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The wealth of the 10 richest people in the world – a list dominated by US tech billionaires – increased by a record amount after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, according to a widely cited index.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that the world’s 10 wealthiest people gained nearly $64bn (about £49.5bn) on Wednesday, the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, registered the largest increase with a $26.5bn addition to his fortune, which now stands at $290bn. The prominent backer of Trump’s campaign, benefited from a surge in the share price of Tesla, the electric carmaker where he is chief executive and in which he owns a 13% stake.

The gains came as tech business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook parent Meta, and Apple’s Tim Cook publicly congratulated Trump on his election win...

Following his standout performance in the box office sensation Terrifier 3, acclaimed character actor and horror icon Dan Roebuck takes on a new lead role in the highly anticipated film Camp Triple Moon. The new film promises to add a fresh twist to the genre, combining Celtic folklore with a story that explores generational trauma alongside supernatural horrors. Read the full synopsis below:

"Camp Triple Moon follows a group of troubled teenagers sent to a secluded rehabilitation camp, where they are forced to confront their past as well as the malevolent forces lurking in the shadows. The campers quickly realize that the area harbors dark secrets and their inner struggles aren’t the only forces threatening their lives. As strange occurrences unfold and tensions within the group escalate, the campers discover the terrifying legend of the Bodach—a sinister trickster from Irish folklore that haunts the forest, preying on those who dare to enter"...

I had been a huge fan of the Hell House LLC series since I stumbled across the first instalment on Shudder during a lazy weekend a few years ago. I often question whether I should cancel my subscription to the streaming platform that’s dedicated to horror and save a few pounds each month, but then there’s always one film that draws me back in.

The first Hell House LLC, released in 2015, was that rare gem and my only regret is that I didn’t discover it sooner.

It had everything I love watching in horror: A group of friends who make silly yet entertaining decisions; a seriously creepy venue like a haunted house; or, in this case, an abandoned hotel and clowns.

I actually have a genuine fear of clowns so the fact that I love films like Hell House and Terrifier will always be a mystery to me.

When I realised Hell House LLC was also found footage, I could not grab my snacks and press play fast enough. And just like that, I was gripped...

Ritual Tides is the first game to come from Vertpaint Studios, and should offer something fresh and original for horror fans who are burnt out on a glut of remakes and sequels.

The first trailer for Ritual Tides is heavy on atmosphere, with an ominous voiceover promising plenty of tension as players explore a secret-riddled island populated by gruesome monsters.

With Halloween just around the corner and the spooky season in full swing, now’s the perfect time for new horror games to make themselves known.

This year has been an excellent year for highly-rated horror experiences, with Alan Wake 2 continuing Remedy’s connected universe and the Silent Hill 2 remake proving to be a major win for the devs at Bloober Team.

However, while there are plenty of frights and delights to choose from in gaming right now, Ritual Tides is looking to set itself apart by diving into Folk Horror, a genre with a deep roots that is not often explored within video games...

Now widely considered as one of folk horror’s classic films, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) was not only the first of the unholy trinity that are seen to define the genre – alongside Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) – but also arguably the most disturbing of the three. Adapting Ronald Bassett’s 1966 historical novel, Reeves examined a world of superstition, heresy and misogyny, effectively dramatising the brutality of a society gone awry.

Reeves’ film follows the evil doings of witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) and his second-in-command Sterne (Robert Russell) as they persecute their way across East Anglia during the English civil war. Parliamentarian soldier Richard (Ian Ogilvy) is due to be wed his love Sara (Hilary Heath) after gaining permission from Priest Lowes (Rupert Davies). With locals falsely accusing Lowes and Sara of witchcraft, Hopkins and his mob descend on the village, enacting terrible deeds supposedly in the name of God. When Richard returns to find the aftermath of Hopkins’ actions, he vows revenge upon the witchfinder.

Although the film has undoubtedly become important to the yet-to-be-identified folk horror genre, Reeves in fact set out to make a kind of English equivalent of a western, particularly in the mould of filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah. He pays particular attention to the landscape, successfully creating the impression of vast East Anglian plains, where isolated communities are left to their own devices and superstitions, which fester into violence. The result is one of the great cinematic inversions of the pastoral ideal; a film whose landscapes are simultaneously idyllic and ominous.

Here are five locations from the film as they stand today...

