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…
Jimmy and Stiggs had its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Saturday 23 August Anyone who has seen Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) will instantly recognise the opening of Joe Begos’ latest feature Jimmy and Stiggs. For it begins with a POV shot (complete with mannered blinks) from someone smoking a joint on the balcony…
Things Will Be Different had its World Première at the SXSW 2024 Things Will Be Different begins with a rendez-vous in a diner, and a time warp. For like so many small-town American diners, the place, with its reassuringly old-fashioned furnishings, is classic, timeless, even out of time, as though nothing has changed here in…
Christmas Bloody Christmas first published by Little White Lies, as entry 167 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Christmas Bloody Christmas opens with a sequence of TV ads: a Yuletide malt beverage “for the entire family”; a slasher (Kill.Xmas: The Lester Lord Story) in which little Lester’s POV catches mummy blowing Santa; ‘Santa Live In Concert’,…