The line between your smartphone and your car continues to blur. Volvo has announced that it is rolling out an over-the-air software update that brings Apple Music directly to the infotainment systems of more than 2 million vehicles worldwide. Instead of relying on Apple CarPlay or plugging in an iPhone, eligible drivers will be able to stream music natively from their car’s built-in system, making Apple Music another integrated feature of Volvo’s software experience.

The update is arriving for a wide range of Volvo models, including the EX90, ES90, XC90, S90, V90, XC60, S60, V60, XC40, EX40 and EC40, covering model year 2020 onwards. Availability, however, may vary depending on the vehicle.

At first glance, adding another music streaming app may not sound particularly significant. But it highlights how modern cars are increasingly being treated like connected computing platforms, where new features arrive through software updates rather than requiring new hardware.

Apple Music becomes a built-in part of the driving experience

The biggest advantage of native Apple Music support is convenience. Drivers no longer need to connect an iPhone through Apple CarPlay or Bluetooth just to access their playlists. Once signed in, they can browse Apple’s catalogue of more than 100 million songs directly from the vehicle’s infotainment display, creating a more seamless experience during everyday commutes and long road trips.

To celebrate the rollout, Volvo is also offering promotional access to Apple’s streaming service. Customers who are new to Apple Music can receive up to three months free, while eligible returning subscribers who have been away from the service for at least one month can claim two months free. The offer remains available until July 6, 2027.

Some of Volvo’s premium electric vehicles also receive an audio upgrade. The EX60, EX90 and ES90 will support Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos when equipped with the optional Bowers & Wilkins sound system, allowing compatible Apple Music tracks to be played in immersive surround sound. Volvo also says the newly launched EX60 will ship with Apple Music pre-installed when deliveries begin later this year.

Cars are becoming software platforms, not just vehicles

This announcement is about far more than music streaming. Over-the-air updates have fundamentally changed how automakers deliver new features. What once required a dealership visit can now arrive overnight through a software download. Tesla popularized this approach years ago, and traditional manufacturers have steadily followed by treating vehicles more like smartphones that continue evolving after purchase.

For Apple, the partnership extends the reach of its services business beyond phones, tablets and computers. For Volvo, it strengthens its growing reputation as a software-first automaker, particularly as it continues building vehicles around Google’s Android Automotive platform.

Consumers also stand to benefit. Native apps reduce dependence on smartphones, simplify the driving experience, and make infotainment systems feel less like accessories and more like an integrated part of the vehicle.

As software becomes one of the biggest differentiators in the automotive industry, partnerships like this are likely to become increasingly common. The next major upgrade to your car may not involve a more powerful engine or a larger battery. It may simply arrive while your car is parked overnight.

XGIMI has expanded its Elfin Flip portable projector lineup to four models with the introduction of the Elfin Flip 4K and Elfin Flip Laser, joining the existing Elfin Flip and Elfin Flip Plus. The two additions move the series beyond entry-level LED projection, offering buyers a choice between a 1080p triple-laser projector and a more advanced 4K model.

Both new projectors use RGB triple-laser light engines rated at 1,600 ISO lumens and include a single 7-watt Harman Kardon speaker with Dolby Audio. That represents a substantial step up from the Elfin Flip Plus, which uses an LED light source rated at 500 ISO lumens and relies on two 3-watt speakers. This is considerably more than another model number and a mildly revised shade of beige.

XGIMI has packaged those upgrades inside the familiar book-sized Elfin Flip design, retaining the integrated stand and carry-handle concept that makes the projectors easy to move between rooms and aim at a wall or ceiling. The expanded range now stretches from affordable 1080p streaming to brighter 4K laser projection without requiring owners to drag a black plastic shoebox around the house.

Related Reading: XGIMI Unveils New MoGo 3 Pro, Elfin Flip, AURA 2, HORIZON S Series Projectors For 2024

Elfin Flip 4K

The Elfin Flip 4K sits at the top of the lineup with 4K display resolution via pixel shifting, an RGB triple-laser engine delivering up to 1,600 ISO lumens of brightness, a 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 110% coverage of the BT.2020 color gamut, and ΔE<1 color accuracy—specifications that rival those of dedicated home theater installations. Its optical zoom and 0.98–1.3:1 throw ratio enable precise screen sizing without requiring users to reposition the projector.

