By Nia Edwards-Behi Later this year Takashi Miike returns with Yakuza Apocalypse, pitting the titular gangsters against vampires. I don’t wish to suggest that Miike’s been somewhat pipped to the post, but Hiroshi Shinagawa’s Deadman Inferno also pits the fearsome Yakuza against the undead – only in this film it’s zombies causing mayhem. As we’ve […]
By Svetlana Fedotov They say in space, no one can hear you scream and you can scream as loud as you want, seriously, no one will hear you. Especially in space. I like to imagine that this was the thought that was going through the minds of the crew of the good ship Kanga as […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi Look, okay. I’ve got a thing for South Korea at the moment. I’ve gone full fangirl over K-pop, and South Korean cuisine seems to have awoken my inner chef (she’s not a very good one). We all know that South Korea makes some of the best cinematic thrillers, so plonk me in […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi Portmanteau films, eh? They’ve made quite the comeback in recent years and there seem to be many more due this year. Mexico Barbaro is a particularly exciting entry into this come back, showcasing as it does 8 directors from Mexico, one of many Latin American countries currently making waves in the genre. […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi Readers, you may have been misled. When the first images and trailers for gore-meister Yoshihiro Nishimura’s latest film emerged it seemed like he might have gone a bit (only a bit, mind) more serious than his usual fare. Not so! The Ninja War of Torakage is as silly as you might expect […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi The fact that the National Theatre and Danny Boyle’s stage version of Frankenstein still gets milked in cinemas, in its NT Live broadcast form, every Halloween, is something of a testament to the general public’s desire to see new versions of a classic and frequently adapted story. Bernard Rose, of Candyman fame, […]
By Tristan Bishop Despite an undeniably huge influence on the development of cinema (think Eisenstein and Tarkovsky), Russia doesn’t have a rich history of horror films, preferring to deal, at one end of the scale, with epic social(ist) realism, and on the other with lavish adaptations of classic fairytales. Whether this is down to regional […]
By Ben Bussey The things that are left unsaid can resonate even deeper than that which we put into words; oftentimes the right facial expression or gesture can more than fill in the silence. But what if you’re blind? First time Ecuadorian director Joe Houlberg’s Thirst drops his sightless central protagonist Sara (Ana Cristina Barragán, […]
By Quin I just stumbled upon an article that made a claim that there are over 20 Stephen King stories in some stage of film or television development right now. I have to admit that the article felt like it placed a lot of faith in rumors – and it was also on one of […]
By Keri O’Shea The ‘neo-giallo’ has become something of a hot filming style in recent years, and although not yet numbering as many films as the faux grindhouse trend has given us, a fair few young directors have tried to turn their hand to the heavily-stylised, aesthetically-minded ultraviolence of the giallo – with a range […]
By Keri O’Shea The idea of a presence – something powerful and knowing hidden in the darkness of the woods – is undoubtedly hardwired into us on a primal level; for thousands upon thousands upon years before human culture spawned the horror genre, it was an instinctual fear which allowed our DNA to survive, and […]