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, […]
From the Festivals
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 […]
Red Riding (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
The opening of Red Riding, and indeed the first act, may raise certain expectations in the viewer. The title, as well as an anecdote from a character, suggests that you are in for a particular type of film with various visual cues supporting this expectation, including artwork, a scientific explanation […]
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 […]
Bone Keeper (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
For as long as humanity has walked the Earth, we have both feared and felt the allure of holes in the ground; the first humans lived in caves, and perhaps that is the reason why many crave the opportunity to return to the dark, confined openings in the earth that […]
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 […]
TEN WILL (Slamdance Film Festival 2026)
When is someone’s sentence truly over? The punishment often matches the crime, but what happens when the crime is so distasteful that any judicial ruling pales in comparison to what the world has in store when the accused is released? It’s a weighty, thorny topic, and nigh-on impossible to reckon […]