horror
DVD: Kill ListFriday, 23 December 2011
Filmed and acted with suffocating intensity, Ben Wheatley’s second feature (after 2009’s Down Terrace) is a macabre mutation of horror and crime thriller. Stripped so bare exposition-wise that it’s jolting and intentionally enigmatic, Kill List is a... Read more... |
The ThingThursday, 01 December 2011
John Carpenter's original The Thing from 1982 had punch, pace, shocks, horror, dramatic tension and Kurt Russell in the lead. It also had a great intro, with its scenes of an apparently blameless and photogenic husky being pursued across Antarctica... Read more... |
The AwakeningFriday, 11 November 2011
Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot. Whether audiences will go the... Read more... |
DVD: Witchfinder GeneralFriday, 11 November 2011
Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the... Read more... |
Braquo and American Horror Story join the FX stableTuesday, 08 November 2011
In TV's seasonal rush of Spooks, Downton etc, we must also hail the sterling (if gruesome) work going on at the FX channel. Alongside series two of The Walking Dead, they've thrown in the additional delights of gory French cop thriller Braquo and,... Read more... |
Oslo, August 31st/ The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)Friday, 04 November 2011
Oslo, August 31st and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) share more than a release date. One is a melancholic existential meditation and the other ostensibly a horror film, but both openly draw from earlier films, focus on an outsider unable to... Read more... |
Straw DogsWednesday, 02 November 2011
As this remake’s director Rod Lurie, a former film journalist, well knows, competing with Sam Peckinpah is a loser’s game. His films are no more replicable than a Fred Astaire musical, inseparable from their demonic creator. Straw Dogs was his lone... Read more... |
Halloween Special: Patrick McGrath on Sheridan Le Fanu's horror storiesMonday, 31 October 2011
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, son of a Protestant clergyman and grand-nephew of the playwright Sheridan, was born in Dublin in 1814. He spent part of his boyhood in County Limerick, where from local storytellers he heard legends of fairies and demons.... Read more... |
The Walking Dead, Series 2, FXSaturday, 22 October 2011
At the end of the first series, we left our bedraggled band of survivors in Atlanta, their expectations dashed that they might be able to find some glimmer of hope at the Center for Disease Control. Instead, all they'd discovered was a lone,... Read more... |
Don't Be Afraid of the DarkTuesday, 04 October 2011
Saying that seven-year-old Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) is experiencing a nightmare childhood would be a whopping understatement. An anxious child, medicated into submission by her mother, she’s been sent to live with her father in a spooky mansion... Read more... |
Troll HunterThursday, 08 September 2011
The Blair Witch Project’s found-footage horror formula finds an unlikely new ingredient in this Norwegian phenomenon. The monsters disturbed in the woods by an amateur film crew this time are trolls, fairy-tale staples corralled by a top-secret... Read more... |
Fright NightWednesday, 31 August 2011
After 10 minutes in the company of Fright Night’s vacuous US teens I was thinking, like Colonel Kurtz, “Kill them all!” One of the several virtues of this remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy is that its writer, Marti Noxon, feels the same way.... Read more... |
