It’s always promising when a horror short film gives itself a title as straight up and out there as ‘The Thing That Ate The Birds‘, and accordingly, this film certainly doesn’t disappoint. It packs a lot more into its eleven-minute running time that a Thing which Eats Birds though, so whilst you get what it […]
There has inevitably been a surge in ‘lockdown horrors’ over the past couple of years. It’s a fairly broad church, with some of these films simply being made under lockdown conditions, whilst others directly address the threat of novel viruses – but nearly every one of these films has directly or indirectly addressed the things […]
If you knew that the world was about to end, what would you do? No, what would you do? Rage? Panic? Loot? Or spend the time trying to atone for a lifetime of missteps, treating your imminent demise as a means of finding purpose? Films tend towards the louder, messier, angrier answers to that question, […]
There’s been a run of very good music documentaries lately. This has been facilitated by the likes of Netflix and Amazon, ever hungry for new content, but regardless of the means, the best of these have been about bands with careers and fan bases of a certain vintage, making them commensurate with enough highs, lows […]
Interested in promoting or otherwise supporting filmmakers who are aged 24 or under? You really should be: it’s a jungle out there, and we need that emerging talent coming through. With that in mind – it’s been one of their core aims since their inception – The National Film Festival for Talented Youth is about […]
Is it too soon to talk about go-to themes and styles where director Robert Eggers is concerned? He has, after all, only made three features to date; who knows, he could head somewhere very different next time he works. A comedy musical perhaps. But, let’s indulge ourselves here and look at what he does seem […]
Funny how it’s turned out, but zombie horror has been with us so long and appeared so often now, that it all feels oddly comforting. For the most part, tropes which are maddening from other genres seem more than acceptable when there are zombies in tow: it doesn’t even really seem to matter that much […]
Based on a Japanese novel, partly produced by a Japanese team, you’d be forgiven for expecting Room 203 to contain a fair amount of J-horror elements – but that’s not how it primarily comes across. It’s far more rooted in the Western tradition of haunted houses, though it balances its use of tropes with its […]
Now here’s a risky idea: returning to a short film, around seventeen years or so after making it, hoping to expand the universe of that film into a feature-length. A big ask at the best of times, no? Whilst it’s certainly not the first time this has been done, The Cellar (2022) was always going […]
Director and writer George Popov’s low-key but effective supernatural horror The Droving (2020) is an excellent example of the use of folklore in cinema – and though the folklore in the film is original, it feels linked to pre-existing storytelling, particular through the importance of the English landscape. Sideworld: Haunted Forests of England (2022) is […]
It should be no surprise to anyone that the pervasive world of social media is finding its way into more and more horror cinema: as for the new breed of influencers which inhabit this world, their pursuit of ‘likes’, the drive for more and more content, the fight for revenue generation – of course this […]