Abigail first published by Little White Lies, 18 April 2024 Anyone in the critical game knows that spoilers — at least for reviews timed to be published with a film’s general release and especially when that film pivots around a killer twist — are to be avoided. Yet in the eternal dance between art and…
Scream VI first published by Little White Lies, 8 March 2023 Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream VI opens with a phone call. This is like every Scream film – a franchise that started as a knowing postmodern take on the tropes of the slasher movie in general and the Halloween films in particular, but…
Scream (2022) first published by Little White Lies Not long after Wes Craven went all postmodern on a franchise of his own in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), the director gave a similar self-referential treatment to John Carpenter‘s Halloween (1978) and its many Eighties imitators with Scream (1996), along the way using the power of…
First published by Little White Lies as Part 15 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Anthology horror films come in many forms. At their simplest, they just place their different episodes one after the other (Kwaidan, 1964; Three, 2002; Little Deaths, 2011), perhaps with a wraparound story (Creepshow, 1982; Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, 1990; V/H/S,…
First published by Little White Lies If the title of V/H/S evokes a video format prevalent in the 1980s, then its extraneous ‘slashes’ point in two opposite directions, suggesting both the horror subgenre most closely associated with the Reagan era, and the conventional punctuation of a URL. The film itself, an anthology of short pieces…
