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Why The Wicker Man was Christopher Lee’s Greatest Role

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By guest contributor Adam Page

There is a very particular type of genius which gets buried alive by success, and Christopher Lee probably knew this better than most. For decades, if we thought of Christopher Lee, we thought of a cape, a set of fangs, and two puncture wounds on a trembling ingenue’s neck. Dracula. The role which made him and, if you were to ask Lee in one of his more candid moments, almost unmade him.

But somewhere in the mists of 1973, on wind-ravaged islands north of Scotland, something happened. Something Lee himself would spend the rest of his long life pointing to and saying: that one. That’s the one. Not the Count, or Saruman the White. Or The Man with the Golden Gun. The Wicker Man. Lord Summerisle. A man who never raises his voice, never bares any teeth, and never threatens you with anything more than a smile and a perfectly poured glass of wine.

And yet.

Let’s set the scene, because context is everything.

In the early 1970s, Britain is embroiled in an identity crisis that would make your head spin. Its fabled Empire is a ghost of itself. The counterculture revolution has soured into something a lot murkier. And British horror, specifically Hammer Horror, has spent almost two decades selling fear as something Gothic, reassuring and very nearly comfortable. With Hammer, you knew where you stood. The monster was the monster. The hero was the hero. Christopher Lee had made a handsome living playing the former and was very, very good at it. But Lee was bored. If you know where to look, you can see it in the later Hammer movies. The weariness behind the red contact lenses. The feeling of a man just reciting lines from a contract he would have loved to shred.

Then along comes Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer with a script which was, and I say this with the full weight of a man who has been a horror fan for three decades, truly strange. It wasn’t horror-strange. Or monster-strange. It was strange in the way a folk song is strange. Or in the way the British Isles themselves are strange, if we scratch deep enough beneath the surface of orderly queues and church fêtes.

The Wicker Man follows Sgt. Neil Howie, played with Protestant rigidity by Edward Woodward, who is a deeply devout police officer. He arrives on the fictional island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He instead finds a community that has completely rejected Christianity in favour of something much older. Something pagan. And something which involves naked women dancing round fires and schoolchildren learning about the phallic symbolism of the maypole with the cheerful attitude of children learning long division.

And there presiding over all of it, with the ease of a man who truly can’t understand why he’s making such a fuss, is Lord Summerisle. Lee plays him as, in a stroke of brilliance, totally reasonable. That’s it. That’s his whole performance. It shouldn’t work, yet it is extraordinary.

Summerisle doesn’t leer or scheme, at least not visibly. He is welcoming, and he is educated. He quotes his grandfather, a Victorian scientist who brought back the island’s agricultural productivity by reviving the old gods as a kind of motivational framework, with real filial warmth. He shows off the harbour to Howie with the pride a landowner has when they are genuinely doing good by their tenants. I would imagine he serves excellent tea. By every surface measurement, he is a perfectly delightful man.

And because Lee plays him like this, resisting every temptation to wink at the audience, or signal his villainy, refusing to give Howie or the audience any purchase on what he really is, Lord Summerisle becomes one of the most quietly frightening villains in British cinema history.

Something I think Lee understood about performance that a lot of actors never quite grasp is, restraint is not the same as doing less. Restraint is doing exactly what the scene calls for and not one thing more. It’s an act of real precision.

Consider Dracula. That role requires projection. He is a supernatural force, and Lee played him as one, with physicality and presence. With those incredible eyes that could go from blank to murderous in half a second. Within its parameters, it’s a great performance. You are supposed to feel the threat. The makeup, the sound, the camera, they all conspire to tell us: this is the danger.

In The Wicker Man, there is nothing to tell you that. You have to figure it out for yourself.

Lord Summerisle’s danger is totally architectural. It lives in that structure he has created on the island, in a belief system he has either cultivated or cynically maintained. And, brilliantly, the movie never completely resolves which one it is. Is Lord Summerisle a true believer? Or is he just a pragmatist who discovered the old gods are good for the apple crop and goes along with it? Does he feel anything when the fire climbs towards Howie?

Lee keeps all these questions genuinely open. Every scene is played as though Summerisle himself considers them the wrong questions, or at the very least, unanswerable ones. There is a scene towards the film’s end where Summerisle tells Howie the crops will be good next year, and he says it with the confidence that is either serenity of faith, or the denial of a man who has maybe made a huge mistake and can’t afford to examine it too closely. Lee gives us nothing to resolve that ambiguity. He just inhabits the certainty and lets us decide what its made of.

That is not Dracula. That is not Saruman the White, who is basically Dracula with a staff and better dialogue. It’s something rarer and harder: a performance which trusts the audience to do some of the work.

Lee was hugely vocal on his feelings about The Wicker Man. In countless interviews across the decades, he went back to it, calling it the finest British horror movie ever made. He called Lord Summerisle his best role. And coming from a man with his filmography; close to 300 movies and 61 screen deaths (both Guinness World Records) that is more than a simple throwaway comment. That is a deeply considered position.

And so, why? What did he see in Lord Summerisle that he didn’t see in the Count?

Part of it, I think, is authorship. By the time Lee was done with it, Dracula had become a franchise. The character had existed before him, and would exist long after. Contractual obligations were involved, along with the commercial needs of Hammer and the slow, grinding machinery of sequels. It was work. It may have been skilled and often genuinely inspired work, but it still seemed like work nonetheless.

Lord Summerisle he created. There was no template. The screenplay from Anthony Shaffer may have given him the scaffolding, but the man living inside that role, the flavour of his conviction, his specific charm, and the warmth that seems to make everything a little worse, that was all Lee.

There is also the question of intelligence. There is no doubt that Lee was a genuinely erudite man. He spoke multiple languages, and was a serious student of history. He had served in military intelligence during the Second World War. He was not, it can be safe to say, a man who found deep satisfaction frightening people just for the sake of a production company’s quarterly returns. He was clearly interested in ideas, and Lord Summerisle is a role created entirely from ideas. Ideas about reason and faith and the nature of belief. What it means to build a community around a mythology you might or might not personally endorse, and the violence that is found in even the most pastoral-looking systems of thought.

At its core, The Wicker Man is a movie about two types of certainty colliding. Howie’s particular brand of Christianity is judgemental and rigid, seemingly uncomfortable in its own skin. It makes him cruel in small ways, despite the fact it gives him genuine moral courage. The paganism of Summerisle is joyful and fluid, seemingly inclusive. But he doesn’t hesitate to burn a man alive when the harvest calls for it. Neither of these worldviews comes out clean, and both are shown to contain their own forms of terror. Lee clearly understood this. He plays Summerisle as a man who has really thought about these things, not as a bland antagonist, but as someone with a philosophy, no matter how monstrous that philosophy eventually proves to be.

There’s a moment towards the very end that always lingered with me. The Wicker Man is about to burn, and Howie is trapped inside, praying and singing and dying. The islanders are about to sing too, Sumer is icumen in, a middle-English song so old it pre-dates the Black Death. Their folk hymn will rise to meet his, two strands of devotion colliding in a cold Scottish sky. Summerisle stands apart, watching, his hair whipping in the wind.

Lee plays the scene almost completely internally. There is a fleeting look across his face which the camera catches. It isn’t triumph exactly. It’s more complicated than that. Doubt perhaps, or reverence. Or maybe just the expression of a man who has just set something irreversible in motion and it watching it complete itself. It lasts for maybe three seconds. It tells us almost nothing conclusively. It stuck with me for years.

Dracula certainly never gave Lee a moment like that. At the end, Dracula is always defeated; he is comprehensible and containable. Summerisle stands singing on that cliff edge in the wind, and the movie ends, and we still don’t know exactly what he is.

Famously, The Wicker Man was butchered on its release. It was dumped as a B-movie. Director Alex Cox joked (?) that the original negatives had “ended up in the pylons that support the M4 motorway.” It took many years for the movie to find its deserved audience. The Wicker Man is genuinely and uncommonly good. And at its centre is a performance by Christopher Lee that gets better on every viewing.

