By Tristan Bishop At the dawn of the 1980s John Carpenter was riding high on the success of Halloween, which had been released in 1978, and had, after many months and much word of mouth, become an enormous success, making upwards of $65,000,000 on a budget of just over $300,000. Nowadays of course the major […]
Review by Ben Bussey Okay, so we really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, nor make our minds up about what looks like an absolutely appalling microbudget horror movie within the first 15 minutes – but sometimes you just know. Sometimes all the signs are there from the word go, and there can be […]
By Tristan Bishop Those of us who have been horror fans for a number of years tend to be immune to most attempted ‘scares’, mostly because we know the tropes all too well and can read the signposts to the next shock moment. So whilst the average viewer might be jumping out of their chair […]
By Stephanie Scaife This is a story that I’ve told before, but it bears repeating. When we first got a VHS player in the mid-80s and I started frequenting the local video store, I was quickly seduced by the lurid covers of the horror section and the age restrictions that applied to these titles. I […]
By Guest Contributor Claire Waddingham About three weeks ago, in that dreary post Christmas period, I found a copy of Ghostwatch in one of the local charity shops. It was only a quid, and as it was Sunday, and I wanted a bit of nostalgia, I decided to fork out to watch it. I figured […]
By Quin I must admit, when it was decided that we would be doing a series of special features dedicated to our own childhood terrors, I felt a bit perplexed and the anxiety came flooding in. Not because I didn’t want to revisit all of the things that scared me as a kid. I’m perfectly […]
Review by Tristan Bishop Stellan Skarsgard’s 40 year plus career has taken in a lot of different work, from his long-running collaborations with eternal enfant terrible of art-house cinema Lars Von Trier (so far he has appeared in six of the director’s films), to his roles in the recent Marvel Thor and Avengers films, to […]
By Keri O’Shea As I alluded to in the introduction to our Childhood Terrors series, the bookshelf has long been (and hopefully still is) a formidable presence in children’s lives – a rich seam of ideas at the threshold of a room, teeming with characters and forces which command real power. A book is, all […]
Review by Quin A couple days after I received a screener copy of In The House of Flies in the mail, it became available to stream on Hulu in the US. So, if you’re a subscriber to that wonderful service, please feel free to follow along at home. Since my DVD copy had a list […]
By Guest Contributor Helen Creighton Published in the early 1980s, The Unexplained – Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time was a magazine perfectly designed to impress the young and credulous mind. It looked grown-up and vaguely ‘scientific’, although it was the absolute opposite. It avoided crass, splashy headlines and sensationalism for lengthy, scholarly-looking articles, laden […]
By Ben Bussey And so, one writer’s Troma education continues. Up until only a few months ago, pretty much all I’d seen from the famed trash cinema factory were the original Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High (or at least those are the only ones that come to mind). However, after 88 Films […]