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 […]
Hell’s teeth – quite literally, as it happens; two competitions in one week? Well, lucky you, as we also have a copy of Belzebuth to give away. For fans of Mexican horror (which always seems to be ramped up to a level that evades non-Mexican horror), Belzebuth melds the tragedy of a school massacre with […]
Out now from Acorn Media International, and yours to win on Blu-ray comes Terrified, a Shudder Original title set in Buenos Aires. When a cop calls in two paranormal investigators to explore the strange goings-on on this city street, things go from bad to worse as they attempt to untangle this flurry of manifestations. This […]
The Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia is a mercurial, intriguing figure. His work has long been underappreciated, neglected, or simply misunderstood – amongst both Spanish audiences and English-speaking cinephiles. Severin Films are remedying this with several Blu-ray releases of de la Iglesia’s pictures, including his most (in)famous – and arguably, for many years, his […]
At the risk of repeating myself, as I’m sure I have down through the years on the site, short films are often where it’s at in terms of promising new ideas, styles and approaches. When I watched Standing Woman as part of FrightFest’s recent short films digital package, I thought how well the film encapsulated […]
It’s perhaps little surprise, as discourse about man’s relationship with the natural world becomes more and more urgent, that the phenomenon of ‘eco-horror’ is appearing more on screens, too. Whilst audiences have long been warned not to go into the woods, it’s the natural world itself which now poses the threat. But Gaia (2021) is […]
Phantasmagoria is a film which shows, from the very beginning, that it has no truck with conventional storytelling. And how you feel about that will depend on your taste for this level of experimental fare – not just in the sense of a film dispensing with signposted narrative, or character, but also in how you […]
Chiefly circulated amongst fans of extreme cinema in a version culled from its US VHS release, under the tacky title Naked Massacre, the 1976 picture Born for Hell offers an intriguing look at the case of Richard Speck, who during a single night in 1966 murdered eight student nurses in a Chicago townhouse – through […]
News of a new Candyman film came as quite a surprise; the 1992 film, like a good ghost story itself refracted over time through a Clive Barker short story and a novel before becoming a screenplay, has over the years become a classic, a piece of supernatural cinema which has deeper significance seething underneath all […]
Blue Whale is a film which very much starts as it means to go on, throwing the audience into a high-paced, often frenetic online world where we quickly meet two teenage sisters – Yulya and Dana – who are fighting over a device, dropping it and breaking the screen as their long-suffering mother attempts to […]
Any expectations I had for Martyrs Lane (2021) were very quickly blown out of the water; it’s a ghostly tale which in many ways feels like it comes from an earlier time, having more in common with the subtle horrors of the 60s and 70s than the flashier, quick edits of modern cinema. This is […]