paranormal
Owen Richards
As if the real world wasn’t scary enough... Ghost stories are en vogue at the moment, and after the BBC’s hit-and-miss Requiem, Channel 4 brings True Horror to the small screen – a collection of "real" ghost stories, told by witness interviews and dramatised with a decent budget. And just like Requiem, our first tale took us to the rolling hills of Wales.Wales, according to the wide-eyed Pastor Matt Tricker, is a land of old gods and occultists – a description which doesn’t match my Cardiff suburban upbringing, but who knows what happened behind closed doors? The Rich family certainly could Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering the coal-dark nature of her music, it was unsurprising Sweden's Anna von Hausswolff was dressed entirely in black while meeting up at London’s Rough Trade East shop to talk about her new album Dead Magic. Less foreseeable was her sunny disposition and willingness to veer off topic. She happily explored what has brought her to this point and spoke enthusiastically about her inspirations. Whatever was discussed, the overriding impression was of a cheerful but nonetheless serious-minded person who puts a lot of thought into their music.Dead Magic (pictured below) is the Gothenburg- Read more ...
Owen Richards
As we reach December, the year of Stephen King comes to a close with this 4K Blu-ray restoration of his very first film adaptation: Carrie. It was the first major success for Brian De Palma, Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, but how does the original high school horror hold up in the 21st century?Carrie is a strange beast – half satiric high school comedy, half intense psycho-horror. It shouldn’t work; how can film jump from domestic abuse to Benny Hill-style tuxedo shopping? But under the visionary eye of De Palma, both halves form a coherent and fulfilling whole.What dates the film most is Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Another year, another new full-length story ballet from one of the Royal Ballet's in-house choreographers. Time was – a long time, in fact, up to 2011 – when that would have sounded like science fiction, but no longer: Liam Scarlett, whose Frankenstein premiered last night at the Opera House, is treading a path worn smooth in the past five years by Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor and Carlos Acosta.All have played to type in some respects: Wheeldon with pretty, fantasy spectacles (The Winter's Tale, Alice), Acosta with hispanophone classics (Carmen, Don Quixote), and McGregor Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This is Susan Hiller’s first exhibition since her Tate retrospective in 2011, and as it includes work from the 1970s to the present, it can also be seen as a retrospective of sorts. But since the selection was obviously governed by what was available for sale, it inevitably offers a piecemeal view of her achievements.Nor can I do full justice to the work, which is complex and multi-layered, so I’ll concentrate on one aspect – the importance of unorthodox views and marginal voices (especially those of women who have been silenced for centuries) that challenge the hegemony of received opinion Read more ...
David Nice
Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to retirement age.Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure. Daring to upstage her in a final speech is manager Barry Humphries, still with his hand in the till while Edna gives all for her art Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Things go bump in the night in James Wan's chilling latest, based on a supposedly true story. The Conjuring is an event horror movie, benefitting from a sizeable marketing budget and the distribution of a major studio (Warner Bros); appropriately enough it simply screams to be seen. And those looking for a touch of class to elevate their frights will find it heartening to hear that there's a leading role for Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga.Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston play Carolyn and Roger Perron, the parents of five “spirited” girls. The year is 1971 and the family have moved into an old, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Uri Geller was famous once. Superstar, rock’n’roll famous, and though this is now hard to believe, kind of cool. He hung out with John Lennon, who gave him a thing that resembles a gold-plated egg and that was, Lennon told him, a gift from a friendly alien. What’s more, he was the darling of the chat show circuit – no, not those crank channels where psychic readings are available when you phone in with your credit card details, but ones hosted by David Dimbleby. But what’s really amazing is that no one one laughed at him, as they later did David Icke for being several spoons short of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The eminence grise behind Touch is Tim Kring, who also devised Heroes, and it shows. Heroes was about a network of people with paranormal or superhuman powers, and so is Touch. In this case, we find ourselves in a universe which is underpinned by numerical patterns and mathematical probabilities. Only a select handful of humans can discern this astounding cosmic architecture and join the astral dots, one of them being Jacob "Jake" Bohm.Jake is the 11-year-old son of single father Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland), a former ace newspaperman now struggling to bring up a boy who has never spoken a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Glyndebourne’s production of Benjamin Britten’s terrifying The Turn of the Screw is one that really does turn the screw tightly in the mind. It pierces time with its updating from its original Victorian setting to a bleak Fifties Britain, it tightens the tension with its wintry, claustrophic setting, and it delivers its questions into our suspicious, information-saturated modern heads with added twists. Given a magnificent musical and dramatic ensemble to interpret it in this revival, it's an evocative way for Glyndebourne to end this tense, unpredictable summer, art gnawing away at the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Don’t Look Now really the best British film of all time? That’s how a panel of 150 industry experts voted earlier this year in a poll compiled by Time Out. But then, out of a list of 100 top British movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives came third, ahead of Brief Encounter (12) or anything by Hitchcock.Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural chiller no longer shocks with its infamous scene of explicit sex; and the scenes featuring the two spooky sisters remind us that Roeg’s interest in cinematography and clever editing seems often to outweigh his interest in getting the best out of his actors. But Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Derren Brown is witty, urbane, clever and a keen student of what makes humans tick - which must come as a huge advantage when you are developing an evening’s entertainment based on kidology. He makes it clear he’s not a psychic or clairvoyant and that there is a rational explanation for everything he does in his two and a half hours on stage, and indeed describes himself as “Illusionist, mentalist and sceptic” - I imagine emphasis is on the sceptic.Brown is kind enough to explain what he’s doing as he goes along, winkling out various audience members’ guiltiest secrets simply by reading their Read more ...