The title character of Mark H. Rapaport’s debut film, played by the film’s co-writer Kimball Farley, is an amateur film-maker who, quoting Nikola Tesla, promises his audience “man-made horrors beyond your comprehension” – and the Soho Horror Festival seem to have agreed by hosting the film’s UK premiere. It’s no […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Lost in the Night (2023): the environmental thriller too pulpy for Cannes? (Review)
Barcelona-born Mexican director Amat Escalante made his name internationally when he won Best Director at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for Heli – a slow, unflinching film that posited cartel violence and police brutality becoming mutually supportive forces. It drew plaudits, but also some accusations of feeding into American preconceptions […]
Door / Door 2 (1988/1991): the high art of gut-level sleaze (Review)
What kind of films would be produced by a production house called the Directors Company? In a Western context, you could hazard a guess: serious-minded auteur films, unblemished by the crudities of genre, devoted to an artist’s personal vision. The Directors Company that existed in Japan from 1982 to 1992 […]
8 Found Dead (2022) Crime Thriller Playing ‘Guess the Sub-Genre’ (Review)
For all screenwriters moan about how mobile phones and social media have made certain traditional thriller plots obsolete, the internet has also opened up new possibilities for suspense cinema. For example, future books about horror subgenres will have to include a section on “AirBnB horror”, as recent films like Barbarian, […]
It Lives Inside (2023): comfortingly uncomfortable horror with a twist (Review)
Spare a thought for the horror pseuds, folks like me who live to make strained sociopolitical interpretations of horror trends. The 21st century started off well for us, with the zombie revival and the torture wave mapping neatly onto post-9/11 anxieties. Why, though, is everything about exorcisms and possession all […]
Interrogation (1982): merciless, Kafkaesque, a two-hour pressure cooker (Blu-Ray Review)
There aren’t many home media releases where a highlight of the additional features is the transcript of a government meeting. But then, there aren’t many films with a history like Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation, released on Blu-Ray by Second Run. Second Run have previously released this film on DVD, but that […]
Apocalypse Clown (2023): David Earl leads a circus at the end of the world (Review)
It’s been a rough decade for clowns, with everything from the re-emergence of Pennywise to the wave of 2016 real-life clown sightings tarnishing the image of these floppy-shoed circus mainstays. The nearest thing to a sympathetic clown in popular culture has been Joaquin Phoenix’s reading of The Joker, and yet […]
Transmission (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
The “lost media” trope, a centrally important one in online horror fiction, seems to have had its old-media coming-out party this year, with lost episodes and unfinished films turning up in everything from Boots Riley’s Amazon Prime series I’m a Virgo to Graham Hughes’s new film Hostile Dimensions (also showing at FrightFest 2023). Now […]
Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow (FrightFest 2023) (Review)
Jake West’s new documentary, Mancunian Man, opens with a quote from its subject, the late director, actor, bouncer and bodybuilder Cliff Twemlow: “It is far better to be a resident on the brink of hell than spend a whole life in pursuit of a mythical heaven“. Which is an odd […]
Hostile Dimensions & HERD (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
HOSTILE DIMENSIONS After Death of a Vlogger, Graham Hughes takes another stab at making a distinctly modern found-footage film, and it begins with what you might call a Blair Witch speedrun. A pair of documentarians exploring a derelict house find something uncanny and disappear without a trace. It’s then revealed […]