During the 2010s, a trend emerged that many dubbed ‘elevated horror’. It’s a lazy term, suggesting that all horror that came before it wasn’t artistic or explored deeper themes beyond scares and thrills. Regardless of the argument for and against ‘elevated’ horror, it is interesting to note that two of the most acclaimed movies from this period fell into the folk horror subgenre – The VVitch and Midsommar.

Both were distributed by A24 and became well-loved titles in the canon, praised for their exploration of themes such as trauma, gender, grief, life and death, and isolation. To explore these topics, the filmmakers used folklore as their foundation, calling upon old stories that have echoed through generations of humans, and the innate fears and beliefs that have followed people for centuries.

Perhaps that’s why these films came to be labelled ‘elevated horror’: at their core, folk horror relies more on creating a general atmosphere of fear through the exploration of human anxieties and the power of group beliefs, as found in religious cults and close-knit villages.

There is a lack of masked killers, extreme gore, jumpscares, haunting spectres, zombies, and vampires in folk horror. When the genre focuses on witchcraft, the audience doesn’t fear terrifying images of witches per se. Instead, the fear is often found in the humans that hunt them down as though they’re animals, attacking femininity and alternate ways of thinking that don’t align with an autocratic system of beliefs.

Thus, the folk horror genre has a particular allure, bringing us face to face with fears that have been carried down through generations and were experienced by our ancestors. No matter the year, folk horror movies explore themes that remind us of our heritage and that people have always been persecuted for being different and outcasts for religious or social reasons, even to the point of extreme violence and death...

Some of the best folk horror movies of all time base their scares on the slow-burn creepiness of the rural setting. Others are terrifying movies about cults. David Bruckner's 2017 horror film "The Ritual" dabbles in both, and adds in a haunted house aspect with a strange settlement in the middle of a Swedish forest. Then, it becomes something else altogether.

As a group of hikers finds out to their detriment, all the folk horror elements in the movie come courtesy of a single entity: A supernatural beast known as Moder, which is both terrifying to behold and so utterly powerful that it might be able to go toe to toe with just about any other horror movie monster out there. Let's find out more about Moder, the animalistic horror movie god lurking at the center of "The Ritual"...

This striking short story collection, set in a spooky hotel in the Fens, offers a fierce interrogation of women’s roles in the folk horror world.

I heard The Hotel before I read it – Daisy Johnson’s second short story collection was broadcast on Radio 4, at night, during a Covid lockdown. The 15 gothic tales went out over several weeks and were beautifully produced, summoning the uncanny atmosphere of the Fens, the lost, broken, female narrators like ghosts coming over the airwaves on those bleak winter evenings. Johnson has always been about atmosphere: her prose slops and shifts, weird and unsettling, asking you to check your footing with each step into her marshy world.

The stories are linked by place first of all. The Fenland hotel is built on a site that already has something cursed about it: “the earth… looks as if darkness itself has slipped from the sky and filled the ground”. A woman who was thought a witch had been drowned there and now haunts the place. “This land and I share some similarities,” she tells us in the first story, “this land knows the way I know, this land can see everything, it can see us and what lies ahead”...

How do you like your horror? Elevated arthouse or sleazy splatter? Comfortably cliched or disturbingly groundbreaking? Disgustingly gruesome or so subtle you can’t work out why you’re uneasy? Do you limit your consumption of horror films to Halloween but steer clear the rest of the year? Or are you a horror fiend who just can’t get enough of it, whatever the season?

The good news is that the horror genre has been going strong for more than a century, so you’ll never run out of films to scare you. From early silents Le Manoir du diable (1896) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) to this year’s genuinely gruesome slasher hit Terrifier 3 – which recently knocked Joker: Folie à Deux off the top of the US box office – there has never been any shortage of audiences lining up to be chilled, unsettled or downright freaked out. Just look at this year’s robust box office on Abigail, Immaculate and Longlegs, as well as artier offerings such as The Substance. The future of cinema, it seems, is horror. And not just in terms of profit, but in visual imagination, envelope-pushing and audience enjoyment.

Every genre fan knows Dracula and Frankenstein, King Kong, The Exorcist, Carrie, An American Werewolf in London, The Silence of the Lambs and so on. But behind every gamechanger, there are antecedents and influences, both direct and indirect. And however beloved the canon, there are always less familiar treasures to be unearthed. So here I have traced the evolution of the horror genre in 10 films. For the most part I have avoided the big beasts and instead highlighted some less familiar, but no less significant efforts in the long history of the genre.

