The age of streaming is the age of convenience. Everything you fancy watching is available at the press of a button, all wrapped up in a much more affordable price than buying or renting individual films. But with the rise of streaming, we audiences have lost something beautiful – bonus […]
From the Festivals
Buffet Infinity (II) (Panic Fest 2026)
It’s a beautiful day in Westridge County. The sun is shining, the birds are behaving strangely, the local fringe religious movement are advertising their upcoming book fair, and a large sinkhole has opened up in the car park outside everyone’s favourite new spot to eat… Buffet Infinity! Offering a seemingly […]
Pitfall (Panic Fest 2026)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: James Kondelik’s Pitfall is a slasher set in the woods – which maybe needs a little more context because “slasher‑in‑the‑woods” is one of the alpha tropes of horror. It’s a stereotype that’s so baked‑in it reads like a joke, but the spoiler […]
The Burning of Broken Beak (Panic Fest 2026)
One of the first things I do when a film festival drops its programme is scan the catalogue for the titles that leap off the page, which is almost like picking goofy horse names for the Grand National – sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. For Missouri’s Panic Fest, […]
The Plan (Slamdance Film Festival 2026)
Sometimes, friends are exactly what you don’t need. For every smidgeon of love and support, there’s a wave of loyalty and peer pressure that comes with it, taking a bad thought and turning it into a frightening reality. A very 2020s version of that precise tension is found in Jessica […]
Experimental Shorts (Slamdance 2026)
An annual series of notes from underground, the Slamdance Film Festival’s experimental shorts strand is a reliably good weathervane of where the cutting edge of cinema is. Perhaps none of the directors assembled here will be the future of cinema in the sense of winning Oscars, being hired by Disney, […]
Violence (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Movie titles have long fascinated me as beyond the first-impression factor, they’re the most immediate point of marketing, and a good title hints at what’s to come. One of the films playing at this year’s Glasgow FrightFest is Connor Marsden’s Violence, and at first glance the name suggests slasher one-upmanship […]
BRB (Slamdance 2026)
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. When Bob Clark made A Christmas Story, he could afford to hinge whole subplots on the Little Orphan Annie radio show or leg-shaped novelty table lamps, safe in the knowledge that these items of retro kitsch had no further market value. Nobody was […]
The Convenience Store (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
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 […]
The Restoration at Grayson Manor (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Eighteen years after he brought body-snatcher horror back from the grave with his cult anthology favourite I Sell the Dead (2008), and fourteen years since he updated the summer-camp slasher for the found-footage era with his segment in the original V/H/S (2012), Irish filmmaker Glenn McQuaid has returned to reinvigorate […]