Frogman Returns joins a select group of horror sequels that improves on its predecessor, even reckoning on the original’s barking mad hypnosis-impregnation final act. Cousins’ second entry in the Frogman series, however, takes the formula in a welcome new direction, with significantly better effects, a media satire subplot and some […]
Ethan Lyon
Ghost in the Cell (Frightfest 2026)
Perhaps it’s a marker of my strange sense of humour but I found my funny bone thoroughly tickled by Joko Anwar’s splatter-comedy Ghost in the Cell, where a ghost dismembers prisoners and turns them into grizzly art exhibits that nevertheless amaze in their ingenuity. Think of Smile 2 but directed […]
The Mortuary Assistant (2026) A Horror Game’s Logic Trapped in a Linear Film
2026 has seen one of those significant changes in horror taste that comes around every few years, but it’s not simply thematic as we’re being asked to reconsider what we know about horror narratives. The impetus for this change are the IPs that have recently been adapted from other media, […]
The Devil’s Hand (1943): A dark wartime parable
When France was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944 all aspects of life were affected, and cinema was no exception as the Germans set up Continental Films to provide the French populace with an escape from the horrors of real life. Most of films made were harmless escapism, […]
Libido (1965) Argento may be The Artist, but Gastaldi is The Man
Giallo is known by its directors – Fulci, Bava, Argento, maybe Sergio Martino if you do some digging, but someone just as important is screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. Active for nearly thirty years in Italian cinema, he penned the scripts for some of the most iconic gialli, his many credits including […]
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Imagine Film Fest 2025)
You can’t move for nostalgia in the cinema today. People go to the movies to escape into the reassuring, and studios are only too happy to supply them with cinematic safety blankets made from IPs of old, the comic book hero, the remake, the TV reboot. But for those of […]
Daughters of Darkness (1971) Beautiful Euro-Horror with a rich fantastique symbolism
Daughters of Darkness is forever associated with Mark Gatiss’s exceptional 2012 documentary Horror Europa – say what you will about his lacklustre attempts to keep A Ghost Story for Christmas alive. The programmes he made in the early 2010s about the history of cinematic horror are essential viewing for anyone […]
Take From Me (2025) Solemn Indie Horror Full of Promise & Heart
At one point during Take From Me, the enigmatic Elizabeth asks our dishevelled lead John “Are you addicted to death?” Horror and addiction have been bedfellows since the genre turned reflexive in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps the greatest of these is Ferrara’s The Addiction, a uniquely personal take on […]
The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (Frightfest 2025)
Andy Milligan was my cinematic find of 2024. I went into Seeds blind, knowing only that I had been asked to talk about it for the Calibre 9 From Outer Space podcast. What I discovered was the work of a real artist. Certainly, the dialogue sounded like it was recorded […]
32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) Challenges the Grand Tradition of the Biopic
How should a biopic go about expressing a person’s life: from cradle to grave, or a hop skip and a jump through chronology for what feels most relevant to the subject? 2023 offered us Maestro and Oppenheimer – two films that portrayed the lives of two titanic figures of 20th […]