Horror fans may or may not be familiar with the Tokoloshe, an evil South African spirit who targets small children. While the creepy run-down hospital setting of Jerome Pikwane’s debut feature is much more familiar ground (and proves to be as unsettling as ever), this is a film about repressed trauma and the powerful preying
FrightFest
The Pollack family are heading to a cabin in the woods for the healing power of the rocks it’s built on, but genre fans shouldn’t be too surprised to discover they’re heading towards creative dismemberment instead. However, there may or may not be something special about the ground on which so much blood is spilled
The Night Sitter opens with the sound of strange humming – and then we see young ‘Amber’ (Elyse Dufour) driving to a house in a suburban cul de sac for a child-minding job. As Amber carefully discards her cigarette, applies drops to her eyes, and practises introducing herself by her false name, it is clear
“This is the one you’ve been waiting for…”, goes the first line heard in Bodied, reflecting the precise thoughts of those of us who have been waiting six long years since Joseph Kahn’s postmodern meta slasher Detention knocked us sideways – or 13 years for those lost folk who missed Detention but really loved the
The latest horror from Martyrs filmmaker Pascal Laugier sees the writer-director return to the theme of young women in physical and psychological pain in a film that frustrates as much as it intrigues. We begin with aspiring teenage horror writer Beth (Emilia Jones), her sister Vera (Taylor Hickson) and their mother (Mylène Farmer) arriving at
When, in John Landis’ The Blues Brothers, Jake and Eliot roll up at Bob’s Country Bunker claiming to be booked artists the Good Ol’ Boys, half the joke is the absurdity of seeing an urban rhythm and blues band having to impersonate a country-and-western outfit. Though more horror than comedy, Lasso, the feature debut of
At the beginning of CTRL, Christian Lex (Saabeah Theos) and her boyfriend Dru (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett) are heading to the luxurious fifth-storey apartment of Lex’s brother Leo (Julian Mack), a reclusive computer geek with a strong streak of misanthropy, to celebrate his birthday. As the couple ascends, floor by floor, we hear Leo reciting (in
Every horror fan knows that you have to follow the rules of the game if you want to survive, but the twisted “fun” in writer-director Mitzi Peirone’s stylized debut feature goes beyond the usual traps and twists. Instead, it’s a device to send the audience along with its leads into a fairy-tale dark trip. When
There was a time when giallo was the height of fashion. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, Italian thrillers were the very model of genre chic, bringing a splash of style, panache and colour to the Hitchcockian whodunnit, and showing the aesthetic angle – the ‘good side’ – of sadism and murder. Then, as two
With Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway, Paul Hyett’s Heretiks and Corin Hardy’s The Nun all enjoying their premières in rapid succession, 2018 would appear to be the year that sees nunsploitation returning with a vengeance. Not that St Agatha, the latest from genre director Darren Lynn Bousman (Abattoir, Repo! The Genetic Opera, the first three Saw
François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, better known as film collective RKSS describe themselves as a ‘family business.’ Anouk met Francois eighteen years ago at animation school and they have been together ever since and Yoann is Anouk’s brother. Their first feature film, Turbo Kid was released in 2015 and it showed at FrightFest
When you hear the word “fandom”, you tend to think of Marvel movies, Star Wars, Supernatural…anything that has accumulated a fanbase of passionate and dedicated viewers who have a very strong personal connection to their chosen passion. For whatever reason, you don’t tend to think of horror, but if there’s one thing that the genre
All the Colours of the Dark: Arrow Video FrightFest 2018 Horror comes in many colours and flavours. There’s Universal horror, classical horror, drive-in horror, fleapit horror, mainstream horror, alt horror, trash horror, elevated horror, ‘real horror’ and ‘not really horror’. Horror takes up residence in the castle, the woods, the laboratory, the graveyard, the hospital,
While the London-based FrightFest events in August and over Halloween seem to change venues every year or so, the Glasgow chapter is a more fixed affair. For it is always timed for the end of that city’s annual Film Festival, and always takes place on a single screen (Glasgow Film Theatre 1), ensuring that those
While there was a conspicuous dearth of female filmmakers represented in FrightFest’s feature programme (of the 65 films that screened, only Natasha Kermani’s Imitation Girl, Tini Tüllmann’s Freddy/Eddy and Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard’s Radius could boast female directors), the short films showcase went a considerable way to redressing this imbalance. Programmed by Shelagh Rowan-Legg, it
Still/Born begins with both a birth and a still birth, as young mother Mary (Christie Burke) delivers Adam, only to realise in horror that his identical twin Thomas is dead on arrival. Yet the mannered forward-slash punctuation that splits the film’s title (like in Marat/Sade, Face/Off and Frost/Nixon) also betokens other doubles and divisions within
“Alright, whoa baby! She’s gorgeous! Alright, that looks good, how much is it?” The speaker, in the opening scene of Imitation Girl, is a boy in his young teens (William Wakeland), diminished in static wideshot as he negotiates with two older men who have purchased a girlie magazine on his behalf. The boy’s words refer
The first time we see Samantha (Anja Savcic) in writer/director Kurtis David Harder’s InControl, she is facing a mirror. This follows a prologue in which pretty cheerleader Marissa (Sarah Troyer) tries desperately – and vainly – to phone Mark and Jenny, before, in her distraction, flipping her car spectacularly. The connection between these two sequences
“We meet only once every fifty years,” says the Duke (Vincent Regan) to Peter (Tony Curran) as a small group of people of different ages, genders and ethnicities (played by Charlie Cox, Freema Agyeman, Annette Crosby, Lukas Leong and Jordan Long) gathers around the table in a farmhouse at night to discuss boundaries, quotas and