Compliance UK première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Compliance begins as in fact it ends, with high-angle CCTV footage of various room interiors, each logged by a digital label (“Cornell S living room” etc.) to mark the location. The last shot in this series is a bedroom, with Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox) asleep in bed,…
10 Great Horror Films of the Decade So Far (2020-2024) first published by BFI, 24 Oct 2024 Includes capsules of: Host, The Empty Man, Censor, The Innocents, Nope, Skinamarink, Abruptio, When Evil Lurks, Where the Devil Roams, I Saw the TV Glow This decade began with a pandemic. A few smaller, socially distanced productions, like…
We Put the World to Sleep had its world première at Nightmares Film Festival, 18th Oct 2025 [This is a long and detailed review, and contains spoilers. If you are sensitive to this, do not read beyond the first still] Conventionally, feature debuts get called ‘calling cards’ when they are good, or at least show…
The Rebrand in-person and virtual screening at Panic Fest, 28 March 2025 A videographer is enticed to a remote home for a private commission, not realising the deadly madness that awaits there. This may sound like the plot of Creep (2014), but Kaye Adelaide’s The Rebrand is a radical rebranding of Patrick Brice’s ‘stored footage’ film,…
From the very outset, Pablo Absento’s feature debut Bloat comes heavily mediated. As Hannah (Bojana Novakovic) gives birth in a hospital and is informed that the newborn is a girl, her husband Jack (Ben McKenzie) appears, beaming along with Hannah and exclaiming, “Third time mum! Third time dad!”. Yet not only are we aware that…
I Haven’t Done Anything screened at the London Korean Film Festival 2023. This is a transcript of my on-stage introduction (plus programme note) Park Sang-min’s previously co-wrote Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) with its director Jung Bum-shik. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum was horror told in the found footage format, where its intradiegetic camerawork, reportage style and other…
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…