Barbarian is a genuinely creepy horror movie with bite. It opens with the power of suggestion, but morphs into something far more sinister. Tess (Georgina Campbell) has driven herself to a very shady part of Detroit, where she intends to stay for the night ahead of a job interview. But with rain falling, when she…
Ana Lily Amirpour’s new film, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, is an intriguing and entertaining fantasy-thriller. Mona “Lisa” Lee (Jun Jong Seo) first appears wearing a straitjacket in a padded cell at a US psychiatric institution. Regarded as a violent schizophrenic, and still only 22, the abandoned Korean immigrant has been there for the…
Although the title of this film is Halloween Ends, after 13 instalments (three since the reboot) you have to ask whether Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) will ever die? I’m not going to say, but I can say his blood lust hasn’t dissipated in this chilling finale of the slasher franchise. Blood be spilled as…
Smile is a genuinely scary and engaging psychological horror movie. It centres around a hard-working therapist in an emergency psychiatric unit, named Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon). As Dr Cotter is about to leave the facility after a particularly long shift, a young graduate student Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) enters shaking and clearly traumatised. In…
An engaging professor of parapsychology talks us through the history of ghost stories – how they came to be and how they have evolved over time. Phillip Goodman’s (Steve Rodgers) dissertation comes complete with photographic and video “evidence”. Among the most compelling is a photo of four people taken in Scotland in 1972, which, upon closer inspection,…
Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone opens in an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia. A disfigured witch, Maria (Anamaria Marinca), hovers over a crib. The baby’s mother pleads not to take her infant … at least until she turns 16. The God-fearing woman takes a blood oath to that effect. She…
In Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, five 20-somethings gather at a “hurricane party” to see out an impending cyclone. The venue is David’s (Pete Davidson) family’s remote mansion. With the gathering underway, a couple of others walk in. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) – David’s childhood friend – has had a stint in rehab and has a…
In Orphan: First Kill, Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman) looks every bit like a 10-year-old girl. But she’s actually 31 and the most dangerous patient in an Estonian psychiatric institution. Particularly devious, she’s also deadly. When she escapes from the facility, she poses as the long-lost young daughter of a wealthy American family. Thinking his daughter has…
David Cronenberg’s first feature film in eight years sees the master of smart but visceral horror back in the groove. Crimes of the Future (2022*) is a gripping but gruesome exploration of how technology and the human body intersect. As such, this film can be considered the long-delayed (Cronenberg wrote it in 1999 but shelved…
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia seems determined to write a book in every sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has taken on vampires in Certain Dark Things, powers in The Beautiful Ones and the gothic tradition in Mexican Gothic. Now Moreno-Garcia takes on and reinvents The Island of Doctor Moreau, one of the slightly less famous…
