This Fall’s New Haunted House Movie Does What The Conjuring Never Could

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Published Sep 12, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Dave Boyle lives his dream with Never After Dark, crafting a delicate and surprising nightmare

The year's best haunted house movie finds a sweet spot between J-Horror and The Conjuring

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Never After Dark is what I want out of a Conjuring movie then fail to ever get out of a Conjuring movie. Moeka Hoshi stars as Airi, a clairvoyant tasked with exorcising spirits who "haunt" homes and just need a nudge to the other side. The case at the heart of Never After Dark winds up pitting her against stranger, more dangerous forces, ones she’s less capable of dealing with: the living.

The new film from director Dave Boyle, who has swung from intimate musical indies like Surrogate Valentine to sword-wielding chamber dramas with Netflix’s House of Ninjas, navigates a haunted house story with the camera precision of David Fincher and a warmth for human experience that hews closer to the works of Hirokazu Kore-eda. It’s absorbing, twisty, and at times charming — despite being a movie that involves psychic mediums, serial killers, and plenty of splattery moments of pure horror. No surprise, Sony just hired Boyle to direct a remake of Pulse.

Boyle’s unique background, having been raised in Utah as a Mormon before breaking into the SXSW-adjacent indie scene, then devoting most of his filmmaking career to working out of Japan, makes any moves he makes endlessly fascinating. When he delivers a banger? Well, we had to talk to him for the Fall Preview ahead of Never After Dark’s Sept. 25 release.

Polygon: In Never After Dark, you’re layering ghost stories, haunted house movies, and serial-killer thriller on top of each other. So where did it start in your head?

Dave Boyle: Ghost stories are one of my favorite things, and I rarely miss one when they come out. I love haunted house movies. But I feel like I always enjoy the first half to three quarters of them… the endings to those stories are really challenging. As a result, a lot of them end in a handful of the same ways. That's not a knock on the forebears of the genre — it’s the reality of there having been so many of them. The idea that the ghost at the center of the story needs some kind of satisfaction or some redemption at the end in order to be free from it, or else there's some kind of showdown between human and ghost. So, from a thought experiment perspective, the place I came from was wanting to do a ghost story that ended in a new and different way and went in a different direction that was earned and organic to the story.

It's funny because I'd always been a huge horror buff and always wanted to make one, and even though conventional wisdom is that that's the easiest genre to break into, I never had luck that way. When I started, I was in Utah when Napoleon Dynamite became a phenomenon. So the way to get people to get behind your movie was to make wacky comedy. The reality is you really have to take the wave that comes in, and that was the path I went down with [my film] Surrogate Valentine. But from a “why now?” perspective, after I did the Netflix show [House of Ninjas], I just had the opportunity to do whatever I wanted and I wanted to do a horror movie.

I also always knew that I wanted to have a protagonist who's not afraid of ghosts. So then the challenge becomes, well, then how is the movie going to be scary for audiences? What can you throw at her to challenge her and to really make her scared?

You’re the rare American doing a ton of work in Japan, so I’m not surprised to find this story centered on a Japanese psychic. Does the story feel culturally specific to you? Would setting it in America make it different to you?

I think the elements of it are specifically Japanese, but this is by design: the central character, Airi, played by Moeka Hoshi, is meant to come from a tradition that is neither specifically Japanese nor specific to Western psychics or mediums. We wanted to evoke the fact that she comes from a tradition of a belief system of some kind, but we wanted it to be something that would be alien to both Japanese audiences and Western audiences. So the reaction of the clients, the family that she visits in the movie, and the way she thinks about spirits and the belief system that she presents about what she's doing, I think is very atypical for Japanese society and Japanese ghost stories as well.

But we wanted it to feel organic to where the story is set. We really wanted to make it authentic: the practices, the rituals that she does, we wanted those to be easily understandable without any dialogue. You just look and you know what she's doing even though nobody's kind of narrating.

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Airi has the ability to cross over to the spirit world through a cinematic ritual involving candles, hair, and a mirror. It’s as organic and authentic as you’d hope — is it based on anything?

It's all made up. The specific combination was something that I hope is unique and one of a kind. The ritual was the very first thing that I came up with in regard to this movie because I love movies that are procedural, just watching somebody go step by step through a process. So this was just something that I imagined as something that would be kind of interesting to watch somebody do.

And then the ritual provides the structure for the movie. The first act is all leading up to the first time you see her do it, and then she does it again, and then she does it one more time at the end of the film. Each time with a little bit different kind of twist on what happens, and each time there's a little bit different presentation of how it all goes down. Creating something compelling and tactile, from just the storytelling perspective, is what I was really interested in.

Then creating all those elements, like the spinning mirror with the zoetrope on the edge, that's all a practical prop. The animation was all hand-drawn and hand-created so that we could film it with the camera. My production designer, Yûji Hayashida, came up with the design from the written description on the page.

I’m just going to say it: There are a lot of teeth in this movie. Teeth that have been… removed from people. What is it about teeth?

It's really awful. I have a real thing about teeth. I had a really scary dentist as a child. I looked him up on Yelp not too long ago, and there were all these people saying, “It has taken me years of therapy to get over going to this dentist as a child.” So I think that I needed to come up with something that scared me personally, but also kind of transcended logic. I never wanted to delve into the mind of the antagonist in the movie. I just wanted it to be an incomprehensible evil. It just kind of naturally came out that way.

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

I’ve been talking with fantasy writers who came out of Mormon culture, BYU specifically, and I’m fascinated by how that faith can shape an imagination drawn to the supernatural. How much does this movie connect to your own religious upbringing and the way you think about spirituality?

I would say — and probably people would argue with me — that I grew up hearing ghost stories. I feel like the Book of Mormon is full of ghost stories, honestly.

Even though I've never directly talked about it in any of my films, my whole pitch for House of Ninja for Netflix was, “Ninjas aren't allowed to drink, they're not allowed to date.” I just basically wrote them as a Mormon family. For me, the interest in it, because I came onto that show as a hired gun, my personal way into it was not that they have these incredible skills. It's that they have these beliefs and restrictions and obligations and everything. So unquestionably, it's just a part of my DNA. I'd say it was a big influence on Never After Dark. I had a lot of long, personal talks with Moeka Hoshi about what it's like to believe in stuff because I see what the character is doing as a spiritual practice that's rooted in a belief system.

One aspects is that the ghosts are more or less not as scary as real people, which is also something that's influenced by that belief system. So, yeah, it's funny: [My Mormon background] is something that I don't talk about publicly, but I do talk about very openly with my collaborators so that they understand a lot of where the things that I write come from.

Never After Dark opens in theaters on Sept. 25.