Editor’s note: this article contains a full discussion of Night of the Eagle and as such contains spoilers. “I DO NOT BELIEVE” are the first words both spoken and seen in Night of the Eagle. These words are the crux of a lecture being given by Professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), a rational man who […]
Folk horror movies are a bit of an odd duck. Based on the folklore of the country from which the movie originates, the genre relies heavily on the unique landscape of its audience’s heritage and history to divvy out the scares. Examples are much more common in Asian horror such as Sadako from The Ring, […]
“COMPLETE US THE CIRCLE!” STORIES OF STANDING STONES The numerous standing stones of Britain are familiar, beloved points on our landscape: Stonehenge is now an integral part of the British tourism trade, for instance, bringing in visitors from around the world. There are examples of monoliths and circles throughout the country – over 300 in […]
Idylls are not idylls in the British folk horror world, and the land itself hides a multitude of sins – even if ‘sins’ are a relatively modern phenomenon, by its standards. This small, but significant sub-genre derives a great deal of its power by examining the deep unease generated by Britain’s ancient history: the palpable, […]
Strange, isolated houses, villages and islands; closed communities, whose initial friendliness seems to mask something deeply sinister; people who have rejected modernity, or have simply been passed over by it; ritual practices; the uncanny; dark magic; pagan symbols; the threat of the old ways spilling over into the new, with devastating consequences… Welcome to a […]
If you’re not sitting down, I need you to find a seat, and if you are sitting down, I need you to drink some tea so you can spit it out when you hear what I’m about to say. Matt Groening, famously known for Futurama and The Simpsons, has announced a new animated series to […]
Whenever I see a film in which the characters are watching Night of the Living Dead – the breakthrough work of the late, great George A Romero – it inspires very mixed feelings. Such scenes are fairly common in modern horror (see Sinister 2 or XX), and on the one hand they seem a nice […]
It’s with shock and sadness that we have learned that George Romero has passed away, following a short battle with lung cancer. He was 77 years old. His breakthrough film, Night of the Living Dead, accidentally spawned a genre – with the ghouls which he envisioned becoming our ‘zombies’ – not entities which had anything […]
I’m as guilty as anyone for bemoaning the ‘same-old shit’ of certain subgenres of horror films. In fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve bemoaned such a thing on this very website (or at least in its previous, Brutal as Hell, guise). I’ve come to realise, however, that if there’s one thing more tiresome than yet another […]
The other day, I had what I feel I can best describe as a uniquely millennial moment. I was watching Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo & Juliet for the first time in many years, and it reached the scene in which Dash Mihok’s Benvolio quizzes Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo about the sadness that lengthens his hours. Romeo remarks […]
As a Swedish death metal musician once asked, ‘Who examines the doctors?’ and it’s a fair question, speaking to an anxiety which crops up again and again in horror cinema. Little wonder it does, too: ever since Victor Frankenstein decided to use his university education to stitch together dead bodies as a scholar of the […]