horror
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 ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In 1970, the coffin of America’s new vampire count travels to his lair in the hills of LA on a pickup truck. A giant billboard for John Wayne in True Grit observes his passage through Hollywood’s urban bustle, as this Gothic monster enters the then modern world.Soon retiring the increasingly cosy familiarity of Hammer’s period-set Dracula series, the two Count Yorga films restored the ferocity of the 1958 original, when Christopher Lee’s lofty aristocratic veneer hid feral violence. They played to a late hippie crowd hip to camp and the put-on, and drive-ins demanding date-squeezing shocks. Read more ...
India Lewis
Tense with horror and the sticky darkness of the Argentinian night, Mariana Enriquez’s writing is rich and occult. Her epic novel, Our Share of Night, vividly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, follows on from her short story collections Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. In this, her first novel to be translated into English, she delves further into a lushly violent and erotic world.Our Share of Night is set in the aftermath of the Argentine military junta’s worst excesses. The book begins in 1981 (the dictatorship ended in 1983) and the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here.Four years after Michael Myers’ bloody Halloween return, Laurie Strode (Curtis) is healed enough to be bashing out a trite survivors’ memoir, and bonding with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Mabichak, filmed with Green’s customary lustrous devotion to youthful female beauty). A spectacular pre-credits sequence meanwhile introduces Corey (Rohan Campbell, pictured below with Mabichak), whose typically catastrophic spell Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Crimes of the Future is a nostalgic return to classic Cronenberg, a comforting catalogue of body horror and fleshy biosynthesis, paranoid plots and shadowy cabals. Sharing a title with his 1970 debut, the director is still fascinated by our physical adaptation to future shocks.In his vague, allegorical sci-fi future, humanity’s “insurrectional” evolution has largely eradicated pain and produced surplus organs of uncertain consequence. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and ex-trauma surgeon Caprice (Léa Seydoux, pictured below, right with Mortensen) are performance artists on a posh, illicit Read more ...
David Kettle
In many ways, The Stones is what the Fringe is all about: a new theatre company (London-based Signal House); a single actor; a small black-box space; just a chair, a bit of smoke and some almost imperceptible lighting changes for a staging. And with those modest ingredients, it generates a work that’s really quite unnerving in its quiet power, and magpie-like in its references.Out of the blue, Nick receives a text from an old schoolfriend – well, someone he used to taunt with sinister messages in the hope of attention. As a result, he dumps his boyfriend, quits his job, and – almost as if it Read more ...