Blood Shine first published by SciFiNow, for its international première at FrightFest 2025, Sunday 24 August A pattern establishes itself early in Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks’ Blood Shine. For it opens with a wide shot – rotated so that the ground is on the right side of the screen, the sky on the left…
Members Club first published by SciFiNow, for its world première at FrightFest, 24 August 2024 Members Club opens with a ‘No Dogging’ sign, and middle-aged Geoff (David Schall) pulling up alongside it precisely to dog. This being the horror genre – albeit horror comedy – the transgression of any rule will be met with brutal…
The first scene of The Banished takes place in the vast bushland west of Sydney, although this has been preceded by impressionistic shots of flames – less earthly bushfire than abstract hellblaze. If the viewer is unsure how to synthesise these images, then protagonist Grace Jennings (Meg Clarke) also seems lost, as we watch her…
The Pale Blue Eye first published by Little White Lies You wait ages for one fictionalised detective story featuring Edgar Allan Poe during his cadetship years at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and then two come along. Yet where Christopher Hatton’s Raven’s Hollow (2022) was so deeply engaged with the…
Frist published by Little White Lies, as the 19th part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column ‘Observance’ is an equivocal term, referring equally to acts of surveillance and of religious ritual – and in Joseph Sims-Dennett‘s Observance, these two meanings merge into a fluid unity, as the boundaries break down between ‘mystery’ as both genre category…