Weighing just 1.55 kg and measuring 9.64 inches wide, it delivers a large-screen viewing experience with zero visual compromise.

The Elfin Flip 4K’s flip-to-start operation and slim profile reinforce its portability: pick it up, place it, and the picture is ready. XGIMI’s Intelligent Screen Adaptation technology handles the rest automatically through Uninterrupted Auto Keystone, Auto Focus, Intelligent Screen Alignment, Intelligent Obstacle Avoidance, Wall Color Adaptation, and Intelligent Eye Protection.

Gaming Support: For the first time in the Elfin series, the Flip 4K supports console-level gaming performance, with input lag as low as 1 ms at 1080p/120 Hz. It also supports VRR and ALLM, along with Black Equalizer, Virtual Crosshair, and a dedicated Gaming Picture Mode.

The Flip Laser

The Elfin Flip Laser sits immediately below the Flip 4K in the lineup. It uses the same RGB triple-laser light engine, carries the same 1,600 ISO-lumen brightness rating, and includes the same Harman Kardon speaker system and smart features.

The primary differences are its 1080p display resolution, lower 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, and lack of the Flip 4K’s advanced gaming features.

Audio & Smart Features

The Elfin Flip 4K and Elfin Flip Laser each include a 7-watt Harman Kardon speaker with Dolby Audio support, designed to deliver room-filling sound without requiring external audio equipment. Our suggestion: get a soundbar.

With Google TV, users also have direct access to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and thousands of additional streaming apps, making the Elfin Flip Series a complete all-in-one home entertainment solution.

Pro Tip: The previously released Elfin Flip Plus and Elfin Flip remain the more affordable entry points in the lineup, but both use LED light sources rather than RGB triple-laser engines. Their speaker systems also offer less power and do not benefit from Harman Kardon tuning. Automatic setup features may vary by model.

XGIMI Elfin Flip Series Comparison

The Bottom Line 

XGIMI offers projectors for everything from casual streaming to dedicated home theaters, but the Elfin Flip Series occupies an increasingly popular middle ground: compact lifestyle projectors that can move between rooms without looking like surplus equipment from a high-school audiovisual department. The Elfin Flip 4K is the standout, combining pixel-shifted 4K resolution, an RGB triple-laser light engine, 1,600 ISO lumens, optical zoom, Google TV, automatic setup, and serious gaming support inside a slim, book-sized design for $999. That combination of portability, optical zoom, wide color coverage, and 1080p/120 Hz gaming performance is what makes it genuinely different.

The Elfin Flip 4K is best suited to apartment dwellers, renters, gamers, and families who want a large image in a bedroom, living room, or temporary media space without permanently mounting a projector. The Elfin Flip Laser offers the same 1,600 ISO-lumen brightness and RGB triple-laser color performance for $799, but drops to 1080p, reduces dynamic contrast, and eliminates the 4K model’s optical zoom and advanced gaming features. Unless the Laser is substantially discounted, spending another $200 for the Flip 4K is not a difficult decision.

There are compromises. Neither laser model includes a built-in battery, so “portable” means easy to carry from room to room rather than movie night in the middle of a field without access to an extension cord. HDR support is limited to HDR10 and HLG, with no Dolby Vision, and 1,600 ISO lumens still does not turn either model into a replacement for a television in a brightly illuminated room. The single 7-watt Harman Kardon speaker may be adequate for casual viewing, but claims of room-filling sound should be approached with the same caution normally reserved for airport sushi. Both models support HDMI eARC, so budget for at least a soundbar if dialogue clarity, bass, and convincing movie sound matter.

The Elfin Flip Plus remains the value option at $379, offering 1080p resolution, Google TV, automatic setup, and 500 ISO lumens. The standard Elfin Flip is also priced at $379 or less, although its lower 400 ISO-lumen output makes the Plus the more sensible purchase whenever the two are selling for the same amount. Casual viewers working with a dark room and tighter budget should start there; buyers seeking the best combination of brightness, resolution, flexibility, and gaming performance should move directly to the Elfin Flip 4K.

Price & Availability

Related Reading

In the middle of a diarrhea shitstorm, the Food and Drug Administration and lettuce supplier Taylor Farms appear to be facing off in a passive aggressive battle of technicalities.

On July 17, the California-based company issued a voluntary recall on iceberg lettuce sourced from Central Mexico. The recall came after people across at least five states were sickened with cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection that causes explosive diarrhea.

