To mark the release of Sight Extended, a film I called “restrained and savvy” in its careful treatment of AI and social media, we have two sets of iTunes codes to give away so that those of you who are tech-savvy yourselves can take a look. All you need to do to win is to […]
You know that bit at the start of There Will Be Blood (2007), where a silent, grizzled man is digging into the earth – eventually striking oil? Okay, good. Now, let’s shift things to WWII-era Finland; here’s another grizzled, silent prospector, wandering the landscape alone – only this guy is looking for gold, not oil, […]
Irish folklore about the ‘other crowd’, or fairy folk, remains ripe for use by horror cinema. Far from our modern cultural understanding of fairies as Disneyfied, benign, pretty little entities, the Irish stories hang onto a notion of the little people as ambiguous at best – malevolent at worst. Their hill forts, their meeting places […]
Sight Extended (2023) starts out looking like a space-set sci-fi; it’s only when you look closer that you realise you’re looking at a much more familiar, convex shape – a lens, specially-adapted to allow a person to access all of their push notifications, calls, maps, you name it, with a mere, literal blink of an […]
Invoking Yell (2023) is clearly a film that likes to layer its influences, giving us a grab-bag of themes and styles. These chiefly being: found footage; 90s-style analogue cameras; the EVP phenomenon and the film’s biggest, boldest theme – 90s black metal. By way of some on-screen text at the start, the film explains that, […]
Roadkill (2022) has the good sense to let its outback shooting location figure highly throughout its running time, almost making the hostile environment one of its one of its core characters. In fact, it makes more sense as a character than some of the actual characters on offer. The film overstretches itself in its plot […]
Influencer (2022) starts by showcasing its often non-linear, inventive time structure, opening on the vision of a young female body, face down on an otherwise picturesque island beach. We then zip to something else: a motivational speech from a young woman, a social media influencer called Madison (Emily Tennant). Ah, this is content for her […]
Have you noticed that people are getting tied to chairs, or tormented with household tools etc. a lot less frequently in horror nowadays? You could be forgiven for assuming that gratuitous ultraviolence is dead – or at least taking a break. That’s not so in The Wrath of Becky (2023) however: whilst the tone is […]
Thanks to the magic of crowdfunding, there’s now a breed of film made by fans, for fans which doesn’t really seem to see itself much beyond the film festival circuit. If you aren’t there with all of the other contributors to see your name on the credits, has it really happened at all? Mad Heidi […]
Review by Darren Gaskell As we’re introduced to Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), he’s attending what seems to be an all-too regular therapy session and the talk soon turns to a forthcoming journey to his hometown, where his formidable-sounding mother lies in wait. Beau’s building trepidation about the trip results in an updated prescription, but those […]
There have been, in recent years, a number of imaginative explorations of the role of technology in our lives. It’s a diverse topic, ripe for horror: the increasing levels of control we afford to tech, as well as the importance we attach to apps and platforms, have made for some great films – some scary, […]