Christopher Lee played Dracula nine times. He was the villain in a Bond movie, a Star Wars movie, and in a fantasy trilogy that made more money than some nations’ GDPs. By any metric imaginable, he was one of the greatest monsters of 20th century cinema. But the role he pointed to, over and over, until the end of his life, the role he wanted on the record as his finest hour, was a man who warmly hosts you, pours you a nice drink and shows you the apple orchards. Then, when the calendar calls for it, burns you alive.

I think there is something poetically appropriate about that. A man who spent decades frightening people found his greatest performance in a man who never frightens anyone. Right up until the moment when it’s too late to matter.

That is craft. That is the difference between a career and an art form.

I have a feeling the gods of Summerisle would approve.

The Last Thing He Saw Was Everything: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and the Lovecraftian Abyss

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By guest contributor Adam Page

There is a certain kind of dread, and it’s one that has nothing to do with jump scares or monsters or chainsaws. It doesn’t announce itself; it quietly seeps in, until suddenly things are very wrong. Roger Corman knew this in 1963, probably by accident, the way most great things are understood, when making X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. He was working on a low-budget science fiction movie with Ray Milland and an AIP budget that wouldn’t cover the craft services on one of today’s studio movies. Instead of the modest exploitation thriller he had intended, what he created was one of the most quietly frightening movies of the 20th Century. It’s a Lovecraftian nightmare wearing a lab coat, blinking at us through the carnival sideshow lights and asking that question serious people have always been too comfortable to ask: What if you could see everything? Would you survive?

The answer, of course, is no. Obviously no. What were you thinking?

“I’m curious, intensely curious…”

Dr. James Xavier, played by Milland with the quiet dignity of a man who is aware he’s being nibbled to death by the universe, is a research scientist with the belief that human vision is unnecessarily limited. He develops eye drops with enzymes and hormones, allowing him to expand the visual spectrum. Because this is a Roger Corman movie, and also how tragedy works, he tests the drops on himself.

At first, it’s incredible. He can see through buildings. He can see through clothes, which the movie handles with all the leering restraint of a Times Square peep show but also, somehow, with a real philosophical unease. He wins at cards, and becomes a faith healer at a carnival, able to guess illnesses with unnerving accuracy as he can literally see through the skin to the rot beneath. But if you wait long enough, every gift reveals its invoice.

The drops keep working and the spectrum keeps expanding. And we discover what lies beyond the limits of our ordinary human perception isn’t more of what we already know, enhanced and filtered. What lies beyond is something else completely.
Something which shouldn’t be looked at.

Something which is looking right back.

H.P. Lovecraft spent the majority of his writing life articulating a very specific theological concept, which is: the universe isn’t hostile to human life. Hostility has an implication of awareness. The universe is indifferent to human life, and what is lurking in its deeper geometries operates on scales and with motivations so totally incomprehensible that upon genuine contact with them, the human mind simply shatters. Goes dark, and folds in on itself like a collapsing star.

Lovecraft called this cosmic horror, and it’s a very precise term. It isn’t the horror of the monster under the bed. It’s the horror of the realisation that there is no bed. Or room, or house, or planet. Just an infinite black void, with something incredibly huge moving in it that hasn’t noticed you yet. But when it does, your noticing will have been the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.

Whilst Corman was a Lovecraft reader and did adapt some of his work for the screen, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes isn’t one amongst those projects. However, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is Lovecraftian to its bones, in the very specific shape of its horror. Because it knows that the really unbearable thing isn’t the monster. The unbearable thing is the knowing.

Xavier doesn’t get devoured and his discovery doesn’t kill him. He is destroyed by the simple, unfiltered fact of what the universe really looks like when the merciful limitations of our ordinary human perceptions are removed. His experimental eyedrops don’t give him power. They rip away his protection. They take away the necessary and beautiful lie that our world ends at the edge of what we can see.

In terms of an ending, which is either the greatest or most disturbing ending to a B-movie ever committed to celluloid, depending on your tolerance for the abyss, Corman’s instincts here are truly brilliant. After Xavier’s experiments go wrong, after he accidentality kills a colleague and flees into a sort of hunted, half-insane existence, he shows up working in a carnival. He has become a mentalist. Mentalo, he calls himself. It’s a name which should be funny but somehow isn’t.

He sits hidden behind a curtain, telling people what’s wrong with them. He spots a young girls broken ribs, he tells an old woman that the lump in her back is nothing, but he knows she is beyond his help. The audience claps, delighted. They think it’s all a trick.

This is the part of the movie I find the most devastating, and also the most true to the Lovecraftian tradition. Because reading Lovecraft, knowledge is never empowering. It becomes contaminating. His scientists, scholars and explorers who discover the truth about the universe don’t become gods. They become patients or corpses. Or they become the sort of person who can no longer share a room with others without frightening them. On his carnival stage, Xavier is Lovecraft’s archetypal knower; possessed of knowledge that can’t be communicated, which separates him entirely from the safe ignorance of all those around him, knowledge he would give anything to un-know and can’t.

He can see everything. He can see through the tent, and through the whole town. We now understand, he can see further than any human eye was ever meant to reach. He is completely and utterly alone.

“There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself…”

Ray Milland is brilliant in this movie. He had won an Academy Award for 1945’s The Lost Weekend, playing a different sort of man destroyed by a substance he couldn’t stop using. That movie dealt with alcoholism. This movie is about something stranger, and it could be argued more honest. The alcoholism of pure perception and the addiction of seeing more than is good for you, that inability to close your eyes even if closing your eyes would save your life.

Milland plays the disintegration of Xavier with a restraint which becomes its own sort of terror. He doesn’t chew on the scenery. Instead, he stands very still, watching things we can’t see and let’s his face do the work. There are scenes where his eyes, fitted with hideous gold and black contact lenses, lock onto something off-camera and we feel, really feel, that whatever he’s seeing would kill us to see. That’s acting. That’s craft from a man who understood the assignment even if nobody told him.

By the final act of the movie, Xavier is barely there in any human sense. He moves and speaks, pleading for help. But already he’s gone to where the rest of us can’t follow. He’s seen too far and the co-ordinates of his mind are no longer any we can share.

Xavier is at his absolute nadir. He is haunted, hunted, half-mad and seeing through everything. He can no longer stop. He stumbles into a revival tent, where a preacher is working the crowd. Xavier yells out in the voice of a man who has been watching the universe slowly kill him for the whole runtime: I can see! He means it as both confession and curse. He’s seen too much and can’t stop. Someone has to make it stop.

The preacher is a man of God, and therefore intimately aware of the Biblical solution to this sort of problem. He quotes from the Book of Matthew: if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.

Xavier rips out his own eyes.

End of movie.

In various Q&As, Corman has claimed there was a brief discussion about adding another shot after this: a shot of Xavier, eyeless and screaming I can still see! Still seeing something, without his eyes, because what he’s perceiving now has nothing to do with physical eyes. It was cut for time, or budget, or maybe the fact it would have been too much for a 1963 audience. A little too much, even now. But the implication is hanging in the frame like smoke. The eyes were never the point; they were just the door. And that door is now open. It won’t close.

That is pure Lovecraft. The protagonist won’t survive the revelation. He can’t integrate it or become stronger from it. The knowledge wins, because it always does. The universe is under absolutely no obligation to be compatible with human sanity.

What I always found interesting about cosmic horror as a genre, and I think Lovecraft and Corman both understood it in their different ways, is that it isn’t really about the cosmos. It’s more about the limits of what we can endure knowing.

The story of Xavier is the story of anyone who has seen something they can’t un-see. The doctor who knows what the diagnosis is, but can’t explain it to the patient in a way they will accept. The person who knows, on a basic level, that the structure of their life is hollow, scaffolding over nothing and has to keep on getting up and making the coffee and going to work because what’s the alternative? Or the addict who can see with horrible clarity both the destruction and path back but goes for the bottle anyway because unmediated clarity is its own kind of unbearable.

We have perceptual limitations and we wear them like insulation. As Lovecraft himself wrote, ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents’. We can see only a thin band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and thank God for that, because the rest of it would give us madness and cancer in pretty much equal measure. We perceive time only in one direction, and can only hold a certain amount if things in our consciousness at once. These aren’t deficiencies, they’re load-bearing walls.

