horror
Kieron Tyler
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 horror was dreadful. Then there was 1966’s unwatchable Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, which drew the line between beach movie froth and (once again) horror. With its gang of leather-clad undead, Psychomania (1973), recast the biker film. Unlike many horror syntheses, it was deadly serious. With nothing played for laughs it was consequently one of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 homemade short film whose viral success took its Swedish director, David F Sandberg, to Hollywood.The full-scale expansion of Lights Out he made there has a similarly effective moment, when its young heroine Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) awakes to the sound of long nails dragging along her bedroom floor, where a shadowy, long-haired figure hunches. And if Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 remains out there on its own. Audition is arguably ground-zero for torture porn and would go on to influence films like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005: in which Miike made a brief appearance) but the films made in its wake have none of its subtlety or flair with shockingly juxtaposing the day-to-day and the horrifying.Audition is a landmark film, and if it Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
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 playing a Victorian plod in pursuit of an evil, child-snatching surgeon.All of these have attempted to make something new of the archetypes. At first glance that’s exactly the ambition of the big screen’s Victor Frankenstein. But while writer Max Landis and director Paul McGuigan may think they’re offering a dazzling new spin on Mary Shelley’s creation Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 dramatises aspects of the case. It is directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s frequent collaborator Ulli Lomell – they had most recently worked together on Effi Briest. Nonetheless, Fassbinder produced and acted in Tenderness of the Wolves, and many of his regular players including Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Cavena and Kurt Raab appear. A very creepy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 nods to both Italian gialli and films which deconstruct the nuts and bolts of British social attitudes. If late-period Mario Bava and Lindsay Anderson had collaborated to direct an episode of The Good Life, this might have been the result.Sleepwalker begins simply enough. Angela and Richard Paradise (Joanna David and Nicholas Grace) are urban, Read more ...
David Nice
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 rehearsal and performance venue, but imaginative lighting and a clear acting space, with room for a 13-piece ensemble to the side, ought to do the trick.Unfortunately this setting, straight from Aldeburgh, isn’t exactly that for what its "conceivers" describe as “not a conventionally staged production… not ‘semi-staged’, nor… a concert performance”. It’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 way to explaining the runaway success of the series. Ramping it up for Season 5 we go from the generic to the specific. Any student of the cinematic genre would recognise that carpet from The Shining. Yes, and those pallid kids that spook the corridors of the Hotel Cortez are just like those freaking twins – Come play with us, Danny. Come Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As well as releasing electronic music on Ron Morelli’s feted L.I.E.S. label, and the sporadically brilliant Ghost Box, as well a particularly impressive outing on Static Caravan (as Primitive Neural Pathways), Steve Moore is the bass- and synth-playing half of Zombi. On Shape Shift, a heavier, darker and more rock-sounding record than fans of 2009’s Escape Velocity might be expecting, he is doing his utmost to show the acceptable face of horror-suited post-rock. Meanwhile, his accomplice, AE Paterra, provides the path from which they must not stray by beating several shades of something out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any film about a series of real-life unsolved murders is ready to be tagged as exploitation. With The Town That Dreaded Sundown, the waters are muddied as it draws on a 1976 proto-slasher film of the same name which luridly retold the true story of killings which took place in the Arkansas-Texas border-straddling town of Texarkana in 1946. It features a murderer recreating the Seventies film in the present day while also revisiting the 1940's crimes.A meta-take on exploitation, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is not only a sequel but also includes sequences from its inspiration and seeks to Read more ...
Simon Munk
A tidy, English village. Swings hang in the breeze, a bicycle's discarded by a phone box, smoke curls over an ashtray in the pub garden. But no one's here. No one's ever coming back.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture isn't just one of the most arresting, creepy and intriguing pieces of domestic sci-fi since John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (or Jeff Noon's Falling out of Cars); it's also an exercise in minimalism at play – what happens in a game if you remove all the controller grappling and actual interactivity from it. Here, you simply wander around finding things.Waking up near an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A now-canonical film like Eyes Without a Face has the potential to become over familiar. What was once shocking could now seem quotidian. Freshness is a quality which can be blunted. Yet seeing Georges Franju’s 1960 film anew reveals it as still heady, and still unlike any other film.Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) may have given cinema one of its most enduring images with Edith Scob’s mask and lent its title to the Billy Idol song, but it remains potent. The story of Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) seeking to give his disfigured daughter Christiane (Scob) a new face with the help Read more ...