When I heard that Mara was a horror story invoking sleep paralysis as a key element of its plot, as a sufferer I was immediately interested. Sleep paralysis is well understood in the modern age, just as sleep and dreams are generally, but anyone who has ever had a significant nightmare, or a waking nightmare […]
Paul Verhoeven’s first Hollywood production was in many respects a case of ‘start as you mean to go on.’ In line with the Dutch auteur’s later, more celebrated work – RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers (let’s put Showgirls to one side just now, although there’s a lot to be said for that one) […]
It’s a pleasure to find oneself watching a hitherto-unknown supernatural horror, just like The Changeling. Before Insidious and that Woman in Black remake were even a twinkle in the eye, before ghosts got riotous, filmmakers were giving voice to ghost stories which could be understated, yet complex enough to keep their secrets until the end. […]
How much can one ninety-minute film reasonably do within its timeframe? Can a film successfully go from awkward laughs to gore, from femmes fatales to OTT-ultraviolence, and from slacker humour to shock? Rondo (2018) believes it’s not only possible, it’s all part and parcel of its overall appeal. Both the ethos and the resulting movie […]
When a new horror movie lands with a painfully generic title and reports of a troubled journey to the final cut, this tends to leave you with pretty low expectations going in. Dead Night premiered at 2017’s Fantastic Fest, then known as Applecart; a title I’m glad they ditched, as a) it could easily be […]
Umberto Lenzi turned his hand to many different kinds of genre film during his career, so it’s perhaps little surprise that he looked to the kind of cannibalism movies being made by his peers (such Ruggero Deodato), making two of them in very rapid succession, after almost a ten-year break between these and the first […]
There’s a lot to be said for films that wear their heart on their sleeve; plenty of the most affecting and memorable titles in cinema are the work of filmmakers with an intensely personal vision. Writer-director Priscilla Cameron (making her feature debut here) certainly seems to be coming straight from the heart with The Butterfly […]
The annals of cult film history are littered with instantly recognisable names whose many illustrious works could be named at the drop of a hat by anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the material. However, there are plenty of other names who don’t have quite the same level of recognition, nor are any of their […]
When most people think of literary witches, they imagine either a crooked-nosed old hag or a cat-eyed seductress intent on taking your virgin blood. Either way, they are generally written as mischievous or evil women that get their powers from demons. But aside from a few exceptions, it wasn’t until Japan mashed witches with magical […]
Zombies, as anyone who’s been following the trends of horror cinema so far this century will be aware, came dangerously close to over-saturation in the past decade. (I’d say ‘done to death,’ only… y’know.) However, the mid-2000s living dead frenzy in the wake of Shaun of the Dead, The Walking Dead, World War Z etc. […]
Any way you look at it, The Purge is one of the most distinctive cinematic franchises of the past decade. For one, in amongst the slew of films that are quite clearly horror yet inspire umpteen pseudo-high brow think pieces declaring they’re not horror really, The Purge is one property of which we might genuinely […]