Angel City, the year 2247. Trooper Jak Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a gruff cop whose dogged, extracurricular pursuit of the last remaining members of a zombie-like cult has landed him in hot water with his superiors. Detective McNulty (Art La Fleur) warns Jak that trancer hunting is out of bounds, so Jak reacts in the […]
The longer we live with social media, the more of a subgenre of horror it’s going to generate: as such, it’s little wonder that gaming is having its turn too, whether that be through screenplays based on successful games, or screenplays about gaming itself. Really speaking, although the technology is new, these films bring us […]
Body horror has always given us repellent answers to pertinent questions, and The Substance (2024) is a great entrant to the genre, even if it’s quite busy paying its dues to a whole host of past directors and titles. The key question under consideration here is a very familiar one: what happens to women in […]
The ‘heist gone wrong’ is a surprisingly popular motif in genre cinema lately. From Livide (2011) to Don’t Breathe (2016) through to Peppergrass (2021), to name a few, ideas about what could happen in such an unfamiliar, high stakes situation have given a fair few filmmakers food for thought, and each subsequent film uses varying […]
Welcome to Purgatory. In the tradition of updating the afterlife mythos – from Beetlejuice to The Lovely Bones – directors and writers the Butler Brothers have turned their hand to the ultimate hinterland in Purgatory Jack (2023), taking for a setting the place where souls wait to be cleansed of residual sin before getting into […]
“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God”: a young woman, lying on her bed, intones this sentence over and over, like a mantra, as Saint Clare (2024) begins. This is apparently a Joan of Arc quotation, but it’s hopefully no spoiler to point that Joan figures but little in […]
“Take your chances – you don’t get many.” How far can a person be pushed before they finally, irrevocably snap? It’s a question horror cinema has seemingly enjoyed mulling over for as long as it’s existed, pushing for ever more disturbing conclusions as the decades pass. And, as the intense focus on distressed and vulnerable […]
A wonderfully desolate beach and the surrounding countryside clash with a ramshackle nearby house and its sole occupant (Nick Searcy), whom we see frantically writing – against the clock, as some kind of supernatural phenomena seems to be goading him, making him hallucinate, fear for his sanity. So who is this letter for? We get […]
If Broken Bird (2024) begins unusually literally, then it soon becomes something far more complex and symbolic than that: its depiction of the nervy, prim Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) suggests from the earliest moments that something about this character is barely restrained, and that we will discover more anon. But in getting there – despite a […]
Ecocriticism looks at the relationships between humankind and nature; it reinterprets our place in the natural order of things, looking at how we live, where we live and how our decisions as a species impact upon the world around us. As such, science fiction and dystopia offers a rich source of ecocritical ideas: this seems […]
Getting a new Aliens film? Great, but after a few misfires (you can decide which were misfires, but I bet you think there were some) it can feel like a mixed blessing, perhaps. Wars have very nearly been fought over these movies, because the first two instalments set the bar so extraordinarily high; if the […]