Books of Blood (2020)

Books of Blood is the kind of horror-sci-fi anthology that feels like opening a cursed library book: each chapter whispers its own dread, and by the time you look up you realize the stories have been talking to each other all along. Brannon Braga leans into Clive Barker’s taste for the intimate and the grotesque, mixing haunted-house unease, grief-soaked supernatural mystery, and a twilight-zone cruelty that lands with a chilly sense of inevitability. The vibe is slick and sinister rather than jump-scare noisy, with strong performances that keep the weirdness grounded in real human pain and yearning. It’s not for the squeamish—this one earns its TV-MA with body horror and grim imagery—but if you like your genre stories bold, interconnected, and unapologetically dark, it’s a wickedly satisfying ride.

Books of Blood wants to be a Clive Barker-style horror anthology that stitches three eerie tales into one bigger, cosmic nightmare, and you can feel the ambition in the setup and the occasional nasty image. The problem is it often plays more muddled than mysterious, with thin character work and pacing that makes the scares land awkwardly—sometimes closer to “wait, what?” than genuinely unsettling. If you’re coming for Barker’s sharp, imaginative dread, this can feel like a diluted, TV-movie version of the idea, leaning on gore and twists without earning the emotional weight. Still, if you’re easy to please with anthology horror, don’t mind uneven segments, and just want some grim supernatural shocks, it’s watchable in a “one-and-done” way rather than a must-see.