Please note: this is a discussion of the recent BBC version of The War of the Worlds and as such contains spoilers. Like many other H G Wells fans, I was suitably excited by the promise of a new, televised version of War of the Worlds: taking the action back far closer to the time […]
It’s sometimes said that, at heart, all filmmakers are basically trying to make the same film every time, but I doubt I’m alone in appreciating it when they appear to go in wildly diverging directions from film to film – even if, deep down, they may be addressing some of the same essential ideas. Jessie’s […]
Whilst the whole ‘terrified babysitter’ shtick is nothing new in horror cinema, its use and development in Fright (not far off fifty years ago now) is just one facet of the way in which the film works quite differently to a lot of its contemporaries, as well as the films which have followed in its […]
Once I managed to get over my bitter horror fan disappointment at the knowledge that, despite the title, this Polish production isn’t actually about a man turning into a wolf Lon Chaney Jr style, I found much to appreciate in director Adrian Panek’s film. It’s obvious from the (alas, non-lycanthropic) synopsis that we’re not in […]
Art as either a conduit for evil, or a form inspired by evil has been used in many horror films down through the years, and Art of the Dead makes no bones about taking a little of both of these ideas as its central thread. The resulting film is a crowd of ideas, which translates […]
When Mike Flanagan and his creative partners stepped into horror cinema’s big time with the announcement of their adaptation of Doctor Sleep, they were assuming responsibility for one of the most eagerly anticipated sequels in modern cinema. Widely (if not necessarily universally) heralded as a classic, Kubrick’s The Shining is an established treasure trove of […]
Never before released in the UK on any format (at least not legally), by all accounts the only press this sleazy slasher got on release was down to director Ivan Nagy’s role in the Heidi Fleiss scandal. Not long thereafter it sank without a trace, and for the best part of 20 years it was […]
Leigh Whannell should be a familiar name for anyone who’s being following horror cinema this century, as co-creator (hand in hand with James Wan) of two of the genre’s most popular and profitable franchises of the past fifteen years: Saw, and Insidious. Yet while Whannell’s work is known for making money, this hasn’t necessarily equated […]
It’s perhaps pretty inevitable that ideas and anxieties about social media stardom have begun spilling into horror cinema. As a relatively new means of attaining wealth and stature presents itself, and as new risks to autonomy and privacy come along, the human imagination begins to ponder all the things which could go awry. Tragedy Girls […]
Australia’s tourism board must read movie synopses from behind their hands: Wolf Creek might not have been the first outback horror, but it’s become pretty well-known to a whole generation now, feeding into all the (true) stereotypes of a harsh, remote climate ready to isolate and endanger the unwitting and unwary, coupled with the (rather […]
One of the great things about film festivals is the sheer range of films you get, even though most of them might be loosely assembled in one particular genre or other. Horror in particular has a broad remit and can veer from terrifying in one incarnation to hilarious in another, without dropping any of the […]