Xavier takes away those load-bearing walls, but seems amazed when the house falls down.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is sixty-three years old now. It looks cheap because, like the majority of Corman’s work, it is cheap. The special effects are dated and the psychedelic light show that is Xavier’s expanded vision has the lo-fi quality of a high school laser show. But none of that matters. What Corman made and Milland acted, and what writers Ray Russell and Robert Dillon put down in a script that shouldn’t have been that smart, is a movie that still earns its dread.

It does so because it asks the right questions. Not what’s out there in the dark, which is what horror movies usually ask, but what does it cost to know, and that’s the question that will keep you up at night. At its core, the Lovecraftian tradition is a meditation on epistemology; the relationship between knowing and surviving. On the distinct possibility that when reality is undiluted, it’s incompatible with human life.

Xavier stands in that carnival tent with his destroyed eyes, having seen the centre of the universe and what is nesting there. Something, Corman implies without actually showing, that is looking back, and the only thing left for him to do is the only thing he can’t do. Stop looking.

Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022)

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By contributing writer Chris Ward

Valeria (Natalia Solián) is a young woman trying to start a family with her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). After visiting Monumental de la Virgen De Guadalupe – a large statue in Chalma, Mexico, sculpted in 2017 by artist Víctor Gutiérrez – with her mother and her aunt, Valeria discovers that she is pregnant, so the happy parents-to-be begin to plan for the arrival of the new baby.

However, after witnessing one of her neighbours jumping from their balcony and smashing their bones on the road below, Valeria starts to see various faceless people with distorted limbs in and around her apartment. Initially putting it down to stress and malnutrition, she begins to experience various disruptions during the pregnancy, including a sordid lesbian affair with an old flame, a babysitting incident involving her sister’s children and a fire in the baby’s new cot, but as her visions start to get more real, Valeria discovers that motherhood may not be the joyous event she thought it would be.

Huesera: The Bone Woman is one of those psychological horror movies where everything is a metaphor, probably with several interpretations, and is not to be taken literally. So far, so very modern horror, but for her debut director Michelle Garza Cervera has crafted a movie so meticulously put together that every shot is an important part of the story, with not a frame wasted, and we, the audience, are going to get more out of it than just jump scares and one or two gratuitous body horror shots.

Essentially, the movie is exploring the darker side of motherhood – the bits they don’t tell you about in antenatal classes – where not only is your body going to change but so are your perceptions, your feelings and, in extreme cases such as this, your whole persona. Natalia Solián gives an incredibly strong performance as Valeria, a character caught between wanting a certain future, until she is given it, and then trying to relive the past to escape it. In her youth she was a punk, and through flashback we see her with her girlfriend Octavia, living a carefree life as young, anti-authoritarian youths do, only to come back to the present where her grown-up self is doing the things expected of young adults once they’ve supposedly gotten through their rebellious phase.

We get to hear stories of Valeria’s past, mostly from her sister who delights in putting Valeria down in front of their family, and this simmering hostility is manifested when Valeria offers to babysit her young niece and nephew. Valeria is already having problems disciplining the children, and when she has a vision of a deformed intruder in the house she goes into panic mode, grabbing the already distraught children and acting maniacally, thinking she is doing the right thing by protecting them. You can see where this particular plot thread is heading whilst it is happening, because Huesera: The Bone Woman is not a movie that breaks any new ground with its metaphors, but it plants little seeds along the way to make the whole more effective.

The heart of Huesera: The Bone Woman is a psychological profile of a woman going through physical and emotional changes that don’t always connect to her needs, and Michelle Garza Cervera frames this with a body horror approach where we get to see bones breaking and protruding from the skin, but curiously we don’t get to see much of Valeria’s swollen belly or the birth itself – no doubt if this had been made by, say, David Cronenberg we would have seen all sorts of bodily fluids accompanying deformed flesh – and whilst these images are unsettling in themselves, the sound of cracking bones accompanying them is just as – or even more – disgusting. But there is also the suggestion of possession, and by the final act we get to experience the folk/occult angle that had been present throughout – and represented by Valeria’s childless aunt (and that detail is important) – making the climax of the movie more potent than most movies of this ilk, throwing a disturbing red herring into the mix before Valeria’s ultimate – and inevitable – fate is revealed.

This limited edition Blu-ray comes with an audio commentary by film critic Kat Ellinger and video essay by critic Anton Bitel, both of which are worth absorbing to heighten your enjoyment, although it is recommended to watch the movie on its own first. Arrow have also included a collector’s booklet featuring essays by Kat Hughes and there is exclusive artwork by Colin Murdoch, so it isn’t a loaded package, but what is included is definitely valuable to the viewing experience.

Overall, Huesera: The Bone Woman is a very interesting movie in that it isn’t particularly original – anyone who has kept up with the psychological/folk/body horror-for-metaphors movies that mainstream Hollywood and the streaming services have been consistently knocking out for the past few years will be very familiar with its narrative structure and uses of horrific imagery – but it is put together in a way that subsequent viewings will bring more and more out of it. Yes, the metaphors are obvious and do hit you over the head a bit, but the movie looks fantastic, features committed and daring performances and is so obviously a labour of love from the director that it never feels like a chore to sit through, because there are no cynical cash grabs at work here. This is art, and how joyous it is to watch it work as well as it does here.

Huesera: The Bone Woman is available to pre-order from Arrow now.

Double Feature: Pearl (2022) and Maxxxine (2025)

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By guest contributor Chris Ward

So here we have two parts of a trilogy originally released during the past three-or-four years getting a boutique 4K UHD re-release by Second Sight Films, and why not, because Second Sight have also put out the bulk of the director’s back-catalogue in a similarly lavish fashion over the past year.

That director is Ti West and the trilogy has affectionately come to be known as the X trilogy, because the first movie in the trilogy is called X. However, that movie is not part of this release cycle, because region licensing and rights issues dictate that the Blu-ray release from 2022 is all we are allowed to have here in the UK, so if you are a fan/collector with OCD about having all the movies in a series on the same format with similar packaging so it looks neat and ordered on your shelf – as is this writer – then you are just going to have to be patient and hope that a 4K UHD upgrade will be forthcoming somewhere down the line.

However, this predicament is not quite so triggering for me, as I found X to be something of a disappointment, for not only was the plodding pace completely at odds with the (obvious) Texas Chain Saw Massacre aesthetic, but for a movie about porn stars making a porno in a secluded farm setting, the movie was remarkably sexless; yes, there were sex scenes and nudity, but they were just sort of there, filmed blandly and without any excitement, as if Ti West just filmed a few topless shots of the female actors because the movie was set around the porn industry.

But the word ‘sexless’ doesn’t just apply to the sex, because the kills were shot in the same perfunctory manner, the thin plot trying to evoke 1970s grindhouse but the modern retro production not giving the movie enough grime, enough grit, enough… well, sex, in all its colloquial meanings. And don’t get me started on the old-person make-up on the younger actors – worth mentioning here because Mia Goth plays the young porn star Maxine Minx and also the elderly Pearl, who would so dearly love to be young again, but the lighting isn’t friendly to the prosthetics and it looks comical.

But X proved popular with audiences, and Ti West wasted no time in getting another movie in that universe released, that movie being Pearl (2022), but instead of a sequel – because, considering how X ended, what would be the point? Hold that thought… – we got a prequel, concentrating on Pearl, the deranged octogenarian who still wanted to be adored, despite her age-ravaged body in X.

In this movie it is 1918, and Pearl (Goth) lives on the same secluded farm we saw in X, only here it isn’t run-down and old. She lives on the farm with her strict German mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and her wheelchair user father (Matthew Sunderland), who is suffering from an undisclosed disease that means he is unable to move or communicate, and as Ruth takes care of the farm, she leaves most of her husband’s care to her daughter.

