Calibre is a brilliant Scottish thriller released in 2018 and directed and written by Matt Palmer, who has previously made two short horror films, The Gas Man (2014) and Island (2007). The film features two late-twenty-something men, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) who head from Edinburgh up into the Highlands to hunt, an […]
From what I’d read before going in to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), I was expecting a portrait of the deep and lasting effects of grief and trauma. The film chooses to ignore all the sequels to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and picks up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) many years later, […]
The first three seasons of Syfy’s Channel Zero found clever ways to combine fears that veered closer to traditional horror film iconography with those based in the existential and emotional. Indeed, the show’s ability to do just that is certainly a part of why it is arguably the best horror show currently on television. While […]
It’s well over halfway through the year and claims about the best horror films of 2018 are gaining more legitimacy, so I feel on firm ground when I say that Michael Tully’s Irish horror film Don’t Leave Home will be in my top ten this year. It is directed and written by Tully, shot on location […]
Clive Tonge is from Northern England and has devoted his life to working in the film industry. While he has directed a couple of shorts, including the horror film “Sunday Best” (2011), Mara is his first feature film. Written by Jonathan Frank, Mara follows a criminal psychologist, Dr. Kate Fuller (Olga Kurylenko), as she arrives […]
Those seeking to replicate the random strangeness of television by ‘googling’ bizarre keywords may be afflicted by a sense of emptiness. This is because excess brings eternal hunger rather than satiation where there is always something darker, more obscene and twisted waiting for the right hashtag to emerge. One may eventually realize that even though […]
Our House is the feature-length directorial debut of Anthony Scott Burns, who also directed the excellent “Father’s Day” segment of Holidays (2016), reviewed here. Nathan Parker wrote the screenplay, based on a 2010 film, Ghost from the Machine, written by Matt Osterman. Our House is set in a time that evokes the 80s (there’s an […]
Given my tepid at best reaction to the original Unfriended (2014) and my overall disinterest in most found footage films, I went into Unfriended: Dark Web just hoping not to fall asleep. What I got instead was a fascinating reinterpretation of the home invasion conceit fueled by an intriguing premise that I hope more modern […]
For as much as I enjoy so-called “prestige horror” such as The Invitation (2015), Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018), there is something to be said for the value of what I call “popcorn horror,” those movies that eschew all nuance for explicit depictions of carnage and social commentary. And if there is one horror […]