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Are there really more horror films around this year than usual, or does it just feel like it?
The Watchers, Late Night with the Devil, Terrifier 3, Smile 1 and 2 - not to mention horror-adjacent films like The Substance, Joker Folie à Deux and Alien Romulus. The list seems endless.
As a horror-sceptic, I'm marginally more tolerant of semi-plausible scary monsters in a confined space than I am where Demons from the Depths of Hell are involved.
Or for that matter when my non-existent religious convictions are challenged in a film like Heretic.
Heretic was possibly created as a reaction against one too many visits from Mormon missionaries.
What if we could give them a bit of their own back? What if these squeaky-clean young ladies - like Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton - had their beliefs challenged by the Devil?
Given that the Devil should appear initially charming, who better to portray Mr Reed than the debonaire Hugh Grant?
A chance to talk for hours about Latter Days Saints? He'd love to. And so would his good lady wife.
Mind you, if you think his good lady wife is actually hard at work back in the kitchen, you're obviously not paying close enough attention to the ominous noises in Mr Reed's dimly-lit house.
We can only assume the good Sisters are so overjoyed someone's actually taken them up on their offer to chat that they don't notice the sinister turn Mr Reed's conversation seems to be taking.
Well, I say sinister. After ten minutes or so, Mr Reed's endless, anti-Mormon arguments start to sound like Richard Dawkins at his most nit-picking.
But horror audiences don't live by anti-religion arguments alone. Heretic is written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who made the entertaining sci-fi shocker A Quiet Place.
And they realise that sooner or later they need to ramp up the frights.
So eventually the doors bolt, the lights flicker, the walls creak, and the now diabolic Mr Reed is giving poor Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton a terrible choice.
Do they take the door marked "Belief", or the one marked - follow me closely here - "Disbelief"?
And before you realise it, Heretic has become my least favourite horror sub-genre - "the elaborate game."
You know, where the villain lures his victims in and takes them through a fiendishly intricate series of rooms, staircases, booby-trapped tunnels - presumably built on the off-chance of Mormons visiting. And all to... I don't know, to test their faith or something.
Setting up all this nonsense to bully two dim young missionaries is A, unsporting, B, unbelievable and C, incredibly unbelievable.
There is some marginal pleasure watching Grant enjoying himself at the film's expense.
Just as Mr Reed sneers at his young victims' beliefs, you get the idea that Grant - having safely banked his paycheck - is free to do the same with Heretic.
Flying in the face of probability, Heretic has picked up better reviews than you'd expect.
A nasty horror film, based on shaky religious arguments and all part of a random game - as I say, several shades of not my sort of thing.
But it would be a dull old world if we all thought the same way I do about tosh like this - or indeed, I suspect, the same way Grant thinks.
And in the end, a film like Heretic boils down to a matter of belief.
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