New York Comic Con 2025 was everything fans hoped for and more. Every year, the Javits Center becomes a pop culture carnival where superheroes brush shoulders with scream queens, dragons meet demons, and fandoms unite. Between an animatronic invasion at BlumFest and the emotional chills of IT: Welcome to Derry, it was a weekend that proved geek culture isn’t just alive—it’s mutating, evolving, and thriving.
It: Welcome to Derry
The It: Welcome to Derry activation dared fans to face their fears. Participants wrote down their childhood fears, from spiders to bullies to needles (that one was mine). We then stepped into a haunted labyrinth where those fears came alive. A fun haunted house of sorts on the show floor with actors so hilariously dedicated to creeping all of us out—it doesn’t get much better than that.
But the real revelations came from my interviews with the cast and creative team, who are bringing King’s nightmare world to TV.
“The reason those films work so well is because you care deeply about this group of losers,” said Jason Fuchs, co-showrunner and writer. “So our task was to find a new group of young actors who could capture that same emotional connection and I think we did.”
Co-showrunner Brad Caleb Kane added, “The greatest lesson I took from the IT films is: don’t mess with the source material…we went back to the themes of Stephen King’s book, the themes of the exploitation of fear as a tool to control, to divide, to conquer.”
Fuchs agreed that while the series is harrowing, it’s ultimately uplifting: “The IT movies are both very scary films. They’re also happy films. They’re uplifting at the end. You feel good walking out of both those movies, which is not always the objective of every excellent horror film or horror story. Part of the special sauce was how do we do something that is harrowing and terrifying and stressful, but also tell a story that is uplifting, that puts something positive into the world that is about overcoming evil, rather than just succumbing to it.”
Actor Stephen Rider, who plays Hank Grogan, reflected on the show’s 1962 setting. “In that time, a black man in America couldn’t move freely. You had no control over what could happen to you. Hank’s story is one of survival, and that resonated with me deeply,” he shared. “I grew up with my grandmother, mother, and sister, so from a young age I felt the need to protect my family. That helped me understand Hank’s courage.”
He also spoke about the demands of shooting such an intense horror story: “We were scared all the time—ten months of filming stretched into almost two years with the strike. But it brought us closer together.”
When asked what he learned from playing Hank, Rider smiled. “He taught me courage. To live in the moment. I used to observe from a distance. Hank forced me to jump in.”
And yes, Bill Skarsgård is officially back as Pennywise. “If you can get Bill to play Pennywise, do it,” Fuchs laughed.
Mercy
Filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, director of movies like Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and producer of “screen life” films like Searching, Unfriended, and the 2025 War of the Worlds movie, unveiled the trailer for Mercy, a mind-bending techno-thriller starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson.
“This movie is an interpretation of what happens when the screen between the digital and physical world dissolves,” Bekmambetov told me. “Chris plays a man accused of killing his wife, and the trial unfolds in real time. Every witness appears on screens around him—it’s immersive theater for the digital age.”
During the panel, Pratt alluded to Bekmanbetov’s unconventional directorial approach. Pratt is confined to a chair for most of the runtime and acting across from Ferguson in what he described as a “high-definition Zoom call.” As a result, Bekmanbetov would have the actors perform for 50-70 minutes in a row, acting most of the film out in real time.
“I learned that it gives you a very different acting style,” Bekmanbetov says. “Because it’s more like theatre. Actors can create more nuanced performances and improvise more because if you have a 15-minute take, you cannot comment. You can’t say, ‘look right, do this.’ This is what makes this movie very different from many other movies.”
Mercy arrives in theaters on January 23, 2026 from Amazon MGM Studios.
Silent Night, Deadly Night
Director Mike P. Nelson and actress Ruby Modine brought Christmas horror back to NYCC. This reboot of the 1984 slasher movie about a traumatized young man who goes on a killing spree dressed in a Santa suit stars Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends) as Billy, with Modine acting across from him as Pamela.
Modine, laughing, recalled seeing the finished cut: “There’s so much blood. My jaw was on the floor the whole time!”
