horror
Kieron Tyler
Any film about a series of real-life unsolved murders is ready to be tagged as exploitation. With The Town That Dreaded Sundown, the waters are muddied as it draws on a 1976 proto-slasher film of the same name which luridly retold the true story of killings which took place in the Arkansas-Texas border-straddling town of Texarkana in 1946. It features a murderer recreating the Seventies film in the present day while also revisiting the 1940's crimes.A meta-take on exploitation, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is not only a sequel but also includes sequences from its inspiration and seeks to Read more ...
Simon Munk
A tidy, English village. Swings hang in the breeze, a bicycle's discarded by a phone box, smoke curls over an ashtray in the pub garden. But no one's here. No one's ever coming back.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture isn't just one of the most arresting, creepy and intriguing pieces of domestic sci-fi since John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (or Jeff Noon's Falling out of Cars); it's also an exercise in minimalism at play – what happens in a game if you remove all the controller grappling and actual interactivity from it. Here, you simply wander around finding things.Waking up near an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A now-canonical film like Eyes Without a Face has the potential to become over familiar. What was once shocking could now seem quotidian. Freshness is a quality which can be blunted. Yet seeing Georges Franju’s 1960 film anew reveals it as still heady, and still unlike any other film.Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) may have given cinema one of its most enduring images with Edith Scob’s mask and lent its title to the Billy Idol song, but it remains potent. The story of Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) seeking to give his disfigured daughter Christiane (Scob) a new face with the help Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.We are in the early days of VCRs, clandestine cable networks and easily transmitted, contraband imagery. Max Renn (James Woods) is on the hunt for filth to get ratings for his low-budget channel, and is passed a sadomasochist snuff tape. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is an unusually humane horror film, made more chilling by its warmth towards its characters. After a brief prologue of inexplicable, bone-snapping terror, it lets us live quietly for some time with 19-year-old heroine Jay (Maika Monroe, perfectly natural and poised for stardom), till her naive visions of a date with a sexy city boy end with her drugged, bound, and cursed to be followed by an implacable, shape-shifting thing only she can see.Writer-director David Robert Mitchell was inspired by a recurring nightmare, and his monster moves and morphs like a bad dream. Whether taking the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Christopher Lee died this week, aged 93. It’s strange that an actor best known for horror films, for characters that were fiendish and diabolical, should be so cherished a part of the British cultural landscape. That fact speaks volumes for the charisma and charm, as well as craft of Lee’s performances, and for the intelligence, grace and wit of the man in person.He made his name in horror films – first as a terrifying monster to Peter Cushing’s Dr Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein, then more elegantly as one of cinema’s definitive Draculas in 1957’s Horror of Dracula, returning to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.The setting is Bad City, somewhere in Iran. Arash ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Retrospectively, two things help The Blob stand apart from the glut of late-Fifties aliens-invade-small-town-America science fiction films. It gave Steve McQueen his first starring role and its theme tune was an early Burt Bacharach co-write. Either of these – or even both together – are probably not enough to make the 1958 regional independent production into a classic piece of American cinema. But it is pretty good.Somewhere in Pennsylvania a courting couple – the male half of which is McQueen, playing “Steve” – are smooching in an open-top car. Coming back from their close encounter they Read more ...
Simon Munk
Should games be challenging? One of the perennial design challenges of videogames. Make a game too tough and you'll put people off; make it too easy and you'll offer no interest. And then there's the tricky issue of individuals having vastly different play styles and abilities.Bloodborne and its predecessors Dark Souls and Demon's Souls offer no sliding scale of player-set difficulty and, while you're at it, little in the way of mercy. I absolutely loathed the Souls games – for making me feel rubbish as a gamer, for making me die over and over, for offering no incentive, no easy way in, no Read more ...
Simon Munk
The old house seems empty at first. But in the darkness, a flickering match your only light source, it quickly becomes apparent that something terrible is here…White Night is a classic haunted house tale and a classic adventure game wrapped up in a beautiful, stylised visual feast. Like the Sin City comics and films, this uses stark black and white with just the occasional flicker of colour, mostly the guttering yellow of a match.In Sin City the stark design is a homage to the chiaroscuro of film noir and hardboiled detective fiction. And perhaps, in homage also, White Night unwisely adopts Read more ...
David Nice
How can a feisty village dame duetting “lackaday”s with the mounted head of a long-lost, nay, long-dead love be so deuced affecting? Ascribe it partly to the carefully-applied sentiment of Gilbert and Sullivan, slipping in a very singular 11-o’clock number after so much Gothick spoofery, partly to two consummate and subtle singing actors, Amy J Payne and John Savournin, in a production of spare ingenuity by the latter, true Renaissance/Victorian man equally at home in opera and operetta.Savournin also makes a virtue out of the necessity of a nine-strong cast guided by a brilliant pianist – Read more ...
Simon Munk
A shambling corpse, desperately gouging anything that comes near it for sustenance, a shadow of its former self. I'm not talking of the zombies that infest this game, but the Resident Evil series itself and its iconic Japanese publisher Capcom.For those not familiar with the Resident Evil series, this wildly successful set of games jump-started the "survival horror" genre in 1996, and has since spawned an army of spin-off game titles and films, while the main series has mutated – from slow-paced adventure to high-speed action.The original Revelations saw the game broken into TV-style " Read more ...