However, Pearl is not quite in full control of her emotions, and while she waits for her husband Howard to come back from service in World War I she dreams of becoming a star, singing and dancing on a stage to be adored by the whole world. While she has fantasies of stardom, she takes out her frustrations on her helpless father, abusing him when she thinks her mother is not watching, and after a sneaky visit to the cinema whilst collecting her father’s medicine, she befriends the projectionist (David Corenswet) who shows her the stag film A Free Ride, fuelling her passion and encouraging her to chase her dreams. A falling out with her mother and an impending audition trigger Pearl’s descent into madness, as she chases her dreams with violent anger and murderous rage.

Right from the off you can see that Pearl is a different movie to X, because here the titular character is young and fresh-faced, and so the setting matches it, drawing visual inspiration from the Technicolor stylings of The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins. It is a very bright and breezy movie whose look reflects the innocence of Pearl before the gradual unwinding of her mind, although straightaway we can see that Ruth does not like her daughter, for not only is she cold and emotionless – which is understandable, given her husband’s illness and what she must do on a daily basis to keep the farm going – but she is aggressive and unpleasant towards Pearl, hinting that the events of this movie are not the first displays of odd behaviour she has witnessed.

But unlike X, Pearl is a character study, a glimpse into what made the elderly crone into the sexually frustrated and murderous old hag she became, and the seeds are all sown here in a script co-written by Ti West and Mia Goth, which is the biggest strength of the movie as Goth truly inhabits the character on the screen, reflecting her input. Had Pearl been written solely by West, or by him with an outside collaborator, the nuances that Goth brings would likely not be so obvious; the furrowing of the brow during certain dialogues, the glint in her eye whenever she starts daydreaming about being a star, and the realisation that a genre icon is being created on the screen in both looks, personality and execution of the script. You can see Mia Goth’s ascent to stardom through the character of Pearl and her gleeful demeanour, and it gives this movie a soul.

Which is what blunts the edge a little, as we know where this character ends up, and rewatching X in preparation for this review meant I went from what is really a very silly homage to the 1970s with a bit of off-kilter weirdness to mask the lack of tension, to an origin story that, like the titular character, has a few issues but by the end of it made me want to see what happened to her next, except I already knew and didn’t really like it. The curse of the prequel strikes again.

No matter, though, because there was one more outing to be had within this universe and in 2024 we got Maxxxine, a direct sequel to X (told you) which starts out with a problem – this movie is set in the 1980s and does not feature Pearl, the most interesting character in the series. Mia Goth returns to the role of Maxine Minx, the young porn star from X, and we are now in 1985 where Maxine is 33 years-old and very aware that her career in adult movies only has a limited time left, so she is desperate to break into mainstream movies and become a star.

However, the jump from porn to Hollywood is not an easy one to make and so Maxine is cutting corners slightly by auditioning for a horror movie, which may not get her many awards but it is a ‘legitimate’ movie. While this is happening, there is a serial killer operating in Hollywood killing off young starlets, and when the trail begins to lead to Maxine, it threatens to expose her sordid past.

There is a lot to unpack in Maxxxine, with it being a movie about making movies made by people who make a lot of movies, and so there is always a commentary underpinning every action and character decision, with the overall message being ‘Be careful what you wish for’, a message that has, ironically, been made hundreds of times over by other filmmakers who make movies within that system. That said, as an audience, we are viewing this in more enlightened times, when we know what the Hollywood stardom dream costs and, thanks to many scandals that have come to light in recent years, we can watch it knowing that no good will come of it.

And essentially, that is what makes Maxxxine a less successful movie than Pearl, because we can see how it is all going to play out – Ti West drops plenty of hints throughout, none more obvious than the opening scene of a young Maxine being filmed dancing by her very creepy preacher father – with an ending that is very telegraphed and, like X, lacks any suspense or tension.

Unlike X, however, what Maxxxine does do brilliantly is replicate the period setting, from music cues that include ZZ Top, John Parr, Judas Priest (kudos to Ti West for not using one of the ‘hits’, but instead going for a lesser-known bonus track) and Kim Carnes to the fashion choices – not characters wearing fluorescent socks, listening to Sony Walkmans and skating around on roller boots, which is usually the quick movie language to let us know what decade we are in – and it doesn’t feel like a parody or contemporary actors cosplaying. Okay, the cameras are better and the image sharper, but for all intents and purposes, this is 1985 and it does feel wonderful to be back (some of us remember it well).

Being set in the 1980s, there is also the all-important slasher movie vibe and it is there, although black-gloved killers are more 1970s Italy, but this killer is more brutal and the gore effects are superb. Speaking of Italy, there is also a heavy Dario Argento vibe throughout, as the neon of the 1980s pops out against the run-down strip clubs that would have been thriving in the 1970s but were in need of some TLC come 1985. Argento’s visual heyday may have been a few years before this movie is set, but you cannot mistake that influence and the image of new, colourful lights over old, rotten brown wooden doors and windows is a definite nod.

But it isn’t just the strip clubs in need of TLC, because Maxine Minx herself is a woman with issues. The trouble I had with this movie, though, was that I didn’t really care enough about her. Pearl worked because it focused on the one character from X who had a story to tell, and after going back to 1918 to see how that character came about, jumping forward to focus on someone who was very one-dimensional and not particularly likeable didn’t feel like it was warranted.

The character of Maxine Minx was obviously going to be a bit different in this movie, when you consider what she went through in X and where she is now, but Mia Goth just doesn’t seem to inhabit Maxine like she did with Pearl. Yes, the actor was cast to play both roles so we could see a throughline not only in their lives but also with their features, allowing some sort of twisted continuity – they are not the same person but they have the same motives – and whilst she does have plenty of 1980s strong female attitude, something just doesn’t quite work as well as it did in the previous movie. Ti West gets a sole writing credit for this movie, as he did with X, so that should tell you something.

Whatever the merits of each movie, one thing that shines through is Second Sight’s consistent quality, as both of these movies come loaded with plenty of supplementary material, most of which consists of cast and crew interviews and video essays that delve further into what each movie represents. Pearl comes with an audio commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Maxxxine with one by Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes, both of which are worth your time for fresh perspectives, and if you are lucky enough to get the limited editions, then both movies come housed in gorgeous rigid slipcases boasting new artworks, art cards and 120-page books containing essays from various academics. Presented in Dolby Vision with Dolby Atmos audio, these movies do look fantastic, with Pearl looking especially vibrant with its Technicolor-inspired colour grading, and it is very difficult to pick fault in either movie based on visuals. If you are a child of the 1980s and have a decent soundbar/surround sound system, then Maxxxine is best viewed with the volume cranked up, if nothing else because the soundtrack is ace.

So that was my revisiting of this trilogy, and it is a trilogy from which I did not particularly like any of the movies when I saw them upon initial release. On this viewing, X is still a mystery to me – and I say that as a lifelong fan of 1970s grindhouse – but that movie is not the focus of this review. However, Pearl shot up in my estimations as I finally ‘got’ Mia Goth as that character, I finally linked the troubled young woman onscreen to the old hag from X and despite a few pacing issues, the movie worked as an origin story for a character that has more stories to tell.

As for Maxxxine, the 4K UHD presentation helped in making the movie look and sound amazing – the best it will likely ever be – and when the violence is happening it is a nasty movie, but trying to make a character piece about a character that isn’t really that interesting when the actor is not as invested as they were previously means the movie drags to a conclusion that is fairly underwhelming and obvious.

Still, I liked it more on a second watch, so maybe future viewings will unearth more treasures. Maybe I should view them in chronological order next time, but going in knowing the best movie is first means diminishing returns by the time I get to Maxxxine. These movies are clearly a labour of love for Ti West, and hopefully one day we will get a 4K UHD release of X to complete the trilogy in that format. By that point, I may be able to grasp that certain ‘X factor’ that isn’t quite working for me, but until then, Pearl remains the gem of the trilogy and this stunning edition may just be the best looking 4K UHD disc we have seen from Second Sight thus far.

You can find out more about the Second Sight release of these titles, including ways to purchase, here.

You can also find out about Chris’s published work here.

