A title like Sadistic Intentions comes with a certain expectation/bracing oneself, but writer-director Eric Pennycoff’s tightly wound debut is more interested in exactly what the title describes, and whether or not said intentions will come to fruition, than a violent payoff. After a shocking prologue, we watch as Chloe (Taylor Zaudtke) receives a phone call
FrightFest
Stirring mental illness into supernatural horror is a tricky thing to get right. The allure of the “is this really happening?” element is understandable but it can be so dispiritingly manipulative and exploitative when done carelessly, so: hats off to director Brian Hanson and his co-writer Richard Handley for working hard to maintain ambiguity and
The Soska Sisters return with their pointed and bloody remake of David Cronenberg’s Rabid By Katherine McLaughlin 27-08-19 25 There was a moment in fashion back in 2001 when Alexander McQueen confronted the hypocrisies of the industry with his Asylum show. He literally held up a mirror to those in charge with a final reveal
Andrew Desmond’s feature debut The Sonata, co-written with Arthur Morin, opens with composer Richard Marlow (the late Rutger Hauer) putting the finishing touches on a musical score. He then walks downstairs, heads outside into the dark night with a petrol canister and candle in hand, douses his body in the fuel and sets fire to
The beginning of Henry Jacobson’s feature debut Bloodline seems comfortable (at least to the horror viewer) because it is so steeped in cliché. A nurse (Christie Herring) wanders an empty hospital corridor at night, thinks she hears something behind her, enters the shower room, undresses, and has a shower, while a POV shot makes it
The vengeful revenant at the heart of Adam Egypt Mortimer’s feature debut Some Kind Of Hate (2016), co-written with Brian DeLeeuw, embodies and enacts the darkest drives of the film’s living characters. In its follow-up, Daniel Isn’t Real, adapted by Mortimer from DeLeeuw’s 2009 novel In This Way I Saved, once again mental illness takes
As its title implies, Master Of Dark Shadows, directed by David Gregory (Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey Of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr Moreau, 2014; Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death Of Al Adamson, 2019), has two focal points. The first is the romantic gothic TV series Dark Shadows that played on
Witches In The Woods opens with a quote from playwright and screenwriter Robert Oxton Bolton: “A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.” These words introduce the film’s central theme – the irresistible power of belief, misapprehension and deception over our thinking and actions –
“They say when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes,” says James (Adrian Glynn McMorran) in voice-over at the beginning of Volition. “I wish it were that simple.” James is practically announcing that this film, directed by Tony Dean Smith and co-written with his brother Ryan Smith, is a chronicle of a death
Young student Harper (Katie Stevens) is a victim twice over. She still bears – faintly – the bruise on her face from where her alcoholic almost-ex stalker boyfriend Sam (Samuel Hunt) hit her the other night; and she also bears the mental scars of her childhood home – which she expressly terms the ‘haunted house’
“Be me, then be yourself”, advises self-help guru Chuck Knoah (Ben Lloyd Hughes) in the motivational video that opens A Serial Killer’s Guide To Life. “You can be like me, but you can’t be me,” he adds, sounding like an unhinged – and somewhat confused – narcissist. “You can be like me.” The psychotically manipulative
Siblings Jesús (Pablo Sigal) and Maria José (Valeria Giorcelli) work symbiotically. The siblings live together in their late father’s apartment. They have their own routine. They don’t particularly want to be disturbed. So, when their half-sister Magdalena (Augustina Cerviño) arrives from Spain suggesting that dad’s death means it’s time to sell the place and split
When you’re dealing with a film as self-consciously odd as Ant Timpson’s directorial debut Come To Daddy, casting is so important. Get it wrong and you end up with something infuriating, get it right and it can be a joy. This is why there’s a real thrill to be had from seeing Pontypool’s Stephen McHattie
“The following presentation is derived from footage captured by the catastrophic reality TV pilot Extremely Haunted Hoarders,” reads text at the beginning of The Hoard, over a rapid – indeed, so rapid as to be near inscrutable – montage of monstrosity, mayhem and murder. It is not just a precise prelude of what is to
Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein’s film opens to the distorted strains of ice cream truck music, as seven-year-old Chloe (Lexy Kolker) peeks out at Mr Snowcone’s blue-and-pink vehicle parked in the suburban street below. Ice cream is such a simple, tantalising pleasure, yet Chloe’s dad Henry (Emile Hirsch) pulls Chloe back from the window
