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 […]
It was with no mean amount of anticipation that I went in to Robert Eggers’ newest film; his last film – and his first ever feature – The Witch (2015) blended just enough ambiguity with its supernatural content, leading to a film which kept its mysteries without sacrificing its scares, but perhaps most of all, […]
Anyone who’s been paying close attention to the changing face of horror in the 21st century should hopefully be well aware of filmmaker Johannes Roberts. In some respects the British writer-director always seems to be just one big film away from really breaking through into the popular consciousness, yet at the same time he’s quietly […]
Slasher movies, we might theorise, are like the pizza of horror. In other words, even when they’re not much good, they’re still kinda good, so long as those same basic ingredients are being used in the right quantities: masked killer, witless sinful victims, creative or at least gory death scenes. Think of those as the […]