The short film Purge (2026) poses an interesting question, if at first a broad one: what makes us who we are? It then sees the question through in a sharply focused, often brutal manner, invoking aspects of body horror and, arguably, some modern Gothic elements. Honestly, it feels very much like a filmmaker-specific fever dream, […]
‘Tell me a story’, says the therapist at the beginning of Touch Me (2025) – though specifying that it should be a fantastical kind of story. Swap out the details, she says, but find a way of telling me about something which has traumatised you. Well, boy does Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) oblige, offering up […]
Fantasy advertisement for celibacy Together (2025) starts with a search team in the woods, looking for two people – two names are being called, but two people go undiscovered. Almost immediately, we see what the search team does not, as the camera pans down below ground level, where some search dogs seem to have found […]
Amber (Sharlene Cruz) is woken in the early hours of the morning to an upset call from her boyfriend, Justin (Dario Vazquez), but what is he ‘so sorry’ about exactly? We don’t discover that immediately, but we can soon glean that he’s not hurt or sick or anything like that: judging from Amber’s furious response […]
Whilst director Julia Ducournau has made just three features to date (taking roughly a decade to do so), it’s a case of quality over quantity. Any minor quibbles with her work aside, the films she’s produced so far have offered intriguing takes on what could, in other hands, be quite simplistic body horrors. But in […]
Elvira (Lea Myren) is a young girl in love with the idea of being in love. More specifically, she’s in love with the idea of one Prince Julian, an eligible royal who just so happens to be a published poet: she pores over his verse incessantly. Briefly back in the real world, she, her younger […]
It never feels like a negative to find there’s a new David Cronenberg film, and with a title and premise like The Shrouds (2024), hopes were bound to be high. Indeed, the main idea here is fascinating, blending Cronenberg’s love for body horror/bodily trauma with a potential source of existential debate, here about life and […]
Somewhere in a cramped apartment block in urban China, a little girl plays as her father works. She’s carefully drawing a corpse flower; she then feeds a live mouse to their pet snake; it’s all wholesome stuff. Her father, it seems, is a scientist who has tasked himself with ‘fixing’ the presumably hereditary skin condition […]
Warped Perspective has long been promoting short films, and thanks to the ALTER channel on YouTube, it finally seems that there’s a decent outlet for them which extends beyond the enthusiastic, but limited remit of the festival scene. And so, we recently reviewed a body horror/cautionary tale called Nosepicker: if you haven’t already, then you […]
A blend of styles and themes but ultimately a body horror, Tiger Stripes is incredibly worthwhile: lively, evocative and multifaceted. Like the best of horror, it strikes a solid balance between humane and fantastical: the crazy things which happen here, happen to people who are completely plausible and likeable. This is a daring and darkly […]
The Breach (2022) knows exactly what it wants to be: that is, a solid horror yarn, a midnight movie by design which might not surprise you with its plot elements, but will keep you consistently entertained as it burns through a significant number of genre features. Directed by Rodrigo Gudiño, founder of Rue Morgue magazine, […]