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 […]
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 […]