Speak No Evil (2022) is so effective because it comes from such a familiar place: in many respects – and stick with me here – it’s the ultimate middle class European horror, where politeness and social norms conspire to place decent-enough people in a devastatingly precarious condition. It opens with a car driving through the […]
If you go by the title and the poster art alone, you might be forgiven for assuming He’s Watching (2022) is some kind of slasher movie – but you’d be wrong. Instead, the film blends a couple of different kinds of horror, blending anxieties old and new to come up with something quite unique. Yes, […]
Hypochondriac (2022) starts by announcing that is it “based on a real breakdown”, and you quickly believe it. Whilst you may, throughout the film, understand that the protagonist is undergoing a mental health trauma with all of the hallucinations and sensory overload this can bring, it nonetheless feels very real, immediate and personal, something which […]
Honeycomb (2022) is an odd prospect. Electively surreal with a minimal storyline, it often feels a little clumsy where it intends to be out-there. But it’s not without charm, even if much of that derives from its long, mood-drenched shots of long summer days. If you can imagine Yellowjackets remade as a Beck video (complete […]
There’s been a tendency in pop culture to present serial killers as monolithic: they’ve often been painted as almost supernatural, not only ungoverned by the usual social and cultural norms but devoid of familial ties, too. But that is changing: more recent films and TV have hinted at least at something more going on with […]
The spectre of the tower block looms appropriately large over modern society. On one hand these blocks are still ‘modern’ and ‘aspirational’, but on the other, they’re seen as unfriendly spaces, whether because degraded, dangerous or just suspiciously separate from other modes of living. Cinema has examined the worst extremes – Land of the Dead […]
It’s clear by now that the pandemic has had a profound impact upon filmmaking – whether from a logistical point of view, or in terms of subject matter. Skeleton crews, deserted streets, plotlines about contagion…horror, more than other genres, has seen them all in the past couple of years. This is to be expected: as […]
Whilst the two short films, Elbows (2021) and Lips (2022) are not thematically linked – apart from perhaps, the perils of lending an ear – they still share something in common which goes beyond the fact that they’re both Black Octopus Productions releases. Namely, the basis for each of these understated and appallingly funny films […]
Childhood is hell and it can lead to traumas which follow you around for, oh, at least a decade or so, maybe much longer: we shouldn’t expect people to change all that much in that amount of time, either. That’s been the lesson in many excellent horror titles up until now and it’s been given […]
Rural Denmark, 1991: a little girl, playing in a small room in her home, is terrified by what seems to be a violent attack taking place upstairs, in the room right above her head. That’s bad enough, but the attack seems to take on a surreal quality almost instantly, with blood seemingly cascading down the […]
There has been a minor run of punk and metal documentary-making in recent years: some of these do a fine job of simply retelling an interesting band history, and some go a step further, telling us more about what it means to be in a certain band or to have lived through a certain time […]