The title of Paul Holbrook’s latest short film is polysemic. Tor Lewa, or تور لیوهوه, is the Pashto for ‘Black Wolf’, alluding not just to the ferocious canine monster that dogs protagonist Billy (Frank C. Keogh, also the film’s co-writer) when he is otherwise alone on the streets of Bristol at night, but also to…
Infirmary had its world première at Dances With Films NYC, 16 Jan January 2026 Infirmary knows exactly what it is, and right from the outset wants the viewer to know too. For in opening with text about an “unknown disturbance” at LA’s Wilshire Infirmary which left two dead and one missing, and in promising to…
Think of England had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, 14 Nov 2025 Richard Hawkins’ directorial debut everything (2004) was an independently produced, low-budget peep into the world of sex work. Though coming with a period setting, his belated follow-up Think of England is similarly concerned with a kind of sex work,…
Abigail Before Beatrice had its East Coast première at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, 21st Oct 2025 “I won’t come inside without being invited,” says Beatrice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) near the beginning of Cassie Keet’s Abigail Before Beatrice. “Pretend I’m a vampire.” Beatrice has wandered onto a farmhouse property in Franklin County, Arkansas to take some…
By The Throat had its world première Saturday 7 March at the Glasgow Film Festival for FrightFest By The Throat opens with an immediate, literal explanation of its title, and with the primal scene of its central character’s trauma. For the terrified – if not quite helpless – Lizzy Roberts (Patricia Allison) is jumped and…
Shadow of Fire (Hokage) screened at the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2024 In the still smouldering embers left by the end of the Pacific War, an unnamed woman (played with unhinged intensity by Shuri) lives alone in a tavern that is one of the only buildings in this black-market district left standing after the…
Triggered (Topakk) had its international première on Sat 26th Aug at FrightFest “Somewhere in the Philippine jungle”, a close-knit Bravo commando unit comes under attack from “notorious religious militant cult the Papa Sagrada.” After being temporarily dazed by an explosion, the unit’s captain Miguel Vergara (Arjo Atayde) regains consciousness only to witness all his captured…
Diane first published by SciFiNow “I can honestly say, she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve seen in my entire life.” In New Britain, Connecticut, Steve (Jason Alan Smith) is a limping veteran of the War in Afghanistan. He is isolated, earnest, taciturn, able to handle himself – and, with his history of violence, maybe wound…
The doll’s house is the arena where (typically) little white girls play out, or occasionally resist, the model of life that they have inherited from their family and culture, in an idealised, plastic parody of patriarchy. The Toy Terminator opens with an image of a doll’s house – a cottage (that is clearly a model)…
Genre is often just a way to frame and to storify psychological experience, and this is certainly the case with Before I’m Dead. The feature may assume an increasingly mind-melting range of genre elements – space invasion, doppelgängers, time paradoxes, a looping trap (expressly compared to Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day, 1993); and it may feature a…
The dread comes early in Dementer. Opening with a psychedelic barrage of panicky snatches from an impressionistic sequence of events (a bonfire, a barking dog, a naked woman fleeing a vehicle, a grey-haired figure groping about in a room), all choreographed to the sound of a menacing male voice counting up to 13, and to the…