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 […]
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 […]