paranormal
alexandra.coghlan
A good ghost story never ends. Its twirling impetus sets a narrative top in motion that continues to spin indefinitely in the mind, propelled by the force of a listener’s imagination. As good ghost stories go, The Woman in Black is among the most insidious, having reduced audiences of metropolitan adults to whimpering, night-light clutching infants since 1987. With a young pretender – Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories – now installed in the West End, it seems a good time to return to this dusty fixture of London theatre, and discover whether the sunken-eyed, white-faced woman in Read more ...
anne.billson
It's the eternal human-vampire-werewolf triangle, and at times it feels as though it really will go on for ever and ever. The story so far: in the small North-West Pacific town of Forks, where the sun hardly ever shines, a teenage girl called Bella loves Edward, a 100-year-old vampire who is perfect in every way, except of course that he drinks (non-human) blood, and has a tendency to sparkle on those rare occasions when the sun does come out. But, as we all know, girls like sparkly things, so that's OK.But hey, it's complicated, because Bella also loves Jacob, a Native American of the 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 ...
Graham Fuller
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a murdered 14-year-old who hovers in metaphysical limbo over her grieving family, was once to have been filmed by the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. On the evidence of Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, her take on Sebold’s novel would have been a moodily lyrical but deadpan reverie that wouldn’t have skirted its engagement with evil. When Ramsay’s involvement ended, the project was inherited by Peter Jackson, who for all his spectacular CGI work on The Lord of the Rings knew when to leaven Tolkien’s epic saga with restraint and Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Family been bickering over games again this Christmas? Take the blighters to this fabulous supernatural melodrama and they'll learn soon enough what happens to a dirty card cheat. Long unavailable, Thorold Dickinson's 1949 adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's eerie short story, wherein a penniless Russian officer and crusty beldame sell their souls for the secret of winning at a simple game of chance, will be released on DVD, not before time, on 18 January. Meanwhile, it opens today for a short run in cinemas where its baroque imagery and outsize performances, from Anton Walbrook and Dame Edith Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The recent low-budget hit Paranormal Activity has been laughably hailed by delusional critics as “the most frightening movie ever made”, but it barely scrapes the foothills of the hair-raising ghastliness depicted in The Exorcist. William Friedkin’s demonic-possession shocker was released in 1973, but even today you wouldn’t want to watch it without keeping a large brandy and the off switch within easy reach. This documentary in 5's series The True Story, which tries to find rational explanations for movies, sought to explore the real-life story that the movie, and prior to that William Peter Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The best thing in Paradox so far has been the enormous explosion that provided the climax to episode one, as a train stranded on a railway bridge was incinerated by an erupting chemical tanker. A dramatic aerial shot captured an angry pillar of smoke and flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air, against a backdrop of lush Lancashire countryside.But some fine camerawork aside, this new “high-concept, high-octane investigative drama” is caught between being a conventional domestic police show and a boundary-stretching trip into the paranormal. Baffled by its own premise, it seems to have Read more ...
anne.billson
They're back! Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (otherwise known as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) are once again smooching on a screen near you. I turned up one hour early for a showing of the new Twilight movie, and the damn thing was already sold out. Which suggests the film will do every bit as well as, if not better than, its predecessor, which made $383 million worldwide.Look on the bright side - maybe this will persuade studio executives they don't need to aim every single movie at adolescent males. The adolescent female market can be every bit as lucrative. What do young women want Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Filmed in the same Thamesmead locations in south-east London as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Misfits also features a gang of young trouble-makers in boiler suits. Unlike Alex and his Droogs, who face the fearsome "Ludovico" aversion therapy (after which thinking about violence, or hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, triggers nausea), this bunch are on a fairly slack community service gig. They paint benches between spliffs and indulging in the sort of banter you’d find on any Facebook page not being monitored by the grown-ups.That all changes when a massive electrical storm gives Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is first and foremost a psychological horror. And psychological horrors are all about rocking the mental boat. Capsizing the mental boat. Sinking the mental boat. David McVicar’s production of The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera does not rock the mental boat. He doesn't rock any boat. I'm not sure McVicar is in a boat. He plays the work so supremely safe, so PG-safe, so two-condom safe, that I feel McVicar is nowhere near a boat; I imagine him on dry land, in a deck chair sipping a piña colada, flicking through his Key Stage 1 on Read more ...