Trick ‘r Treat first published by Little White Lies With its omnibus approach to storylines, its EC-style brand of twisted morality and its opening credits styled to mimic a comic book’s flicking pages, Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat instantly evokes the anthology format (re)popularised in the Eighties by Creepshow (1982), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983),…
The Field Guide To Evil first published by SciFiNow The Field Guide To Evil opens with the text of a rhyme (attributed to ‘Anonymous, on Folklore’) about the power of dream-like, fictive tales to tell truths. It is programmatic for this anthology of short films, coordinated by producers Ant Timpson and Tim League (The ABCs of Death…
First published by Little White Lies as Part 15 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Anthology horror films come in many forms. At their simplest, they just place their different episodes one after the other (Kwaidan, 1964; Three, 2002; Little Deaths, 2011), perhaps with a wraparound story (Creepshow, 1982; Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, 1990; V/H/S,…
This is, more or less, the text of my introduction to the screening of Horror Stories (9 March 2017) as part of Colette Balmain’s series of overlooked K-horror for the Korean Cultural Centre UK.Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this evening’s screening of Horror Stories, the fourth film in Chills and Thrills programme of overlooked genre titles…
Review first published by CineTalk In the wake of the Credit Crunch when cash is in relatively short supply, if you are an independent genre filmmaker who hopes to advertise your wares to the market in the hope of attracting investment for your future full-length projects, one of the best approaches is to contribute a…
First published by Little White Lies If the title of V/H/S evokes a video format prevalent in the 1980s, then its extraneous ‘slashes’ point in two opposite directions, suggesting both the horror subgenre most closely associated with the Reagan era, and the conventional punctuation of a URL. The film itself, an anthology of short pieces…
Mystery Train first published by EyeforFilm “Hotels and airports are the things I forget,” declares 18-year-old Jun (Matasoshi Nagase), explaining to his girlfriend Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh) why he photographs the rooms where they stay, but not the places that they visit. Indeed, it is the common setting of a low-rent Memphis hotel over one eventful night…
Creepshow first published by Film4 Synopsis: An anthology of comicbook tales from the crypt, made on the dream (or nightmare) ticket of fright auteur George A Romero and bestselling horror writer Stephen King. Review: Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) and Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006) have all exploited advances in digital technology to…
The ABCs of Death first published in Sight & Sound, May 2013 Synopsis: An anthology of 26 short films, each named for a different letter of the alphabet, each directed by different genre filmmakers, and each focused upon death. Review: “I’m sorry, it was going to be better – but we didn’t have time.” The…