By guest contributor Caitlyn Downs Twice delayed by the pandemic, Antlers has likely been on the radar for many horror fans for some time, thanks in no small part to the involvement of producer Guillermo del Toro and the promise of the kind of magic creature horror that he is so well known for. Those […]
A Banquet (2021) is an incredibly slow-burn, incredibly meticulous family drama with only a distant-feeling link to its more supernatural content – if that is the right way to even describe the direction it takes. As such, it may feel too remote and abstract for some audiences. However, at its heart it’s a story about […]
There’s frequently something in the woods in horror movies, but what the filmmaker chooses to do with this is more open to question. Where’s Rose presents us with a horror-spliced family drama, looking at the impact of a brief crisis on a household. It’s somewhat slight in places, notably around the mid-section of the film, […]
Setting your film in a very limited space has its risks. All of the usual components – your characters, your pace, your plot – will be held to the utmost scrutiny, with no sweeping vistas or changing scenes to distract the eye. It’s certainly gone wrong in the past; get it right, however, and you […]
Don’t let the 2021 release date for Mad God fool you; this is a film which has been an incredible thirty years in the making. The reasons for the long hiatus between conception and completion encompass a few things – as you’d expect, given that time scale – but essentially, the big shift from practical […]
It’s always a pleasure to encounter filmmakers who are interested in Southern Gothic – a genre which is difficult to define, but easy to recognise in its effete communities, its crumbling facades, its bizarre characters and its mysterious landscapes. Offseason (2021) is one such film, a clever and often understated horror which wears its influences […]
It’s a little curious, speaking from a personal perspective, that Netflix’s Squid Game has turned into such a break-out success. This is not to claim it’s anything other than great TV – in many respects, it is – but, given the sheer amount of new series routinely arriving on the streaming service, for a Korean […]
Horror fans are unusual in the way we know the names of many of the people working behind the scenes in film, and this is particularly true of SFX artists; we can all name a few, and it’s highly likely that Tom Savini will be on that list. In many ways, this documentary film about […]
Prior to the Hammer age, Britain did not produce many horror films. It was a genre frowned on both by censors and producers, and during the war years was actively discouraged – it was felt that there were enough horrors to face in real life. With the exception of the vigorously outrageous Tod Slaughter’s series […]
A mid-80s comedy about the charming pastime of gaslighting, Overboard is, in retrospect, an extremely… odd Hollywood picture, whose more bizarre elements are carried by the charm of its lead performers, Hollywood golden couple Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. It’s a film that seems an off-piste choice for Severin Films to release on Blu-ray, but […]
The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch can not be accused of misrepresenting itself with that title; it’s an engaging, fairytale-like film which overlays a warped family dynamic with ‘old dark house’ style horrors, though it never becomes a full-blown horror, balancing its supernatural scares with something far more saccharin. Tonally, it works, and […]