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: […]
We’ll start this feature with a part-confession, but hopefully a relevant one. Speaking from the perspective of a Westerner to (by and large) other Westerners, here it is: many of us will hold, or at least recognise certain stereotypes about the Japanese character. If we take one of these at face value, we might acknowledge […]
I wonder if it’s the pandemic which has reminded us of our fear of the outdoors? Or did we always know? Regardless of where you stand on that question, the specific perils of climbing have appeared in a couple of films this year: The Ledge blended a dangerous climb with some dangerous pursuers, which kept […]
The rise and rise of social media has definitively blurred the line between consent and content. Good horror films were quick to realise this, as horror so often is: by looking at the continual blurring of reality and unreality, persona and person, horror has invited us to think about a new, updating number of worst […]
Who knew the art world could be this dangerous? Expensive? – absolutely. Elitist? Sure. But actively harmful? A Wounded Fawn (2022) opens on a prestigious auction, where a rare Greek bronze is being sold via an array of buyers primed to get the sale and get their commission. This frenetic, competitive environment prepares us for […]
In many respects, horror cinema has always taken the stuff of our nightmares and drawn them out into fully-fledged stories, but also, horror has often explored the phenomenon of the nightmare itself. The Eyes Below – the second feature by Alexis Bruchon, whose debut The Woman With Leopard Shoes made quite an impression on me […]
The Feast (Gwledd) is a Welsh-language horror about place and ‘progress’; as such, it bears many of the hallmarks of folk horror, though it never neatly expounds all of these elements. It doesn’t divulge everything; perhaps it doesn’t need to. However, its message is still bloodily clear and familiar: tradition and folklore are more than […]
Predator (1987) is one of those action/sci-fi films of the 80s which feel like almost perfect movies: no lulls, no tedious side-plots, but enough focused writing to pit plausible characters against hitherto implausible adversaries. It’s no surprise then that the original film has presented tantalisingly rich pickings for subsequent films, whether reboots or add-ons (and […]