horror
Tom Birchenough
Circus and church, and a whole lot of other extremes, come up against each other in bewildering opposition in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s re-released 1989 Santa Sangre, a cult film of which it could truly be said, “They don’t make them like this any more.” It’s practically a one-off, visually spectacular and musically vibrant; if you’re looking for equivalents, Buñuel, Ken Russell at his most hysterical, and the Italian horror-and-gore genre of the Seventies (think Berberian Sound Studio) are the nearest you might get.The opening scene finds hero Fenix seriously out-of-his-tree (literally) in a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
If you hate zombies and East End gangster movies, Cockneys vs Zombies will wreck those prejudices. Expect to have them turned topsy-turvy by this pocket-sized dynamo of horror comedy. Visually, it gets the simple things right straightaway. The blood looks real(ish). The London locations are cheerily drearily evocative. Then there's the unique opportunity of seeing Goldfinger Bond Girl and all-around heroine Honor Blackman fire a machine gun. Certainly as good as if not better than Shaun of the Dead, there is no doubt that Cockneys vs Zombies will be, in some Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores. In Berberian Sound Studio writer-director Peter Strickland takes this phenomenon as a mere starting point, following his self-financed debut Katalin Varga with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren was already subject to scrutiny, and is symbolic of his fascination with blondes. Soon, with Sienna Miller playing the leading lady of 1963’s terrifying The Birds and Toby Jones as the director, it’s going to be revisited with the TV film The Girl (2010’s Hitchcock’s Women had trodden this path). Hedren has advised Miller, and also told press that Hitchcock “was an extremely sad character…deviant almost to the point of dangerous”. (See the clip below for more of her views on Hitchcock.)After seeing Hedren in a drinks’ ad on TV, Hitchcock put her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The main problem with making a prequel to Alien is that the 1979 original was so shockingly successful. Even now, countless generations of CGI and special effects later, Ridley Scott's unstoppable monstrosity is surely the most hideous intergalactic threat ever burned onto celluloid.So, all credit to Sir Ridley (who wisely steered clear of the three Alien sequels) for making Prometheus almost worthy of the pre-match hype. One advantage of revisiting his notorious interstellar Frankenstein is that the creature is now so much part of movie-going folklore that its horrific qualities can be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Island of Lost Souls might be from 1932, but its release on DVD verifies that it’s one of the freakiest, most disturbing films made. This adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau is dominated by Charles Laughton as the eponymous Doctor. Creepy and monomaniacal, he puts in a towering performance. Convinced he can turn animals into humans via surgery, he’s undermining evolution and playing – as he declares – God. The film arrived in cinemas the same year as the equally transgressive Freaks and also went on to become a cult, inspiring new-wave weirdos Devo to co-opt the half-human, half- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Considerable quantities of bile have been hosed over Silent House by American critics, who have found its premise flimsy and its execution dismally predictable. It was made by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who were also responsible for 2003's low-budget hit Open Water. That was the one where a couple of objectionable yuppies were left behind by their dive-boat and we bobbed about in the ocean with them as they succumbed to terror, hypothermia and hungry sharks. Its seasick, hand-held feel lent it an unsettling edge, but ultimately it felt like a single clever idea stretched way too thin.Similar Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Wicker Man is a great British film, one of the top horror films of all time. Since its release in 1973, its curious combination of queasily jolly folkloric ritual and sinister paganism has only grown to seem more discomfiting, reeking of the uncanny, and flavouring new films as recently as the extraordinary Kill List. I propose, then, to assume The Wicker Man is 5/5 smash - if you haven’t seen it, you should do so at once - but this review will deal with the other film in a new DVD set, Wicker Man director Robin Hardy’s 2010 sequel, the far less well-known The Wicker Tree.The plot has a Read more ...
ash.smyth
Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon. Most famously, though, he shares his Nobel laurels Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like an adrenalin injection straight to the heart of a flagging horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods is fresh, funny and teeming with deliciously nasty surprises which - have no fear - will not be revealed to you here. Although it’s helmed by first-time director Drew Goddard (the Cloverfield scribe and co-producer of Lost and Alias), for many the key name attached to The Cabin in the Woods will be Joss Whedon, the film’s co-writer and producer. Whedon is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on which Goddard also worked as a writer), Firefly and the lesser but still impressively ambitious Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts. As its daring do-gooder, it features boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe, now a man and here a father who, in his continued battle against evil, is hardly Read more ...
emma.simmonds
This Friday sees the release of James Watkins’ bloodcurdling adaptation of The Woman in Black, produced by the recently resurrected Hammer Films, who have risen like one of their macabre creations to torment us once more. With its old dark house spookiness and “bat out of hell” villainess, the screen incarnation of Eel Marsh House is suitably forbidding, but it’s only the latest in a long of line of diabolical dwellings where you reside at your peril and leave - only if you’re lucky - sanity surrendered and trousers browned. Buyer beware: these are the houses that drip blood.Every horror film Read more ...