The prolific Jirô Nagae makes his UK debut at Glasgow’s FrightFest with his 38th film, The Convenience Store, hitting productivity numbers that rival peak-era Takashi Miike. Working almost exclusively within horror, it was inevitable that his work would eventually reach the UK’s hungry genre audience. Japanese konbini (the Japanese term […]
Rob Simpson
Chief Editor
Host of the Uncut Network. With a love of movies kicked off by Hong Kong Action and Claymation Monsters, Rob has forever been cradled in the bosom of Cinema. Rob has his hands in many a pie, including no budget film making. Filthy
Karmadonna (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Biases and expectations are inherently and exceedingly dumb, as they often prove to be, but they remain – no matter how much you’d like to beg to differ. A case in point from Glasgow’s iteration of FrightFest is Karmadonna, a Serbian thriller/horror directed by Aleksandar Radivojević. As a fan of […]
Jailbroken (Glasgow Frightfest 2026) World Premiere
Opening this year’s Glasgow FrightFest is the World Premiere of Vasily Chuprina’s directorial debut, Jailbroken, and while the opening movie of any festival is a statement of intent, here that statement is unusual. Instead of horror, we get a one-room thriller in the mould of Steven Knight’s Locke or Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth as […]
ELSE (2024) A Claustrophobic French Body Horror That Gets Under Your Skin
Not that it needs explaining, but there’s a marked difference between a traditional horror movie and one that deals in body horror. A traditional movie would feature an external threat hunting down our heroes, and although there are exceptions, it’s as close to a hard-and-fast rule as you are likely […]
Redux Redux (2025) Reclaiming the Multiverse, One Brutal Reality at a Time
After its UK screening at FrightFest 2025, I’ve long wanted to revisit Redux Redux, the follow-up to Kevin and Matthew McManus’s lo-fi horror The Block Island Sound. That movie felt like something a few friends could knock together in their local community — a modern regional horror piece pitched far […]
Jimmy & Stiggs (2024) The Messy, Mean, DIY Splatterfest Begos Was Born to Make
In returning to his roots with Jimmy & Stiggs, Joe Begos becomes a conflicting and truly beguiling filmmaker. As a fan of independent music and the punk ethos, a filmmaker who champions those ideals should be right up my street — and for his breakout Bliss (2019), he was. However, […]
The Strange Dark (2024) A Cosy Thriller Where The Twilight Zone Invades a Hallmark Movie
Whether in the age of Star Wars, The Avengers or something smaller, Sci-fi has always been overshadowed by spectacle, which is an odd state of play for a genre fundamentally concerned with ideas. Even if the likes of Star Trek reign supreme on small screens, yet even as spectacle dominates, […]
Sohome Horror 2025 Round Up: Featuring Mooch, Stinker & More…
We are wrapping up for 2025, but before we do, we have to conclude our coverage of one of our final festivals of the year—specifically its online sibling. Soho Horror has become one of the more respected British horror film festivals in recent years, forming a B-tier alongside Sheffield’s Celluloid […]
The Misadventures of Vince and Hick (Soho Horror 2025)
This may sound like a contradiction or beside the point, but personally, it’s the “palate cleansers” at a horror festival—the movies that stray from the fest’s titular genre—that mark it out as one to pay attention to. Some don’t offer those, whereas the good ones do. Soho Horror has long […]
Head Like a Hole (Sohome Horror 2025)
Slow cinema has a curious history. Once upon a time, it wasn’t even a thing; for a movie to be slow meant something was taking its time to evoke a world or character. Then the term “slow cinema” was invented, and it eventually became a lazy byword and strategy for […]