The opening scenes of Mother Superior (2022) do a couple of things: not only do they establish the film’s esoteric subject matter via the newspaper clippings, photos, art and symbols shown to us, but they also forge links to a German horror tradition which has, in effect, shaped horror cinema itself since its inception a […]
Setting your film in a very limited space has its risks. All of the usual components – your characters, your pace, your plot – will be held to the utmost scrutiny, with no sweeping vistas or changing scenes to distract the eye. It’s certainly gone wrong in the past; get it right, however, and you […]
Writing and directing team Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are another couple of filmmakers who, after the initial rise of ‘new French extremity’ in the Noughties, didn’t maintain the same prolific trajectory. Hey, it happens – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in a feature on Martyrs, once you’ve gone that far, where is left to go? […]
Anything for Jackson is a horror film which clearly starts as it means to go on – offering drastic, sometimes bizarre contrasts between humdrum suburban life and an occult storyline which is recognisable, but no less OTT for it. The resulting film is like a mash-up between Hereditary (2018) and Inside (2007) – make of […]
Well, they say that you sell a film on its first few minutes, and if so, then it’s a piece of guidance which Coven director Margaret Malandruccolo has taken to heart in this, her first feature-length. The film begins with five lingerie-clad young witches turning up at an evocative ruined building, ready to begin a […]
Horror films have often invoked different kinds of physical media as conduits or access points for dark forces, and given the significance of music in our culture, it’s little wonder that records have figured fairly highly over the years, particularly in decades gone past. There have been some great stories which feature records, or other […]
As we’ve seen countless times, the weight of expectation can be an ambiguous gift to a film, but it’s fair to say that few recent horrors have enjoyed such a steadily-building sense of anticipation as Hereditary (2018), which has been running tantalising trailers for the past few months. For one thing, the return of Toni […]
As I’ve discussed at length in the past, we really can’t overstate the impact of The Silence of the Lambs; a bona fide game changer, it blurred the lines between police procedural and horror story (not to suggest this hadn’t been done before: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, anyone?), setting the stage for the psychological […]