There is a point in every successful film franchise when the core fan base starts curling its lip a bit. For the immensely lucrative series of Saw shockers, that dip went down last year with the release of director (and former series editor) Kevin Greutert’s sixth installment. While all the previous entries owned their opening weekends’ box-office charts in their Halloween seasonal premieres, SAW VI slunk to second banana against the punishing viral-marketed power of the low-budget vérité shocker PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. And that’s a damn shame, because SAW VI was without a doubt the best entry since the first and—even removed from the confines of the series—played as a first-rate, exceedingly well- directed and dazzlingly violent thriller.

“There’s a lot of extreme stuff this year,” promises TRUE BLOOD series creator/executive producer Alan Ball. “There are a lot of prosthetic parts.” He pauses for effect. “Let me just say, yes, there will be blood.”

There are some things in this life that seem to have always been here, which carry such a level of perfection that we as mere mortals cannot possibly fathom that they were created by human hands. For genre fans, one of these wonders exists in the form of a little movie called PREDATOR.

The eight films hitting DVD and VOD in the coming months—with one also receiving theatrical play—under the FANGORIA FrightFest banner (see www.fangoriafrightfest.com for details) represent a cross-section of horror subgenres and countries of origin. And for one of them—Jaume Balagueró’s FRAGILE—the series represents a long-awaited resurrection. Produced more than five years ago and released across the world in the mid/late 2000s, the movie fell into U.S. limbo due to the financial troubles of the two distributors (MGM and Bauer Martinez Studios) that wound up with the Stateside rights.