horror
Joseph Walsh
Starting life as a comic strip in 1938, The Addams Family seems to have reinvented itself for every generation. It’s the story of an odd-ball family from ‘The old country’ (where that is geographically located is by-the-by), who love the grim and gothic. Their outlandish ways were neatly juxtaposed against the wholesome values of American suburbia. The comic preached a message of acceptance which was rife with quirky and yes, kooky, humour. It’s a narrative construction that lends itself easily to being updated, without losing that original black magic. From its humble begins in the New Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There used to be this myth that we knew nothing about the concentration camps until the victors opened their gates in 1945, and that the survivors were then nursed back to health. The Russians put out newsreels filmed weeks later of nurses tending to the children of Auschwitz, but the reality was that many had already been marched by the Nazis in the final stages of the war to camps like Gross-Rosen in south western Poland. And often when they were liberated, those children became just more human flotsam in the displaced persons camps that scarred Poland and Germany for years after the war Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Equal measures class system satire and Scream or Saw genre knockoff, Ready or Not is entirely appalling, except perhaps to those forgiving hipsters in the crowd who will view its ineptitude as some deliberate "meta" statement all its own. Nonsensical on virtually every level and as badly acted as it is written and directed, this celluloid amalgam of comedy and horror wears its coolness on a distinctly blood-spattered sleeve: my sympathies go out to all involved. The fast-rising Australian actress-model Samara Weaving (pictured below) stars as the about-to-be-married Grace, who has Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just two years after It Chapter One became the most successful horror film ever made, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is once again giving the American town of Derry absolutely nothing to laugh about. But this time around it’s audiences who may feel unable to enjoy the irony of a killer clown. For Chapter Two feels like a pointless, nay horrific case of déjà vu. Andy Muschietti’s decision to divide his adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel into two – the first part dealing with the characters as children, the second with their adult selves – initially seemed a strong Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Guillermo del Toro considered directing this adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s bestselling campfire tales, and his sensibility can still be discerned in its kind sort of fantasy and concern with outsiders. He finally settled for producing, and turning Schwartz’s beloved, gory stories into incidents within a wider saga about the sort of American high school kids who read them, rather than an anthology film (a horror format with rotten box-office form).It’s Halloween, 1968, with Vietnam at its height, Nixon about to be elected, and "Season of the Witch" on the radio. The screenplay tries to tie a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This gothic yarn set in 1850s Snowdonia stars Maxine Peake as Elen. She’s left alone with two young daughters to manage an isolated farm when her husband goes off to war. Mysterious omens – a sheep’s heart filled with nails festoons the farm door – and ghostly shadows in the night all conspire to alarm her older daughter. Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) begins to doubt that her strict mother has the ability to keep her children safe, especially when Elen starts to have seizures. There’s no help from neighbours or the church and it becomes clear that the local slate mine owner is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Annabelle, the demonically-possessed doll now making its third appearance, makes its intentions clear pretty early here. Scarred by earlier misadventures so no sane child would want it, and sitting balefully in the back car-seat of married demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the latter pictured below), she is soon making vehicles crash and ghosts rise, in a vain effort to prevent her incarceration in the Warrens’ Artifact Room. This chamber of cursed curiosities sits at the heart of the suburban home they share with their young daughter, Judy (Mckenna Grace Read more ...
Owen Richards
It sometimes feels like an age between Stranger Things seasons. Blame Netflix. The binge-watching trend that it helped solidify means that most people consume all eight hours of content in a single weekend. It comes and goes in a flash. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a disposable snack, the TV equivalent of those famous Eggo pancakes. Stranger Things 3 is blockbuster television, full of the laughs, jumps and exaggerated nostalgia that made it such a hit in 2016.After a mixed-bag second season, creators The Duffer Brothers have returned to their winning formula. Gone are the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.Think of your worst romantic relationship, the one that churned you up inside and left you a sobbing mess for months. This is the territory that Aster mines in his latest work. Florence Pugh plays Dani, a post-grad student whose life is split between worrying about her suicidal, bipolar sister, and her relationship with Christian Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road cost $15.9 million. It also happens to be the site of a now-demolished pink-washed house owned by drug lord Pablo Escobar until his killing in 1993. Reputedly, the Colombian cocaine king stashed treasure in secret hidey-holes here, as at his other properties. When the wreckers came in 2016, they found two well-hidden safes – one of them later stolen. All true. On this terrain of bizarre Read more ...
graham.rickson
Life in rural 19th century Estonia looks hard. The ice and the squalor are tough enough, but then you’ve the kratts to contend with. We see one in the eye-popping opening sequence of Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 epic November, an unsettling creature cobbled from bits of wood, random tools and an animal skull. Resembling something thrown together by the Brothers Quay, this one’s on a mission, capturing a terrified cow and taking flight like a steampunk drone. In Estonian folklore, kratts can be given life if you offer three drops of blood to the Devil; the snag being that he now owns your soul.This is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Isabelle Huppert is famed for the chilly intensity of many of her performances, and a willingness to mine all manner of darkness and perversity – her recent, award-laden turn in Elle being a good example. So it’s surprising how rarely she’s played unequivocal villains. But now, 24 years after her shotgun-wielding psycho postmistress in La Cérémonie, the French legend is again letting her hair down. Greta teams her with Neil Jordan, the Irish writer-director whose career has been defined by outstanding Troubles dramas (The Crying Game) and fantasy horror ( Read more ...