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, […]
Unorthodox stories of the afterlife seem to offer a great deal of potential for exploring fundamental ideas about what it means to be alive: when faced with disruptions to what we know, or think we know, or believe in, we’re encouraged to think differently, or given a new focus on what’s important. A Ghost Waits […]
I can’t help it. I see a film is set at sea, I hear mention of ‘creatures’ and my Pavlovian response is ‘Lovecraft!’ God knows, we don’t need every horror story set at sea to feature the Great Old Ones, but it’s a response that’s always lying in wait with me; saying that, some elements […]
Perhaps it’s to be entirely expected that the number of social media-related horrors continue to grow and grow. Alongside the likes of Tragedy Girls, Assassination Nation and Making Monsters, we can now count The Cleansing Hour, though quite unlike those others, this most recent film melds the premise of a successful social media channel with […]
Short films are fun because they often make for statements of intent: whilst good short films do more than simply act as calling cards, it’s still true that the best of these show something, in terms of style and theme, of what could follow. This is certainly the case with Mr. Clean (2020), an economical […]