horror
emma.simmonds
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. With his chilling follow-up Mitchell goes full horror, presenting us with a STH: a sexually transmitted haunting.It Follows updates Halloween's suburban horror story – where the adults disappear, leaving Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We have been doing sex” is Flora and Miles’s answer when housekeeper Miss Jessel asks what they are up to. The brother and sister have seemingly been violently attacking each other on a bed. The inspiration is gardener Peter Quint’s interactions with their governess Miss Jessel: Miles has been spying on them. The Nightcomers sought to provide the backstory for Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and, in so doing, explain the torments in the novella.While doing this unnecessary job, 1971’s The Nightcomers also tried to shock. Quint is played by Marlon Brando with a laughable Irish accent and a Read more ...
Simon Munk
The gloom of Victorian London might be shared with The Order: 1886, also reviewed this week, but the games couldn't be further apart. In Sunless Sea, you play a nautical captain, navigating the "Unterzee" of the waters surrounding a fallen, underground London. Or rather, you play lots of captains – because if this cruel game is about anything, it's about repeated death.Death comes from being eaten by a crew turned cannibal from a lack of supplies, from drowning after pirates hole your hull, or from your ship being swallowed whole by one of many foul monsters prowling the blacked-out waters. Read more ...
Simon Munk
In terms of atmosphere, The Order: 1886 wins out in spades. It's just everywhere else that it falls down, unfortunately.Sneaking through the Ripper-stalked streets of an alternative Victorian Whitechapel, you can almost smell the stink of the slums. And certainly this matches the recent Assassin's Creed: Unity for the detailed and fetid depiction of dirty, litter-strewn cobbled streets. It's moments like this that The Order does excellently.Another high point is when the zeppelin you're on board crashes into Crystal Palace (about 50 years early, but never mind), and you stagger out of the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Techland's previous first-person zombie game was Dead Island. This swaps its beach resort location for a nondescript south American city, and its supercharged, cobbled-together weaponry for parkour-style run-jump-climb agility. One of these swaps is good news, the other not so much.Crash-landing in the zombie-infested city of Harran, your undercover government operative has to ingratiate himself with the locals, trying to survive holed up in a tower block. How he does that is largely by going and fetching things for them from all over.On the way, you also get to open up "safe houses" and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Children – they’re inherently scary, right? Add to that the fraught rip-tides of a claustrophobic mother-son relationship – a son with behavioural problems and a compulsive fear of monsters under the bed, and a single mother tormented by the violent death of her husband – and then stir in a character from a pop-up book called Mr Babadook, who pops up just a little too close for comfort, and you have the necessary ingredients for a consummate chamber piece of mounting and inexorable terror.Written and directed by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook stars Essie Davis as sleep-deprived, rapidly Read more ...
Simon Munk
Four human players team up to take on a monster – also played by another player. That's the simple version of Evolve, a mainly multiplayer online game developed by the team that created the superlative squad horror series Left 4 Dead. It's a great idea – but is let down in execution, so far.The core of Evolve is its asymmetric play – with each side and each character requiring radically different approaches and skills even within one match. As the monster, you start each match in a weak position. You've got to move fast, but stealthily, through the industrial areas and jungles of the alien Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If coming to Ganja & Hess under the impression it’s Seventies’ Blaxploitation along the lines of Blacula, beware. It does feature an immortal character as its lead. And there is the drinking of blood as well as violence. Instead of doing what he was commissioned to do, director Bill Gunn’s 1973 film is an art-house oddity.When the film was completed, Gunn’s backers cut 35 minutes and gave it the horror-friendly title Blood Couple. After that, it went out as Black Evil, Blackout: The Moment of Terror, Black Vampire and Vampires of Harlem. This release is from an original, uncut print which Read more ...
fisun.guner
Polish director Agnieszka Holland is best known for two Holocaust films, both based on remarkable true stories: the 1990 Europa Europa and the 2011 release In Darkness. Here she tackles horror of the supernatural kind. This NBC two-parter is an updating of Ira Levin’s best-selling 1967 novel rather than a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic film, though it wouldn't matter either way, for while Polanski remained faithful to the book, this version of Rosemary’s Baby revises significant details. And in doing so, it cuts off the rich vein of elegantly spun dark humour that runs through the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted from the cult novel by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) and directed by Alexandre Aja, Horns can't keep itself on an even tonal keel for more than a few minutes. Part policier, part doomed romance and part gothic nightmare, I suppose it might even have created its own nano-genre.Nonetheless I enjoyed it quite a lot, even with its over-optimistic two hour running time. But this probably isn't the film which will carry Daniel Radcliffe across the great divide from boy wizard to mature screen actor. Partly it's the nature of the piece, which frequently finds itself trying to straddle the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mother love is mangled, yanked inside-out and tested almost to destruction in Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s heartfelt horror debut. The Babadook enthusiastically fulfils its remit to scare, but finds its fright in the secret corners of maternal instinct, where frustration, grief and violence meet.Amelia (Essie Davis) is the mother of 6-year-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who was born hours after her husband died in a car crash, speeding to the hospital as she went into labour. The matrix of guilt and mourning from that trauma still defines Amelia and Samuel’s relationship. She looks Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We all romanticise the olden times. Those we think of as belonging to them are no different. The Castle of Otranto – by common consent, the first Gothic novel – was published a quarter of a millennium ago. “Otranto ‘lost its maidenhead’ today,” wrote its author Horace Walpole. To him, if not to us, the 1760s reeked of modernity so he claimed that this was a true story plucked from a cobwebbed Neapolitan library in 1529 – that is, a quarter of a millennium before.“Tranflated by WILLIAM MARSHAL, Gent,” fibbed the frontispiece. “From the Original ITALIAN of ONUPHRIO MURALTO, Canon of the Read more ...