It opens with an abstract image. To the accompaniment of jazz drums and psychedelic flutes, a red blob grows and emerges out of the ambient darkness. This resembles a cosmic event, like the alignment of the planets at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In fact, as the first word in…
Dead Lover screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 “There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand”, runs the text that opens Dead Lover. The explicit ascription of this quote to Mary Shelley, and the fading away of the first nine words to leave only “I do not understand”,…
Eldritch, USA had its international première on Sat 28th Oct at the Halloween FrightFest “Dude, this is not a horror film,” Geoff Brewer (Graham Weldin) insists some way into Eldritch, USA – yet his best friend Colin Fischer (Cameron Perry), a nerd who knows the tropes of horror films inside out, remains unconvinced, discerning, in…
Birth/Rebirth seen for the BFI London Film Festival 2023 Birth/Rebirth opens with two extremes of life in a single sequence. After a pregnant woman experiencing a medical emergency is raced to hospital, her tiny premature baby is delivered by Caesarean, while she herself dies. These extremes – birth and death – allow for the dual…
Pet Sematary first published by VODzilla.co True story (with an old spoiler or two): in Stephen King’s best-selling novel The Shining (1977), the hotel chef Dick Halloran is summoned from his Florida vacation by the psychic powers that he shares with Danny Torrance, and rescues little Danny and his mother Wendy from terrifying supernatural events…