I’ve made my feelings about the contributors to director Rodney Ascher’s documentary about The Shining – Room 237 (2012) – quite clear elsewhere; I’m still far from clear on some of the ideas held by its interviewees, nor indeed how there is any link between skiing and the Minotaur, much less how it’s related to […]
It’s no great surprise that the early relationship between Mary Shelley (née Godwin) and Percy Bysshe Shelley has proven irresistible to filmmakers, given its importance to the development of horror. Perhaps my favourite version of the events at the Villa Diodati comes via Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), which presents a colourful, but nightmarish spin on […]
It’s not something I’d normally do but, prior to writing up my own review of the new Neil Marshall film The Reckoning, I took a peek at a few other reviews of the film. Almost without exception, other critics prefaced their review by mentioning how much they loved his work, how The Descent (2005) and […]
The Indonesian genre cinema which I know best is decades old now, but it certainly tends toward the unforgettable; during the country’s 1980s cinema boom, its genre film was clearly in love with the opportunities afforded by SFX (however rudimentary), leading to some incredibly lurid, overblown pieces of work, heavy with folkloric influences. In some […]
It’s already been eight years, give or take, since Brandon Cronenberg’s first film, Antiviral (2012): a cold, unflinching and decidedly grotesque satire on celebrity culture, explored via the body horror genre which his father David helped to establish. Possessor (2020) picks up the questions of personhood which Antiviral posed and takes them still further, delivering […]
Having added The Droving (2020) as one of my favourite films of the year, it was great to catch up with Droving director George Popov for a chat about his career to date, priorities, future plans and the importance of working together to support film in these troubled times… WP – So you have made […]
American Psycho (1991), third novel of self-styled enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis, was one of those books whose notoriety preceded it and swept it along. Becoming a kind of double-dare-you read in the same way that many films have become rites of passage, it no doubt found a sizable audience that quite simply wanted to […]
Hunted is a film not shy about signposting where it’s planning on going. That being said, it’s an impressively nasty film, showing a deft touch in terms of its structure and successfully keeping two different elements in check: on one hand it’s a deeply unpleasant game of cat and mouse through the woods, and on […]
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 […]