“Twenty years on there seemed much more of this world behind me than in front of me. I wandered a crumbling landscape busy with ghosts, where every object spoke of what had passed and all lines led back into history.” When we consider different modes of writing, we probably have a number of preconceived rules […]
For a lot of fans growing up during the VHS anime era of the mid-to-late 90’s, getting a hold of a copy of your favorite show was a frustrating experience. You either had to buy wall-length VHS runs, borrow from your friends or movie store, or, god help you, tape them off the TV whenever […]
The Company of Wolves (1984) really is a force of nature – a vivid array of stories-within-stories which capture the insurrectionist tendencies of Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of familiar fairy stories reworked into unfamiliar forms. The film brings several of Carter’s tales to the screen, albeit via a new, modern framing […]
Don’t Look Now is a strange and rather wonderful horror film: routinely featuring on ‘best films of all time’ lists, it clearly made (and continues to make) a resonant impression on viewers, whether those who saw it upon release or those who have come to it later. It’s this lasting appeal which has prompted some […]
Spectacular Optical books really seem to be cornering the market when it comes to diverse, broadly academic but accessible collections of essays linked by a horror theme; this time around, we have an incredibly varied compendium all about that strange phenomenon, Christmas horror. Or, as you’ll realise after reading, it’s modern culture that’s the strange […]
Alongside the likes of Ring and Audition, Ju-on: The Grudge was one of the first Japanese horror films to ever grace my collection. I still contend that it’s simply one of the finest supernatural horrors of the past twenty-five years, though perhaps unfairly, it’s now often seen as so much less than that – a […]
I first encountered the cinema of Jean Rollin via the UK’s Redemption Films, whose founder, Nigel Wingrove, became good friends with Rollin over the years; the film company deserves far more awareness of the great service they did by bringing so many of these films into the common consciousness in the Nineties, making the films […]
Meiko Kaji is, from a Western perspective, one of the most unmistakable and recognisable Japanese actresses of all time, but this comes with a significant proviso. Most of us know just a tiny fraction of the films she has ever made; only a handful of these nearly one hundred films have really made it over […]
There seems to have been something of a resurgence in print media – alongside many other pre-internet media – in recent years; titles which had quietly slipped off the radar are back, and the indie press, which many folk had anticipated would have disintegrated by now, is ticking along rather nicely. Even we (that is, […]
The so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ of the Eighties (with some fallout in the following decade) is a curious phenomenon – one born out of a collision of new media, psychiatry, pop-psychiatry and pop culture. It’s one of those things which could – and did – run and run, borne aloft by its ‘hidden’ status (how do […]
By Ben Bussey The 17th annual FrightFest may have not long since come to an end after its five day reign of terror in London – but, like any monster worth its salt, it keeps on coming back bigger, stronger and nastier. So it is that the FrightFest brand continues to expand. Having already moved […]