There are a couple of mysterious proverbs – at least they seem to be proverbs – at the beginning of All You Need is Death. ‘Love is a knife with a blade for a handle’; ‘Love goes in at the eye’. Taken together with the version of a certain Beatles track used for the title, […]
Irish folklore about the ‘other crowd’, or fairy folk, remains ripe for use by horror cinema. Far from our modern cultural understanding of fairies as Disneyfied, benign, pretty little entities, the Irish stories hang onto a notion of the little people as ambiguous at best – malevolent at worst. Their hill forts, their meeting places […]
By contributor Gabby Foor The ice-cold Irish thriller Gateway from director Niall Owens opens with a simple quote, “Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other greater ones invariably slink in after.” This reminds me of The Offering’s powerful quote, “Only we decide how much good and evil enters our realm,” and foreshadows […]
Now here’s a risky idea: returning to a short film, around seventeen years or so after making it, hoping to expand the universe of that film into a feature-length. A big ask at the best of times, no? Whilst it’s certainly not the first time this has been done, The Cellar (2022) was always going […]
The very opening scenes of The Lodgers speak to the key themes of the film as a whole: a young woman, sitting alone by a lake at night, preoccupied by her thoughts, suddenly flees back to a dilapidated mansion house when she hears the clock striking midnight. This is the first, but not the last […]