If the most recent title in this selection is from 2001, it doesn’t mean 21st-century horror is in decline. On the contrary, the genre is thriving, with film-makers such as Jordan Peele exploring new avenues, more female directors adding their voices to the mix, and subgenres overlapping in surprising new ways. It takes time for trends to coalesce; it wasn’t until 30 years after its release that The Wicker Man (1973), and films with related themes, were given the label “folk horror”. But of one thing you can be sure: the genre is a constantly evolving beast, and horror films will continue to shock, delight and terrify us for many years to come...

• Monsters: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
• Mad science: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)
• Satanism: The Seventh Victim (1943)
• Dreams and hallucinations: Dead of Night (1945)
• Aliens: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• Slashers: Peeping Tom (1960)
• Sadeian cinema: Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
• Zombies and gore: Dawn of the Dead (1978)
• Body horror: Videodrome (1983)
• Techno horror and ghosts: Kairo, AKA Pulse (2001)

Nick Frost both writes and stars in the folk horror comedy Get Away – a movie originally going by the name Svalta. The synopsis reads as follows:

"Looking forward to a vacation on the small Swedish island of Svälta, the Smith family is unsettled by the unfriendly mainlanders who advise them to avoid the island at all costs, especially during the Karantan festival. But the 4-member family is in deep need of some time away & stubbornly decides to take the ferry anyway. On the island, the locals are rather rude & unwelcoming, and their behavior suggests that some big event is about to happen. Is it a cult? Is there a sacrifice in the works? Seemingly unbothered by so much discourtesy and drama, the family enjoys a swim in the sea, treks in the woods, and, oh, the silent isolation… which turns out to be a pretty perfect situation for the Smiths, who have special plans of their own."

Get Away will be available to watch on Sky Cinema from the 10th January.

Watch the trailer...

Nick Frost both writes and stars in the folk horror comedy Get Away – a movie originally going by the name Svalta. The synopsis reads as follows:

"Looking forward to a vacation on the small Swedish island of Svälta, the Smith family is unsettled by the unfriendly mainlanders who advise them to avoid the island at all costs, especially during the Karantan festival. But the 4-member family is in deep need of some time away & stubbornly decides to take the ferry anyway. On the island, the locals are rather rude & unwelcoming, and their behavior suggests that some big event is about to happen. Is it a cult? Is there a sacrifice in the works? Seemingly unbothered by so much discourtesy and drama, the family enjoys a swim in the sea, treks in the woods, and, oh, the silent isolation… which turns out to be a pretty perfect situation for the Smiths, who have special plans of their own."

Get Away will be available to watch on Sky Cinema from the 10th January.

Watch the trailer...

... A truism of combat is that whoever shoots first wins, and having a drone wait while a human makes a decision can cede the initiative to the enemy. Warfare at its core is a competition—one with dire consequences for the losers. This makes walking away from any advantage difficult.

Experts believe the “man in the loop” is indispensable, now and for the foreseeable future, as a means of avoiding tragedy, says Zach Kallenborn, an expert on killer robots, weapons of mass destruction, and drone swarms with the Schar School of Policy and Government. “Current machine vision systems are prone to making unpredictable and easy mistakes.”

Mistakes could have major implications, such as spiraling a conflict out of control, causing accidental deaths and escalation of violence. “Imagine the autonomous weapon shoots a soldier not party to the conflict. The soldier’s death might draw his or her country into the conflict,” Kallenborn says. Or the autonomous weapon may cause an unintentional level of harm, especially if autonomous nuclear weapons are involved, he adds.

While physical courage may not be necessary to take lives, Kallenborn notes that the human factor retains one last form of courage in the act of killing: moral courage. That humans should have ultimate responsibility for taking a life is an old argument. “During the Civil War folks objected to the use of landmines because it was a dishonorable way of waging war. If you’re going to kill a man, have the decency to pull the trigger yourself.” Removing the human component leaves only the cold logic of an artificial intelligence…and whatever errors may be hidden in that programmed logic.

If autonomous weapons authorized to open fire on humans is an inevitable future, as some armies and experts think it is, will AI ever become as proficient as humans in discerning enemy combatants from innocent bystanders? Will the armies of the future simply accept civilian casualties as the price of a quicker end to the war? These questions remain unanswered for now. And humanity may not have much time to wrestle with these questions before the future arrives by force...