the horizon, anticipation is already running high. Though HBO has yet to release an official synopsis for the upcoming episode, the trailer offers some clues that the series is only going to get darker, and there is a return of danger for the season’s primary cast. Pennywise’s shadowy silhouette at the end of Episode 4 served as something of a turning point, and the fifth chapter promises to bring even more direct interaction with the creature.

The final four episodes will significantly up the ante, with an emphasis on the increasingly disturbing visions, elements of Derry’s long-buried past, new developments in its characters’ stories, and of course, the full terrifying potential of Pennywise. It seems like this series has only just begun to crack Derry’s facade, and with a December 4th premiere for the second half of the season, there’s every reason to expect it to only get darker from here.

Here is the trailer if you missed it:

Theory: The killer in Scream 7 is Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard)

The trailer shows that Stu Macher’s home has been turned into an AirBnb. Ghostface arrives and terrorizes a couple of guests before saying “I’m gonna burn it all down” and setting fire to the home. Who would be that triggered by Stu’s home being turned into a tourist destination for obnoxious fans and looky-loos? Stu Macher would. His voice can even be heard at the end of the trailer saying “This is gonna be fun.”

A funny bit of foreshadowing for this could be that in Scream (2022) Matthew Lillard has a cameo as Ghostface wielding a flamethrower in Stab 8. This scene also shows a YouTube video on the sidebar that is titled “Did the real-life Stu Macher survive?” This in-movie theory is later referenced by Jasmin Savoy Brown’s Mindy Meeks-Martin character, who says some believe Stu is alive and living in hiding.

We do know that Matthew Lillard is officially part of the Scream 7 cast. This doesn’t necessarily mean Stu is alive as David Arquette and Scott Foley are also returning and their characters, Dewey Riley and Roman Bridger, are deceased. All three deceased characters could return as part of a flashback — OR — the casting of Arquette and Foley could be a red herring to distract from the casting of Lillard. If Lillard was the only “deceased” character to be cast, it would more obviously create fan speculation that his character may have survived and might be behind the Ghostface mask again.

A brief history of the “Stu is alive” theory

After Scream VI, the franchise was completely upended by the firing of its star Melissa Barrera for voicing support for Palestine on social media. Scream VI ended with a cliffhanger hinting at the possibility of Barrera’s character Sam Carpenter turning into the series villain. Skeet Ulrich had even returned to encourage Sam, his character’s daughter, to follow in his psycho killer footsteps.

Scream 7 writer Guy Busick said Barrera’s firing made the concept they’d been working on completely unusable and they had to create a new story from scratch. At that point, franchise creator Kevin Williamson was brought on to direct and write the Scream 7 screenplay with Busick. What do we know about what Williamson wants to see in the Scream movies? His original treatment for a Scream trilogy included Matthew Lillard’s return in Scream 3 as Ghostface.

In Williamson’s idea for Scream 3, the cold open would have been Sidney and a friend being attacked in her house. Sidney outsmarts the killer and ends up killing him. When he is unmasked, “Ghostface” is a complete stranger, a random “fan” of her life story. The movie would later reveal that Stu Macher was alive and in prison. From there, he influenced a group of high school students to follow in his footsteps. Lillard was even under contract to return. However, after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, the studio wanted to steer the franchise away from a school setting and Scream 3 was reworked to take place in Hollywood. This unused idea could have been recycled when Scream 7 suddenly needed a plot that centered around Sidney Prescott again.

Matthew Lillard has been one of the most vocal proponants of the “Stu is alive” theory. In an interview with Us Weekly, he argued that because his character was 17-years-old at the time of Scream (1996), he could have served 25 years in prison and be released in time for Scream 7 (2026). In the interview, he even offers to “throw a TV on my face right now” to prove that it is possible to survive such an event.

Is Stu alive and will he be revealed as Ghostface in Scream 7? We’ll find out together when Scream 7 hits theaters on 2.27.26.

Further reading:

• Matthew Lillard Insists “Stu is Alive”
• Matthew Lillard Was Hired to Return as Stu Macher in ‘Scream 3’, Here’s What Went Wrong
• Ghostfaces in the ‘Scream’ Franchise, Ranked

They called it hysteria in the 1940s, obsession in the 1960s, and in the 2000s it’s the high-school sweet spot of “crazy ex-girlfriend.” In horror, it’s something a wee bit bloodier, and more honest. I call this, the feminine grotesque. It’s the place in film where the performance of femininity breaks and something wild pours through. Where beauty curdles into fury, where desire is too big to be contained by courtesy or reason.

