“Take your chances – you don’t get many.” How far can a person be pushed before they finally, irrevocably snap? It’s a question horror cinema has seemingly enjoyed mulling over for as long as it’s existed, pushing for ever more disturbing conclusions as the decades pass. And, as the intense focus on distressed and vulnerable […]
How do you signal to your audience that things are going to head south pretty fast – other than by titling your film A Most Atrocious Thing, that is? Turns out it’s by showing us almost instantly a sign reading Danger! Contaminated Water! Then a deer drinking from this water, before cutting straight to some […]
Any film that opens on a title card bearing a quote from HP Lovecraft is guaranteed to get horror fans sitting up and taking notice. Whether the subsequent hour and a half of They Remain will keep them in that upright, attentive position is another matter. Writer-director Philip Gelatt’s film strives to give us an […]
Once more unto the minefield that is the indie horror scene. Director Eric Pham brings with him a degree of cult cred due to his association with Robert Rodriguez, having worked in visual effects on a number of RR movies including Sin City and Grindhouse; and his lead actor here, Elle LaMont, is also from […]
It’s comparatively rare these days to go into a film viewing with no idea of what to expect, so often your best chance at this is to gain access to an online screener – particularly if these screeners come via film festivals which, for good or ill, have a fairly selective audience until such time […]
Has any two-word alliterative descriptor inspired so much abject despair in the past two decades as ‘found footage?’ (Don’t answer that, I’m sure there are plenty worse if I put my mind to it.) While the handheld, shakey-cam, first-person perspective mock-real approach has produced a good few gems – say, the REC movies, Cloverfield, Troll […]