Explorations of mental illness – particularly fractured selves – are not new in horror, but as they go there’s nothing quite like Every Time I Die. It’s a discomfiting watch which splices intense depictions of mental breakdown with supernatural elements, reaching towards a new mythos of life and death. The resulting film is eerie and […]
Ten years has passed very quickly in the world of independent filmmaking: in that time, there have been a lot of great films, a lot of not-so-great films, and none (to my mind) which have had so much as a fraction of the impact of A Serbian Film (Srpski film). It was a film, like […]
It was rather difficult to know what to expect from a rather unprepossessing title like The Shed; it doesn’t give a great deal away, does it? I half-wondered whether it was going to be a straight-up horror comedy, but in actual fact, this is a surprisingly sober tale of teen angst, where the horror elements […]
The phrase ‘Southern Gothic’ – as evoked in the press materials for Union Bridge (2019) – is both wonderfully evocative and a big promise to fulfil, for any project. With its associations with ominous, heady Southern locales, flawed individuals and sinister subtexts, it clearly offers great potential for any movie. Union Bridge certainly takes a […]
Vivarium (2019) has the kind of incessant, weighty atmosphere which sticks with you; it riffs on the horrors of anonymous suburbia, taking the idea of the family and the joys of the property ladder to a hideous extreme. To accomplish this, it opts not to give the audience all the answers, something which has apparently […]
At last, we have up-to-date evidence that it’s perfectly possible to make a new version of a classic story that neither tinkers unnecessarily, nor departs entirely from the tone and content which made the story so good in the first place. Leigh Whannell’s take on the H G Wells story of The Invisible Man retains […]
Takashi Miike’s output is so expansive that I am in no ways caught up with his recent films; in fact, I reckon the last one I might have seen was about nine years ago. Now with over one hundred credits to his name, you could essentially get a part-time job for a few months just […]
Having been very lucky indeed to have attended FrightFest Glasgow – even more so, given the current ban on cinemas and gatherings – I decided to stretch my luck a little more by asking Adam Stovall, director of the deeply humane and immersive indie film A Ghost Waits, if he could spare a little time […]
You could be forgiven for thinking that whatever could be done with the zombie genre has been done by this point, but a viewing of The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (or Zombie For Sale, as it was titled at the screening I attended) proves this wrong. A deeply funny and ingenious spin on the […]
Whilst depictions of loneliness are not rare in genre cinema, on odd occasions a film comes along which treats the subject with a level of sophistication and subtlety which is both compelling, and difficult to do justice in words. Saint Maud (2019) definitely fits into this category. Having some similarities to Lucky McGee’s May (2002) […]
The (almost total) demise of the anthology film is a crying shame: despite a minor, if noteworthy comeback with some notable entrants into the genre such as the ABCs of Death or Dead Girls over the past decade or so, it’s still a format which just doesn’t seem to attract the interest it once did, […]