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 […]
An exploration of Indigenous folklore and myth offers rich and often unknown, or lesser-known potential for horror stories. Don’t Say Its Name (2021) interweaves aspects of folkloric belief with real-time concerns and anxieties afflicting a small First Nations community; in doing so, it has many merits, though in time resorts to very broad strokes and […]
The production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Pagsanjan region of the Philippines left behind a local filmmaking infrastructure ripe for exploitation. During the 1980s, numerous filmmakers capitalised on this. Severin Films have released one such film, Alan Birkinshaw’s 1982 picture Invaders of the Lost Gold, on Blu-ray for the first time. Made […]
By guest contributor Caitlyn Downs The Fantasia 2021 Radical Spirits shorts block showcases six films that focus on belief systems and ancestral connections, using genre as a gateway to the unique nature of spirituality and ritual. Often complex and frequently contested, these films all offer powerful representations of concepts frequently difficult to put into words. […]
Short films are always a highlight of the film festival calendar, and as we’ve been saying on this site for years, it’s such a shame that they don’t often get seen outside of the festival circuit – with the odd exception, such as ABCs of Death. Hopes were high that this would kickstart a new […]