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 […]
For many of us, Kurt Russell will always be associated first and foremost with his run of cult classics in cahoots with director John Carpenter. Even so, in 2018 he remains an equally familiar face for contemporary audiences thanks to his high profile roles in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, the last two Fast […]
We receive quite a lot of short films overall at the site, and it’s always fun seeing what kind of a calling-card filmmakers have on offer: better still is when films channel formative horror and nostalgia along the way, which is the case with She Came From The Woods (2017). We took a look at […]
There are times when you sit down with a low budget indie horror film knowing exactly what you’re going to get from the moment it begins, with no real surprises along the way to the end of the tedious hour and a half. Then, on the other hand, there are times when you sit down […]
It’s a very rare thing indeed to see a filmmaker working in the styles so far chosen by director Alex Bakshaev in his career to date. His last film, The Devil of Kreuzberg, was to my mind a languid and stylish love letter to Jean Rollin; in S&M, Les Sadiques, we have a film not […]
A fairly solid point about Rawhead Rex is made in the accompanying press release for Arrow’s new Blu-ray edition. It’s long been said that Clive Barker, who wrote the screenplay from his own short story for director George Pavlou, was so appalled with the resulting film – not to mention their earlier collaboration, Underworld (AKA […]
The 1990s may have been a boom period for the psychological thriller, but it’s debatable as to just how fitting a description that is to many of the films classed as such. In Hollywood, the bulk of them tended to be half-baked Silence of the Lambs knock-offs or sensationalised Hitchcock updates; in either case, the […]