It seems as though there has never been a stronger appetite for dramatisations of true crime. The fascination with serial killers has long been there, but in the last few years, the quality and the focus of dramatic retellings of same has definitely shifted; with The Serpent, we get a cleverly-constructed and very engaging series […]
Sophia Banks started her career as a stylist and designer, before starting her career as a film director with Making It On Time (2017), a short film for fashion designer Christian Siriano. Her last two short films have showcased an interest in science fiction; Unregistered (2018) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and went the extra […]
Post-apocalyptic cinema tends to be full of sound and fury. Even if we don’t see the cataclysmic event which overthrows society, we certainly see the aftermath: ruins, road gangs, disease, deprivation. But what if the kind of deprivation shown to us was of a different kind? What if the loss incurred from such an event […]
Arkansas, 1999. Mandy (Angela Bettis) is the world’s most disinterested nurse at the local hospital, and we meet her just ahead of a double shift. This isn’t the only reason she’s a little curt, though. To give her credit, her apparent disinclination for nursing is multifaceted: she’s a drug addict who enjoys hoovering up any […]
My experience of Mexican cinema tends towards the non-mainstream, admittedly, but even based on the little I do know, it seems that lurching straight into the strange and the bloody unreasonable is a niche national pastime. And so we come to Violent Delights a.k.a Beber de tu Sangre, which certainly starts as it means to […]
Well, that was the year that was. Every year when I write up a ‘best of’ list, I can’t help but add a preamble about how things have been, what developments there have been and so on; never has there been a year like 2020, and no preamble can really do justice to the impact […]
It’s very sad to hear of the passing of Great Britain’s very own pulp horror legend Guy N. Smith. And yes, I do think that ‘legend’ is an appropriate term here. I’m ready to believe that Smith’s long writing career never made him a particularly rich man even if he did, happily, do well from […]
I’m afraid Matt Glasby’s book came to me via a place of great perplexity, but one which hasn’t ultimately done it any harm. When first approached to cover it, I happened upon an inexplicably angry review of the book by a woman who, in a similar vein, had angrily reviewed a Kate Summerscale book because […]
Alongside the Borley Rectory haunting, the story of the ‘Bell Witch’ (or the ‘Tennessee demon’) is one of those stories which made a big impression on me when I was a child, something I first encountered in a ‘mysteries of the unexplained’ compendium and which I’ve reflected on ever since with a mixture of fascination […]
If you could have back a moment in time – to say something differently, or to ask something you never asked – would you? Or, if you could tell someone in the here-and-now what you really think of them, or what they did to you – would you? That is the central premise behind short […]
If ever you’ve wondered, deep in your heart, what an experimental/arthouse spin on The Fall of the House of Usher would look like, then wonder no further: The Bloodhound explores similar themes of warped family dynamics, fatalism and isolation, though by coming at it in an ultra-modern location with a low-exposition, dialogue-lite story. A first […]