The Lodgers 2017

There used to be a time, cinema goers, that you could see most the latest horror movies up on the big screen, if they were halfway decent of course. Sure you had your Cellar Dwellers and 976 Evils coming straight to VHS but anything well made with a sense of an original idea would get…

Veronica 2017

It takes something very special to raise my interest in the ouija/possession/haunted-by-a-demon sub sub genre nowadays. The Conjuring movies manage it because of how well they are made by James Wan and company. However there seems to be an increasing belief that any old fool can knock out a ouija or an exorcism film and…

Insidious: The Last Key 2018

The first Insidious was a whirlwind of frights and freaky jump scares which remains one of the best supernatural horror movies of this millenium. Even with its nasty open ending it was clear that they were never going to be able reacreate that lightening-in-a-bottle mixture of genuine scares and surreal demonic activity in the sequels….

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House 2016

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House take minimalist filmmaking to new highs with very little, obviously. Or it could be to new lows, depending on your tolerance levels. Ruth Wilson plays a home nurse who has come to look after a famed author in her dying days. Wilson suspects there may…

The Interior 2015

There certainly was a good deal of resistance to the digital revolution in film, and in some ways who can blame people. There will always be something lush, vivid and real about film stock that digital will never be able to capture. However, film was always a prohibitively expensive necessity: even the most low-budget of…

The Conjuring 2 2016

I first read the screenplay for The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist (as it was known then) when the company I was at was bidding to work on the effects. At the time I was struck by two things. One, that if we got it and I was to go on set to supervise then…

Tales of Halloween 2015

Here in the Queen’s country we don’t really don’t celebrate Halloween as much as our American cousins do. We think it’s all a bit crass and uncouth. Trick or treating is even worse as it seems like a desperate attempt to get money of strangers and we’d never been caught dead begging. Of course we’re…

Annabelle 2014

It is clear that all the best horror movies nowadays are being made by independents. The studios seem happy to churn out either overblown found footage films like The Pyramid and countless Paranormal Activities or haunted/possession numbers like Ouija or another Insidious. The independents meanwhile are knocking our socks with Starry Eyes, Honeymoon, Late Phases,…