There are a couple of mysterious proverbs – at least they seem to be proverbs – at the beginning of All You Need is Death. ‘Love is a knife with a blade for a handle’; ‘Love goes in at the eye’. Taken together with the version of a certain Beatles track used for the title, […]
On occasion, you see a film – whether a short film or a feature – and something about it stays with you afterwards. Something about the visuals, perhaps, or some ingenious touch to the plot, or its characters – or perhaps some of its hints of a universe existing on its periphery, not fully extrapolated, […]
Dagr (2024) is quite clear on what it is and what it’s all about from the very opening credits: this is found footage, brought right up to date. We get some on-screen text telling us about two social media stars, Thea and Louise, who had amassed a serious following by 2021 for their particular shtick, […]
There has, in recent years, been a modest resurgence in interest in the genre of folk horror, with directors such as Ari Aster and Robert Eggers putting their own spin on recognisable folk horror features such as closed communities, local belief systems and irrational devotion to the edicts of these systems. As such, the likes […]
By contributor Gabby Foor Most tragedies have come and gone by the time we arrive at the funeral, but our journey is only beginning in The Haunting of the Lady-Jane when we arrive in a church half-full of mourners. Kneeling and distressed is Lily (Natasha Linton), straining to absorb the priest’s words through her grief […]
Rural Denmark, 1991: a little girl, playing in a small room in her home, is terrified by what seems to be a violent attack taking place upstairs, in the room right above her head. That’s bad enough, but the attack seems to take on a surreal quality almost instantly, with blood seemingly cascading down the […]
The phenomenon of ‘folk horror’ has been with us for some considerable time – you might argue for as long as storytelling has existed – but, at least in terms of folk horror cinema, there does seem to have been a real explosion of interest in the last decade or so. This has found expression […]
Toil – in the Biblical sense – sets us going on the very first scenes in The Family. This is an immediately bleak, dirt-encrusted tale of life inside an insular and grimly religious household, with an undisputed – and cruel – patriarch presiding over the children’s labours. ‘Father’ (Nigel Bennett) is not averse to smothering […]
The back story of Sator (2019) is a deeply interesting one. It’s a film seven years in the making, with director Jordan Graham doing far more than even most first-timer indie directors find themselves doing (right down to building a cabin used for one of the sets). Not only this, but the film has a […]
At the risk of an extreme case of deja-vu – here we are again, then, with another year (and a decade) done. Business as usual, in many respects – but if I was to identify anything particularly significant about 2019, it’d be to say that the distance between mainstream cinema and independent cinema never seems […]
By Matt Harries With the weather in this country finally starting to resemble the heat and humidity of last year, summer, it seems, is finally well underway. Swiftly following on from the critically-praised Midsommar is a second piece of folk-horror for these warmer months. But while Ari Aster’s film is replete with the fertile imagery […]