horror
Ismene Brown
Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. Last night’s opening of the Royal Opera’s revival of its jaunty 2008 production fielded in a splendid cast a tremendous Witch, Jane Henschel, the Read more ...
neil.smith
It is not uncommon for opportunistic film-makers to put together a flashy promo in the hope it will attract enough investors to turn it into a full-length feature. When Robert Rodriguez made the Machete trailer for 2007 double-bill Grindhouse, though – an all-action spoof featuring striking bit-part actor Danny Trejo as its titular knife-wielding protagonist – he had no intention of taking this parodic in-joke any further.Watch the original Machete trailer:Three years on and countless fan entreaties later, Rodriguez has expanded that earlier gambit into a 104-minute opus whose “strong bloody Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You’re casting a deputy sheriff from Kentucky who wakes from a coma to find the landscape littered with corpses and overrun by flesh-eating zombies, so who do you call? Well obviously Andrew Lincoln, the irritatingly drippy English actor from Teachers and This Life. But it’s amazing the difference a reasonably plausible Southern accent and a hunk of iron from Smith & Wesson can make.Right from the opening of this pilot episode of director Frank Darabont’s ghastly horror saga, Rick Grimes (Lincoln’s character) was shooting zombies point-blank through the head or coolly battering them to a Read more ...
anne.billson
By the standards of contemporary horror movies, Let Me In has several things going for it. It isn't about somebody being tortured to death, its leading characters aren't played by the usual vapid twentysomething actors pretending to be high-school students, and, by and large, it eschews some of the more tedious horror fads of our time, such as herky-jerky editing, or big "Boo!" musical cues designed to make you jump. Unfortunately, the Swedish film of which it's a remake - Let the Right One In - is one of the finest horror movies of the past 30 years, maybe even one of the best vampire movies Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Landis will always be loved for writing and directing An American Werewolf in London (1981), the definitive horror-comedy. That - and The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places - was reason enough for Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis to agree to star as 19th-century grave-robbers Burke and Hare in Landis’s first feature for 12 years. Pegg’s Spaced co-star Jessica Hynes (playing Hare’s slatternly wife), Sir Christopher Lee, Stephen Merchant and Ronnie Corbett are also among those queuing to work with the legendarily affable and energetic director. Burke and Hare won’t, sadly, recruit future Read more ...
howard.male
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.With Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” throbbing away in Read more ...
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 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 ...