Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)

It’s not entirely clear what has happened to Sion Sono in the past decade. Shorn perhaps of whatever inspiration was behind discomfiting, outrageous gems like Guilty of Romance and Love Exposure, he seems to have dedicated himself to being a filmmaker making films about filmmaking, and on and on it goes – a kind of […]

Last Night in Soho (2021)

There’s already been abundant proof of Edgar Wright’s love of horror, but his most recent film, Last Night in Soho, changes tack from what we may have seen already; it’s a ghost story, but it pushes at the boundaries of what a ghost story can be; it’s a kind of 60s-glam spin on The Mezzotint […]

Blood in the Snow 2021: Woodland Grey

In many respects, a good way to sum up the sylvan horror of Woodland Grey is with the old adage, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. It’s an unusual film, calling on some familiar horror elements, but then in other ways completely rejecting these, in order to create something far more introspective, […]

Denis Pulls It Off – Reacting to Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE

So, DUNE is finally out, the reviews are in, and the consensus is that critical darling Denis Villeneuve has pulled it off against all the odds. He has presented an adaptation of the once-termed ‘unfilmable’ 1965 novel Dune that has – incredibly – managed to please the full spectrum of viewers – the hard-to-please book […]

Celluloid Screams 2021: Titane

Note: unusually for the site this review contains mild spoilers – words failed me else – so read on with caution. On first consideration, Julia Ducournau’s new film, Titane (2021) is quite unlike Raw (2016), her last feature and, for most people, the most familiar point of comparison. To put it mildly, Titane is an […]

Raindance 2021: The Welder

Given the success of Get Out a few years ago, it was inevitable that we’d get a few follow-up, socially conscious horror movies. Likewise, it was inevitable that some of these would fall short of Get Out: it turns out that balancing a political message with elements of fantasy is not all that easy to […]

Celluloid Screams 2021: Antlers

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 […]

Celluloid Screams 2021: A Banquet

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 […]

Raindance 2021: Where’s Rose

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, […]