There is no doubt that the writings of H. P. Lovecraft have enjoyed a significant renaissance of late. In both literary academia and mainstream culture, his idiosyncratic oeuvre has now been properly recognised for codifying and popularising a unique form of horror commonly known as ‘The Weird’. In an essay written by Lovecraft himself, aptly […]
Alma Katsu, author of historical horror novels like The Hunger (2018) and The Deep (2020), returns to the genre in her latest The Fervor (releasing on April 26, 2022). Like her other novels, The Fervor centers on a main historical event, playing with the timeline and details ever so much. This time, readers are placed […]
Gothic: An Illustrated History, by Roger Luckhurst (Princeton University Press, 2021) At the climax of Viy, the intensely Gothic 1967 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s original short tale, the hapless seminarian Khoma is assaulted by a phantasmagoria of ghouls and goblins. Grasping hands burst from the walls, sinister, bat-faced demons creep out of the shadows, […]
This is a spoiler-free review. A spoiler-filled one will come later on when Scream is accessible to people who may prefer not to venture into a movie theater quite yet. There are no bad Scream (1996) sequels. After Wes Craven took us to Woodsboro for the first time in 1996, he returned to Sidney Prescott […]
The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord (2021), written by Jared Jay Mason and directed by Mason and Clark Runciman, is a film that raises more questions than it answers. An independent movie distributed by Random Media, it features two actors, Jordan Ashley Grier (Gabby) and Swayde McCoy (Michael). It received seven award nominations. This review will contain […]
Comprehensive documentaries are a tricky business. Condensing the overview of a chosen topic into cinematic form without the resulting piece folding into the realm of glorified lecture is far from guaranteed. No filmmaker wants their work to land with all the glory of an out-of-print history textbook that smells of glue and decades of after-school […]
The Land of Blue Lakes (2021) is an independently-produced film directed and written by Arturs Latkovskis. It is the first Latvian found footage horror movie, although that doesn’t quite do the film justice. It is also a Latvian entry (again, perhaps the first) in the folk horror genre – and, according to director Latkovsis, it […]
The moments when Scott Cooper’s ambitious foray into the horror genre–Antlers–comes closest to being truly terrifying instead of just jump-scary are those featuring a far more insidious evil than the CGI creature shedding the titular antlers. The connection between these two is one of the more interesting, if ambiguous, aspects of a monster movie which […]
Folklore, fable and family dynamics breed a challenging chimaera of a movie the horror of which arrives with the self-evidence of fairy tales. Such are part of the inspiration for Icelandic debut-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s captivating cinematic condensation of mythologic motifs from his home country. Its people’s close conjunction to nature – a relation revealed by […]