horror
Blu-ray: The Oblong BoxTuesday, 12 November 2024
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... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The OutcastsTuesday, 29 October 2024
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinemaTuesday, 22 October 2024
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... Read more... |
Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid proseTuesday, 22 October 2024
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... Read more... |
Smile 2 review - worthy follow up to runaway hitSaturday, 19 October 2024
No film tackles the knotty topic of inherited mental illness with as much gleeful abandon as Smile. Mental health has been a popular subtext in contemporary horror for the past decade, but Parker Finn's Smile felt refreshing in how unsubtle it was.... Read more... |
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remakeSunday, 13 October 2024
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of... Read more... |
Things Will Be Different review - lost in the pastSunday, 06 October 2024
Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (... Read more... |
The Substance review - Demi Moore as an ageing Hollywood celeb with body issuesFriday, 20 September 2024
If you like a body-horror movie to retain a semblance of logic in its plot line, then The Substance – grotesque, gory and finally insubstantial – may not be for you.French director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature (her first was Revenge in 2017, a... Read more... |
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review - a lively resurrectionTuesday, 10 September 2024
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many... Read more... |
Starve Acre review - unearthing the unearthly in a fine folk horror filmMonday, 09 September 2024
Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since... Read more... |
Cuckoo review - insane time in the Bavarian AlpsThursday, 22 August 2024
Strange noises fill the crisp nighttime air in a small Alpine village: Avian shrieks and some wild beast a-rustling in the hedgerows – or are those the screams of a desperate woman?Into the strange, scary, funny world of Cuckoo comes a British-... Read more... |
In a Violent Nature review - inverted slasher is fascinatingSunday, 21 July 2024
A group of young people rent a cabin in the woods. A masked killer lingers nearby. Surely you know how the rest unfolds. The slasher and its well-worn tropes have been parodied, satirised and subverted for as long as it has existed. In fact, we seem... Read more... |
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