For most readers of this site, director Alexandre Aja is probably best known for his work within the horror genre. When Switchblade Romance (or High Tension) burst onto the scene in 2003, it very much formed part of the new wave of unflinchingly nasty European ordeal cinema; films made since then, such as The Hills […]
Placing monsters on screen – as in your vampires, or your aliens, or so on – has its own share of challenges, but at core, there’s a fairly obvious requirement to, well, get the monsters on screen. When you are aiming to represent monstrous behaviour or thoughts, however, this can be rather more tricky, even […]
Reflections on the twilight years of any great artist or company tend to be tinged with sadness and regret, lamenting on how the mighty had fallen, how their latter day work could only serve as a pale reminder of how great things had once been. Conventional wisdom would seem to dictate that this is how […]
By Helen Creighton Power corrupts. Superpowers corrupt absolutely. That’s the message of the 2006 comic series ‘The Boys’ – a 72-issue story arc about superheroes gone bad and the people who fight them, and now a TV series for people who don’t like superheroes, or are at least bored with the current, ever-spawning, squeaky-clean superhero […]
By Matt Harries We often exclaim, or hear others exclaim, ‘They don’t make ‘em like that any more!’ Call it sentimentality, rose-tinted spectacles, or plain old nostalgia; whatever you call it, the audience for stories refracted through the lens of retro-appreciation is huge these days. Listing various works of the small or big screen that […]
Sometimes the loss of an actor just gets you somehow, because you automatically associate that actor with a role which is highly important to you. So, yesterday, it was hardly surprising that, with the news that Rutger Hauer had passed away at the age of seventy-five following a short illness, the internet was quickly awash […]
By Matt Harries With the weather in this country finally starting to resemble the heat and humidity of last year, summer, it seems, is finally well underway. Swiftly following on from the critically-praised Midsommar is a second piece of folk-horror for these warmer months. But while Ari Aster’s film is replete with the fertile imagery […]
If it comes in miniature and could conceivably be evil in nature, chances are Charles Band has probably used it as the basis for a schlock horror film (even ‘worry dolls’ have gone very, very wrong in his hands). And, in terms of success stories, the Puppet Master franchise has probably been one of his […]
The notion of folk horror – of isolated communities, barbaric practices and something distinctly sinister about the land itself – has received an awful lot of critical attention in the past few years, not least of which from this very site, so it’s unsurprising to see new films are now appearing, borne out of that […]
By Matt Harries Nowadays there is a kind of movement or at least prevailing school of thought that seems to be infusing through certain echelons of horror filmmaking. A school of thought that would prefer to see the genre transcend its lowly place as a parade of predictable distractions, to instead be regarded as the […]
Hill House and Beyond By Guest Contributor Matt Harries For the first part of Matt’s special feature on Mike Flanagan, click here. For Keri’s feature on The Haunting of Hill House, click here. ‘What struck me the most is that I think grief is such a universal experience that when we were in the writers’ […]