Fantasia 2023: Satan Wants You

The ‘Satanic Panic’ of the latter decades of the 20th Century serves as a deeply unedifying lesson in paranoia, exploitation and groupthink. It also reminds us of the human capacity to ignore the overt to fantasise over the covert: this impulse is still with us, now aided and abetted by the internet and social media; […]

Baphomet (2021)

It’s possible that Baphomet benefits from the power of reduced expectations. This is a low budget horror movie of the sort you might find propping up the arse-end of Amazon Prime listings, complete with gimmicky casting or ageing and perhaps not all that fussy genre icons, and so you might understandably expect it to be […]

Review: Regression (2015)

I’d almost forgotten about Alejandro Amenábar. Having come to prominence with 1997’s Abre Los Ojos AKA Open Your Eyes, a psychological drama with a bizarre sci-fi twist (which later spawned an inferior remake in the Tom Cruise/Cameron Crowe movie Vanilla Sky), the Spanish director really broke big with 2001’s The Others. Ghost stories with an […]

DVD Review: John A. Russo’s ‘Midnight’ (1982)

Review by Keri O’Shea. If it’s true that ‘the Devil has all the best tunes’, then what does that tell us about unholy forces on our cinema screens? Well, it appears that Satan not only sells, but has found himself a comfortable niche in horror and exploitation movies. The results of this can be great; […]