The next day, the FDA said that it had detected the parasite in a sample of Taylor Farms lettuce that wasn’t part of the initial recall. The day after that, the company and the FDA said that the result was actually a false positive.

“Today, the FDA apologized to us,” Taylor Farms then posted on its X account on July 19.

The FDA did not quite agree with that interpretation, however. On July 20, an agency official told reporters that it did not offer the company an “official apology.” Instead, the official said, “mostly we were providing factual information” about how difficult it is to test for and trace the sources of cyclospora outbreaks.

The agency emphasized that the recall—which spans 27 states, and includes certain lettuce sold to Taco Bell and Walmart—still stands. “To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms,” it posted on X.

In its July 19 post, Taylor Farms also wrote that the FDA “has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora.” While true, this elides the difficulties involved in accurately testing for the parasite.

Many foodborne illness investigators determine the source of outbreaks without ever testing products. Instead, investigators use epidemiological evidence, such as interviewing people who have tested positive, to determine commonalities.

Taylor Farms has reportedly taken issue with how the FDA and CDC has conducted their weeks-long investigation into the source of the outbreak. A spokesperson told The New York Times that, last week, the company met with White House and FDA officials to discuss what it called “shortfalls” in the government organizations’ response processes. The Times reported that Taylor Farms executives attempted to cast doubt on the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s conclusions in the meeting, which took place on July 16, the day before Taylor Farms issued its recall.

Taylor Farms did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

Since May, thousands of people have been sickened with cyclosporasis, as health officials have struggled to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. Authorities in Michigan say that they have counted 6,148 cases in that state alone, though experts previously told WIRED that the number of cases nationwide is likely higher than what’s been reported.

Apple is moving on with its developer beta program, with new fourth builds of iOS 27, macOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and iPadOS 27 now undergoing testing.

The fourth round is here, and participants in Apple’s developer program can download the new builds to their devices right now.

The third developer builds arrived on July 6, while the second occurred on June 22 for most of the operating systems. The watchOS 27 counterparts landed later, on June 23 and June 25.

The first developer builds of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, tvOS 27, visionOS 27, and watchOS 27 were made available on June 8.

The fourth builds are:

• iOS 27 beta 4 is 24A5390f, replacing 24A5380h
• iPadOS 27 beta 4 is 24A5390f, replacing 24A5380h
• macOS 27 beta 4 is 26A5388g, replacing 26A5378j
• tvOS 27 beta 4 is 24J5325d, replacing 24J5315i
• watchOS 27 beta 4 is 24R5325h, replacing 24R5315i
• visionOS 27 beta 4 is 24M5326g, replacing 24M5316k

The initial changes included tweaks to Liquid Glass, the long-awaited overhaul of Siri, child-protective features, and many other smaller changes.

The second iOS 27 developer beta included an update to Apple TV in the Home app, showing it like a connected HomePod or HomePod mini. The Apple Wallet also added a new insights option, albeit in a non-functional fashion.

The third included some visual tweaks, with more customization options added for Siri AI on newer iPhone models.

At your own risk

While AppleInsider regularly warns readers that people trying out beta software should do so on secondary, spare hardware instead of their mission-critical or daily driver devices, it’s something that actually matters more this time around.

It’s because Apple’s early developer betas are for an operating system that is still under active development. There’s a higher chance of buggy, broken, and potentially harmful elements being distributed.

The initial builds are also intended to help developers learn about the operating system changes before the final public release later in 2026. It’s not meant to be used by consumers.

Unless you have a vested interest in using them, such as app development, don’t install the early developer betas.

Instead, members of the public should seek out the public betas, when they become available.

Find any changes in the new builds? Reach out to us on X at @AppleInsider or @Andrew_OSU, or send Andrew an email at [email protected].

CYBER-CRIME

Chinese open-weight model GLM 5.2 happily obliged

Apparently, being a leading destination for AI development doesn’t mean AI will bail you out. AI agents broke into Hugging Face’s production infrastructure, but commercial LLM guardrails blocked the forensic investigation, forcing it to turn to a Chinese open-weight model instead.

The intrusion, “driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” compromised a “limited set” of Hugging Face’s internal datasets and “several” credentials used by its services, according to a Thursday security incident disclosure.

