It may star an actress widely regarded as one of today’s predominant scream queens, and its central character may visit a creepy old house in the woods within the first five minutes, but don’t be fooled: Ayla is pretty far removed from your standard ultra-low budget indie horror movie. Written, produced and directed by Elias, mononymous […]
As I’ve discussed at length in the past, we really can’t overstate the impact of The Silence of the Lambs; a bona fide game changer, it blurred the lines between police procedural and horror story (not to suggest this hadn’t been done before: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, anyone?), setting the stage for the psychological […]
The Ghost Stories film comes to us off the back of a much-praised stage play of the same title by two of our finest writers, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson: at the time it was doing the rounds some years ago, I managed to immure myself against hearing even the barest hint of what it […]
It’s been pleasing to see an apparent rise in films about girls and the aftermath of adolescence in the horror genre of late, with 2016’s Raw perhaps being the stand-out example. Blue My Mind is the latest, and it’s a striking and engaging film. The young woman at the centre of the film is Mia […]
In a stark opening scene, composed largely from a colour palette of black, white, and tiny amounts of red – a young woman awakens. She is in a mysterious room, has crippling injuries to her legs, and is clearly shocked and confused by her predicament. As soon as she wakes up, she’s addressed by a […]
I don’t think I ever anticipated seeing the day when the release of a Steven Spielberg-directed sci-fi adventure would be greeted with such widespread disdain as we’ve seen for Ready Player One. Sure, as the king of the blockbuster, more or less responsible for inventing the format as we know it along with George Lucas, […]
In some ways it’s hard to believe it’s been a full five years since Pacific Rim. A lot’s happened in the interim, though: director Guillermo del Toro returned to his signature Gothic territory with Crimson Peak, then bagged a bunch of Oscars for The Shape of Water; and giant monster epics have returned to the […]
Nothing sells a slasher like a holiday association. You really don’t need me to do the list; if it’s been deemed a day of rest or celebration which is in some way marked annually, then it’s fertile ground in which to cultivate 80-odd minutes of hapless, sinful youngsters getting hacked up by a maniac. Small […]
The arrival of this new big screen take on the digital adventures of Lara Croft brings with it mass cries of, “will this finally break the video game movie curse?” Well, not unlike this new live action incarnation of Lara, I don’t really believe in curses. While the good is undoubtedly outweighed by the bad, […]
Depending on how closely you follow the news coming out of Hollywood, Red Sparrow is a film which is pretty much impossible to take entirely on face value. Everything from the premise, to the casting of Jennifer Lawrence, to the tag line ‘Take Back Control’ marks the film out as a thriller with a distinctly […]
Is it just me, or does the ‘found footage’ craze of the past fifteen years or so seem to have died back a little of late? This sub-genre seemed to dominate indie cinema for what seemed like forever, becoming infamous as a go-to model for those on a shoestring budget. Well, found footage films are […]