Another year, another bunch of comments about how this year’s been a terrible one for decent horror titles. To be fair, the quantity of those comments appears to be substantially smaller than the pile of posts which bemoaned 2023’s genre output. Narrowing the field down to ten proved, as ever, exceptionally difficult because there’s been […]
Everyone likes a bit of data and, as a change, I thought it would be interesting to check in with the most popular posts on the site this year. It’s often interesting to keep half an eye on this – not least because, on occasion, it can be quite surprising – but I’ve not been […]
Insert preamble here… Well, here we are again. As Warped Perspective is about to enter its tenth year – and that coming off the back of the old Brutal as Hell days, too – I’ve racked up quite a few editions of these Top Tens, and every year I search for some kind of summative […]
When we think about vampires, our expectations have inevitably been shaped by popular literature, which has in turn – for the last century – also found expression in cinema. In the nineteenth century, popular reading habits created a set of cultural expectations about vampires. The birth of horror fiction, which stemmed in turn from the […]
Made in 1972 for Spanish TV, Antonio Mercero’s short film La Cabina (The Phone Booth) didn’t appear on British television for around a decade after that, but it was a case of once seen, never forgotten for those people who first saw it in the early Eighties, appearing as part of a suite of programmes […]
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 […]
A wounded hand disappears into nothingness as a modern, chain link fence divides us, at least initially, from an idyllic English churchyard; if Penda’s Fen (1973) can be seen as fairly recusant in its treatment of themes and narrative structure, then you could equally argue that it spells out its key themes, or at least […]
You’ve gotta love a film that straight away states its intent (and understand a film which needs to sell its merits pretty damn quickly) and Nightmare (1981) does both of these things. We’re off with a dream of a dismembered body, a shrieking nightmare, a man in a straightjacket – and the immediate need to […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Gabby Foor Shuffling, shambling or sprinting, our relationship with the zombie has changed as fast and furiously as someone bitten by one. In the last twenty-five years we have seen an evolution of the nearly one-hundred-year love affair with the undead in all their various forms, and twenty years ago (counting to its United […]