Fantasia 2023: Stay Online

Слава Україні Героям слава!Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes! In the early hours of February 22nd, 2022, the Russian state began an illegal and unprovoked military invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine, heralded by a nationwide blitzkrieg air attack. The country was thrown into instant chaos, as two million people fled their homes […]

Deadstream (2022)

Investigations of haunted houses or places have been a horror staple since the inception of cinema. And, whilst in many cases (with some notable exceptions) the allegedly haunted house/place itself has remained unchanged, the means of investigation themselves have changed and developed as the years have passed. You could even argue that technological developments have […]

Frightfest 2022: Follow Her

The rise and rise of social media has definitively blurred the line between consent and content. Good horror films were quick to realise this, as horror so often is: by looking at the continual blurring of reality and unreality, persona and person, horror has invited us to think about a new, updating number of worst […]

Fantasia 2022: Sissy

Childhood is hell and it can lead to traumas which follow you around for, oh, at least a decade or so, maybe much longer: we shouldn’t expect people to change all that much in that amount of time, either. That’s been the lesson in many excellent horror titles up until now and it’s been given […]

Win social media horror Superhost (2021) on Blu-ray

It should be no surprise to anyone that the pervasive world of social media is finding its way into more and more horror cinema: as for the new breed of influencers which inhabit this world, their pursuit of ‘likes’, the drive for more and more content, the fight for revenue generation – of course this […]

Filtered (2021)

It’s been discussed elsewhere on the site how, via successive lockdowns and the increasing role of social media, the latter has gone from steadily moving into horror cinema to hitting it at some pace. That being said, Filtered (2021) manages something a little different by taking a social media element which is usually trite and […]

The Cleansing Hour (2019)

Perhaps it’s to be entirely expected that the number of social media-related horrors continue to grow and grow. Alongside the likes of Tragedy Girls, Assassination Nation and Making Monsters, we can now count The Cleansing Hour, though quite unlike those others, this most recent film melds the premise of a successful social media channel with […]