The story goes that when a foundling child suddenly appeared on their farm, decent, warm-hearted Jonathan and Martha Kent adopted him as their own under the name Clark Kent and raised him with their homespun rural values before sending him out into the world. This legend casts its shadow over The Witch: Part 1 –
Taking place (mostly) in an isolated petrol station on the night that the Danish football team is playing in the finals of the European Championship, Finale sets itself up as a familiar – indeed timeless – tale of predatory victimisation. The station owner’s daughter Agnes (Anne Bergfeld) and disgruntled employee Belinda (Karin Michelsen) are working
“She wants to be let out,” says a soldier, drawn, as if by a whispering siren call, to the wooden chest that his troop is transporting across the border to destroy. They are intercepted by another squadron, and the bloody skirmish that ensues – in which that first soldier acts as if possessed, and fights
This fourth feature from Ron Carlson (All American Christmas Carol, Tom Cool, Midgets Vs. Mascots) opens with a before-and-after sequence: a young woman buys peyote from Native American Bigfoot (Michael Horse) and his diminutive sidekick Firecracker (Danny Woodburn), with a warning of ‘grave consequences’ should their client disrupt the local fauna; and then the same
A faded, jumpy film reel from the 1970s, part of a correspondence course from the ‘Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research’, claims to help the viewer deal with the modern age’s ‘duality of the self’. The method used, similar to – but not the same as – hypnosis, promises to allow subjects to reach their ‘full
Prepubescent Vivien (Sarah DaSilva) and Sophia (Lori Phun) reside on Level 10 of an authoritarian boarding school for girls, and dream of being chosen for adoption by a good family and seeing the sky for their first time. While helping Sophia pick up the jar of facial cream that she has dropped, Vivien commits a
After creating plays for radio and also making a series of short films, writer/director Billy Senese helmed his first feature, Closer To God (aka A Frankenstein Story) in 2014, updating the Frankenstein myth to the age of genetic science and cloning. Now his latest, The Dead Center, explores mental illness and demonic possession within a
Now that 2018’s Arrow Video FrightFest is over, here is a round-up of eight more films (The Most Assassinated Woman In The World; Book Of Monsters; Heretiks; Chuck Steel: Night Of The Trampires; Life After Flash; Hell Is Where The Home Is; Anna And The Apocalypse; Open 24 Hours) and a short (Final Stop) that
The old saying that beauty is only skin deep has inspired a legion of horror films, but while Takeshi Sone’s latest has a plastic surgery at its centre, it’s much more interested in the lingering effects of emotional, rather than physical, trauma. In other words, what starts out feeling like a chilly Cronenbergian horror takes
Writer-director Demián Rugna’s Terrified was one of FrightFest’s most hotly anticipated films, promising full-blooded scares (a promise made by the filmmaker in a charming and immensely quotable video intro), and it definitely starts with a bang. No sooner have we had the obligatory but decidedly creepy “hearing voices” scene than we’re witnessing a horrifying and
This year’s FrightFest features three documentaries that hold up a mirror to the festival audience. For Cult Of Terror, Wolfman’s Got Nards and FrightFest: Beneath The Dark Heart Of Cinema all show that strange, intimate and weirdly obsessive connection that horror fans have to the films that feed their insatiable hunger for cathartic thrills and
With their previous film JeruZalem, Israeli brothers Doron and Yoav Paz refreshed found footage with intradiegetic ‘Smart Glasses’, and reinvigorated the tropes of zombie apocalypse by staging them on their conflicted home territory of Jerusalem, and inflecting them with Dark Angels, Nephilim and other monsters from the Old Testament and Talmud. Their latest, The Golem,
Climax opens near its end, with a god’s-eye aerial view of virgin snow being disturbed by the staggering traversal – and collapse – of a young, blood-stained woman dressed in a tank top. Text appears on screen which reads, “To our creators who are no longer with us,” framing the full listed credits which immediately
“You know my girlfriend left me last week because she said I was too safe. Now look at me: I’m running around an underground facility, fighting wannabe ninjas, with a cracked rib, so as I could deport a god.” The speaker is Sam Levi (Mike Buckingham), delivering one of those conveniently recapitulatory lines, typical especially
Yvonne Strahovski fights off a masked home invader in routine cabin in the woods horror He’s Out There By Jonathan Hatfull 27-08-18 65 When people go to a cabin in the woods in horror movies, these places tend to have been in the family for generations, or a surprisingly cheap rental (uh-oh), or newly purchased