tue 08/04/2025

horror

Restless review - curse of the noisy neighbours

Horror comes in many forms. In writer-director Jed Hart’s feature debut Restless, it’s visited on middle-aged nurse Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) by thirtyish Deano (Aston McAuley), the superficially affable toxic male who moves in next door with two...

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical, Theatre Royal Bath review - not a screaming success

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised...

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Blu-ray: Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest...

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Blu-ray: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect...

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The Monkey review - a grisly wind-up

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The...

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Presence review - Soderbergh's haunted camera

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled...

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10 Questions for Mark Gatiss, writer-director of 'A Ghost Story for Christmas: Woman of Stone'

There are no white-sheeted ghosts in this year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. The BBC’s annual adaptations of MR James’s best-known stories have been a holiday favourite since the 1970s.More recently, in the hands of writer-director...

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Nosferatu review - Lily-Rose Depp stands out in uneven horror remake

Robert Eggers' strength as a director is his ability to bring historical periods alive with gritty, tactile realism. He does this successfully because of his anthropological attention to props, costume and language, but also his willingness to treat...

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Blu-ray: The Oblong Box

The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began...

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Blu-ray: The Outcasts

This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema

You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-scares and gore. It was first used to describe a crop of horror films...

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Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid prose

In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected upon the special kind of paranoia that attends the ill individual. Each person is, by virtue of "being a little world", supremely conscious of a...

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