paranormal
Believer wields the Exorcist saga poorly by vomiting so much at the screen and leaving little more than a mess of themes and characters.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a different breed of horror, but is still just as beautiful and engaging.
Followed, with its contrived shaky ghosts and shoddy script, is the millennial’s answer to The Shining and 1408, without the compelling stories.
Castle Rock’s The Queen takes us on a wander through time and memories with Ruth, as Sissy Spacek gives a breathtaking performance.
Lacking the dirsired jump scares and trust in itself, Our House is a film that will now be stuck in limbo, too tame for modern horror audiences and not emotionally satisfying enough for others.
Castle Rock is haunted, and there’s a reasonable amount of fantastical threads, but it is grounded with characters impacted by very real circumstances.
The Devil’s Doorway is effective up to a certain point, but ultimately it squanders all of the potential set up in its first act in lieu of a very by-the-numbers found footage horror.
In our latest Away From the Hype, we examine The Blair Witch Project, seeing if the classic found footage horror still holds up after all this time.
Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s adaptation of their hit stage play Ghost Stories is a serviceable British horror – but with so many recent gems in the genre, is being “serviceable” enough to justify its existence?
The Spierig Brothers’ latest “based on a true story” horror movie Winchester is a cinematic checklist of every dreadful ‘haunted house’ cliche, every formulaic competent that’s been implemented by other, better genre entries.
Despite a winning performance from Lola Kirke, it looks like Fallen’s destiny is to be assigned to the scrapheap of YA movie history.
It would be to put it lightly that this film’s reputation preceeded it. After years of people theorising about another sequel to Ghostbusters (1984), naively deciding to overlook the fact that Bill Murray didn’t want to work with Harold Ramis again, and Ramis’ recent death, a new film was announced. The only problem was that noted comedy director Paul Feig was put in charge.
After a brief hiatus with Fast and Furious 7, mainstream horror’s prodigal son James Wan has returned to the Devil’s Church of Jump Scares with a sequel to his paranormal blockbuster, The Conjuring. The main lesson he seems to have learned on his franchise-hopping action excursion is how to make things feel absolutely massive, and in following the golden rule of sequels, he’s applied that bigger-is-better ethos to The Conjuring 2. The ghostbusting duo of the first film – Ed and Lorraine Warren – are called to London to flush out some more housebound demons, but in an effort to raise the stakes over the first film, Lorraine is also faced with her own adversaries:
Film Noir is not an easy genre to tackle nowadays, simply because trends in culture have changed. The hard-boiled detective of the black and white screen, the one with the alienated, tough exterior and a penchant for femme fatales – think Dana Andrews in Laura or Bogie in The Big Sleep – would cause no more than a snicker, so removed are they from the world we witness every passing day. Our post-modernist mindset asks for the type of heroes we find authentic, those we can relate to, this is why the grand days of Film Noir have passed – which is not to say some of its elements cannot be used for fine, fine cinema.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
