“Towns like Meadville haunt you.” So goes an early voiceover by Carrie (Rainey Qualley), who is working on a book about the local legend of Pig Hill, centred around mutant, porcine creatures who are supposedly responsible for a string of young women going missing. We’ve already seen the latest of these disappearances in the cold […]
The Balconettes (2024) is an odd customer. It perhaps starts with the title, a slightly clunky translation of the French title, Les femmes au balcon – choosing a word which may indeed mean ‘women on the balcony’ but is more likely to conjure the word ‘bra’ for most Anglophone audiences. It’s not the last time […]
It’s great that HollyShorts is around: the more festivals we have covering the world of short genre film, the better. As an example of the kinds of films they have featured this year, here are just four titles: each diverse, but each compelling examples of the short film format. First up is Halfway Haunted, which […]
Feeling nostalgic for the torture horror wave of the Noughties yet? If you are, then Your Host (2025) has got you covered. The proviso which comes with this, however, is that if you didn’t particularly enjoy that style of filmmaking, then this isn’t the one to win you over. It’s a clear and affectionate homage […]
Blood Shine (2025) is an immediate barrage of contrasts – tonal and aesthetic – and it maintains its multi-layered approach throughout, using different styles of horror as it grows steadily more intense and provocative. If there are echoes of other films in here – and you may notice a few – there’s more than enough […]
Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian (2022) has been inspiring tentatively hopeful comment (and some controversy) ever since it was first announced; surely a director who essentially founded Airbnb horror – a genre for our times every bit as valid as social media horror – could do great things with what looked, from its initial premise, […]
The key event in Burning (2024) is revealed to the audience in the opening moments: a house is on fire in a small Kyrgyzstani town, and we arrive just as the fire brigade also arrives. In the aftermath of the blaze, a group of neighbours meet up with one another in a local shop, where […]
1892. California. It’s then and there we find novelist Emma Strand (Scottie Thompson) holidaying with artist husband Albert (Connor Paolo) and doing their best to enjoy a day on the beach when they meet George Ford (Jilon VanOver) and his wife Lillian (Vivian Kerr). After a mannered and somewhat awkward chat, the four end up […]
Foreigner (2025) starts with an advertisement: if this seems trivial, be forewarned, it’s actually surprisingly central to the plot, this product called Die [sic] Blonde – a box dye, seemingly particularly popular with teens… We don’t stick around here, though. We next meet a little girl and her mother, dreaming of a better life in […]
To go by a select few recent horror and genre titles, toilet cubicles can be pretty dangerous places. In Stalled (2013), a janitor has to deal with a zombie outbreak; in Glorious (2022), a man has to contend with a Lovecraftian entity – all of which whilst trapped inside a toilet stall. There have been […]
In a way similar to Suspiria (2018), the laboured breathing of a dying woman plays across the opening moments of The Undertone (2025): this film is an aural nightmare and no mistake, starting straight away and keeping up that relentless sensory overload throughout. In a house full of photos and other keepsakes, a young woman […]