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Posted on September 9, 2018

Mara: The Best Horror Feature about Sleep Paralysis

Dawn Keetley

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 at a troubling murder site. A man is dead and it seems clear to everyone that his wife (Helena) did it. But she insists that her husband had been experiencing increasingly troubled sleep and that the night he died a “demon” entered their bedroom, sat on her husband’s chest, and choked him to death. As Kate investigates, she is led to a string of apparent strangers who have all shared the same terrifying night paralysis. More and more of them start dying inexplicably in their sleep, and soon Kate is investigating a phenomenon in which she too has become a victim.

Posted on August 21, 2018

The Foaming Node: A mutant cult and television

Guest Post

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 the media junkyard of the Internet certainly supersedes Television in terms of perversity, it is missing the uncertainty that made the latter a special source of weirdness. Let us remember that unlike the sinister infinity of the online (nether) world, morbidities were promised but never guaranteed by the preprogrammed broadcast of the TV. This absence of choice imbued viewing experiences of the weird kind with a unique sense of awe; as one could equally stumble upon the bizarre—ranging from exposes on outlandish cults to psychosexual documentaries on alien abductions—or the oppressing normality of John Travolta in Look Who’s Talking Too (1990). The Foaming Node (65min, 2018) by Ian Haig, which recently screened at the Revelation Film Festival in Perth, seems to borrow from Television’s dark sense of marvel to deliver a story about a freakish cult.

Posted on July 28, 2018

Our House: Great Characters, Unoriginal Story

Dawn Keetley

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 interesting ambiguity about time that resembles what David Robert Mitchell did in 2014’s It Follows). Our House centers on genius college student, Ethan (Thomas Mann) who is obsessed with creating a machine that forges a kind of wireless network of electricity (how it works exactly was a bit obscure). His scientific obsession, in time-honored fashion (going back as far as Frankenstein), causes him to neglect his family—something he soon lives to regret when his parents are killed in a car accident. In the wake of his parents’ death, Ethan must relinquish college and his fledgling career as an inventor to get a job, drive a minivan, and take care of his two younger siblings—Matt (Percy Hynes White) and Becca (Kate Moyer). As the months struggle by, Ethan is eventually lured back to his project, and it’s not long before he discovers that the device animates the dead—and not only the recent or the happy dead. Ethan unwittingly unleashes darker spirits that start to prey on his family and his neighbor, so he must, again, give up science and devote himself to protecting his family.

Posted on July 5, 2018

The First Purge (2018) Review

Elizabeth Erwin

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 movie this season that fits that bill it’s The First Purge (2018), the fourth film in the franchise that serves as its de facto origin story and explains how an America of the very near future turned to a yearly program of intentional lawlessness in order to combat cultural aggression. Directed by Gerard McMurray, the movie is a direct frontal attack on Trump’s America that pulls no punches in its depiction of class warfare. From pointedly associating the NRA with the villainous political party in power to a devious Spicer-like mouthpiece of the administration to a character literally being “grabbed by the pussy,” there is no question that this movie is designed to be a searing indictment of Donald Trump and those who support him.

How a viewer receives The First Purge is likely to depend upon where he/she falls on the political spectrum, and I suspect Rotten Tomatoes will be awash in both one star and five-star reviews. As a horror flick, the movie is slightly above average. Given that it is a prequel, it spends a good deal of the time situating and developing the characters—so much so that the actual Purge doesn’t begin until the movie’s midway point. One of the criticisms of the franchise has always been that the films advocate non-violence while simultaneously depicting in graphic fashion the spectacle of violence. But here, the opposite is true. While there are scenes of graphic brutality, it feels underplayed, especially in comparison to the other films. We’re also given heroes who understand that part of resisting is being prepared to fight back. Read more

Posted on June 30, 2018

The Devil’s Doorway and the Summer of Scary Nuns

Dawn Keetley

Stellar Irish horror film The Devil’s Doorway is the first feature film from Aislinn Clarke, a writer and director from Northern Ireland. Indeed, according to Morbidly Beautiful, which features an interview with Clarke, she is “the first woman in Northern Ireland to write and direct a produced horror film.” Devil’s Doorway was invited to showcase at BAFTA in London and was later screened at the Cannes film Festival. The film has secured international distribution, and will be released in the US by IFC Midnight on July 13, 2018.

The summer of 2018, it seems, is not only witnessing record heat but a surge of scary nuns. The trailer of the high profile film The Nun, directed by Corin Hardy, is doing the rounds at the moment. As a spin-off of the highly successful Conjuring franchise, The Nun (due to be released on September 7) will no doubt do well at the box office. But I doubt it will be as good as Devil’s Doorway. The trailer for The Nun suggest that the nuns in that film are exploited as jump scares, demonic faces appearing in the background, nuns rocketing like high speed trains from outside the frame. The nuns in Devil’s Doorway, on the other hand, are real nuns. And they are terrifying. Helena Bereen, in particular, delivers an utterly chilling performance as the Mother Superior of a Magdalene Laundry in 1960—a woman fully aware of the Church hierarchy and hating, in equal parts, the men above her and the women below her.