horror
fisun.guner
Few artists can creep you out like Gregor Schneider. His work is scary and it’s absurd. But even as you giggle nervously when confronted with its less than subtle deployment of shock-horror tactics, a more profound disquiet creeps up on you. Schneider knows how to tap into our visceral fears.You may recall his Artangel project a few years back, Die Familie Schneider. Two adjacent terraced houses in Whitechapel, east London, were identically kitted out. In each of these drably furnished, impoverished residences an “identical” family – twins - had been installed: Mother could be found Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full of fearsome but unfulfilled ideas on the terrors waiting at your front door.For the first few minutes, as middle-aged Mike (Tom Butcher) and Christine (Rachel Blake) settle down in their north London semi after work, uncorking the wine and preparing dinner, the atmosphere is indefinably uneasy, the conversation faintly dislocated. Mike’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although it has taken over a decade to come to fruition, Splice still feels like a timely piece of work with its macabre and gruesome take on notions of genetic mutation for commercial gain and the god-like delusions of the scientific community. In addition, it spits out poisonous barbs in the direction of dysfunctional parents who visit their own inadequacies on their hapless offspring.Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, previously best known for the 1997 shocker Cube, has evidently hoovered up a few tricks from fellow Canuck David Cronenberg, with whom he shares a fascination with weird Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The friendship between level-headed Sarah (TV’s Hustle star Kelly Adams) and impulsive Zoe (Lucy Evans) is the emotional core, as Zoe dumps her college course to surprise teacher boyfriend Malcolm (David Horton) in his flat and declare her undying love. There is a vague sense of unease in glimpsed locations, apparently in East London, where a bag lady squawks Cassandra-style warnings. But Watson can find no cinematic use for the city, and we’re soon stuck in Malcolm’s flat, along with wheelchair-bound Declan (Jonathan Rhodes) and his Goth girlfriend Kendra (Calita Rainford).Declan is the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What is it with horror films and water? Think back through all the watery episodes in the horror canon, not the grandiose creature-from-the-deep type but the more domestic scenarios – beaches, showers, baths, bathrooms. From Hitchcock’s originary shower scene onwards, the list is long and gory. Most recently we've seen the elegant atmospheric manipulations of Juan Antonio Bayona’s El Orfanato with its plot-significant headland setting and dark tidal caves; now following close behind is fellow Spaniard Gabe Ibanez with his first feature Hierro.Sharing a mentor in Guillermo del Toro and even a Read more ...
anne.billson
When were you last horrified by a horror movie? Really horrified, that is, as opposed to merely creeped out, or disgusted, or amused. Black Death is a proper horror movie, for grown-ups rather than ADD-afflicted teens, and I'll wager grown-ups will be duly horrified by it. Not because of the gore - although it does have a fair amount of that - but because it takes you on a real journey into the heart of darkness, and you might not like what you find there.This Anglo-German production is the fourth film from Bristol-born director Christopher Smith, who has been steadily improving since his Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Call me a grumpy old man if you like, but on an average week it can be hard to see the point of BBC Three - unless the point is for an overly expansionist state broadcaster to patronise the nation’s youth as a generation of weight- and Wag-obsessed delinquents with an unhealthy taste for autism and Asperger’s. But then on rare good weeks – or perhaps even years - along comes an original show like Little Britain, Being Human or Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts which suggest that maybe, just maybe, all that investment has been worthwhile. Pulse, the pilot for a potential new hospital horror series, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“There is no hell, there is no heaven. This, this is real, this is now, and here is where matters.” So Professor Philip Goodman, sceptical expert in parapsychology and debunker of superstition, assures us. Except that what we are watching isn’t real, it’s theatre. The Professor is actually Andy Nyman, creative partner of celebrated trickster and mentalist Derren Brown and co-author of Ghost Stories with Jeremy Dyson of comic grotesques The League of Gentlemen. And whether, within the dramatic construct, the character Goodman will live up to his name and prove himself to be, indeed, a good man Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Low-budget horror movie, comprising supposedly "found" video footage depicting freaky supernatural events... it's Blair Witch 2! Indeed, writer/director Oren Peli has taken discount film-making to new extremes, using his own home in San Diego as his sole location, restricting the cast to five (I can't even remember the "Girl on Internet" mentioned in the cast list), and bringing the piece home for a ridiculous $15,000.Thanks to some cunning marketing, including special midnight screenings (so spooky!) and some viral internet action, Paranormal Activity's earnings have already breached Read more ...
theartsdesk
English National Opera's new production of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle is photographed here by Johan Persson. Directed by Daniel Kramer, designed by Giles Cadle and lit by Peter Mumford, it updates Charles Perrault's 1697 fairytale to a horrific modern reality. Clive Bayley and Michaela Martens sing Duke Bluebeard and Judith. See Ismene Brown's review.Click on an image to open full view of the portfolio.Josef Fritzl's houseBluebeard photographs feature Clive Bayley as Bluebeard, Michaela Martens as Judith, and actorsGustave Doré's 1862 engraving for Charles Perrault's Les Contes de Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the picture. Cases where men abduct girls and turn them into sex slaves and father multiple children by them, often incestuously, hiding them in garages, basements, behind walls, sometimes for decades undiscovered, sometimes murdering them. Mostly you read that it happened, you shudder, and try not to think more about it. Impossible if you go to ENO’s Read more ...
anne.billson
Blame it on the bloody menarche. The combination of schoolgirls and horror is so intoxicating it's a wonder there haven't been more films like Carrie, Suspiria or Ginger Snaps to exploit that tricky adolescent surge of oestrogen. So I'm sorry to disappoint you, but Jennifer's Body isn't worthy to be set alongside The Craft, let alone any of the aforementioned titles. It has all the ingredients for guilty pleasure - cheerleader transformed into man-eating succubus, high-school students played by actresses in their mid-twenties, girl-on-girl snogging, indie rock musicians who've sold their Read more ...