By Tristan Bishop The western and the horror film are two of the oldest genres in film – almost as old as film itself, in fact – and so it’s no surprise that there is a long history of cross pollination between the two. From creepy 1930’s pulps such as Riders Of The Whistling Skull […]
By Ben Bussey We’ve had no shortage of documentaries covering the cultural shifts of the 1970s and 1980s. In the US, American Nightmare charts how horror cinema was revitalised from the late 60s onwards by the likes of George Romero, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, whilst Going To Pieces chronicles the slasher movie boom which […]
By Keri O’Shea It’s so often the case that, when I sit down to watch a Japanese film, I find that it’s based on an extensive manga and/or gaming series of which I have no knowledge whatsoever. It’s been the case with filmmakers I know reasonably well – such as Takashi Miike (or at least […]
By Ben Bussey Welcome back to Wales! In a strange kind of way it seems fitting that the horror festival of England’s bilingual neighbour should play host to the UK premiere of a movie spoken in Italian though shot by Argentinians. Okay, maybe that’s a bit tenuous, but bear with me on this. To be […]
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 […]