By Ben Bussey There are few things so tiresome as a horror comedy which is neither funny nor scary. Alas, we seem to get rather a lot of them; and, double alas, The Funhouse Massacre is yet another title to add to that undesirable list. A well-meaning, ambitious endeavour with a very agreeable core concept, […]
By Ben Bussey Few things show up gaps in one’s own film knowledge more acutely than a movie you’ve never heard of dropping in your lap with a press release describing it as a ‘cult classic.’ It’s true, I was hitherto utterly unaware of writer-director Philip Ridley’s debut film, and indeed of Ridley himself and […]
By Ben Bussey Halloween tends to be a time when the older, more established horror movies we often roundly label as ‘the classics’ get picked up, dusted off and sent on the rounds. It was no doubt with this in mind that our friends at PR company Fetch Publicity got in touch with us with […]
By Ben Bussey The passions that capture us in our youth invariably impact the person we grow to be in adulthood. This almost always seems to be true of horror fans: those who come to be lifelong devotees very often first develop that affinity for the genre whilst young (as we explored early this year […]
By Keri O’Shea The question ‘what would you do if you only had hours to live?’ is one that we’ve probably all considered at some point; of course, the world ends for individuals all the time, but in terms of some grand event, whether it’s the four-minute warning (alright, that’s shorter still), the biblical apocalypse […]
By Keri O’Shea Over the years, the festival of Halloween and the horror movie industry have become almost symbiotic, extensions of one another, with one feeding the other. Take Scream, for instance: I remember the exact model of mask used in the film being around way before the franchise came into being; it was another […]
By Ben Bussey Expectations are a tricky beast indeed. As I remarked in my earlier Celluloid Screams 2015 review of the wonderful He Never Died, very often the joy of the festival experience is going in with little to no prior knowledge or expectation and encountering something brilliant, and knowing you’re among the first to […]
By Keri O’Shea At its best, horror has a great deal of power to question and probe aspects of modern life. By turning a uniquely distorting eye on social and cultural norms, it can make us reconsider them – or see them in such grotesque and new ways that we can’t thereafter see them as […]
By Quin Exactly the way I discovered All Hallow’s Eve in 2013, the sequel All Hallow’s Eve 2 appeared on the iTunes horror page just like the unmarked video tapes find their way to unsuspecting viewers in the two films; I seriously hope this is going to become a regular thing. The list of sequels […]
By Ben Bussey Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the film festival experience is sitting down to watch a movie of which you have little to no advance knowledge, and wind up being taken totally unawares. Going into Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema for the Celluloid Screams screening of He Never Died, I basically knew nothing other than […]
By Keri O’Shea The first thing we find out about James (Patrick McFadden) is that he’s a guy who wears a cheap work suit like it’s doing horrible violence to him. He’s stressed, miserable, and what’s more, he’s not in good health either: suffering from double vision, numbness in his hands, and other symptoms which […]