Writer/director/editor/cinematographer Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters begins in familiar territories. An audio recording of an obviously distressed if incomprehensible call to emergency services is accompanied by stills (from happier times) of the four people whose voices can be heard ranting and freaking out on it – Michelle August (Michelle May), Angela Bocuzzi (Angela Basolis), Scott Zagorac (Scott…
Something in the Dirt first published by Little White Lies, 23 Jan 2022 In Something In The Dirt, fifth feature of filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution, Spring, The Endless, Synchronic), we hear wind chimes before we see anything. These chimes hang outside a somewhat dingy apartment building in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, where…
The Midnight Swim first published (in a shorter version) by VODzilla.co The Midnight Swim opens with a lilting lullaby sung by a woman in what sounds like a Middle Eastern language, and with a pure white screen which resolves first to mist-bound watery ripples, and then to an empty bed with a white sheet on…
Broadcast first published by Little White Lies, as entry 143 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column We know from the beginning how a filmed expedition into New Jersey’s remote Pine Barrens in search of the legendary Jersey Devil will end, because it has already ended. On the night of 15th December, 1995, cable TV host Stefan Avkast…
The Medium first published by VODzilla.co “You might have watched too much TV,” Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) tells an unseen film crew. What we are watching purports to be footage that this crew has shot making their documentary Shaman Bloodline – and Nim is their focus because, although she is an ordinary-seeming seamstress in a small…
Masking Threshold UK première at Soho Horror Film Festival 2022 Johannes Grenzfurthner’s Masking Threshold, which he co-wrote with Samantha Lienhard, is named for an acoustic phenomenon: if two sounds are played concurrently but one is louder than the other, it can mask the softer sound from the human brain, reducing it to inaudibility. Likewise the…
Everybody Dies By The End had its world première at FrightFest 2022 Anyone who has seen Don Coscarelli’s John Dies At The End (2012) or Ryuhei Kitamura’s No One Lives (2012) will know that this kind of title can often come with irony and antiphrasis. So the title of Everybody Dies By The End, though…
LOLA had its UK première at the Edinburgh International Film Festival “In 2021 a cache of film reels was discovered in the cellar of a country house in Sussex, England,” reads text that opens LOLA. “The film appears to be a broadcast recorded in 1941.” This immediately situates the feature debut of Andrew Legge (co-written…
When The Screaming Starts first published by VODzilla.co “I’m Norman Graybridge. A two-time award-winning documentary filmmaker. I’ve achieved great success in unearthing groundbreaking stories in people living on the fringes of society. So when I stumbled upon Aidan Mendle in the darker recesses of the internet, and learned of his twisted dream, I knew I’d…
Boots On The Ground first published by SciFiNow In October 2014 – the eve of the British pull-out from conflict in Afghanistan – a unit of five squaddies is under fire in the Hindu Kush. Coming to a huge British-engineered fort (“Leftovers from the First Afghan War”, as one of them wryly observes), they see…
Rec (aka [Rec]) first published by Little White Lies Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) may have set the ball rolling, but it was the terrors of 11th September, 2001, recorded live by amateurs at the scene, that made reportage the vehicle of choice for today’s horror films, from Diary of the…