While the ML platform says that it’s still investigating whether any partner or customer data was exposed in the breach, there’s “no evidence of tampering with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces, and our software supply chain (container images and published packages) was verified clean.”

It also doesn’t know which model the attackers used to power a swarm of AI agents, which, we’re told, executed many thousands of individual actions across short-lived sandboxes, using self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.

“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” according to the Hugging Face blog.

Additionally, after unsuccessfully using unnamed frontier models to start the forensic analysis, the Hugging Face security team ultimately ran the log analysis on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai, on the platform’s own infrastructure.

The advanced commercial models didn’t work because their analysis required submitting real attack commands, exploit payloads, and command-and-control artifacts – all of the things that the LLMs’ guardrails have been trained to block so that the AI systems can’t be used in real-life attacks.

“The attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried,” the security team wrote, noting that it’s not arguing against safety measures on hosted models and has shared this information with the LLM providers.

Using GLM 5.2 had another benefit, Hugging Face noted: “No attacker data, and none of the credentials it referenced, left our environment.”

This also serves as an important reminder to defenders, according to the AI platform. “Have a capable model you can run on your own infrastructure vetted and ready before an incident, both to avoid guardrail lockout and to keep attacker data and credentials from leaving your environment.”

The Hugging Face intrusion is yet another indication that attacks carried out by autonomous AI agents are no longer a future threat, but rather the current state of AI-based intrusions.

Last week, The Register spoke with TrendAI VP of AI and security threat research Tom Kellermann about another recent attack, during which a jailbroken Google Gemini did 90 percent of the work – including spinning up a new C2 server in just six minutes. The human did just 10 percent.

Additionally, earlier in July, Sysdig threat hunters documented what they say is the first-ever documented agentic ransomware infection with an LLM – not a human – driving the entire extortion operation, from gaining initial access to compromising a production database server and destroying data.

“Think of a burglar that never gets tired, never needs sleep, and instead of jiggling one door handle at a time, is trying a thousand of them simultaneously,” Zero Networks field CTO Chris Boehm said in an email to The Register about the Hugging Face intrusion.

“That’s basically what happened here. Not one guy typing commands into a terminal, a swarm of little automated processes hammering away nonstop, hopping between hiding spots to make it harder to trace,” Boehm said.

He added, the “part that actually unsettles” him most is that the platform’s security team couldn’t get commercial AI tools to help analyze the attack, “because those tools were built to refuse anything that looked like a real attack command. It didn’t matter that it was the good guys asking.”

Boehm said the takeaway for security teams is twofold: “These agents can now move faster and more relentlessly than any human ever could, and the safety tools we’re building aren’t always ready to help us respond at that speed.”®

AI and ML

Datacenters tax utilities normally, so just imagine what they could do if workloads were designed to destroy

AI datacenters wreak havoc on the power grid under normal circumstances, so what happens if a bad actor controls all the GPUs and wants to cause harm? Cybersecurity researchers in China have devised a way for malicious tenants to attack their infrastructure provider, potentially causing blackouts or damaging equipment. 

The attack, dubbed Bit2Watt, imagines an adversary masquerading as a legitimate cloud tenant to launch GPU workloads that have the potential to damage datacenters and supporting electrical systems. It’s intended to demonstrate the need to extend cybersecurity defenses to datacenter workload scheduling.

The researchers, Zhouhao Ji, Kaikai Pan, and Wenyuan Xu, from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, describe their technique in a preprint paper titled “Bit2Watt: A Cyber-Physical Vulnerability Exploiting GPU Workloads Across Power and Computing Infrastructures.”

AI training workloads represent a known challenge for datacenter operators. As Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI noted in a 2025 research paper arguing the need for power stabilization during AI training, the transition from GPU computation to GPU data synchronization causes large power swings to occur. And if the frequency spectrum of these power swings is “harmonized with critical frequencies of utilities, [that] can cause physical damage to the power grid infrastructure.”

Meta’s paper on the training of Llama 3 also cites the risk AI training poses to the power grid.

It says, “During training, tens of thousands of GPUs may increase or decrease power consumption at the same time, for example, due to all GPUs waiting for checkpointing or collective communications to finish, or the startup or shutdown of the entire training job. When this happens, it can result in instant fluctuations of power consumption across the datacenter on the order of tens of megawatts, stretching the limits of the power grid.”