“I actually really love the setup of the original movie,” says Nelson. “So keeping that semi-intact and kind of giving the audience sort of like that recognition, like ‘yep, we’re watching Silent Night, Deadly Night.'” This film takes the basic setup of the original ’80s slasher and reinterprets a lot of it, but retains a few callbacks to the kills of the OG.
The scariest films they’ve ever seen? “Hereditary,” Modine confessed. “I slept with the lights on for a month.” Nelson chose Event Horizon: “It rattled me to my core.”
Silent Night, Deadly Night releases in theaters on December 12, 2025, from Cineverse.
Ronda Rousey: Expecting the Unexpected
WWE legend and actress Ronda Rousey swapped the ring for the page with her new graphic novel, Expecting the Unexpected. The novel follows a deadly, pregnant hit-woman who must fight off wave after wave of assassins in a hybrid of action, romance, and comedy.
“What makes this so different and makes it so special to me because it isn’t something that I felt pressured into or felt like I had to do,” Rousey said. “It is something that I couldn’t not do.”
David Dastmalchian Talks Through
Rousey’s not the only one with a graphic novel out. David Dastmalchian, who’s made appearances in The Dark Knight, The Suicide Squad, Oppenheimer, and a starring role in Late Night with the Devil, has a new one out now called Through.
“I’m so proud of this book,” says Dastmalchian. “It’s a story set in Chicago in the present day, and it involves a young woman who goes on an unintentional journey through the eye of a sewing needle into another realm that was constructed for her, possibly by her, even though she doesn’t know how it came into existence. And it’s very much inspired by my love of Alice through the Looking Glass by Louis Carroll, The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum, the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan, and incredibly influenced by Guillermo del Toro, in particular, his film Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Dastmalchian also shared about his relationship with horror and superhero, two genres he’s a veteran of. “Genre has given me comfort, escape elevation, incredible entertainment, deeply touching, personalization as far as like my connection to people who are outsiders that have sometimes conditions that make them feel like they’re broken, but can end up becoming their own superpowers,” he says. “And it’s been that way for me since I was a little boy reading comic books in Kansas.”
Black Phone 2
Years after Scott Derrickson’s movie The Black Phone merged a kidnapping thriller with the supernatural, this sequel brings back Ethan Hawke as The Grabber, calling Finney (Mason Thames) from the depths of hell.
Stars Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw confirmed what fans were hoping: The Black Phone 2 is darker and more intense. “It’s definitely scarier, definitely bloodier,” Thames said. McGraw added, “In every aspect, it is ten times scarier. It is ten times more emotional. Honestly, it gives you a little bit of everything.”
Their scariest movies? The Conjuring for Thames, Sinister for McGraw (complete with a real-life power outage mid-viewing—terrifying).
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Director Emma Tammi teased that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 goes even bigger: “We’ve got more animatronics, more sets, and a lot more action. It’s a thrill ride.” Despite the mixed to negative critical reception of the first movie, it was a box office hit. “I think the reception that we were more interested in looking at was the fan base—the critics sometimes are with you, sometimes they’re not,” said Tammi.
The chaos continued at BlumFest, where animatronics from the movie actually crashed the event, and they announced new cast additions—Kellen Goff as Toy Freddy, MatPat as Toy Bonnie, and Megan Fox as Toy Chica. The highlight? Matthew Lillard’s roaring grand entrance that had fans on their feet.
The Copenhagen Test
Simu Liu, Thomas Brandon, and Jennifer Yale discussed their spy thriller The Copenhagen Test. Liu reflected on lessons from Shang-Chi: “Action that doesn’t serve story is just people fighting. The best scenes are about what’s really happening between characters.”
Brandon added, “You can’t wait for inspiration; you just have to write,” revealing that he wrote the pilot for The Copenhagen Test while on the set of his show Legacies. Yale, formerly of Dexter, revealed her secret weapon: “You always need to make the audience feel unsettled, but not exhausted.”
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