The Lord of Misrule is the latest horror film from William Brent Bell, who has previously directed 2016’s The Boy and Orphan: First Kill (2022), among others. The Lord of Misrule is firmly in the folk horror tradition and, as a huge folk horror fan, I had been excitedly anticipating its release. Unfortunately, I was […]
Initial reviews suggest that Kenneth Branagh’s new Hercule Poirot adaptation, A Haunting in Venice (2023), has little in common with the Agatha Christie novel on which it is supposedly based. While Hallowe’en Party (1969) is set in a small English village, A Haunting in Venice is set in, well, Venice. The latter apparently centers a […]
The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery, 2023) was released in April to much fanfare and has just recently landed on Netflix. While it performed well enough at the box office, it failed to wow the critics. It certainly didn’t rise to the level of The Exorcist (1973). In fact, the many possession/exorcism movies that have appeared since William Friedkin’s masterpiece have […]
Beau Is Afraid seems like something other than a horror movie. It’s nightmare-ish at times but simultaneously absurd and rarely (if ever) scary. It includes some bodily destruction or exaggeration, but these moments are brief or bizarrely humorous rather than straightforwardly horrific. And the movie is mostly described by critics as black comedy or bleak […]
The horror genre is currently experiencing an interesting slasher renaissance. Our favorite masked killers such as Leatherface, Ghostface, and Michael Myers have all seen reboots, sequels, and even requels in the last few years. However, not all slasher fans have been satisfied with these remakes and have been itching for a new take on the […]
Horror films provide paradoxical feelings of fear and fun, offering ways of navigating societal darkness while simultaneously giving us humorous delight. In the case of, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (Rhys Frake-Waterfield, 2023), it punches up toward Disney IP and punches down on marginalized audiences. However, the film ultimately spends far more time doing […]
Even though Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ is one of my favourite weird tales, possibly even my most favourite, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve read little of his less-known work and hardly any of his non-fiction writings. This is doubly shameful as not only is there a huge amount of work beyond stories like ‘The […]
Since bursting into the literary scene in 1985, author Bret Easton Ellis has remained a divisive and controversial figure in popular culture. His debut novel Less Than Zero (1985) was described by revered critic Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times as “one of the most disturbing novels I have read in long time” and, […]
Rewilding is a folk horror anthology written and directed by Ric Rawlins. It includes three short films, “Stone Mothers,” “The Family Tree,” and “The Writer’s Enquiry” that all harken back to the stories of M. R. James and to their adaptation in the 1970s’ BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. The influence of James […]