Bit2Watt weaponizes this scenario by proposing that an adversary could use malicious GPU workloads to destabilize the datacenters and electrical infrastructure.

“Our results indicate that GPU loads can reach modulation frequencies exceeding 6,000 Hz, compared with only a few hertz observed in conventional household loads such as air conditioners,” the Zhejiang University authors state in their paper. “Such high-frequency modulations can substantially induce voltage excursions, harmonic distortion, and damping degradation.”

The authors claim an attack on a 1-MW local power grid consisting mainly of distributed energy resources like photovoltaics could use 1,000 GPUs to create a total harmonic distortion of 46.8 percent, which would squander nearly half the electrical current on non-productive work and would throw off about 20 percent more heat than normal. 

“This not only threatens the availability of the computing equipment but also produces a negative damping ratio of -0.27, introducing an unstable mode into the system,” the authors contend. “Once the protections are triggered and computing loads are shed, it can trigger cascading failures, potentially leading to blackouts exceeding 80 percent in large-scale power systems.”

The attack is relatively covert, the authors argue, because it can be launched within authorized workload execution paths and would likely be missed by cloud-provider monitoring frameworks. Thus, they propose that infrastructure providers coordinate defenses across the cyber and physical layers to look for malicious computation patterns. They also emphasize the need for local energy buffering systems to handle power demand spikes.

Bit2Watt also potentially opens the door for a side-channel attack called Watt2Bit. The researchers note that the electrical and thermal stress on hardware from a malicious workload creates denial of service events and enables the covert exfiltration of data via power modulation. As a proof of concept, they showed they could recover a 50-bit test sequence using frequency-shift keying (FSK) encoding.

“These findings underscore a fundamental shift: as power and computing infrastructures converge, security must be addressed across domains, requiring coordinated defenses that consider workload behavior, power electronics, and grid dynamics,” the authors conclude. ®

Who’d have thought that the first big spinoff to come out of The Big Bang Theory (not including Young Sheldon and Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, as they’re Sheldon-adjacent) would focus on awkward comic store owner Stuart (Kevin Sussman)?

Our new heroic lead, on-off girlfriend Denise (Lauren Lapkus), as well as friends Kripke (John Ross Bowie) and Bert (Brian Posehn), are brought back together when Stuart triggers a multiverse Armageddon by accidentally breaking a device built by Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki).

The drive-in movie theater was born in New Jersey on June 6, 1933, which feels exactly right. Only this state could give America Sinatra, The Sopranos, the Pine Barrens, the Taylor Ham versus pork roll blood feud, Wawa parking-lot diplomacy, Friday the 13th, and the drive-in, then look at the rest of the country like it needs to merge faster or get out of the left lane.

Richard Hollingshead Jr. tested the idea in his own driveway with a Kodak projector, a screen, some cars, and the very American belief that almost any activity can be improved if you don’t have to leave your vehicle. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, thousands of drive-ins were scattered across the country, glowing in weird places that eventually became strip malls, storage facilities, car washes, vape shops, and urgent-care centers with suspiciously cheerful signage.

Today, the surviving number is somewhere between “fewer than 300” and “roughly 330,” depending on who is counting, which theaters are still operating, and whether anyone picked up the phone. That is a long fall from the glory days, but maybe inevitable. Land became too valuable, multiplexes got bigger, VCRs happened, and eventually someone decided the drive-in needed gourmet snacks, $11 coffee, artisanal pretzels, and the kind of concession menu that uses the word “curated” without shame.

No.

The real drive-in was not about prestige. It was not about black levels, Dolby Atmos, recliner seats, or a lavender oat latte served by a man with a tiny hat and a screenplay. It was about monster movies, fast cars, biker gangs, radioactive insects, beach-party nonsense, slashers, revenge, bad science, worse decisions, and movies loud enough to survive the speaker bolted to your window.

And yes, that speaker sounded terrible. Nobody cared. You were in a car. The windshield was the screen. The audio was an afterthought. Sometimes the movie was too.

Unless you were a movie nerd, and some of us were already broken that way, the drive-in was also a place where teenagers discovered that privacy was relative, bench seats were a design miracle, and horniness was not a gendered activity. Some people came for the movie. Some came for the date. Some came in the trunk, which used to be called “sneaking in” and in 2026 is probably an ICE raid.

