If ever a film spoke to unpalatable truths, then it’s Jennifer Kent’s most recent film, The Nightingale. Where her previous feature The Babadook put a fantastical spin on mental trauma, The Nightingale strips back all varieties of artifice and fantasy, striving to represent a notoriously brutal period in Australia’s colonial past as realistically as possible. […]
One of the most talked-about films on the horror film circuit back in 2013 was The Battery, an ultra low-budget mumblecore American indie take on the classic zombie apocalypse set-up. It proved divisive, with many viewers finding it too slow, uneventful and low on the expected gut-munching horror, but plenty of others (myself included) being […]
There’s a brutal serial killer on the loose in South Korea. His modus operandi is quite simple: by faking a collision with another vehicle on a deserted road, he encourages the aggrieved party to get out of their car: when they do so, he waits for them to get distracted, then stabs them to death. […]
Daniel Isn’t Real was introduced as ‘a cross between Drop Dead Fred and Hellraiser’; if you are immediately wondering how that could ever play out, then rest assured, this is as good an approximation as you are likely to get. This film is incredibly dark throughout, threaded through with ambiguities which grow the more you […]
As the point has been made several times before on this site, horror comedy can be a risky venture; when it goes wrong, it can be either not that funny, nor really capable of showing any love for the horror genre either. Happily, neither of these charges can be levelled at Extra Ordinary. The film […]
After the Firefly family got caught in a hail of bullets at the end of their little road trip in The Devil’s Rejects, I don’t think anyone really foresaw a sequel. But it turns out these characters have a life of their own now that defies expectations: House of 1000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects are […]
It seems that gone are the days when social commentary in cinema happened as a matter of chance; more and more, in our hyper-aware times, filmmakers actively tackle hot topics such as attitudes to sexuality, race or class – it’s there from the start, right from the beginning of the writing process. So when I […]
By Matt Harries Despite professing to not be a political film maker, William Friedkin demonstrated his social conscience at the very beginning of his directorial career. The People Vs Paul Crump was Friedkin’s 1962 debut and follows the story of the titular Crump, sentenced to death by electric chair for his part in a bungled […]
Winter in Poland. A woman is taking the train from Warsaw back to her dilapidated home town, a part of the world evidently undergoing a spate of child disappearances, given the newspapers and news bulletins we soon encounter. This is Alicja (Magdalena Cielecka), a journalist, who has chosen to return to her old home in […]
When I read some of the blurb for Imperial Blue and saw that its story revolved around drug use, I expected to get one of two things: either a brutal crime drama, where cartel is pitched against cartel, or else a surreal, even overblown imagining of substance abuse on-screen. In truth, Imperial Blue contains some […]
By Helen Creighton At first glance, Certain Kind of Silence has the whiff of a certain kind of Stepford: vague parallels could be drawn between the classic 70s sci-fi The Stepford Wives and Czech director Michal Hogenauer’s tale of a young au pair slowly but inexorably drawn into an oppressive cult environment against her better […]