horror
graham.rickson
Finnish horror is a niche genre if ever there was one. Erik Blomberg’s directorial debut The White Reindeer is a seminal example, a beguiling, unsettling little film that’s two parts local colour to one part metaphysical thriller. Blomberg cut his teeth making documentaries (one of which is included as an extra in Eureka’s reissue) and if you’re curious to know about rural folk culture in 1950s Lapland, start here. Though set in what was then the present day, you sense that we’re watching a way of life that hasn’t changed in centuries. That Blomberg used a mostly non-professional cast and a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This might just be the most challenging film review I’ve had to write in decades. The best thing would be to go and see Border knowing nothing more than that it won the prize for most innovative film at Cannes. Don't watch the trailer, and definitely don’t read those lazy reviewers who complete their word count by writing a detailed synopsis ruining every reveal and plot twist. Border is simply brilliant and best seen clean, although a duty of care means that viewers of a delicate disposition are warned that there’s a significant amount of body horror on screen. Fans of David Cronenberg, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mothers’ fears for and of their children are primal horror material: The Babadook and Under the Shadow set recent standards for exploring its emotional terror. Lee Cronin’s debut, The Hole in the Ground, has similarly profound subtexts in mind, and more fine actors as his mother and boy. The razor’s edge of ambiguity in The Babadook in particular, the nervous uncertainty of what is happening and who should be feared, is, though, less sharp.When Sarah (Seána Kerslake) brings her 8-year-old son Chris (James Quinn Markey) to a big, badly lit house on the edge of an Irish forest borrowed from the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ghosts of previous B-movies flit through this low-budget lesbian vampire flick. Part Hammer horror, J-horror, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, it is ultimately about a young woman in a very large house full of unpleasant people out for her blood. Director/co-writer Iain Ross-McNamee’s suggestion of a Brexit metaphor may not be wholly far-fetched, as we busily rip ourselves apart in a frenzy of auto-cannibalism. At least the cast here look good doing it.The titular crucible is used in a black-and-white, English Civil War-set prologue to keep a female vampire’s undead flesh alive, till Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Sitting somewhere between Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Final Destination, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a satirical supernatural thriller that goes for the jugular of the LA art scene.We open at the Art Basel Miami Beach, where art snobs with fat wallets glide from room to room with glazed eyes as they gaze at the objet d'art. There's a talking robot exhibit Hobo Man, and a giant polished silver orb pocked with holes you can stick your arm into - what it does it mean? No one cares much, it’s about how much it’s worth. It’s all incredibly pointed and fun, with Gilroy showing up the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The first Suspiria was a sensation, and spectacularly, monomaniacally new. Its young heroine Susie Bannon’s ride from an innately hostile airport through eldritch woods in which a panicked girl ran from her destination, the Markos Academy of Dance, as Goblin’s rock score gibbered and pounded at the senses, was hysterical, relentless film-making. In 1977, Dario Argento had daubed the giallo thriller tradition lurid red, offering ultimate horror.Luca Guadagnino will not be rushed. His Suspiria is long, slow, sometimes torpid and diffuse. His 1977 is a resonant historical period, in which winter Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The trailer for Overlord promises havoc, horror, evil, madness, terror and rage, and to be fair it delivers on most of those. From the fantasy factory of producer JJ Abrams, it’s the ghastly story of an alternative D-Day, in which American paratroopers drop into Normandy only to discover that the Nazis are working on appalling Frankenstein-esque experiments to bring about their “thousand-year Reich”.This isn’t a mega-budget film, but thanks to some ingenious special effects and computerised assistance, it roars out of the screen like a monster truck on a Jack Daniel’s bender. One of the most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not to be confused with Nineties supernatural sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Netflix’s new incarnation of the high-schooler with infernal powers is a ghoulish thrill-ride which boldly surfs the dark side, with a pronounced feminist and gay slant. It’s the story of the titular Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka, who played Don and Betty Draper’s daughter Sally in Mad Men) as she struggles to reconcile the half of her which is a human teenager with the supernatural lineage of her warlock father Edward.As her 16th birthday looms, Sabrina prepares for her “dark baptism”, when she must sign Read more ...
David Kettle
Matthew Holness clearly knows a thing or two about low-budget British horror from the early 1970s. In TV comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace he was as merciless as he was affectionate in ripping the genre apart. His debut feature as writer-director is an odd, woozy creation that pays just as overt homage, but Possum is in another tonal world altogether – one that’s brooding, clammy and unremittingly grim.Former children’s entertainer Philip – disgraced, though we’re left to guess precisely how – makes a physical and psychological return to the charred, crooked remains of his boyhood home, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Watching Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum, you’d be forgiven in thinking he was a tortured soul. Lead character Phillip (played by Sean Harris, pictured below) is a lean marionette of a man, prone to horrific flights of fantasy involving a human-headed spider puppet. Nauseating sequences are punctuated by the unmistakable drones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, while the significance of a local kidnapping begins to seep into Phillip’s life.In person, whatever dark shades Matthew Holness has are well hidden. As charming as he is self-effacing, he speaks passionately about crafting a film Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a man seeking love and fortune via a bloodthirsty plant. This revelatory revival from Maria Aberg embraces the work’s B-movie dichotomy: equal parts dark, gory fable and riotous carnival of delights.Orphaned Seymour (Marc Antolin) is nerdy assistant to the Skid Row florist who took him in as a child. He pines after colleague Audrey (Jemima Rooper, Read more ...
David Nice
Opera and music theatre have set the birds shrilling in Regent's Park before in the shape of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess – a very forgettable production – and Sondheim's Into the Woods – much better, and a score which can give any 20th century opera a run for its money in terms of thematic interconnection. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been the obvious candidate; its earlier, tauter, smaller-scale companion-piece in terms of a very English haunting, The Turn of the Screw, was the more problematic choice for the Open Air Theatre's first collaboration with English National Opera Read more ...