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 […]
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, […]
Time flies, and it certainly doesn’t seem like three decades since I scored the poster for Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth from the local video shop, back when you could ask nicely for posters at the end of their release run and – if the member of staff took mercy on you – you could […]
For the first part of Keri’s article, please click here. ‘Keep Filming…’ It would be borderline impossible to write about the horror of the first two decades of this century without mentioning a phenomenon which, like ‘torture porn’ cinema, has been rather divisive. I’m talking about the found footage craze – and I think ‘craze’ […]
It’s hard to believe that two decades of the new millennium have already passed. It seems like only yesterday that we were complaining about ticket prices for Millennium Eve, whilst simultaneously fearing a computer glitch which would potentially mean the end of the world as we know it. Well, it didn’t quite happen that way […]
By Matt Harries If ever there was a horror franchise that elicited an equal sense of both joy and frustration, it is surely the Hellraiser franchise. How many films have managed to nail (sorry) such a heady blend of slasher flick and (to paraphrase Doug Bradley) ‘Gothic Ibsen’? The first film, Hellraiser, established a template […]
As this is a detailed examination of the film, it contains spoilers. Seldom has the sole creation of one person travelled so far and changed so many times as the story of Frankenstein (1818). Sure, horror is populated with multiple vampires, mummies and zombies, but even the best-known stories have often been woven out of […]
By Matt Harries We often exclaim, or hear others exclaim, ‘They don’t make ‘em like that any more!’ Call it sentimentality, rose-tinted spectacles, or plain old nostalgia; whatever you call it, the audience for stories refracted through the lens of retro-appreciation is huge these days. Listing various works of the small or big screen that […]