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 […]
The mysteries surrounding Edgar Allan Poe’s life seem to make him as attractive a subject for a mystery yarn as anything he wrote about – which is particularly interesting, given his role in the development of the genre itself. The relationship between Poe’s art and Poe’s life is just too tantalising to ignore. The Raven […]
By Guest Contributor Chris Ward In Southold, New York in 1843 a young woman named Mary (Stefanie Scott) is being interrogated by the local authorities about what has happened in her family’s mansion house. The thing is, Mary is blindfolded and behind the blindfold there is blood trickling down her face, and as she starts […]
Dancer Faye (Roxy Bugler) lives an isolated existence in a remote cottage, where she is largely untroubled – at least, by other people. From the opening seconds, it’s clear that she has some unexplored trauma of some kind: even her dance moves and stretches quickly give way to tortured-seeming movements and gestures. Wild Bones (2022) […]
Denkraum (2020), an independent film which operates very much in an experimental vein, differs from many experimental films in its choice of subject matter. The rather more expected deliberations on life, the universe and everything are refracted through a new kind of social media here: this is the ‘Denkraum’, or experimental space, of the title: […]