horror
David Kettle
Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ A viciously critical review gets its unfortunate writer driven mad and sent to an untimely death in this adaptation of a macabre MR James chiller. In that case, I’d better be careful what I say about British movement and puppetry company Box Tale Soup’s fluent two-hand staging. Though to call their Casting the Runes a two-hander isn’t strictly correct: actors Noel Byrne and Antonia Christophers (who also adapted the tale for the stage, adding in a few choice elements from elsewhere in James’s output) are joined by three puppets in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it. The crown not only justifies the means of his ascension up the slippery pole, but its preservation becomes the sole object of his every deed. History does not record if Read more ...
James Saynor
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.Like Schrödinger’s cat in quantum physics – dead and alive simultaneously – they’re both five stars and one star. Or at least that’s how many cineastes saw slasher movies in the romping, anything-goes era of postmodernism 40 years ago, when Quentin Tarantino was gleefully slinging work by Dario Argento or Abel Ferrara across a video-store counter somewhere.From that perspective, Read more ...
Justine Elias
Keeping up with viral teenage trends is nearly impossible – they travel at the speed of light – but here’s a new one, or ancient one given an electronic makeover.In Talk to Me, the new horror movie directed by twins Danny and Michael Philippou, Australian teenagers dare each other to become possessed by the dead while their friends capture the terrifying (or embarrassing) effects on their mobile phones.Talk to Me is no simple summer roundup of cheap shocks and jump scares. Full of shadows and melancholy, the movie delivers a sharp, twisty tale of shifting allegiances among a rough Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“There are sex maniacs out there, sodomites, murderers, suicidal people, and communists on the loose! I vote for a curfew!” This fabulous explosion of anxiety, from a teenage girl who we’ve seen beat other young women to a pulp for no good reason, both begs to be quoted, and is indicative of the deep well of ignorant loathing and hypocrisy that informs this very funny, but also deeply serious satirical horror from the gifted Brazilian writer-director Anita Rocha da Silveira. While da Silveira happily wears her influences on her sleeve – Stanley Kubrick, Dario Argento, John Carpenter Read more ...
Gary Naylor
After the pantos, the movies (epic, camp and animated) and the television series, is there anything new to be mined in the story of Robin Hood? Probably not, as this messy, misjudged show takes that hope and fires an arrow through its heart.We’re in an Albion of misty woods, mighty castles and feudal exploitation, the King weakened by poison administered by his right hand man, Sheriff Baldwyn, whose day job is brutally extracting taxes from the peasants to build a new road for the barons (Shaun Yusuf McKee, Simon Oskarsson and TJ Holmes pictured below). He doesn’t have it all his own way: Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julia (Mia Farrow) stands jolting and shuddering, a butterfly pattern of blood on her blouse, shocking the ambulancemen on her doorstep. Her nine-year-old daughter Kate, who choked on an apple like Snow White before Julia cut her throat in a desperate tracheotomy, lies dead and unseen in the kitchen.This traumatic eruption into a quiet Kensington morning sends lingering tremors through this atmospheric, understated London ghost story. Based on the first horror novel by Peter Straub, an American genre master best-known for Ghost Story (1979), director Richard Loncraine shares Straub’s fine- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White Lotus on bad acid.Infinity Pool is set in the fictional coastal nation of Li Tolqa – the film was shot in Croatia, but wherever it is, Li Tolqa is an impoverished police state with a draconian legal system which stipulates the death penalty for all crimes. Queasily inverted camera angles and shots of a menacing sunset and dark, roiling waves suggest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The moral of this story is that if you’re going out to commit a robbery, don’t take your iPhone with you. This was the grave error committed by TJ (Anthony Turpel) and his friend Ross (Chris Lee), whose attempted heist was foiled by an angry shotgun-toting citizen. TJ managed to get away, but Ross – carrying the iPhone containing incriminating evidence of the pair’s guilt – was shot and left for dead.When a distraught TJ confessed all to his sister Chloe (Bailee Madison), he thought his goose was cooked. However, Chloe had other ideas. Unleashing the deductive powers that have made her an apt Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At their best, horror movies reflect destabilisation caused by cracks in the social fabric. The crack indicated in the documentarist Andrey Paounov’s fiction debut January is the widening abyss that, one character fears, will swallow Bulgaria village by village, town by town; the entire world, he says, will eventually succumb to this state of waking death. Maybe it already has?Doomy it may be, but Paunov’s allegorical folk chiller is also a joy – a playful grim fairytale that disturbs the imagination more than the viscera thanks to its evocation of haunted woods, barely seen, that symbolise Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson deal in the modern eerie and truly weird, placing relationships under supernatural pressure with unsettling empathy. Where genre-schooled peers such as Ti West and Adam Wingard splice post-slacker, naturalistic conversation with skin-flaying horror, Moorhead and Benson scare with cracks in reality, reflecting quietly broken protagonists.Styled as Moorhead & Benson, Benson writes, Moorhead is cinematographer, and the pair co-direct, produce, edit and sometimes star. Their self-sufficient cult has led to Marvel TV work on Moon Knight and Loki, but their Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paramount added a late “old dark house” mystery comedy to Hollywood’s annus mirabilis of 1939 by teaming Bob Hope with Paulette Goddard in The Cat and the Canary, skilfully directed by Elliott Nugent. The death-trap mansion in the Louisiana bayous where family members gather to hear the reading of the deceased owner’s will – his niece Goddard inherits it – proved the perfect venue for Hope’s hilariously pusillanimous shtick.The movie was a hit, so the stars were reunited in an identikit picture, 1940's The Ghost Breakers. Adding a gangster intrigue to the genre mash-up, it was based on a Read more ...