horror
gerard.gilbert
Call me a grumpy old man if you like, but on an average week it can be hard to see the point of BBC Three - unless the point is for an overly expansionist state broadcaster to patronise the nation’s youth as a generation of weight- and Wag-obsessed delinquents with an unhealthy taste for autism and Asperger’s. But then on rare good weeks – or perhaps even years - along comes an original show like Little Britain, Being Human or Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts which suggest that maybe, just maybe, all that investment has been worthwhile. Pulse, the pilot for a potential new hospital horror series, 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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Low-budget horror movie, comprising supposedly "found" video footage depicting freaky supernatural events... it's Blair Witch 2! Indeed, writer/director Oren Peli has taken discount film-making to new extremes, using his own home in San Diego as his sole location, restricting the cast to five (I can't even remember the "Girl on Internet" mentioned in the cast list), and bringing the piece home for a ridiculous $15,000.Thanks to some cunning marketing, including special midnight screenings (so spooky!) and some viral internet action, Paranormal Activity's earnings have already breached Read more ...
theartsdesk
English National Opera's new production of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle is photographed here by Johan Persson. Directed by Daniel Kramer, designed by Giles Cadle and lit by Peter Mumford, it updates Charles Perrault's 1697 fairytale to a horrific modern reality. Clive Bayley and Michaela Martens sing Duke Bluebeard and Judith. See Ismene Brown's review.Click on an image to open full view of the portfolio.Josef Fritzl's houseBluebeard photographs feature Clive Bayley as Bluebeard, Michaela Martens as Judith, and actorsGustave Doré's 1862 engraving for Charles Perrault's Les Contes de Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the picture. Cases where men abduct girls and turn them into sex slaves and father multiple children by them, often incestuously, hiding them in garages, basements, behind walls, sometimes for decades undiscovered, sometimes murdering them. Mostly you read that it happened, you shudder, and try not to think more about it. Impossible if you go to ENO’s Read more ...
anne.billson
Blame it on the bloody menarche. The combination of schoolgirls and horror is so intoxicating it's a wonder there haven't been more films like Carrie, Suspiria or Ginger Snaps to exploit that tricky adolescent surge of oestrogen. So I'm sorry to disappoint you, but Jennifer's Body isn't worthy to be set alongside The Craft, let alone any of the aforementioned titles. It has all the ingredients for guilty pleasure - cheerleader transformed into man-eating succubus, high-school students played by actresses in their mid-twenties, girl-on-girl snogging, indie rock musicians who've sold their Read more ...
sheila.johnston
There has been robust debate on the internet over whether Colin could, in fact, have been made for such a small sum - it makes the forthcoming chiller Paranormal Activity, made for $10,000 and now a huge box-office hit in the US thanks to a vigorous viral marketing campaign (it opens in the UK on 27 November), look like a megabudget blockbuster.Clearly it wouldn't be possible to make even such a modest film as Colin for £45 without calling in an awful lot of favours. (The first-time director, Marc Price, told me his cast of dozens had to bring their own packed lunches, while his make-up Read more ...
anne.billson
Just when you thought vampires had lost their bite, along comes Korean director Park Chan-wook with Thirst. It's a loose adaptation of Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin in which the adulterous lovers also happen to be drinkers of blood. They suck, they fuck and they kill, and, in the event of a vampire death-match, they would surely make mincemeat out of a toothless teen idol like Edward Cullen. Twilight this is not.The leading man is Song Kang-ho, one of the better-known Korean actors in the West thanks to his enjoyably broad performances in The Host and The Good, The Bad, The Weird (in which, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Caught in a crossfire between licence-payers and rival media groups, the BBC has reached the frankly surreal conclusion that the answer is to cut down on imported programmes. Luckily Harper's Island (BBC3) has snuck in under the wire.A fiendishly slick 13-parter acquired from CBS in the States, Harper's whisks us off to the eponymous location (situated offshore from Seattle amid dreamily-shot Washington State scenery) where wedding guests are gathering for the nuptials of wealthy Trish Wellington and earthy regular guy Henry Dunn. Trish's dad (Richard Burgi from 24 and Desperate Housewives) Read more ...