The feminine grotesque occupies the quiver between beauty and rot. It’s the perfume-scented violence of a woman smiling at you while she cuts your throat, the flash of fury lurking beneath the eyeliner. It’s the acknowledgement that the same traits which make women “valuable” to the world sensitivity, sex appeal, loyalty…. are the same traits that render them monstrous when they are taken to an extreme.

‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009)

On the surface, many argue 2009’s Jennifer’s Body is a dumb, gross, and quasi-ridiculous teen horror movie. Beneath the eyeliner and the bite marks, hiding in the deceptively trashy folds of the screenplay, is one of the best, smartest, most wickedly incisive examinations of girlhood and hunger that’s ever been shown on screen. Jennifer Check (played by Megan Fox, like most great things of the mid-00s) is both prey and predator, her body quite literally the sacrificed vessel for male enterprise. When she comes back starving, angry, and glorious, she is the monstrous, physical embodiment of what women look like when they take the power that was taken from them back.

Diablo Cody’s screenplay drips with gore and girl wrat skewering the absurdity of purity culture and the quiet toxicity of friendships between women conditioned to compete for male attention. The horror here is not only supernatural, but social. It’s the horror of desire, of being desired, and the understanding that the two can never coexist without a healthy dose of violence.

You can stream this movie for free on Tubi.

‘Pearl’ (2022)

“Please, I’m a star.”

Pearl is Mia Goth’s glittering psychosis told in technicolor. This movie serves as a horrific fable of repression, a story of womanhood as suffocation and decay. Set in 1918 but almost entirely timeless, it traces a farm girl’s devolution from repressed obsession to axe-wielding maniac. Pearl is stuck in stasis. Her father is disabled, her mother cruel, her husband at war. Their farm is dying, and Pearl’s desire to be seen, to be adored, to be chosen is a suffocating weight she can no longer bear. So she cuts loose, giving a performance of her own liberation… with the flourish of an axe of course!

Pearl, is gothic horror transforming the “woman’s picture” into macabre nightmare. Its gauzy pastel prettiness a violence in and of itself. Written and directed by Ti West and Goth, the film is a shrine to the holy madwoman who can no longer contain her desire to be more than merely alive. The final shot… that wide, wide, manic smile, is the face of female repression giving way to divine lunacy.

You can stream this movie on HBO Max.

‘The Substance’

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is body horror weaponized against the male gaze itself. Demi Moore plays a faded celebrity who injects herself with an experimental serum that births a younger, “perfect” version of herself (Margaret Qualley). These two halves of a single identity become trapped in a horrific cycle where youth devours age and beauty consumes its own existence.

This becomes a madwoman’s laboratory, a body dissected, a soul split by societal demand. The makeup mirror becomes a morgue light. The instruments which serve beauty purposes including physical appearance, clothing and makeup have transitioned from protective armor to destructive tools that mutilate. It’s grotesque, yes, but it’s also an ecstatic act of exposure. Fargeat forces us to witness what womanhood looks like when it stops performing.

You can stream this movie on HBO Max.

‘The VVitch’ (2015)

Robert Eggers’ The VVitch is the origin myth of the madwoman not as a victim but as prophecy. The film reimagines the Puritan nightmare not as a story of evil encroaching upon innocence but of repression finally giving birth to truth. Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the eldest daughter of an exiled Puritan family, lives on the trembling edge of adolescence: her desires waking, her body changing, her voice still caught between obedience and defiance. Her mother fears her. Her father can’t see her. The film places her in the suffocating crucible of early colonial patriarchy, where the slightest trace of female autonomy reads as sin.

The film’s infamous question “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” lands as both temptation and sacrament. It is the first time anyone has offered Thomasin a choice. Her “yes” is a reclamation of the body and the self that Puritanism tried to annihilate. When she strips off her shift and walks into the woods, her nakedness is not vulnerability but rebirth. The forest the space of all things deemed wild, sensual, and forbidden accepts her. Her levitation at the end is not a surrender to darkness but an ecstatic refusal of the world that made her small.

Now streaming on HBO Max.

