We might say that the lasting legacy of all the great horror movies can be measured by the number of imitators they spawn. However, while the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and The Blair Witch Project presented a format that opportunistic filmmakers could easily duplicate on a limited budget, one influential horror […]
Donnie Yen may have been a relatively obscure figure to the wider western audience until his role in Star Wars: Rogue One, but he’s long been revered among Kung Fu movie aficionados as one of the best in the business; and while 1993’s Iron Monkey wasn’t necessarily where it all began, it was without a […]
As we’ve seen countless times, the weight of expectation can be an ambiguous gift to a film, but it’s fair to say that few recent horrors have enjoyed such a steadily-building sense of anticipation as Hereditary (2018), which has been running tantalising trailers for the past few months. For one thing, the return of Toni […]
I daresay that anyone who’s ever worked in an office building – certainly any horror fan, at least – has idly fantasised about what might happen if, somehow, shit went south in that environment. It’s something I myself have imagined in years gone by, in my short story Paperwork (plug time: you can read that […]
Midnight movie horror often strikes a similar chord to the sex comedy genre – bawdy humour and titillation, deliberate distastefulness – and yet, I struggle to think of any movies which have combined the two formats in quite the same way as Night of the Virgin (AKA La Noche Del Virgen). The first feature from […]
Scott Adkins holds a pretty unique status among 21st century action heroes. Since breaking through with a small part in 2001 Jackie Chan movie The Accidental Spy, the British martial artist and actor has been widely acclaimed as one of the best in the business, clocking up an impressive body of work with over 40 […]
Horror has always been a heavily self-referential genre. It’s often suggested that Scream started this trend, but that’s patently untrue; go back decades and you can find no shortage of horror movies which openly point out and play with genre conventions, as well as directly addressing the audience in a fourth-wall breaking manner. The digital […]
Inspired by the success of Hammer’s lurid horror cinema in the 1960s, the ever-versatile Toho Studios made a sound business decision to make some vampire films of their own. Whilst there is a modest array of films based specifically on Far Eastern vampire lore, the productions overseen by director Michio Yamamoto are rather different, blending […]
It’s a curious twist of fate/scheduling that writer-director Graham Skipper’s arcade game-themed horror should land on streaming platform Shudder in the same week that David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ gets its UK Blu-ray release. The Canadian body horror pioneer’s 1999 film would seem a likely influence on Sequence Break, given the gaming angle and the emphasis on […]
It’s odd to think that there was a time in which an abstract take on video game culture which features people entering a virtual reality by plugging an umbilical cord into a portal at the base of their spine might be considered a fairly safe, mainstream-friendly work of cinema. This, however, was pretty much the […]
It feels a bit weird and inherently dishonest to discuss any studio-backed superhero movie in terms of being a ‘surprise hit,’ yet this is how 2016’s Deadpool is generally regarded. Though being officially part of the X-Men franchise and sporting a whopping budget ($58 million may be low by modern blockbuster standards, but it’s still […]