Based on a novel by Craig Davidson – who also writes under the pen-name, Nick Cutter – The Fight Machine (2022) is, by some strange chance, the second of Davidson’s/Cutter’s novels to get adapted for the big screen, with both films appearing at this year’s Fantasia (The Breach being the other). It’s a pulpy, often […]
Remember that meme from a few years ago which pointed out that if you run Godzilla backwards, it’s the story of a benevolent lizard who builds a city before moonwalking into the sea? Yeah, yeah, but it raises a valid point: you have to wonder, in those many fine films where a city gets decimated […]
All great old cities are built on the bones of the dead. Paris conceals miles of spooky catacombs beneath its streets. London sits on layers of plague pits, paupers’ graves, Roman-era burials, the forgotten dead from wartime conflagrations, as well as the ashes of its own ancient sacking. Tokyo, the main urban centre of Japan […]
The Breach (2022) knows exactly what it wants to be: that is, a solid horror yarn, a midnight movie by design which might not surprise you with its plot elements, but will keep you consistently entertained as it burns through a significant number of genre features. Directed by Rodrigo Gudiño, founder of Rue Morgue magazine, […]
If you go by the title and the poster art alone, you might be forgiven for assuming He’s Watching (2022) is some kind of slasher movie – but you’d be wrong. Instead, the film blends a couple of different kinds of horror, blending anxieties old and new to come up with something quite unique. Yes, […]
There’s been a tendency in pop culture to present serial killers as monolithic: they’ve often been painted as almost supernatural, not only ungoverned by the usual social and cultural norms but devoid of familial ties, too. But that is changing: more recent films and TV have hinted at least at something more going on with […]
The spectre of the tower block looms appropriately large over modern society. On one hand these blocks are still ‘modern’ and ‘aspirational’, but on the other, they’re seen as unfriendly spaces, whether because degraded, dangerous or just suspiciously separate from other modes of living. Cinema has examined the worst extremes – Land of the Dead […]
It’s clear by now that the pandemic has had a profound impact upon filmmaking – whether from a logistical point of view, or in terms of subject matter. Skeleton crews, deserted streets, plotlines about contagion…horror, more than other genres, has seen them all in the past couple of years. This is to be expected: as […]
Whilst the two short films, Elbows (2021) and Lips (2022) are not thematically linked – apart from perhaps, the perils of lending an ear – they still share something in common which goes beyond the fact that they’re both Black Octopus Productions releases. Namely, the basis for each of these understated and appallingly funny films […]
Rural Denmark, 1991: a little girl, playing in a small room in her home, is terrified by what seems to be a violent attack taking place upstairs, in the room right above her head. That’s bad enough, but the attack seems to take on a surreal quality almost instantly, with blood seemingly cascading down the […]
There has been a minor run of punk and metal documentary-making in recent years: some of these do a fine job of simply retelling an interesting band history, and some go a step further, telling us more about what it means to be in a certain band or to have lived through a certain time […]