‘Girl, Interrupted’ (1999)

Girl, Interrupted takes place in a psychiatric ward in the late 1960s. It plays like a costume drama of pathology. Its women Susanna (Winona Ryder), Lisa (Angelina Jolie), Georgina (Clea DuVall), Polly (Elisabeth Moss), and Daisy (Brittany Murphy), are all symptoms of a world that cannot contain their intensity. The asylum acts as a kind of microcosm of the social order, a place where unruly women are reclassified as patients, and their transgressions are medicalized, their passion diagnosed as disease.

Lisa in particular presents as charming and cruel, magnetic and self-destructive, where she wields her madness as a performance, as a means of survival, but sadly even Lisa’s rebellion is contained by the system, the spectacle made entertainment of her disorder. What I personally find most devastating about Girl, Interrupted is its ending. Susanna “recovers,” and returns to society, while Lisa is left in the institution. It’s the same old false resolution of the madwoman’s tale…integration without future. The film gestures toward healing, but cannot conceive of what thriving might look like. The real tragedy here is not in madness itself, but in the world’s refusal to let women live with their madness, to love it, to find art and power inside it, and to move on.

You can stream this for free on Pluto!

‘Black Swan’ (2010)

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan may be the purest form of the feminine grotesque in recent memory. A ballet of mirrors, doubles, sex, and decay where its heroine is caught in the throes of absolute obsession. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a woman possessed. Everything is about becoming, about perfecting her performance. She wants to be good, pure, and corrupt. The body is discipline, the mind an instrument to be shattered. Erotic and grotesque, each rehearsal is destruction. Aronofsky films the body as a site of both eroticism and horror. Skin cracks and peels, nails split and bleed, feathers sprout where there should be none. The grotesque is the price of transcendence.

Nina’s hallucinations make manifest her inability to differentiate self and other, victim and rival, performance and possession. The final act, where she becomes the Black Swan onstage, is a moment of ecstatic annihilation. “I was perfect,” she whispers, bleeding out under the curtain. It is the central paradox of the feminine grotesque where in the madwoman’s perfection she finds self-actualization, but only through the obliteration of self. In this case, through Nina’s dying eyes, we see all the cinematic madwomen who have come before her… Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Isabelle Adjani, and all the real women who have been burned alive for the sin of wanting too much.

Streaming now on Hulu.

For Corcoran, it seems the horror wasn’t limited to the screen. The actress is suing Terrifier producers including writer/director Damien Leone for “breach of contract and the distribution of sexually explicit materials without consent”, according to Variety. The suit filed on Oct. 26 alleges “fraud, sexual harassment and, ultimately, betrayal”.

Here are the allegations made in the legal filing:

1. Filming conditions did not meet industry standards. Filming took place without any other women on set, sometime in abandoned buildings with no bathrooms and real rat feces were put on Corcoran’s skin by the crew. In order to film Dawn’s death scene in Terrifier, Corcoran was strung up by her feet, topless, for 10 hours in below freezing temps. The next day, a doctor diagnosed her with cranial swelling and eardrum damage.
2. Breach of contract/failure to pay. Corcoran agreed to be paid $100 for the role because Damien Leone said in writing that she would receive 1% of all net sales of Terrifier movies and merchandise. The defendants will need to prove that this money has been paid out to Corcoran in full, which will be difficult as the producer in charge of making these payouts, Phil Falcone, allegedly said he “doesn’t keep records”.
3. Failure to comply with Screen Actors Guild requirements. The SGA requires filmmakers to get written consent to film nude scenes, which they did not obtain. It seems that on the day of filming, there was a disagreement between Corcoran and production because they wanted her fully nude and said being topless was “required”. The SGA requirement is in place to avoid this exact type of disagreement. It helps actors agree to nudity without coercion, which is almost impossible to avoid if its left up to the director (the boss) asking an actor to do something in the moment when the pressure and stakes are highest (while filming).

Some of the allegations seem like a reasonable grey area when working for a low-budget, independent movie. The budget for Terrifier is estimated to be just $35,000–$55,000. For example, the inexperienced crew willing to work for that budget didn’t know not to use actual duct tape over Corcoran’s mouth. They may not be able to afford a staff member who is familiar with SGA regulations and can ensure compliance, which then opens them up to the risk of lawsuits like this in the future.

