Cults

The current wave of 80s revivalism comes to a head in Ti West’s The House of the Devil. Shot on startlingly beautiful 16mm film and featuring the music of The Fixx (God help us all), everything in this movie points to an infatuation with the decade that bought us Manimal and Reaganism. [...]

The horror genre is not an easy one to navigate and commonly alienates large audiences with extreme images and challenging themes. But, for one reason or another, the Nightmare on Elm Street series has endured where others have failed. A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984 to huge critical and commercial success. Including [...]

Clive Barker is not a good writer. His stories are ineffectual and undemanding, largely due to a juvenile prose style which walks a fine line between irrefutably grotesque and gut wrenchingly hilarious. So why then (I hear you scream) do so many filmmakers draw such heavy influence from Barker’s embarrassingly trite, genre casualties? The answer [...]

Take 5 students, a degree in the occult, a creepy old halls of residence, and what do you get? The perfect setting for a bit of ouija board and devil worship. From the onset, it’s easy to think that you know how it’s going to pan out. But this little flick has more to offer [...]

Here’s an interesting thought, imagine if you will that Mary Whitehouse is still alive and that The Festival of Light continues to eviscerate and scarify the cinema of today. Now envisage how they would react when faced with the unequivocally disturbing Martyrs, a film to which graphic violence is integral. Like Pasolini, Peckinpah, Preminger and [...]

Described by its many fans as the ‘greatest British horror film of all time’, The Wicker Man (1973) certainly has a cult following. Directed by Robin Hardy, on its original release, distributors, British Lion Films (EMI), demanded extensive cuts and by doing so the story lost many of its essential early plot elements. Upon release [...]