But the films mattered. Not always because they were “great” in the respectable sense. Many were too cheap, too lurid, too strange, too violent, too stupid, or too poorly supervised to survive inside polite cinema. Outside, under the stars, with bad popcorn and worse judgment, they became something else.

They became drive-in movies.

Not every great movie is a great drive-in movie. And not every great drive-in movie is technically good.

That is not a flaw.

That is the business model.

Midnight Movies and Cult Damage

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is less a movie now than a civic disturbance with fishnets, and Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter is the reason it still walks into the room before anyone else does.

It belongs here because it turned midnight screenings into participatory chaos: costumes, callbacks, rice, newspapers, toast, toilet paper, and behavior that would get you removed from most respectable theaters. At a drive-in, I’m still not sure how you hit the screen from your car with toast, but ambition deserves respect.

Scary? Not really. Essential? Absolutely.

Where to buy: $39.99 at Amazon

Pink Flamingos (1972)

John Waters did not make Pink Flamingos to win approval. He made it to contaminate the water supply.

Divine stars as Babs Johnson, competing for the title of “filthiest person alive,” which is not exactly AFI Top 100 material unless the AFI was having a breakdown. It is gross, funny, aggressive, and proudly allergic to good taste.

This belongs in the drive-in conversation because midnight movie culture needed films that felt dangerous, transgressive, and slightly illegal even when you paid for the ticket. Bring disinfectant. Maybe a priest.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

Eraserhead (1977)

David Lynch’s Eraserhead is what happens when anxiety gets pregnant and moves into an industrial apartment with no windows and worse plumbing.

It is not a monster movie, car movie, or exploitation picture in the usual drive-in sense, but midnight movie culture runs straight through it. The film is strange, funny in the way bad dreams are funny, and deeply unpleasant in ways that suggest your nervous system has filed a formal complaint.

This is not popcorn horror. This is “why is my soul making that noise?” horror.

Where to buy: $29.99 at Amazon

Monsters, Mutants and Bad Science

Them! (1954)

Before giant bug movies became easy punchlines, Them! did it properly.

Nuclear testing creates giant ants in the New Mexico desert, because apparently irradiating the planet had a few side effects. Imagine that. What makes Them! endure is that it plays the material straight. The ants are ridiculous if you are determined to be joyless, but the film treats the threat with real tension.

Personal favorite for a reason. Them! has legs. Six of them on the ants, and two rather memorable ones on Joan Weldon, who brings actual poise to a movie about irradiated insects eating their way through the Southwest.

And unlike Grease, which later turned the L.A. River basin into Thunder Road with leather jackets and hair product, Them! made better use of the city’s concrete nightmare fuel. The climax moves into the Los Angeles spillways and storm drain system, turning civic infrastructure into a giant ant colony. That is urban planning with mandibles.

Where to buy: $44.98 at Amazon

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

The Gill-man remains one of Universal’s great monsters because he is both ridiculous and elegant.

Creature from the Black Lagoon has everything the drive-in era needed: jungle atmosphere, underwater photography, scientists making poor choices, and a monster who clearly did not ask to be dragged into humanity’s nonsense. It is short, atmospheric, and visually strong enough to survive distance, bad projection, windshield glare, and someone walking back from the snack bar with fries.

A good drive-in monster needs a silhouette. The Gill-man has one.

Where to buy: $29.98 at Amazon

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

Roger Corman and Ray Milland give drive-in science fiction an unusually nasty philosophical edge.

Milland plays a doctor who develops eye drops that let him see beyond normal human vision. At first, it sounds useful. Then it becomes a curse, because in Corman’s world, knowledge is wonderful right up until it starts peeling your sanity like an onion.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes has the title of a cheap exploitation picture, but it is smarter, stranger, and more unsettling than the poster suggests. Corman sold the sizzle and still delivered steak. Thin steak, but steak.

Where to buy: $43.98 at Amazon

The Blob (1958)

Before Steve McQueen became the Cooler King in The Great Escape and made a motorcycle, a baseball glove, and solitary confinement look cooler than most actors’ entire careers, he was here fighting space jelly in small-town Pennsylvania.

The Blob is classic drive-in marquee bait: a monster from outer space, adults who refuse to listen, teenagers forced to save the day, and a creature that looks like dessert fighting back. The fact that the climax ends up around a diner only makes it more perfect. Of course the Blob attacked a diner. Even alien goo understands that late-night pie is where America lets its guard down.