However, the franchise has gone on to make over $100 million. This is enough money for the filmmakers to hire an accountant and ensure the workers who built the franchise get the money they were promised. It’s even more black and white when you consider that they are directly profiting from selling merch of Corcoran topless.

Damien Leone, Phil Falcone and the other named parties (Dark Age Cinema, Fuzz on the Lens Productions, Art the Clown) have not commented on the lawsuit.

Further reading:

• Will ‘Terrifier 4’ Be the Last ‘Terrifier’ film?

The night of November 13th, 1992, began like any other in the Valencian town of Alcàsser. Three teenage girls, Miriam García (14), Antonia “Toñi” Gómez (15), and Desirée Hernández (14) asked their parents to be allowed to go to a party that evening at the Coolor nightclub in a neighboring town, Picassent. Their parents agreed, not suspecting the dangers that awaited them on the road. In Spain, hitchhiking was not as dangerous as it is in the United States, and people were willing to pick up random hitchhikers even if they did not know their destination. After receiving permission from their parents to leave for the party, the three set out together to hitch a ride to the disco. Their parents would never see them alive again.

The disappearance of the girls set off Spain’s largest missing persons search to date. Newspaper, radio, and television were consumed by the case. Family members pleaded for information on live programs. Policemen combed the rural highways between Alcàsser and Picassent looking for clues. Search parties were organized and sponsored by community leaders and business groups. For three months, the whereabouts of the girls were unknown, until two beekeepers found the shallow graves of Miriam, Toñi, and Desirée on January 27th, 1993 in a wooded area known as La Romana near the Tous reservoir. The three girls’ bodies were found together in the single grave. The girls had been beaten, raped, and tortured before they were shot and buried. Autopsies later revealed that they had been gagged with their own clothing, blindfolded, beaten, bound, and sexually assaulted before being strangled, shot in the head, and buried. Injuries on their skulls and bones indicated both blunt force trauma and stab wounds.

Two men were arrested on suspicion of the crime, Miguel Ricart and Antonio Anglés, both from the town of Catarroja. They were linked to the murder by eyewitness accounts and circumstantial evidence recovered near the gravesite. Ricart was apprehended on January 28th, 1993, but Anglés fled and a massive manhunt was put in place across Spain and internationally. According to police, Anglés had stolen multiple cars and police were alerted in various provinces after he eluded the law by changing his appearance and tactics. One of his last reported actions before he disappeared was boarding a British freighter called the City of Plymouth, which was bound for Dublin, Ireland. There are claims that he escaped before docking and jumped into the ocean. He has never been found since, despite regular sightings or leads in various countries. To this day, Anglés is Interpol’s most wanted fugitive.

Miguel Ricart’s case was sent to trial in 1997. The trial was one of the most highly publicized in Spain’s history. Ricart was found guilty of kidnapping, rape, and homicide, and sentenced to more than 170 years in prison. The prosecutors and judges believed that the crimes had been committed by a group of two individuals. They placed Anglés as the ringleader and Ricart as his underling or “street soldier.” Ricart, in his testimony, indicated that he felt that he had been forced to participate and that Anglés had either blackmailed him or directly threatened his family. The proceedings were at times gruesome, with photographs and graphic accounts of the crime dominating daily testimony.

The original autopsies had been lost or destroyed in subsequent handling. Photos of the girls’ corpses were leaked to tabloids; and multiple forensics and evidence protocols were either circumvented or ignored. The public and investigators alike became jaded and skeptical of the perpetrators, raising new questions as to whether powerful individuals or others may have been complicit in the acts or, more likely, in the potential coverup.

Autopsies on the three girls found seven different DNA samples from hairs not belonging to any of them, neither the victims nor the convicted perpetrators. There are concerns that other people had been present in the crime scene or that evidence had been mishandled or contaminated. This caused doubt on how the case was handled. Jewelry belonging to the victims was found at the scene and reported missing by the parents after the initial search, but then allegedly replaced during a subsequent search. After twenty-one years of Ricart’s sentence (Spanish law has a 30-year cap on maximum sentences, which has since been overturned), he was released from prison in 2013. He was greeted by a nation that had watched every development of the case for over two decades. Ricart’s release was met with hostility by the public, who largely believed him to be guilty. The disappearance and murder of the three Alcàsser girls remains one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in Spain and has been in regular rotation in the Spanish media. Fernando García, the father of Miriam García, became a media and political activist fighting for accountability in the justice system.