The Man in the White Van (2023)

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By guest contributor Anna Pease

I began watching The Man in the White Van (2023) with high hopes that it might be a grimy 70s exploitation style ode to true crime – specifically something akin to Chuck Parello’s 2004 film The Hillside Strangler, which faithfully portrayed the crimes of cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi with a seedy gruesomeness that left the viewer feeling in need of a shower. Lawrence Bittaker aka the Toolbox Murderer drove a van; maybe it’s about him? I wondered; nope; try again. The Man in the White Van, despite its claim to be based on true events, has absolutely nothing to do with true crime in the 70s. How disappointing!

What it is about – and I use this term loosely since the plot is rather threadbare – is a girl in her late teens called Annie, who lives in an impossibly massive house in the countryside and rides around on her pony, Rebel. Get it? Rebel, because she’s a rebel! Although, presumably not in a confederate Dixieland racist way, because she vibes with socially progressive southern rockers like Neil Young and Creedence. Annie’s conservative family have had enough of her tomboyish behaviour and are absolutely over her stinking of horse. This is particularly irksome to her older sister, a debutante who is obsessed with having a private phone extension in her room, but slightly more tolerable to her gun crazy little brother who yearns to “protect the homestead” and thinks his sister Annie is a rootin’ tootin’ modern day Davy Crockett. Amid this homage to The Sullivans – where god-fearing folk go to church on Sunday (even Annie, and she has to wear a dress like a girl! Yuck!) there is an ominous white van around, which appears to be following and kidnapping young women to fulfil nefarious means.

The van is particularly innocuous: it’s basically a shagged old white van that a painter and decorator or window cleaner might use, not the ominous black van which features in the similarly 70s true crime inspired flick Black Phone (2021), or the terrifying, clattering monstrosity driven by the Creeper in Jeepers Creepers (2001) – nope, its just a white van which turns up every now and then and… revs its engine and….flashes its lights. It’s important to point out that when it does this, the soundtrack absolutely shits the bed and plays obscenely loud and jarring, crunching white noise, presumably to insinuate that this is an extremely scary and harrowing occurrence. Understandably, after a few rounds of revving and flashing, Annie is absolutely crippled by fear and confides to her family that she believes that the man in the white van is following her.

For some strange reason, because Annie is a tomboy and rides a horse, this makes her a liar and her entire family disbelieve her because apparently perverts and murderers didn’t exist in the 1970s. This was the first thing that really didn’t track for me and without going into detail and therefore spoilers, there seems to be a bizarre insinuation that somehow being pursued by a pervert in a ropey old van can act as the glue that can ultimately bring a dysfunctional family together again. Who knew?

There are several issues with this film, which make it both arduous and extremely irritating to watch – firstly, it really does feel like a television dramatisation with a focus on high school relationships and coming of age themes. I had to remind myself throughout that it was meant to be a horror/thriller, since, although there are very few violent scenes, they are introduced very poorly and make very little sense. Secondly, there is a rolling year counter which accompanies these violent incidents and I honestly had absolutely no idea that this was supposed to represent the years this kidnapper, killer, window cleaner – white van dude was active. I only worked out its purpose when I was three quarters of the way through the movie. Thirdly, the film has a penchant for what I call ‘fake’ or ‘false’ jump scares – Annie has seen the van and she’s on edge etc., and a hand reaches out and grabs her but… oh it’s just her mum telling her that dinner’s ready. This was grating by the third jump scare, but by the fifteenth you really are sick of it: it actually made me angry. It’s an incredibly lazy and cheap mechanism to employ in any film and this film really rinses it ad nauseum.

Nice things to say: it’s shot quite well, the acting is acceptable, but genuinely, that’s all I’ve got. This film is a confusing mess with a variety of deadends and plot holes which seem to suggest it was a basic idea that had a rushed and poorly structured plot cobbled together last minute before going into production. It’s both dull and teen-movie-esque and at the same time, so lacking in depth and nuance that it’s actually laughable. Oh dear, I hope they don’t make a sequel.

The Man in the White Van is available on digital download, DVD and Blu-ray from 29th September 2025.

Sublime Disorder – Liminal Spaces in the Cinema of Jean Rollin

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By guest contributor Matt Rogerson

The phenomenon of liminal spaces is one that traditionally exists in both Architecture and Psychology. With its beginnings in the term ‘liminality’, conceived by Arnold Van Gennep in his book Rites de Passage (1909) and determined to mean a passageway, be it from one physical location, situation, status or time period to another, the liminal space is generally considered to be a place or state of change (1). In psychology, liminal spaces represent the transitional and the transformative, where we find ourselves in between one state of being and another. In architecture they might relate to hallways, waiting rooms or bus stations; any threshold between one place and the next, not meant to dwell in but to pass through, a way-point on our journey. In some cases, a liminal space can exist simultaneously in both the geographical and psychological sense. Consider an abandoned building, in a state of uncertain transition between owners, or a cemetery, a cold and uneasy place that people hurry through at night, haunted by the sense of proximity to the spiritual plane.

In horror, the liminal space is often to be feared. It evokes feelings of unease and dread, and can represent a portal not just between places but time, space and other dimensions. Between the known and the unknown.

Between the living and the dead…

In the hands of accomplished horror creators, liminal spaces can also be so much more. In Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2023), a family home becomes at once claustrophobic and impossibly vast, a mundane environment turned into a haunting, alien domain. Kane Parsons’ Backroom (2022 to date), which has spanned from online creepypasta to YouTube series to a forthcoming A24 movie (2) offers its audience “a maze-like expanse of hallways and open spaces that seem almost infinite…(with) a constant sensation of dread”(3). In literature, Mark Z Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000) deals with liminal spaces in a number of inventive ways, from the living, mutating expanse of unlit passageways in the Navidson house, to re-creating those liminal spaces on the page through creative text positioning (4), to the extensive use of footnotes to establish a parallel narrative running through the book.

Liminal spaces are an intrinsic component of the cinema of Jean Rollin, the French surrealist and eroticist horror filmmaker whose works were often derided at the time of their release, but have undergone a period of artistic recuperation in recent years. His locations, often recurring (such as the Pourville-sur-Mer beach in Dieppe, where many of his filmic narratives begin and end) and often signifying the transition from life to death, are as important to his oeuvre as any character, inciting incident or overt narrative signposting. One of the oft-levelled criticisms of Rollin is that his films are aimless and uncompromisingly languid; plot, pacing and narrative cast aside in favour of disconnected images of nudity, sex and death. This is largely unfair, with the director’s films tackling socio-political, feminist, queer and existential themes that the audience is encouraged to find and follow – Rollin will direct you towards meaning, but he won’t hold your hand. One way of determining the rich variety in Rollin’s films is in his use of liminality. Rollin’s vampires, zombies, succubae, pirates, escapees and virginal young women are drawn to liminal spaces in each of his films, in service of a variety of themes, subtexts and messages. According to Tara Ogle, Director of Architecture for Page & Turnbull, sometimes liminal spaces “are liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another” (5); Rollin’s various portals and vestibules exist in each of these states and more, as evidenced by the following examples.

Cemeteries exhibit their discomfiting liminality in La rose de fer (1973) and Lèvres de sang (1975). In the former, a young woman and her new lover become trapped in a cemetery overnight, and the membrane between the worlds of the living and dead grows thin overnight, prompting madness and murder. In the latter, protagonist Frédéric attempts to have his childhood acquaintance Jennifer (believed to be a vampire) accepted by a society ruled by superstition and paranoia, and it involves bringing her and her followers from a remote chateau to Paris, via a cemetery.

Deighan notes that “coffins and coffin-like boxes often serve as portals or gateways, generally transporting characters through time and space.”(6) Rollin frequently features vampires in his films, and explores the use of coffins and coffin-like boxes in a number of sub-textual ways. In Le frisson des vampires (1971), a grandfather clock is used by vampire Isolde to visit and seduce uncertain newlywed Isle. The liminal space in Rollin’s third vampire movie represents a passageway from the realm of the undead to that of the living, but it also speaks to a queer-coded transformative experience: the Sapphic awakening of Isle, who represents generations of women that have entered into heterosexual marriage for the sake of expectation and appearances, tragically denying their sexuality and hiding their authenticity. While the clock might represent Isolde’s passage between realms, it is also the liminal space that allows Isle to undergo her transition and to ‘come out of the closet’.

