Elvira (Lea Myren) is a young girl in love with the idea of being in love. More specifically, she’s in love with the idea of one Prince Julian, an eligible royal who just so happens to be a published poet: she pores over his verse incessantly. Briefly back in the real world, she, her younger […]
It’s all going on in the opening scenes of Scurry (2024) as a calamitous event tears a literal hole in the fabric of an American city. At the bottom of a sinkhole which has opened up, an unfortunate man regains consciousness. He’s injured, but he has phone signal, and daylight is auspiciously close. Never mind […]
The Severed Sun (2024) opens in a remote religious community, just prior to a calamitous event. A young woman named Magpie (Emma Appleton) has, presumably with the tacit approval of her bruised and battered elder stepson David (Lewis Gribben), concocted a plan to poison her monstrous husband. Husbands tend to be monstrous, by the by, […]
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 […]
Ash (2025) is, for the most part, as much about thoughts, impressions and experiences as it is a conventional piece of narrative film. It comes in like a space-age fever dream, all body horror and blaring noise, before pausing on the lone, prone figure of Riya (Eiza González), injured and amnesic on the floor of […]
We have an unusual and specific start point in Traumatika (2024): Egypt, 1910. A man crosses a stretch of desert, clutching something he clearly wants to bury and forget, as he’s haunted by visions of his deceased son. This death – this murder – is linked to the object he’s carrying, a statuette of a […]
“Towns like Meadville haunt you.” So goes an early voiceover by Carrie (Rainey Qualley), who is working on a book about the local legend of Pig Hill, centred around mutant, porcine creatures who are supposedly responsible for a string of young women going missing. We’ve already seen the latest of these disappearances in the cold […]
The Balconettes (2024) is an odd customer. It perhaps starts with the title, a slightly clunky translation of the French title, Les femmes au balcon – choosing a word which may indeed mean ‘women on the balcony’ but is more likely to conjure the word ‘bra’ for most Anglophone audiences. It’s not the last time […]
It’s great that HollyShorts is around: the more festivals we have covering the world of short genre film, the better. As an example of the kinds of films they have featured this year, here are just four titles: each diverse, but each compelling examples of the short film format. First up is Halfway Haunted, which […]
Feeling nostalgic for the torture horror wave of the Noughties yet? If you are, then Your Host (2025) has got you covered. The proviso which comes with this, however, is that if you didn’t particularly enjoy that style of filmmaking, then this isn’t the one to win you over. It’s a clear and affectionate homage […]
Blood Shine (2025) is an immediate barrage of contrasts – tonal and aesthetic – and it maintains its multi-layered approach throughout, using different styles of horror as it grows steadily more intense and provocative. If there are echoes of other films in here – and you may notice a few – there’s more than enough […]