From its opening sequence, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is hard-coded as a product from the second half of the Eighties. It is not just the cathode ray television playing music videos on MTV, or the kitchen fridge containing drink cans labelled Coca-Cola Classic, or the touch-tone phone in the living room, but also…
Happy Halloween had its European première at FrightFest 2024, 22 Aug “You know I hate this Halloween shit,” says high school senior Campbell (Ethan Mannecke) at the beginning of writer/director Brittney Greer’s feature debut. Text messages, supposedly from his ex Lila, have lured Campbell to a cornfield decorated with jack o’ lanterns and a creepy…
Derelict was reviewed from an exclusive preview screener prior to its 2024 festival run The opening sequence of Derelict resonates with its title. For it shows empty spaces at dawn: a forlorn field, and by it an old, graffiti-covered building, perhaps once used for stables, but now long abandoned. Its sole occupant is merely a…
SpookT had its world première on Sat 26 Aug at FrightFest “You know, there’s a Greenville in every state,” says Rachel (Christen Sharice), on her YouTube Channel where she debunks paranormal phenomena, near the beginning of Tony Reames’ feature debut SpookT. She is about to head to Greenville, Pennsylvania, to investigate the disappearance, six years…
Blackout has its world première at Fantasia 2023 When, in an open field under a blood moon, a couple making the beast with two backs is murdered by someone – or something – with animalistic brutality, suspicion falls on the sole eyewitness to the killing, the migrant worker Miguel (Rigo Garay), who claims the…
Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán) had its UK première at FrightFest 2022 Like David Hebrero’s debut feature Dulcinea (2019), his follow-up Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán), co-written with Javier Kiran, concerns a would-be suicide, and uses genre to explore the ramifications of this damning desire. A brief text introduces us to the small…
The Crazies first published by EyeforFilm, 26 Feb 2010 In George A. Romero’s original The Crazies (1973), the insanity of post-Sixties America – where soldiers were firing live rounds at unarmed students and the spectacle of flaming corpses and chemical warfare in Vietnam was playing out nightly on the TV news – was contained within…
Assimilate first published as an audio contribution to The Grimm Exchange John Murlowski’s sci-fi horror Assimilate opens with a close-up of tiny ant-like creatures swarming on a large leaf. In a single fluid motion, the camera pans left to reveal a well-lit suburban middle-class home at night. We cut to inside, and a young, panicked…
The Vast of Night is mediated, and somebody is watching. Framed as a monochrome episode on Paradox Theater, a Twilight Zone-like television show “found only in a frequency caught between logic and myth”, and set in (fictive) Cayuga, New Mexico in the 1950s, Andrew Patterson’s accomplished feature debut follows two young people who work in…
Knives and Skin (2019) at Fantasia and FrightFest A woman clutching a large kitchen knife walks through a home bathed in giallo-esque neon pinks, reds and blues, and knocks at a bedroom door. “Carolyn, are you in there?”, she asks. “Are you still not talking to me?” She then picks the lock with the knife’s…
Strange Behavior firs published by VODzilla.co Michael Laughlin had already produced a number of films in the late Sixties and early Seventies – including Monte Hellman’s classic road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) – when he decided to try his own hand at directing. The result was the determinedly odd feature debut Strange Behavior (aka Dead Kids),…