Les Démoniaques (1974) is almost expressionist in its depiction of a dangerous stretch of France’s Coast. Smooth, obelisk-like rocks rise from the sand into the sky, looming over everything like ancient Gods. The shipwrecked boats look like the skeletal remains of giants long since killed, their ribcages split open under the bright blue moon and the endless night. This is a place where many have come to transition unwillingly from life to death. It is only after two young girls (the titular Demoniacs) are defiled and murdered by pirates that they are able to escape to a location yet further adrift from the real world; an old monastery, where the Devil and his minions await them, and bring gifts of healing and vengeance. The film’s beach (the very same Dieppe beach that Rollin returned to time and again, though it is unrecognizable here) acts not just as a liminal space between life and afterlife, but between rape and revenge, between the wronged and their wrath.

The liminal spaces in many of Rollin’s films are indicative of the socio-political climate in France at the time. Rollin’s first film was released during the 1968 Paris riots, where students and workers brought the city (and other parts of the country) to a stand-still for an entire month. Paris was an oppressive place, with a heavy gendarme presence and was unsafe for many marginalized people, particularly its LGBTQ+ community. This prompted a wave of countercultural urban migration – “le retour à la terre (‘the return to the land’)”(7) – with utopian aims of escaping de Gaulle’s government and living freely in rural communes (8). This is reflected across Rollin’s oeuvre, from his vampire films to his ‘escape’ cycle (La Nuit des Traquées,1980; Les Paumées du Petit Matin, 1981), as his liminal spaces provide his characters with passageways between metropolitan hell and rural idyll.

Perhaps most interesting is Rollin’s use of liminality to represent the transition of a young transgender girl (via queer-coded subtext). In La vampire nue (1970), antagonist Georges keeps his young ward captive (the nameless, titular vampire girl) first in his Paris mansion then later in his rural estate, where he subjects her to experiments as he seeks a ‘cure’ for her condition. Rollin’s critics suggested his sexualized vampires as nothing more than exploitative eroticism, but evidence in Rollin’s second film suggests themes of liberation, of queerness and potentially of the plight of the transgender child. Such children are often cut off from the world and denied necessary care by abusive parents who assert that they know ‘what is best for them’. This is all acutely resonant of Rollin’s narrative: the young ‘vampire’ is held captive by Georges until he can find a ‘cure’ for her condition, a thinly-veiled metaphor for the abusive practice of conversion therapy. His mansion is awash with signs and symbols of broken childhood. When the girl is revealed to be a harmless but fantastical creature, and her community come to rescue her, they do so by means of liminal spaces. It is somewhere between Rollin’s crumbling chateau and Pourville-sur-Mer beach that a portal exists, one that denies all known laws of physics. This liminal space, represented by a red velvet curtain, is both an otherworldly portal and an avenue for the young girl’s safety, and the most concrete example yet of Ogle’s assertion of the liminal space representing “transitioning from one identity to another”(9) in Rollin’s work.

Jean Rollin’s use of liminal spaces is impressively displayed across his entire filmography and concerns both the architectural and the psychological to convey the transitional and the transformative in a myriad of ways. They are portals between places, between realities, between states of being, and sometimes all at once. We can find liminality at the heart of everything he created…just don’t dwell there too long.

The son of a Video Nasties Pirate (and grandson of a censorious Roman Catholic matriarch), Matt Rogerson became a fan of genre cinema at a disturbingly early age. Decades later, his writing often concerns the intersection between the Roman Catholic faith and the horror film. He features in House of Leaves Publishing’s Filtered Reality: The Progenitors and Evolution of Found Footage Horror, Diabolique Magazine, Horror Homeroom, Dread Central, Horrified Magazine and Beyond the Void. Matt’s first two books, The Vatican versus Horror Movies and Faith in the films of Lucio Fulci will be published by McFarland & Co.

References:

1 Grindle, Mike (2024) The Psychology of Liminal Spaces: On the transitional zones between “what was” and “what’s next” [online] Available at: https://medium.com/counterarts/the-psychology-of-liminal-spaces-7aa1f650e7d5 [Accessed 9 April 2024]

2 Grobar, Matt (2023) ‘The Backrooms’ Horror Film Based On Viral Shorts By 17-Year-Old Kane Parsons In Works At A24, Atomic Monster, Chernin & 21 Laps [online] Available at: https://deadline.com/2023/02/the-backrooms-a24-developing-feature-based-on-viral-horror-shorts-1235249413/ [Accessed 9 April 2024]

3 Millican, Joshua (2023) Skinamarink: Why Liminal Horror May Be the Perfect Subgenre For the Times [online] Available at: https://gamerant.com/skinamarink-liminal-horror-perfect-post-pandemic-subgenre/ [Accessed 9 April 2024]

4 Brant, Lewis (2022) The Horror of Liminal Spaces [online] Available at: https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/437408/the-horror-of-liminal-spaces/ [Accessed 10 April 2024]

5 Ogle, cited by Hoyt, Angela (2024) Why Do Liminal Spaces Feel So Unsettling, Yet So Familiar? [online] Available at: https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/architecture/liminal-spaces [Accessed 9 April 2024]

6 Deighan, Samm (2017) “The Thing in the Coffin: Jean Rollin’s Female Vampire as Romantic Liberator” In: S.Deighan, ed., Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin Toronto: Spectacular Optical, 113

7 Farmer, Sarah (2020) Rural Inventions: The French Countryside after 1945. Oxford University Press, 54

8 Farmer, 54.

9 Ogle.

Spirit of Independence 2023: Black Daruma

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Review by Darren Gaskell

Aimless Ryan (Richard Galloway) is struggling to find purpose in life. Having quit his teaching gig, he’s struggling to find gainful employment and his lack of drive is testing the patience of partner Louise (Louise O’Leary). Wandering around a local antiques emporium, Ryan picks up a somewhat overpriced hammer, but also gets an unexpected extra into the bargain – a Japanese luck doll which grants ongoing fortune to its owner. Easy, right? No, of course not. There are rules to be obeyed and consequences for not adhering to them…

I remember watching (and reviewing) Fionn and Toby Watts’ previous movie Playhouse and, although the ambition of such a project may not have quite matched the budget, the promise for future endeavours was there for all to see. Black Daruma, with its (much) smaller cast, reduced interior space and far less emphasis on the natural dramatics of the surrounding locations, finds the dialogue and characters coming into much sharper focus.

The innovation here is that all of the escalating madness is shown from the point of view of the doll itself, which instantly lands the piece in found footage territory, complete with Paranormal Activity-style shots of rooms and corridors in which the viewer is waiting for something terrible to happen. The obvious fact that none of the doll can be seen – and is continually described as strange looking by various characters – lends a further edge of unease to the proceedings, leaving the audience to fill in the blanks on just how disturbing an item it is. Do you get a glimpse of the daruma in, say, a mirror, at some point? I’m clearly not going to tell you here.

Galloway and O’Leary convince as a couple trying to get the best out of a relationship which has hit a few rough patches, mostly down to the male half of said relationship being somewhat flaky, his unfocused attempts at finding a job being given support and encouragement by his partner because she doesn’t want to call time on what they have together, regardless of how much he arses about. Their early, less frantic interactions are nicely written, foreshadowing how incapable Ryan is of dealing with the supernatural and how Louise is probably going to be the one taking charge of the situation.

Supporting characters add to this darkly comic portrayal of fragile masculinity. There’s Alan (David Castleford), who spouts counselling buzzword bollocks masquerading as motivational soundbites and possibly has the least self-awareness of anyone on the planet. Also, and there’s no way for me to get around the detail of the guy’s name, a very close second to Alan in terms of being an utter wazzock is, ahem, Darren (Ross Marshall), a businessman with whom Ryan enjoys a drink and drug-fuelled odyssey around the suburbs, the two of them never coming close to any profound conclusions about life despite them being convinced they have.