In the meantime, Antonio Anglés remains an enigma. He has reappeared in the news sporadically over the years. The skull of a man found on Lambay Island, Ireland, was investigated by Spanish police in 2021 as a possible lead but DNA confirmed it was not a match. He resurfaced in 2015 at the British pound-to-euro exchange rate when an Irish businessman was arrested by the Guardia Civil for swindling a London business of over £400,000, leading authorities to suggest that he was driving taxis in London. It is likely that Anglés is dead, possibly killed during the escape or shortly thereafter. The wounds and torture on the three victims have never been conclusively linked to the convicted perpetrators. The explanations, inactions, and acceptance of faulty or contaminated evidence have not satisfied the families or the public. Even now, experts question how forensic evidence was collected and not corroborated. The failure to account for every aspect of the physical evidence and the case itself means that new theories, angles, and cases continue to percolate, each offering a different revisionist take on one of Spain’s most violent criminal cases in recent history.

In many ways, The Alcàsser Murders documentary serves as a time capsule of the crime and the failed investigation that followed. It also underscores a profound loss of innocence for Spain and how it covered a crime of that nature in the early 1990s. The series reconstructs the investigative process and media coverage as if it were a contemporary coverage of its own. It is fascinating and chilling to watch the archival footage of the tragedy in real time, documenting not only the forensic bungling but also the media frenzy. Real talk show broadcasts are replayed in the documentary, showing live segments of the families asking for help as police searched the grounds. Tabloid coverage is shown with sensational headlines. Journalists speculate about everything from police incompetence to cover-ups. Autopsy photos were published in graphic detail. Tabloids interviewed convicted killers, untested psychics, and other random characters making up fanciful stories and wild conspiracy theories.

Director Elías León Siminiani’s approach is a deliberate effort to underscore both the crime and how the original investigation collapsed. The first few episodes move chronologically, covering the kidnapping, search, and eventual discovery. The second half of the series moves from the investigation and trial through the fallout and impact of the case. He approaches the entire subject as both a reconstruction and a social autopsy. He interviews journalists, lawyers, investigators, and family members about their individual impressions of the case and its handling, while providing stills, video, and transcripts from official proceedings. By putting together official testimony with personal impressions and recollections that conflict, the documentary provides a glimpse not only on what happened but what became of Spain after the crime.

There are consequences to the case even beyond the courtroom and TV screen. It has changed how Spanish authorities approach missing persons cases, created reform in police communication, and irrevocably altered the media landscape. It also created a generation that grew up conflating the news with entertainment, reducing the social impact of tragedy to “you had one job.” For the families, however, there is no end to the pain and suffering. The mothers of the victims, especially Fernando García (Miriam’s father), have been activists in the community and in politics, all while enduring their own public judgment.

The Alcàsser Murders forces folks to confront not only the heinousness of the crime but the addiction to the speculation and coverage of its own. It is sickening to watch but vital. It is a tragedy in so many ways, not just because of the crime itself but how and why it was allowed to be treated as entertainment. In the process, the truth itself becomes a casualty.

It Welcome to Derry takes place in 1962, decades before the events of It: Chapter One, diving headfirst into the earliest days of Pennywise’s reign of terror, back when the evil first began to claw its way out of the sewers and into the mind of our main storyteller, Georgie Denbrough. The premiere wastes no time making one thing abundantly clear: no one….and I mean no one….is safe. This premiere delivers a handful of disturbing storylines that quickly converge into one of the most disturbing opening sequences I’ve seen in years. (Seriously, spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched it yet.) A lost boy, a douchey family, and a creature that simply shouldn’t exist get the ball rolling and sets the stage for the rest of the episode.

What I loved about Welcome to Derry is how it manages to take a formula we’re all so familiar with from Stephen King, childhood innocence clashing against unthinkable evil all while making it feel raw again. I can’t stop feeling the presence of Andy and Barbara Muschietti’s fingerprints all over this production, from the world-building that is so rich and lived-in. Every shadow hiding a secret, every street corner buzzing with Cold War paranoia, down to the way their camera lingers lovingly and abhorrently on human and supernatural carnage alike. What’s also notable here, beyond the supernatural terrors that lurk in Derry’s grimy shadows, is that there’s real human darkness to be found here as well. Racism, grief, and guilt that rot this small town long before Pennywise ever sinks his teeth into his first victim.

