Memory is something sinister and not to be trusted in Parallax (2020) – an unusual, character-centred story which admittedly takes a while to get going, but when it does, it goes somewhere very interesting indeed. Selfhood is offered as a theme straight away: via a dispassionate voiceover, a young woman called Naomi (Naomi Prentice) begins […]
Well, they say that you sell a film on its first few minutes, and if so, then it’s a piece of guidance which Coven director Margaret Malandruccolo has taken to heart in this, her first feature-length. The film begins with five lingerie-clad young witches turning up at an evocative ruined building, ready to begin a […]
There’s plenty of 80s nostalgia floating around in indie film these days, but it’s not often it comes in the form of something like Jesus Shows You The Way to the Highway (a title which, by the way, is only marginally relevant to what goes on here). Director and writer Miguel Llansó already has something […]
It’s always a delight to find yourself surprised by a film, and The Droving – despite its use of elements which immediately call certain other films and subgenres to mind – manages to surprise throughout. Intensely character-driven, it largely keeps its horror off-screen, or represents it solely through its lead. In so doing, it weaves […]
If you ever caught up with Room 237 – a documentary film about the varying levels of mania which afflict some fans of The Shining – then you will already have encountered producers P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes. Room 237 is a very diverting film, it is true, though the chief diversion comes purely […]
You know, pretty much every review I have read so far of Glenn Danzig’s ‘directorial debut’ Verotika has started with a disclaimer: love the Misfits, been a big Danzig fan for years, and so on and so forth. I could do the same – the handful of riffs playing in the background in some of […]
Despite I Spit on Your Grave being over forty years old, it’s probably fair to say that having lead actress Camille Keaton’s name attached to a project is always going to appeal to certain audiences. It’s a fact undoubtedly not lost on the director of Cry For The Bad Man, Sam Farmer, and nor on […]
Whether or not a horror film festival takes place online in our ‘new normal’, it’s good to have a film to close the day which knows how to play for laughs and, let’s be fair, make very few demands on us as an audience. So, when the director of Chestersberg, Jamie McKeller, introduced his film […]
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 […]