horror
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 ...
Nick Hasted
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.We are in the early days of VCRs, clandestine cable networks and easily transmitted, contraband imagery. Max Renn (James Woods) is on the hunt for filth to get ratings for his low-budget channel, and is passed a sadomasochist snuff tape. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is an unusually humane horror film, made more chilling by its warmth towards its characters. After a brief prologue of inexplicable, bone-snapping terror, it lets us live quietly for some time with 19-year-old heroine Jay (Maika Monroe, perfectly natural and poised for stardom), till her naive visions of a date with a sexy city boy end with her drugged, bound, and cursed to be followed by an implacable, shape-shifting thing only she can see.Writer-director David Robert Mitchell was inspired by a recurring nightmare, and his monster moves and morphs like a bad dream. Whether taking the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Christopher Lee died this week, aged 93. It’s strange that an actor best known for horror films, for characters that were fiendish and diabolical, should be so cherished a part of the British cultural landscape. That fact speaks volumes for the charisma and charm, as well as craft of Lee’s performances, and for the intelligence, grace and wit of the man in person.He made his name in horror films – first as a terrifying monster to Peter Cushing’s Dr Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein, then more elegantly as one of cinema’s definitive Draculas in 1957’s Horror of Dracula, returning to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.The setting is Bad City, somewhere in Iran. Arash ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Retrospectively, two things help The Blob stand apart from the glut of late-Fifties aliens-invade-small-town-America science fiction films. It gave Steve McQueen his first starring role and its theme tune was an early Burt Bacharach co-write. Either of these – or even both together – are probably not enough to make the 1958 regional independent production into a classic piece of American cinema. But it is pretty good.Somewhere in Pennsylvania a courting couple – the male half of which is McQueen, playing “Steve” – are smooching in an open-top car. Coming back from their close encounter they Read more ...
Simon Munk
Should games be challenging? One of the perennial design challenges of videogames. Make a game too tough and you'll put people off; make it too easy and you'll offer no interest. And then there's the tricky issue of individuals having vastly different play styles and abilities.Bloodborne and its predecessors Dark Souls and Demon's Souls offer no sliding scale of player-set difficulty and, while you're at it, little in the way of mercy. I absolutely loathed the Souls games – for making me feel rubbish as a gamer, for making me die over and over, for offering no incentive, no easy way in, no Read more ...