The genius is that nobody overcomplicates it. Blob lands. Blob eats. Town panics. McQueen squints heroically. The diner gets involved.

Where to buy: $25.99 at Amazon

The Scary Ones That Still Have Teeth

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Carnival of Souls is proof that you do not need money to make something deeply unsettling. You need atmosphere, patience, and a face in the dark that looks like it has been waiting for you since birth.

Herk Harvey’s low-budget horror film follows a woman who survives a car accident and becomes drawn to an abandoned carnival pavilion. The plot is simple. The mood is everything.

This is not loud drive-in monster business. It is a ghost story with freezer burn, and it still feels like something you found on late-night television after everyone else in the house went to bed.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Messiah of Evil is the kind of 1970s horror film that makes wallpaper feel suspicious.

A young woman travels to a coastal town looking for her missing father and finds locals who seem less like residents and more like people waiting for a signal from something awful. The film is dreamy, disjointed, and genuinely creepy, with a supermarket sequence that deserves more respect than it gets.

It feels like a nightmare taking place in a town that forgot to wake up. Explanation would only ruin it, and horror already has enough paperwork.

Where to buy: $22.16 at Amazon

Black Christmas (1974)

Before Halloween, before the slasher rules hardened into formula, there was Black Christmas.

Bob Clark’s film is still one of the creepiest slashers ever made because it does not over-explain its killer. The obscene phone calls are vile, the sorority-house setting is claustrophobic, and the ending remains brutally effective.

And yes, this is the same Bob Clark who later directed Porky’s and A Christmas Story, because apparently one career could contain obscene phone calls, shower peeping, and Ralphie nearly shooting his eye out without anyone in Hollywood asking for a wellness check.

Porky’s also gave Kim Cattrall her infamous “Lassie” moment, which is probably not the scene you want to use when evaluating Mark Levinson electronics unless you enjoy explaining things to your neighbors and local law enforcement.

Where to buy: $39.98 at Amazon

Phantasm (1979)

Phantasm does not explain itself.

Don Coscarelli’s cult horror classic has graveyards, alternate dimensions, flying silver spheres, Jawas from hell, and Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, one of the great horror figures of the era. It operates on dream logic, which is a polite way of saying you may not know what is happening, but you will remember it.

A normal movie gives you plot. Phantasm gives you a chrome ball drilling into someone’s skull and dares you to complain.

Where to buy: $49.98 at Amazon

Cars, Bikers and Bad Decisions

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is not subtle, polite, or especially interested in behaving itself. Good. Drive-in movies were not built for manners.

Three go-go dancers tear across the desert in sports cars, leaving violence, seduction, and bad decisions in their wake. Tura Satana’s Varla remains one of exploitation cinema’s great screen presences: dangerous, stylish, and fully aware that everyone else in the movie is already losing.

Personal favorite. Obviously. The title alone has better posture than most actors.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

The Wild Angels (1966)

Roger Corman understood the biker movie before polite culture knew what to do with it.

The Wild Angels stars Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, leader of a motorcycle gang that tears through California with nihilism, noise, and a general disregard for anyone’s insurance premiums. It is crude, influential, and essential because it helped turn biker films into a full-blown exploitation lane.

This is not romantic outlaw nonsense. It is ugly, chaotic, and half in love with the very thing it claims to critique.

In other words, very drive-in.

Where to buy: $11.54 at Amazon

Vanishing Point (1971)

Barry Newman plays Kowalski, a former cop, race-car driver, and Vietnam veteran hired to deliver a white Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco, because apparently FedEx was too emotionally stable.

Newman was never a household name, unless your household had strong opinions about Vanishing Point or watched Petrocelli in the 1970s, but that helps the movie. He looks less like a star and more like a man who has already accepted that speed, drugs, bad decisions, and state troopers are now the same problem.

The open road is not freedom here. It is a trap with better scenery and worse gas mileage.

Where to buy: $29.99 at Amazon

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

That title sounds like three nicknames found on a police blotter, which is exactly the point.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is drive-in car-chase junk food: loud, greasy, fast, and probably terrible for you if consumed too often. Peter Fonda and Susan George play criminals on the run after a supermarket heist, with Adam Roarke along for the ride and Vic Morrow chasing them down.

