The Breach first published by SciFiNow The Breach begins where Sean S. Cunningham‘s Friday the 13th (1980) ends, with a canoe free-floating in the water – which is to say that as the vessel drifts downstream, the film is both advertising and literalising its own derivativeness. Yet the canoe is not conveying a traumatised final…
New Religion had its world première at FrightFest 2022 After a brief impressionistic prologue in which abstract shapes, transforming bodies, fluttering moths and fractal patterns – all red in colour – emerge from the darkness, and a red-filtered cityscape and its inverted image are seen mirroring each other, New Religion opens with a primal scene,…
The Changed has its world première at FrightFest 2021 “Nobody seems to care about anything lately, good or bad,” comments Mac (Jason Alan Smith) to his neighbour and best friend Bill (Tony Todd) as they enjoy a morning coffee outside Mac’s house at the beginning of Michael Mongillo‘s The Changed. “I think people are finally…
Assimilate first published as an audio contribution to The Grimm Exchange John Murlowski’s sci-fi horror Assimilate opens with a close-up of tiny ant-like creatures swarming on a large leaf. In a single fluid motion, the camera pans left to reveal a well-lit suburban middle-class home at night. We cut to inside, and a young, panicked…
Honeymoon first published by VODzilla.co The opening image of Honeymoon is of tin cans on strings being drawn along the road by a car. For as its very title implies, director Leigh Janiak’s first feature – which she also co-wrote with Phil Graziadei – is concerned with marriage, or more particularly with what comes next…
Phantasm first published by VODzilla.co The paradox of death is that it is both inevitable and arbitrary. We know that it is coming, just not when or how, and this mystery of mortality is one of the more haunting parts of the human condition. 13-year-old Mike Pearson (A. Michael Baldwin) has had to learn these…
Get Out first published by Little White Lies A beleaguered protagonist struggles to determine whether he is just being paranoid, or there truly is a grand conspiracy – with him as its malevolent focus. While one way to approach this sort of material is through the filter of horror, another would be just to make a…