Frogman Returns at Chattanooga Film Festival, 19 June 2026 In a way, there are always returns with Frogman. In Anthony Cousins’ found-footage feature debut Frogman (2023), Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) returned to Loveland, Ohio with his friends Amy (Chelsey Grant) and Scotty (Benny Barrett) to try to capture on camera the legendary local cryptid that Dallas…
The Descent: Part 2 first published by Sight & Sound, December 2009 Review: Neil Marshall‘s The Descent (2005), at least in its full UK version (curtailed slightly but significantly for US audiences), closed with a cliffhanger. It was not just that its protagonist Sarah Carter (Shauna MacDonald) was last glimpsed clinging for dear life to…
Dawn of the Dead first published by Through The Trees Magazine George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a sequel of sorts (with no common characters) to his groundbreaking sociopolitical zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968) – and its two opening sequences offer a sketch in diptych of society in rapid, chaotic…
Doctor Sleep first published by Little White Lies Let’s call it the battle of the SKs. In 1977, Stephen King publishes his best-selling novel The Shining, translating into the allegorical language of horror fiction the toll that his own alcoholism was taking on his professional and domestic lives. in 1980, Stanley Kubrick turns that novel…
The Grudge first published by Dirty Movies In 1998, for the TV anthology Gakko no Kaidan G, Takashi Shimizu made two very short (three-minute) shock films, respectively titled Katasumu and 4444444444, in which he introduced creepy, contorting revenant Kayako Saeki and her meowing son Toshio, laying the central groundwork for the grudge-bearing, implacably vengeful spirits…
The Grudge first published by Movie Gazette in 2004 To call Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) a ‘reimagining’ of Hideo Nakata’s extraordinary Ring (1998) would be to imply that there was any imagination at all in the Hollywood retread. Instead, there were some second-hand frights, a few entirely gratuitous new scenes (mostly involving spooked…
As films like Deathwatch, The Devil’s Rock, the Outpost franchise, Frankenstein’s Army, Overlord and many others amply demonstrate, films pitched as ‘trapped in a bunker with infernal abominations’ form a (literal) subgenre, exposing the monstrousness of the military mentality. Falling neatly into this category, Matt Mitchell’s original The Rizen (2017) showed cold warriors struggling to…
Grave Encounters 2 first published by VODzilla.co Found footage is one of the few subgenres whose name refers not (like, say action or comedy) to content, nor (like horror) to an ideal viewer response, but rather to the films’ (fictive) material framing and form – which is to say that, for all its claims to…
Insidious: The Last Key first published by Sight & Sound, March 2018 Review: In the spaces between all stories there are yet more stories – which goes some way to explain Insidious: the Last Key, the latest, literally middling tale of mediumship in the Insidious franchise. Originally a pastiche of Poltergeist (1982) and other domestic horror…
First published by Little White Lies It has been a long time since Heather Donahue and her two-man crew ventured into the woods of Burkittsville to become a part of the local legend that they were there to document. Back in 1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s ultra-low-budget The Blair Witch Project would revolutionise genre…
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) first published by Little White Lies If Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis begins with Gregor Samsa waking from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous bug, then Tom Six’s The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) comes with a decidedly Kafkaesque pedigree. For its protagonist Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) is also…