horror
DVD/Blu-ray: The Neon DemonThursday, 10 November 2016
Only a film which is very sure of itself would set one of its climactic scenes against a backdrop of wallpaper dominated by swastikas. Such audaciousness is typical of Nicolas Winding Refn who, with the startling Neon Demon, confirms he is now... Read more... |
Nocturnal AnimalsFriday, 04 November 2016
Tom Ford steps up to the celluloid big leagues with Nocturnal Animals, a deeply disquieting film that resists classification – even precise meaning – up until the final frame. A failed-relationship drama that enfolds elements of mystery and horror... Read more... |
Ouija: Origin of EvilFriday, 21 October 2016
A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander... Read more... |
Blair WitchFriday, 16 September 2016
Primal fear of the forest plus new technology made The Blair Witch Project a micro-budget phenomenon in 1999. Its “found footage” premise, with student film-makers’ tapes showing their gradual unhinging by a witch-haunted Maryland forest, has been... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: PsychomaniaFriday, 09 September 2016
Fusing genres to come up with unique takes on familiar tropes can be risky. The unwieldy results may be an unappetising mess. Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, where Arthur Lucan and Bela Lugosi fought for space in an unfunny 1952 fusion of comedy and... Read more... |
Lights OutThursday, 18 August 2016
A woman cowers beneath her bedclothes, building a useless barrier against the thing she hears creeping and scraping across the room, the thing that only appears when she turns off the light. This is the most primal image of domestic terror in the... Read more... |
DVD: AuditionFriday, 26 February 2016
Although Audition was released in 1999, seeing it again reveals it as neither dated or blunted by subsequent, more alarming horror films whether Japanese or otherwise. As it was then, Takashi Miike’s study of a romantic relationship gone wrong... Read more... |
Victor FrankensteinFriday, 04 December 2015
Television has been quite obsessed of late with reinterpreting horror myths, whether it’s Penny Dreadful’s gothic melange of vampires, werewolves and man-made monsters, Jekyll & Hyde, or The Frankenstein Chronicles, with Sean Bean currently... Read more... |
DVD: Tenderness of the WolvesTuesday, 17 November 2015
Fritz Haarmann was – although the term wasn’t in use at the time – the first murderer to be recognised in Germany as a serial killer. He was executed in 1925 after being found guilty of 24 killings. Filmed in late 1973, Tenderness of the Wolves... Read more... |
DVD: SleepwalkerTuesday, 03 November 2015
However it is looked at, Sleepwalker is one of British cinema’s strangest films. What initially seems to be a Mike Leigh-style, Abigail’s Party-ish hyper-real take on middle class mores quickly becomes an intense journey into dystopian horror which... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Aurora Orchestra, LSO St Luke'sTuesday, 27 October 2015
A Hawksmoor church ought to be the right setting for the psychological terror of Britten’s great chamber opera, a slanted but still chilling adaptation of Henry James's novella. True, the once-deroofed interior has been coolly revamped as a... Read more... |
American Horror Story: Hotel, Season 5, FXWednesday, 21 October 2015
A haunted house, a mental asylum, a witch’s coven, a circus freak show. Check, check, check. And check. Is there no horror trope left unturned in American Horror Story? Nope. And that’s precisely the point – familiarity and postmodern camp go a long... Read more... |
