Na Hong-jin’s latest feature Hope takes its title from the name of the village in and around which its action is set. Hope is a relatively small coastal community whose population is disproportionately made up of retirees and the elderly, and whose location is near the Demilitarised Zone between a South and North Korea still…
The Brook world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 Given its small population, the remote English village of Elmbrook, from which Paul Stainthorpe’s narrative feature debut The Brook takes its title, has a strikingly large number of missing persons, their faces displayed on a wall at local music venue The…
Rory Karpf’s Grace Point, co-written with Paul Russell Smith, opens in medias res, with a shirtless young man running desperately through an avenue of woodland trees. Yet in a way Brandon Hayes (John Owen Lowe) has been running since his childhood, when his alcoholic mother was snatched from him by a deadly accident of her…
Test Screening had its world première at FrightFest 2024, 22 August Test Screening takes place in 1982, often regarded as one of the most inventive, and one of the geekiest, years for American cinema releases. The news, though, has not quite reached the isolated, unincorporated community of New Hope in Oregon, where local theatre manager…
The Middle Man first published by Sight and Sound, April 2023 Review: Adapted by its director Bent Hamer from Lars Saabye Christensen’s 2012 novel Sluk, The Middle Man is set during the Trump Presidency in the fictional Midwest town of Karmack – a once flourishing community which has of late suffered severe economic depression, and…
Tremors first published by Little White Lies, as entry 157 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Ron Underwood’s Tremors opens with Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) standing on the edge of a rocky cliff, and urinating onto the ground far below. He is first shown from the front in an extra wide shot too distant to allow…
Hot Blooded (Ddeu-geo-un pi), script of my on-stage introduction to its screening at the London Korean Film Festival, 2022 Cheon Myeong-kwan is a novelist and screenwriter. In the Nineties, he co-scripted Chang Gil-soo’s I Wish What is Forbidden To Me (1994) and Kim Eui-suk’s Gun and Gun (1995) and A Great Chinese Restaurant (1999). Then…
In Graham Baker’s Impulse (1984), toxic waste leaks into a rural town’s milk supply, causing the residents to lose all their inhibitions and to pursue their most violent or sexually taboo urges without censorship. Where Baker’s film was an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, Love In Kilnerry tells a similar story in an entirely different genre. For…
Bad Candy first published by VODzilla.co Halloween. It is, at least in myth, a time of masks and monstrosity, when the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the living and the dead, are unusually fluid, when candy and other just des(s)erts are served cold, when a healthy respect for the seasonal spirits can make…
A Cloud So High had its world première at the Glasgow FrightFest 2022 A Cloud So High opens with a classic establishing shot: a road sign for Schooner, California that situates the viewer in a highly particularised place. It then shows local ex-cop and realtor Gene ‘Sackler’ Sarling (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) listening to…
Zalava had its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2022 Taking place less than a year before Iran’s 1979 Revolution and named for a small village built into a steep mountainside in rural Kurdistan, Arsalan Amiri’s feature Zalava – which he co-wrote with Tahmineh Bahramalian and Ida Panahandeh – is a film of jars, of…