So, we have accurate observations about various incarnations of the manchild and a kitchen sink (literally, at some points) style of relationship comedy drama, but if you remember where we came in, the first paragraph points to this being a horror movie, right? Well, it’s that too, each scene being shot through with a nervous tension that balances on the edge of chucklesome and chilling, the standout example of this being an extended job interview scene which is both hilariously OTT and low-key terrifying as Ryan goes to work on selling himself to a potential employer, buoyed by the daruma’s promise of riches as long as it’s by his side.

The gradual build up, a genuine disinterest in piling up victims and general lack of all-out moppet mayhem may put some off, but Black Daruma is a fine example of using limited resources to their full potential, relying on the strength of the writing and performances rather than showering the screen with blood, which is to the credit of all involved. The darkly comic, twisted final fifteen minutes may telegraph its ultimate act of nastiness but that’s hardly a blot on the copybook of what is a fun, fearsome experience for the bulk of its hour and a quarter. You’ll be questioning yourself as to why you’re laughing at some of the disturbing events within, but you will be laughing. It’s a minimalist shot in the arm for both doll kill pics and found footage concepts. Be careful of what you might find in antique shops!

Black Daruma screened as part of the Spirit of Independence Festival 2023 in Sheffield, UK.

Spirit of Independence 2023: Prep For Death

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Review by Darren Gaskell

23rd March 2020. As the spectre of Covid loomed large over the UK and the population was told to isolate, filmmaker Damien Sung decided to film a series of vlogs documenting his experience as a divorced father of three living some distance away from his wife and kids. Soon the effects of being alone in his flat take a toll and Damien takes drastic action, turning his initially cosy YouTube vignettes into an increasingly strange journey into the darkness of the soul.

Starting off as a genuine series of lockdown lifestyle videos and then warping into one of the oddest “on the run” adventures you’re ever likely to see, Sung’s friends worried that he was losing it and people believed he was committing crimes and filming them. This might appear ridiculous on the face of it but the convincing nature of how Prep For Death is assembled, coupled with a number of thoroughly unnerving moments, results in a truly gonzo experience that delivers on unfiltered WTF-ery.

Sung’s tale progresses on the lines of writing himself into ever more difficult corners and then looking for ever more wacky ways out of those predicaments, culminating in a final shot that fits perfectly with that ethos, delivering a punchline that doesn’t so much lean into the extreme as smash straight through it. It’s bizarre, it’s chilling, it has extraordinary ramifications as to where the story may go beyond the credits and, above all, it’s funny in that specifically queasy way the rest of Prep For Death serves up its utterly weird humour.

Yes, the in your face filming style may send people looking for a nice, comfy, multiplex experience running screaming from the room, but this film is not aimed at them. To be perfectly honest, I have genuinely no idea at whom it’s aimed, but that matters little when you’re dealing with something this odd. The sound mix is piercingly sharp, some of the visuals may induce motion sickness and the central character is an absolute lunatic but to those willing to go along for the ride – and keep riding for an hour – it’s a strangely rewarding time, even if it’s just to proclaim, “I survived that.”

A runtime of only an hour, you say? That’s true, but such is the intensity of Prep For Death that there’s no way this could stretch to ninety minutes and not result in frying the brains of its audience. In addition to its increasingly batshit plot developments, there are unexpected moments of gut-pummelling emotion, such as a conversation between Damien and a friend who is also divorced and is unable to see his children because of the psychological spectre of Covid and how it made us all afraid of being with others, in case we unwittingly killed them with a virus about which we knew little. It’s an amazing, superbly written, almost unbearably sad sequence which adds a bold, sobering edge to the general craziness on view.

To anyone who appreciates movies which are “out there,” give this one a whirl. Trust me, it’s out there. To the rest of humanity, who may tap out after ten minutes, I know where you’re coming from, but you’re also missing something which puts its own stamp on filmmaking. You may get through Prep For Death not quite knowing how to process any of it, but isn’t that a refreshing and exciting way to feel as the credits roll? I can’t tell you whether this is a one-star or five-star film or anything in between and that’s exactly what I love about it. Go into it with absolutely no preconceptions and make up your own mind.

Prep For Death screened as part of the Spirit of Independence Festival 2023 in Sheffield, UK.

Spirit of Independence 2023: All Through The Hall

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Review by Darren Gaskell


Security guard Ben (Adrian Linke) is working a night shift at a warehouse when three people, intent on getting their hands on the contents of the safe, break into the building. As Ben considers how to tackle the intruders, he also has to deal with the spectre of his recent past coming back to haunt him. As matters escalate and loyalties are tested, who will survive the night?

Falko Jakobs’ micro-budgeted, noir-influenced thriller bounces back and forth in time as the plot plays out from various perspectives, revealing vital details about the past of the protagonists as the confrontation heads towards its potentially lethal conclusion. For those of us who bristle at the use of chapter headings, they are in place here, but in this case they serve a useful function in terms of breaking down the story into its component parts before hitting the fast forward button in order to bring us back into the present.

As well as being a decent little thriller, All Through The Hall (2022) serves as something of an instruction manual for those interested in making a feature film for little money. The bulk of the film takes place in one location, the cast is limited in numbers (Jakobs himself plays a supporting role) and a virtue is made of reusing footage. Arguably, some of the cat and mouse sequences are played out to the point where suspense is over-stretched but there are a couple of pleasing, if not entirely unexpected, twists which keeps the tale engaging.

Despite the tiny budget, there’s the odd burst of entertaining, competently staged action and some niftily edited violence, which elicits the requisite amount of wincing from the audience without having to show too much. For instance, the very sight of Ben deciding upon a hammer as his weapon of choice is likely to set folks on edge (or have horror fans rubbing their hands with glee), creating instant trepidation as to if or when it may be used.

While it doesn’t reconstruct the thriller template, All Through The Hall is an efficient time-flier which recalls, in passing, a smaller-scale Free Fire without that movie’s need for over-egging its characterisations. The protagonists here are believable, the scope of their dreams not especially extraordinary. The heist is commensurate with the scale of the overall piece, relying on a few relatively simple ways of breaching a building which isn’t exactly Fort Knox.

Similarly, the de facto hero figure which Linke portrays isn’t the wise-cracking, thief-taking, shoot first, ask questions later figure you’d get in an American spin on this kind of story. Ben is weary of coming up against criminals and just wants a quiet life, and his confrontations with his antagonists are shot through with an air of reluctance. His escapes from various situations are refreshingly unspectacular. One particular way out of a locked space is so droll, I snort laughed.

The final act plays out exactly as you’d expect, right up to the point where it doesn’t. Remember, this is a movie from Germany and, as a film industry which has Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s shadow hanging over it, there’s always room for doom, resulting in a darker – but still entirely fitting – denouement than the one that appears to be slotting into place. It’s a blunt slap of an ending which not everyone will enjoy, but it doesn’t feel unearned in the slightest, considering the various hints dropped at regular intervals.

Occasionally the performances wobble and there are a couple of flat spots which feel like padding to push the svelte runtime over seventy minutes, but All Through The Hall works hard to deliver its thrills with a smidge of invention. More often than not, it succeeds. The film itself, like its criminal element, ties up the loose ends and leaves few, if any, questions but a more general one for me would be: What would Falko Jakobs make with a sizeable budget? That’s an interesting one to ponder.

All Through The Hall (2022) played as part of the Spirit of Independence Festival in Sheffield, UK.

Spirit of Independence 2023: Miracle Mile

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Review by Darren Gaskell

Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) meets cute Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) and life is good as he prepares for what he believes will be a life-changing first date with her. One power outage later, Harry finds himself three and a half hours late to meet Julie at the diner where she works and, to no one’s surprise, she’s long since headed home in a state of upset. Calling her from the payphone outside the diner, Harry leaves a message apologising for blowing it in such a big way and when the phone rings almost as soon as he’s put the receiver down, he picks up, hoping it’s Julie giving him a chance to explain further.

It isn’t Julie.

