Every year there’s always some comment about how it’s been a terrible one for horror movies, and every year I think “What have those people been watching”? The genre rarely fails to deliver terror of all types and, as usual, narrowing the field down to my favourite ten (plus five honourable mentions) has been just […]
Every year – and I have done lists like this for quite a few years now – I wonder what I’ll say for the little preamble: before getting straight to talking about the films themselves, it always feels proper to say a little something first. Well, this year I’ll start by saying this: 2023 has […]
Appearing midway-through what might once have been the new normal of the New Extremity movement of the Nineties and early Noughties, Calvaire (2004) was, nonetheless, an odd and interesting fit for that movement. No doubt it was helped into existence by the advent of films like Irréversible, which had been released two years prior (sharing […]
After the actor went missing earlier this year whilst hiking in the San Gabriel mountains, it was always a slim-to-none chance that Julian Sands was going to turn up unharmed. Now, sadly, remains recently found in the area have been confirmed as him; whilst not a surprise, it also feels greatly sad to receive that […]
Irreversible does, at least, warn us of what is coming. In its first few minutes, with its hammering soundtrack, its almost infrasonic hum, its extraordinary, pinballing camerawork and its first pitstop with two odious, broken men who warn us that ‘time destroys all things’, the film instils a kind of sensory fight-or-flight response. It sets […]
On occasion, a film comes along which makes an almost immediate, indelible mark. As soon as it appears, it disrupts what came before it; it can be difficult to even remember a time before it, so quickly do its characters and archetypes take hold. Such a film was Ring (1998), coming at the tail end […]
Another year bites the dust… From the perspective of the kinds of independent films usually covered here at Warped Perspective, 2022 has, after everything, been a good year for film: lots of the big genre film festivals have boasted excellent, extensive line-ups, and after a run of virtual-only fests, most physical fests are back (though, […]
Having recently read and reviewed Jim Queen’s debut novel, I was also keen to run an interview: it’s such a heady, hedonistic book, for starters, that it begs many questions. But more than that, I was interested in its back story, so to speak: it’s a book which feels both very alienating and yet very […]
October is a busy month for genre film fans, and for folks on the East Coast it’s happily no exception as the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival prepares to launch this year’s event. Running from the 13th October to the 20th, it promises both a run of classic cinema and brand new titles. (Warped Perspective is […]
The Hellraiser franchise is the thing that won’t die. Decades after its inception in the 80s, and since one excellent sequel in the form of Hellbound (1988), it has morphed and been sold on and changed and spoiled and (partly) redeemed down through the subsequent years. The original story’s Cenobites have walked the city streets, […]
We all know the late George A. Romero as the pioneer of the zombie in horror cinema – a cinematic monster which has sustained appropriate levels of longevity in modern culture. But there was far more to his career than that and he found far more ways to critique the society he lived in than […]