Even those people for whom nostalgia seems to be a kind of tragic full-time job would likely struggle with V/H/S/99 (2022). Okay it’s better than V/H/S/94, but surely that’s damning with faint praise. It clings onto the same silly tics in any case, with the same religious devotion to all those shitty elements of analogue […]
Clues that we are seeing the aftermath of violence are what introduce us to Repulse (2021): shattered glass, a trashed vehicle, a discarded hammer. But no sooner has this eerie calm unfolded, than it’s being disrupted by an angry scream; then we’re elsewhere entirely, now actually witnessing violence taking place. This episodic, fitful structure is […]
The opening scenes of Mother Superior (2022) do a couple of things: not only do they establish the film’s esoteric subject matter via the newspaper clippings, photos, art and symbols shown to us, but they also forge links to a German horror tradition which has, in effect, shaped horror cinema itself since its inception a […]
Ah, short horror films. Let’s assume that people are still making films about what they’re most afraid of these days; if so, then the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival’s Creeping Terror package brings us remote families, spirit incursions, bodily breakdowns, wicked imposters and a healthy dose of paranoia along the way. All of the titles achieve […]
The Hellraiser franchise is the thing that won’t die. Decades after its inception in the 80s, and since one excellent sequel in the form of Hellbound (1988), it has morphed and been sold on and changed and spoiled and (partly) redeemed down through the subsequent years. The original story’s Cenobites have walked the city streets, […]
There’s no time wasted in Two Witches: it lays out its approach straight away, making it clear that this is going to be a quick-paced, overblown brand of occult horror, in places almost more of a montage of witchy scenes quite nominally linked together, rather than a film with much of a complex overarching story […]
Investigations of haunted houses or places have been a horror staple since the inception of cinema. And, whilst in many cases (with some notable exceptions) the allegedly haunted house/place itself has remained unchanged, the means of investigation themselves have changed and developed as the years have passed. You could even argue that technological developments have […]
With a title like Pig Killer, you know you’d be mad to expect a philosophical work, some light moral lessons or charming whimsy. That much is perfectly clear. What you may be less prepared for, though, is just how deliberately low the film aims. Wherever the ‘acceptable level’ is, it elects to nosedive past that, […]
Tigers are among the most loved, admired, commercially exploited, and abused wild animals on earth. They were hunted close to extinction by the mid-20th century in their native lands, are currently farmed in vile facilities in various parts of the world for their bones, their bodies are currently used in superstitious Chinese pseudo-medicine, and they […]
David Temple is a journalist – well, a photojournalist, with a grisly specialism; he specialises in crime and accident photography, so there’s lots to do, especially in his resident city of London. The book starts on New Year’s Eve; David is unexpectedly called to dash out of the Knightsbridge pub where he’s drinking to photograph […]
Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán) is a film of many modes: it moves from distressing content to bizarre, skittish black comedy, from historical curse to pastiche of small-town life. It divides up its rather abundant two-hour (or as near as damnit) running time between horror tropes and the self-indulgence of blasting a righteous hole […]