Jovan Adepo brings immense heat as the role of Major Leroy Hanlon, a decorated pilot whose personal story grounds the show in the social and political tensions of the 1960s. There’s also incredible emotional heft from Taylour Paige as Charlotte, and from young Clara Stack as Lilly, two women who are both just trying to survive in a town that feels cursed from the inside out. Stack, in particular, is giving one of the best child performances I’ve seen in recent horror memory. The fear is so real, her courage so fragile, and you absolutely believe every scream, every tear.

And, of course, then there’s the blood. This IS an HBO show I mean… Oh, mama, there’s plenty of it. The much-discussed sequence at the end of Episode 1 is not just shocking, it’s horrifying in a way that lingers. Long-time fans of Game of Thrones‘ most brutal twists and turns will find themselves feeling that same “did they really just do that?” feeling in this moment. It’s a reminder that Welcome to Derry is not interested in playing it safe. If you came here expecting predictable scares, forget it. The body count climbs fast and furious, and this series makes one thing brutally clear… in Derry, there are no guarantees.

Yes, it gives us the gore, more than enough to satisfy even the most hardened horror junkies out there, but there’s also restraint. Pennywise himself (played by the incomparable Bill Skarsgård) mostly lurks in the periphery in these early episodes, appearing in snippets and glimpses here and there. It’s the absence that makes him so much scarier, in a way. I feel him everywhere. This series also knows its fans, which is refreshing. They get that we’ve all memorized every beat of King’s novel, that we’ve read and watched every adaptation, analyzed every balloon and sewer grate along the way. So instead of retreading that old ground, it takes its time to expand.

There are nods to the cosmic elements of King’s mythology here of course with the turtle, the cycles of Pennywise’s return, but it’s also opening up new, fresh layers of lore in ways that feel like we’re just getting started. The Muschiettis are clearly playing a long game here, with the creators already teasing a three-season arc that will explore Derry’s cursed history through the decades. So, yeah, if you’re a horror fan, this is your Halloween feast. It: Welcome to Derry does not just float, my friends it soars, drips, and claws its way into your nightmares with all the cinematic and tonal chops it needs to prove, once again, that in the world of Stephen King, the monsters are real – and they’re a hell of a lot closer than you think.

Episode 2 will drop a few days early to celebrate Halloween. The episode will premiere Friday, Oct. 31, at 12:00am PT/3:00am ET on HBO Max. It will premiere as planned on Sunday, Nov. 2, at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO. Future episodes of the eight-episode season will continue to drop Sundays on HBO and HBO Max leading up to the season finale on Sunday, Dec. 14.

It was only when they filed into the funeral home’s viewing room that the Espinoza family realized something was terribly wrong. In the casket was not Joseph, but a stranger. Even the coffin itself was not the one they had selected. Espinoza’s aunt, Laura Levario, told KCAL she was “shocked and very confused.” When she informed staff of the mix-up, they were “alarmed and shocked as well,” she said.

Funeral home staff allegedly told the family there had been a scheduling error with two viewings on the same day, according to the lawsuit. Employees then led the Espinoza’s to another viewing room, assuring them that the situation would be rectified. Upon their arrival, they found yet another stranger lying inside. The chaos that ensued was only the beginning. Joseph’s family’s grief soon gave way to mounting disbelief and anger, with funeral home staff frantically scrambling to find Joseph’s body. The search, according to court documents, would last more than an hour.

In the confusion, Joseph’s uncle, George Levario, collapsed inside the chapel. He later learned he’d had a heart attack, the result, the family suspects, of the overwhelming stress of the situation. “I woke up three days later in the hospital on life support,” he said in an interview. “It’s the worst experience we’ve ever had.”

It was only a matter of days before the Espinozas went to court, filing a lawsuit against Forest Lawn in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The suit alleged negligence, breach of contract, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit lays out the emotionally grueling experience of that day, as the family continued to suffer “great mental anguish, suffering, humiliation, and grief,” as a result of the funeral home error. Forest Lawn has so far declined to comment on the pending litigation, but previous reports noted that the funeral home initially offered the family $200 to cover a $20,000 service, a sum the family called insulting.

Forest Lawn has declined to comment publicly on the matter, citing pending litigation, but the incident has nevertheless sparked outrage among social media and the local community.