Editor’s note: this discussion of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities contains some spoilers. Anthology TV series always feel like a tantalising prospect: the same goes for feature films which use the same frame. Even if one, or a couple of the stories aren’t to your tastes, you can usually bet that there’ll be something […]
Most Horrible Things starts at the end, or thereabouts. Here is a grand house party gone wrong, all blood splatter, discarded underwear and – body bags. We also hear a 911 call, alongside seeing police and scenes of crime moving through the property. Clearly, this party has ended… interestingly. Starting a film like this, well, […]
Dead Can Dance have long been a deeply resonant, exploratory presence on the outskirts of alternative music. Never comfortably existing in one genre or another – no surprises there, given their incomparably wide range of musical influences – they have nonetheless formed a kind of breathing and thinking space for an array of punks, goths […]
In the days of the YouTube famous, everyone wants a gimmick to get them noticed – even if it means an element of personal risk. It’s a way to get ahead, right? This phenomenon has steadily started to make its way into cinema, where looking at what people are prepared to do, and at what […]
By guest contributor Grace Anderson There’s no denying that Stephen King reigns supreme when it comes to horror literature. With sixty five novels, two hundred short stories and ninety movie and television adaptations under his belt, Stephen King has been a powerhouse in the horror world for decades. However, there have been many valid criticisms […]
If Triangle of Sadness (2022) could be rendered down to one message, it’s this: society’s new ‘aspirational’ goals are just as likely to come crashing down as everything else. The film offers up a world of floating wealth, glamour, vanity and privilege, calls the whole shebang into question and then glories in pulling it down. […]
Somewhere in rural Carpathian Ukraine, just before a significant local festival: dad Leonid (Oleksandr Yatsentyuk) is back in his home village after an unspecified period of time ‘working away’, much to the delight of his adolescent son Nazar (Stanislav Potiak). It seems at first that he’s been in jail perhaps, or otherwise prevented from being […]
There’s a battle of the sexes on its way in Old Flame (2022), as is abundantly hinted by the opening seconds of the film. A woman’s screams immediately cut to a video call between a father, Calvin (Andy Gershenzon) and his two young children; Daddy is away for a few days at a college reunion, […]
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 […]