By Quin If you have ever handled a VHS tape, you may remember the advisory written on the edge telling you not to touch the tape inside. Some tapes also had instructions as to which end to insert into the VCR – which always seemed intuitive enough to me. But that advisory always made me […]
By Ben Bussey The 17th annual FrightFest may have not long since come to an end after its five day reign of terror in London – but, like any monster worth its salt, it keeps on coming back bigger, stronger and nastier. So it is that the FrightFest brand continues to expand. Having already moved […]
By Keri O’Shea If ever you felt cordially invited to loathe a set of characters within the first few minutes of a film, then Don’t Breathe seems to offer it; we’re shown, from the outset, a group of three young housebreakers who use their ill-begotten insider info to get in to well-to-do homes, take as […]
1999 saw the sudden emergence of a fairly unique cinematic trend: glossy Biblical horror movies with Gabriel Byrne in them. One of these was End of Days, which cast the charismatic Irish actor as Satan and pit him against a grizzled Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s charged with protecting the main girl from The Craft from getting […]
A lot of the films we cover on the site relate to the great ‘what if?’, the playing out of fantastical scenarios, some more realistic, many supernatural and many fairly impossible if not utterly so – but a genre we rarely get asked to cover is the disaster movie. It’s strange that so very few […]
By Ben Bussey One simple fact about horror, which any vaguely knowledgeable fan can tell you but which seems so often to be forgotten by the wider audience, is that the genre first and foremost speaks to and for the outsider, the ‘other,’ those who for whatever reason cannot find a place for themselves in […]
By Ben Bussey Biopics are always tricky. Bring any true life story to the screen, and questions will always be asked about just how accurate a representation of the events it really is. These concerns are amplified when the story in question is fresh in the popular consciousness, and centres on figures of some cultural […]
By Karolina Gruschka Going by the artwork and the trailer for VFX artist Torey Haas‘ (V/H/S Viral, Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie) first attempt at directing a feature, I had high hopes for The Neon Dead. I was expecting to see a serious horror film interlaced with comedic elements and a camp sensibility; the […]
By Keri O’Shea When is a giallo not a giallo? Sure, the cinematic tradition is expected to deliver crime drama as per the print publications which gave us the term ‘giallo’ in the first place, but the expectation is also there of a certain aesthetic on our screens, usually invoking sexuality as well as criminality; […]
Isn’t it well past time that sharks became truly scary again? Beyond the original Jaws, it’s debatable any film has ever presented those formidable sea dwellers as true objects of terror, and in recent years it’s pretty much a given that any film which features the creatures in the title is going to be an […]
By Ben Bussey When the most prominent words in the PR of a new release are ‘from executive producer Ben Wheatley,’ two key thoughts immediately come to mind: firstly, it’s a shame that writer-director Nick Gillespie doesn’t get full credit for his own work (although he’s hardly the first director to be overshadowed by an […]