If you have come to Projected Figures expecting accountancy, you are in the right place. Accountancy is what film writers do: counting minutes, counting words, reducing all cinema’s abstract expressions to calibrations, evaluations and calculated formulae on a simplified, and simplifying, worksheet. Critics, you see, operate a kind of reverse-alchemy, transforming vibrant sights and sounds into bland verbiage and, if you’re…
Stanley Kubrick’s only horror film The Shining may famously have been disavowed by Stephen King for the liberties it took in adapting King’s bestselling 1977 novel, but those deviations are part of what makes the film so effective (leaving aside the shrill edge-of-madness performances, the exquisitely over-designed mise en scène, the unnervingly mobile camerawork, and…
213 Bones first published by SciFiNow for its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Sunday 24 August Like so many slashers, 213 Bones begins with a couple doing the nasty, and then getting nastily penetrated with a weapon by a masked figure. Rather less like your average slasher, the victims are not young co-eds having their mortality…
Blockhead first published by SciFiNow, for its world première at FrightFest, 6pm Saturday 23rd August “Something’s missing… I don’t see any of you in it… we both know what you should be writing about. What you went through, what happened six years ago.” This is the advice, near the beginning of Blockhead, that writer Will…
Ninja Scroll (Jubei ninpucho) first published by Little White Lies, Nov 2012 Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll (Jubei Ninpucho) was one of the first Japanese animated feature, along with Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), to go on general release abroad, showing Western audiences what could be achieved in anime…
Blood Shine first published by SciFiNow, for its international première at FrightFest 2025, Sunday 24 August A pattern establishes itself early in Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks’ Blood Shine. For it opens with a wide shot – rotated so that the ground is on the right side of the screen, the sky on the left…
Pig Hill first published by SciFiNow for its world première at FrightFest, 1.30pm Saturday 23rd August There is a contradiction at the beginning of Kevin Lewis’ Pig Hill, adapted by Jarrod Burris from Nancy Williams’ novel Pig (2019). “It’s just crazy that he wanted to meet you here,” Emily (Emma Kotos) tells her beau…
In A Cold Vein first published by SciFiNow for its world première at FrightFest, 8.15pm Friday 22nd August In A Cold Vein opens, not unlike Brock Bodell’s Hellcat (2025), in medias res, with its protagonist, as disoriented as the viewer, regaining consciousness in the back of a moving vehicle. Even though Dean O’Reilly (Evan Gamble)…
Your Host first published by SciFiNow for its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Friday 22 August DW Medoff‘s Your Host opens with Jake (Tom Claxton), his face bloody and his neck in a chain collar, seated before three large wrapped gift boxes, as the voice of an unseen master of ceremonies declares him the winner,…
Appofeniacs first published by SciFiNow, for its world première at FrightFest 2025, Friday 22 August After on-screen text is shown defining the word apophenia (“The tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things”), an opening sequence pins down the punning link between this technical term and the title of Chris…
CognAItive first published by SciFiNow, for its UK première at FrightFest, 8.50pm Thursday 21st August There are, near the beginning of CognAItive, tightly intercut parallel sequences that show two of the film’s contrasting key players in diptych. In one, we see CEO Ethan Conway (Noel Fisher) – whose surname encodes his character – giving an…
The Home first published by SciFiNow for its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Thursday 21st August “Thicker than blood” is how Max as a child (Jagger Nelson) and the older Luke (Matthew Miniero) used to characterise their close bond. After all, they were not actual blood brothers but rather genetically unrelated foster children to loving…