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 […]
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 […]