Morrow, best known for Combat! and later as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s father, brings some gravel as the lawman in pursuit. He was killed in 1982 during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, along with two child actors, in one of Hollywood’s most infamous on-set disasters. Different helicopter tragedy than the one that killed Boris Sagal, Katey Sagal’s father, because apparently Hollywood needed two of those.

Where to buy: $34.28 at Amazon

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Roger Corman produced a movie about a future America where vehicular homicide is national entertainment, and somehow we still call it satire.

Death Race 2000 is cheap, nasty, funny, and smarter than it looks, which is the Corman sweet spot. David Carradine brings the cool as Frankenstein, Sylvester Stallone brings the volume as Machine Gun Joe, and the whole thing turns bloodsport into media spectacle with all the delicacy of a cinder block through a windshield.

Cars, violence, politics, jokes, and a title that screams poor citizenship.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

Trash, Revenge and Exploitation

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Troma’s most famous creation is a mop-wielding mutant from New Jersey, because of course he is.

The Toxic Avenger is disgusting, juvenile, violent, and frequently indefensible. It is also weirdly sincere beneath the sludge. A bullied janitor falls into toxic waste, mutates into a hideous hero, and starts cleaning up Tromaville with a level of force that would make most municipal agencies nervous.

This is not polished cult cinema. This is radioactive garbage with a cape.

It belongs here because sometimes the drive-in needed a hero who looked like a lawsuit.

Where to buy: $39.99 at Amazon

Surf Nazis Must Die (1987)

Surf Nazis Must Die is not here because it is great.

It is here because the title alone could sell tickets to people who had already made several poor decisions that evening.

A post-apocalyptic California coastline is overrun by neo-Nazi surf gangs, and revenge eventually arrives in the form of a woman who has had enough. It is a Troma-distributed artifact of bad taste, cheap anger, and exploitation marketing so blunt it practically hits itself with a folding chair.

The movie is clumsy. The title is immortal.

Sometimes that is enough to earn a parking space.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

The Stuff (1985)

Larry Cohen’s The Stuff is one of the great junk-food horror satires.

A mysterious dessert-like substance bubbles out of the ground, gets marketed to the public, and becomes a national obsession. It is delicious, addictive, and possibly alive. Which, given the state of some supermarket shelves, feels less like fiction every year.

The film works because it turns consumer culture into a monster movie without losing the B-movie hook. The title is perfect. The premise is ridiculous. The satire has teeth.

If dessert climbs out of the earth, maybe do not build a brand around it.

Where to buy: $24.99 at Amazon

Coffy (1973)

Pam Grier did not enter exploitation cinema. She kicked the door open and made the room behave.

In Coffy, she plays a nurse who goes after the drug dealers and criminals responsible for destroying her sister’s life. The movie is violent, stylish, angry, and built around Grier’s charisma. She is not just the star. She is the engine, the steering wheel, and the brick through the windshield.

The film is very much of its era, with all the complications that brings, but it remains one of the essential revenge films of the drive-in and grindhouse circuit.

Where to buy: $32.40 at Amazon

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters is teen-gang melodrama with knives, betrayal, power struggles, and the kind of leadership problems that would make a school board meeting look serene.

The film follows a girls’ gang navigating loyalty, violence, and internal politics, and it has far more energy than polish. That works in its favor. It feels dangerous, theatrical, and proudly overheated.

This is exploitation cinema with attitude. Not realistic. Not respectable. Not asking for either.

A proper drive-in movie should occasionally make you wonder who approved this and whether they were later promoted.

Where to buy: $17 at Amazon

The Bottom Line

The best drive-in movies were not trying to impress critics. They were trying to get cars through the gate.

They had titles you could read from the road, posters that lied with confidence, monsters that wobbled but still worked, cars that sounded better than the dialogue, and revenge plots that required neither nuance nor a therapist. They were loud, cheap, weird, horny, scary, and occasionally brilliant by accident.

Today, you can buy craft coffee and gourmet popcorn at a “reimagined outdoor cinema experience” where nachos apparently need a mission statement. Good for them. I hope the margins are excellent.

Give me the old version: giant ants, murderous surfers, toxic waste, biker scum, go-go dancers with bad intentions, radioactive dessert, and a movie title that sounds like it was shouted by a man selling fireworks out of a van.

That was the drive-in.

Not respectable.

Better.

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