This is in fact more than one film. It is of course Oscar Harding’s documentary A Life on the Farm, but within that is its subject, another film (or films) entitled Life on the Farm (no indefinite article) which forms its starting point and principal subject. These amateur videos shot on VHS camcorder by ageing…
The Glenarma Tapes had its international première on Sat 26th Aug at FrightFest Near the start of The Glenarma Tapes, a drama class is discussing the lovers’ double-suicide at the end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “I get it,” suggests Gordon (Warren McCook), “These two are the only good things in either family, and when…
Dashcam first published by Sight & Sound, Summer Edition 2022 Review: Presenting only what the characters see on their devices as a séance conducted over Zoom goes wrong, Rob Savage‘s feature debut Host (2020), co-written with his regular collaborators Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd during the first Covid lockdown, was pure ‘screenlife’ horror. This is…
Invoking Yell has its international première at Panic Fest 2023 One of the disparate story strands in Patricio Valladares’ Covid-curtailed, inchoate sci-fi Embryo (2020) involved a music video shoot gone awry in the Chilean backwoods – and with Invoking Yell, Valladares, working with his regular co-writer Barry Keating, revives this basic premise, while confounding the viewer’s sense of genre. This ambiguity of genre is…
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 feckless bartender Levi Danube (Benson) has just moved…
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 of course containing a truism about human mortality,…