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 […]
When you know the film you’re sitting down to is from the producers behind the Harry Potter films and is adapted from a comic book by the creators of cartoon series Ben 10, you might not anticipate something grounded, intimate and introspective. However, this is just what we get from I Kill Giants, feature debut […]
While I’m not sure we have enough Sasquatch movies for us to necessarily declare it a subgenre in its own right, it does seem that we’ve had a good few in recent years, from the excess-all-areas grindhouse of Dear God No! to the more grounded found footage of Willow Creek. Now, writer-director Justin Lee has […]
A potentially confusing title for anyone more familiar with Norman J Warren’s work than Indonesian genre classics, Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves is a remake of a 1980 film of the same name. Anwar retains the 1980s setting and delivers a modern take on demonic possession, ritual and societal pressures. The film is currently screening at […]
We’re no longer the 100% horror site we used to be back when we still went by Brutal As Hell (sigh, remember those days? Anyone…?) However, the genre is still very close to our blackened hearts, and as such we’re as excited as any bloodthirsty Brit for the upcoming horror festival season. While the bulk […]
If a filmmaker wants their work to have an air of eccentricity about it, a sixteen word title isn’t a bad start. After all, it worked with The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain (shit, that’s a whole seventeen words if we count those ‘a’s), so who’s to say it […]
If I’ve learned one thing from all my years following contemporary horror cinema (listen to me, making it sound like a tour of duty), it’s that you should never write off any one subgenre or motif. Every time you’re certain that something’s been done to death, along comes a new movie which, against all odds, […]
The Monster Squad holds a distinctive and relatively unique position in horror fandom. Released in 1987 back when it was still pretty early days for the PG-13 certificate, it was a box office bomb, and neither its director nor the bulk of its cast went on to do much of note. However, as with a […]