The Black Mass January 14th, 1978. While a mysterious man shaves, a warped voiceover explains how murderers have no identifiable features, which means that anybody in your life could be demonic. That chilling realisation lingers as the unnamed man (Andy Sykes), walks into a store intending to charm people, pick […]
From the Festivals
My Mother’s Eyes (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
For an entire generation of horror fans, the movies that came out of Japan around the turn of the millennium were crucial stopovers in our journey of cinematic discovery. They fell under the collective-yet-reductive umbrella of “J-Horror”, which had slowly burned out by the mid-’00s, but in 2023 the smouldering […]
To Fire You Come at Last (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
Throughout the English countryside, there are roads built for the dead. Very few of these paths still exist in any easily detectable way, with many of them now overgrown and forgotten to time, but there was a time when these “corpse roads” were a necessity for remote rural communities, marking […]
Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee & J-Horror Virus (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
The Frightfest line-up is often home to some exceptional documentaries that chronicle everything from cultural curios to cinematic movements. They act as a sort of cinematic sorbet from the fictional chills and thrills that surround them, and this year is no different with two strong examples being Enter the Clones […]
River (2023) Junta Yamaguchi with another ambitious time-twisting treat (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
Junta Yamaguchi is a filmmaker who loves repeating himself, which is understandable given that his feature film work so far has concerned itself with two-minute cycles and loops in time that infuriate and complicate in equal measure. It should be clear from the outset, however, that this is not necessarily […]
Raging Grace (Frightfest 2023): A Striking Genre Take on Immigration (Review)
In the last few years there have been a couple of interesting horror movies that focused on servitude like The Maid (2020), and Nanny (2022). Raging Grace continues this (hopefully growing), trend by following in Nanny’s footsteps and adding anxiety around immigration to the mix. The tale of an illegal […]
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 […]
Illusion (Review) (Kinoteka Festival 2023)
The spectre of a missing person creates a different type of distress than death, because not knowing is a unique form of anguish. While there may be grief over the strong possibility that the missing person is dead, this grief is hard to process when the lack of certainty adds […]
The Pawnshop (Kinoteka 2023 Review)
The great documentarian Molly Dineen once said her preferred subject was “anything British that’s dying”. Łukasz Kowalski’s debut film The Pawnshop, presented as part of the 2023 Kinoteka festival of Polish cinema, shows that this formula works for anything Polish as well. It’s set almost entirely within the four walls […]
The Perpetrators (BFI Flare 2023) bite-sized cinematic rumination on depictions of queerness and villainy (Review)
The Perpetrators is a ghost story. This is likely obvious to anybody familiar with the film’s concept, with its lead character being a pre-pubescent phantom, but beyond that, this 14-minute short is a tale of the collective ghosts of a queer past, ones which still continue to haunt the LGBTQ+ […]