The Night House first published by Movies on Weekends The Night House begins with a montage: a boat rocking against a jetty, a beautiful timber lakehouse above, and multiple shots mapping out the the house’s interiors. What unifies all these images is their emptiness. For there is no human presence in or around this house,…
The Ritual first published by Sight & Sound, November 2017 Review: Regardless of where it ends, the starting point of David Bruckner’s The Ritual is a tangled forest of grief, loss and guilt from which its characters will struggle to emerge. As five one-time English university friends, now approaching middle age, discuss where they will spend…
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,…
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…
The Signal first published by EyeforFilm. Like so many good things, The Signal comes in threes. Three writer/directors, three linked episodes (or ‘transmissions’), three radically different filmmaking styles and moods – all unified by the three-way psychodynamics of a love triangle that just happens, crucially, to unfold in the middle of a mind-melting future apocalypse. Three…