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 […]
If ever a film spoke to unpalatable truths, then it’s Jennifer Kent’s most recent film, The Nightingale. Where her previous feature The Babadook put a fantastical spin on mental trauma, The Nightingale strips back all varieties of artifice and fantasy, striving to represent a notoriously brutal period in Australia’s colonial past as realistically as possible. […]
The notion of the ‘cursed film’ is nothing new in horror cinema, and it has formed the basis of some deeply disturbing, evocative projects over the course of the years. The Ring was a hugely successful crossover from what was, for many viewers, a largely unknown horror tradition with its own mythology and rules of […]
The opening scenes of any film are important in setting the style and tone of the film to follow; accepting this, the beginning of The Golden Glove rapidly establishes that what is to follow will be saturated with grime, misery and desperation, coming in immediately with largely intimated, but no less horrific violence. Based on […]
One of the most talked-about films on the horror film circuit back in 2013 was The Battery, an ultra low-budget mumblecore American indie take on the classic zombie apocalypse set-up. It proved divisive, with many viewers finding it too slow, uneventful and low on the expected gut-munching horror, but plenty of others (myself included) being […]
Two young girls, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michelle Dotrice) are on a summer cycling holiday in rural France. It’s sunny, bright and picturesque; the atmosphere is relaxed, both girls are having fun and Cathy is keen to soak up the sun a little, but Jane is keen to press on to the next village. […]
There’s a brutal serial killer on the loose in South Korea. His modus operandi is quite simple: by faking a collision with another vehicle on a deserted road, he encourages the aggrieved party to get out of their car: when they do so, he waits for them to get distracted, then stabs them to death. […]
Remember the seventies and eighties, when regular moral panics about popular films, music, television shows and finally, videos were the thing? When the Tipper Gores and Mary Whitehouses of this world would insist, without a scrap of real evidence, that various media were responsible for acts of moral depravity and horrific violence? This argument has emerged […]