Instead, it’s a guy called Chip, attempting to call his father to warn him that America has launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia and that the retaliatory missiles will be hitting the States within the next seventy minutes. The phone call is terminated in the most abrupt way imaginable and Harry is left wondering whether or not he’s just been the victim of a prank call but if it was true, can he reach Julie and get them both out of Los Angeles before the unthinkable happens?

At this point, it’s only right that I ‘fess up about my feelings for Steve De Jarnatt’s wonderfully peculiar genre hopper. Simply put, it’s my all-time favourite. I remember seeing it for the first time in an art cinema in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, delaying my appearance at a very understanding friend’s housewarming party because it was the first time I’d spotted the film playing anywhere in the UK. Already having purchased the incredible Tangerine Dream soundtrack on CD, I had to watch the movie to which it was aligned. After the credits had rolled, I was still in my seat trying to deal with it all, my world utterly rocked by the previous eighty-seven minutes of cinematic chaos.

Miracle Mile sets out as a rom com, detours into a memorably nightmarish set-up straight out of the best Twilight Zone episodes, stops off to take in a one location, ensemble mini drama piece then drives headlong into a real time, against the clock thriller before the gradually encroaching horrors are fully realised in a brilliantly tense final act, playing off the audience’s – and Harry’s – realisations and expectations of what has been set in motion, all delivered with a delightfully surreal edge.

Crucial to the success of the piece is the casting of Edwards and Winningham as the couple, displaying a winning, easy going chemistry that makes it impossible for the viewer to root against them. Edwards brings his innate likeability and charm to Harry and Winningham scores as a love interest that, as the script states, is slightly out of time, pleasingly out of step with typical Hollywood leading ladies of the era and perfect for this skewed look at life.

And oh, what a supporting roster too, packed with performers who have graced numerous movies and TV projects across the years. Bringing their A-game (amongst many others): Denise Crosby as a no-nonsense businesswoman who suspects the warning may be real; Robert Do’Qui, previously the gruff desk sergeant in RoboCop, here playing an even more gruff diner owner; Earl Boen and Danny De La Paz as patrons and BBQ enthusiasts.

When the action movies away from the eatery, the quality of actor doesn’t drop one iota, with our hero encountering Terminator alumnus Brian Thompson as a beefcake with a very specific set of skills, Mykelti Williamson as Wilson, whose involuntary involvement in Harry’s quest may clash with a set of business interests possibly not entirely on the level and Kurt Fuller as…well, I should allow you to discover what’s going with Kurt Fuller’s character for yourselves.

Underscoring its often downbeat plot points with a streak of quirky, occasionally laugh out loud humour, Miracle Mile also delivers on suspense and spectacle in a way which belies its budget, focusing on tightly marshalled sequences of mayhem that resonate more than any bloated, big studio swings at portraying a citywide slide into complete lawlessness.

Characters make frustratingly misguided decisions, blurt out odd lines of dialogue, flounder in the face of urgency. In this extraordinary situation, its inhabitants feel convincingly ill-equipped to deal with any of it. Even Harry is far from perfect. He’s a victim of his own idealism, seeing too much good in others, overestimating his assumed role as the central character in an unfolding catastrophe, focused on his mission to a point at which he has little grasp of the bedlam enveloping the area.

Switching the “Will they/won’t they?” construct of the comedy romance for “Will they/won’t they survive?,” the final twenty minutes are fraught with back and forth, life threatening moments for Harry and Julie, giving the audience sporadic pauses for breath before plunging them back into an even worse predicament, culminating in a final scene which may leave you an emotional wreck. That’s if the previous eighty minutes hasn’t.

Thirty-five years on, the power of Miracle Mile remains undimmed. Its willingness to mix genres results in a piece of work which switches effortlessly between sweet and terrifying, bolstered further by fabulous yet unshowy performances by Edwards and Winningham and superb support by all concerned, especially Williamson’s initially fun, ultimately sympathetic turn. The propulsive Tangerine Dream score is one of their best and to this day I always hear their track Running Out Of Time whenever I’m pushing a shopping trolley.

Ridiculously overlooked by audiences on its original release, the movie’s undoubted quality has endured and its following has rightly grown. I haven’t even gone into the heart rending subplot concerning Julie’s grandparents, one of whom is She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (and Tarantula!) star John Agar. There is so much more I could say about Miracle Mile but you should seek it out: watch it, get blown away and then we will talk about it. Oh, we will talk.

Miracle Mile (1988) screened as part of this year’s Spirit of Independence Film Festival in Sheffield, UK. For more information on the fest, please click here.

Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: the Robert Englund Story (2022)

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Review by Darren Gaskell

Whether you’re a horror movie fan or you’d run a mile rather than watch anything remotely scary, chances are you’ll know the name of Robert Englund, propelled to icon status via his memorable portrayal of knife-gloved, stripey sweater sporting child killer Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare On Elm Street movies. Of course, there’s more to him that the infamy bestowed upon him courtesy of this most unlikely of fan figures.


Chris Griffiths and Gary Smart, who are also part of the team behind the Hellraiser documentary Leviathan and four-part RoboCop retrospective RoboDoc, draw upon six decades of performances and the reminiscences of a notable array of talking heads from the filmmaking community, all ready to spill the beans on working with the subject. Eschewing voice-over narration, the colourful details of Englund’s formative years and career trajectory are painted by the man himself in an informal, engaging way, clearly enjoying the attention but also ready to cut through his potential ego trip with a welcome streak of self-deprecating humour.


Often the issue with pieces of work which provide a certain level of fan service to genre staples is a reliance on overstating what all around amazing people these folks are, rendering the overall work too sugary and difficult to swallow. In the case of Hollywood Dreams And Nightmares, there’s a predictable dearth of colleagues turning up to stick the boot into Robert Englund but it’s clear that those who know and work with him have a genuine love of the bloke, many of them citing his enthusiasm and generosity on set, especially when it comes to those less experienced co-stars and crew.


Starting with those first forays into the theatre, leading to his first on-screen credit in Daniel Petrie’s drama Buster And Billie, from then on it’s a whistle stop tour of movie highlights – and some lowlights – which will almost certainly elicit the response of “I forgot he was in that” at various points. For me, it was the role of Harry in Gary Sherman’s superb small town chiller Dead And Buried, and Sherman is on hand here to wax lyrical about Englund’s ability to inhabit a character and imbue his dialogue with a naturalistic feel.


There’s vital coverage of his breakthrough as an internationally identifiable star resulting from his role as gentle alien Willie in superior science fiction miniseries V, at which point a certain Wes Craven was about to come calling. Although the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise and the spin-off TV series are given due prominence, that particular juggernaut isn’t allowed to run roughshod over the remainder of the runtime. The final third focuses on Englund’s enduring appeal and a new crop of genre writers and directors with his name at the top of their casting wish lists, allowing him to step into new roles whilst gaining a new generation of fans without ever truly leaving Freddy behind.


Clocking in at two hours and ten minutes, Hollywood Dreams And Nightmares may feel slightly on the long side, but the focus on a career with such longevity demands that a raft of key films (and a few lesser known gems) clamour to be featured, which makes the inclusion of earlier appearances in Stay Hungry, Big Wednesday and Don’t Cry, It’s Only Thunder such pleasing additions to the tale. The latter movie, a low-key, lesser seen but well regarded Vietnam War story, demonstrates Englund’s range and keenness for detail while also allowing for fun, travelogue-style recollections from star Dennis Christopher.


Englund’s parents have sadly passed on and he has no children, leaving all the observations of sharing your life with a horror hero to brief but nonetheless effective contributions from wife Nancy, who is honest about their decision to travel the world and enjoy the ride rather than take the option of the picket fence, the kids and the dog. Why not? The picture is of two people extremely happy with each other for company, and their relationship brings a further lightness to the piece which far outweighs the odd darker moment.


There is, of course, an argument to be made for a much longer and more detailed trawl of Robert Englund’s career but Hollywood Dreams And Nightmares is a carefully curated exhibition of the man’s filmic journey and acquaintances down the years, which should leave horror hounds with a smile on their face and cinema fans with their appetite whetted to track down the work of someone whose considerable talent extends far beyond Freddy Krueger.

Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares (2022) is available to watch on all major streaming platforms now.