Blumhouse, the production company behind Insidious, The Purge and Halloween, has treated us to four new tales of terror. SFX chats to the directors to find out what lies in wait in each of them

WORDS: JOSH WINNING

BINGO HELL

DIRECTOR GIGI SAUL GUERRERO HAS one person to thank for her blood-spattered new horror movie Bingo Hell: her grandma. “My grandma is obsessed with Loteria, which is the Mexican version of bingo,” she explains. “She plays it every Sunday with her siblings. I was having a conversation with my co-writer Shane McKenzie, whose wife’s relatives are religiously obsessed with bingo. He said, ‘Gigi, what would happen if we took bingo away from them?’ I said, ‘Listen, man, my grandma would murder somebody!’”

The rest, as they say, is (ahem) a horror story. Set in the tiny American town of Oak Spring, Bingo Hell follows Lupita (Adriana Barraza), a bingo-loving, gangster-bandanawearing senior who is stubbornly refusing to move out of her home as gentrification sweeps through the neighbourhood. Sick of the hipsters taking over with their coffee shops, she is further horrified when her beloved community-centre bingo hall is shut down, replaced by a gaudy new hall run by the ominous Mr Big (Richard Brake).

“So it’s up to these stubborn old cute seniors to fight back for their bingo hall,” Guerrero says, “and these seniors are not just cute – they’re crazy!”

Playing like a mix of Stephen King and Rob Zombie with a little John Carpenter thrown in for good measure, Bingo Hell revels in gory mayhem as Lupita fights for her town while her bingo-obsessed friends die in increasingly outlandish ways that often include a lot of green slime. “Every day on set, I said, ‘More blood, more slime,’” Guerrero laughs. “It became the quote of the day. I’m a big believer that to make things either gory or shocking, there has to be a reason for it. I think we went pretty crazy! I think we went to a perfect level of, ‘Oh my god.’”