Let The Wrong One In had its Scottish première on 11 March, 2022 at the Glasgow FrightFest 2022. First published by VODzilla.co Let The Wrong One In opens with a Romanian castle at night, and a horse and carriage passing underneath – only for a group of loud, drunk Irish women to enter the frame….
The Hunger on-stage introduction for the Ultimate Picture Palace’s Blood & Celluloid: Vampire Film Festival, 15 Oct 2022 In the late Seventies and early Eighties, there was a new movement identifiable in British cinema: the rise of the adman director. For filmmakers like Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and his younger brother…
30 Days Of Night first published by EyeforFilm Since their very first on-screen appearance, cinematic vampires have proven surprisingly flexible when it comes to their own prescribed conventions. Count Orlok in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) may have been drawn directly from the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but in FW Murnau’s film neither garlic nor…
Red Snow first published by VODzilla.co “I write about vampires, and I read about them, a lot, and I’ve seen a lot of vampire movies,” declares Olivia Romo (Dennice Cisneros), some way into writer/director Sean Nichols Lynch’s Red Snow. “But I never actually met one in the flesh, I didn’t even know they were real…
There’s No Such Thing As Vampires first published by Through the Trees Sometimes titles are antiphrastic. Think Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End (2012), Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s This Is Not a Film (2011), or Ryuhei Kitamura’s No One Lives (2012), all promising one thing and delivering, well, not quite that thing. To…
Mr. Vampire (Jiāngshī Xiānshēng) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 107 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column There is a scene some way into Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire (Jiāngshī Xiānshēng) where Taoist priest Master Kau (Lam Ching-ying) is invited to a ‘Western tea’ by the wealthy businessman Master Yam (Huang Ha). Unfamiliar with Western…
Much as genre producer Travis Stevens’ feature debut, the haunted house movie Girl On The Third Floor (2019), exposed the toxic masculinity at the heart – and in the very architecture – of the American home, so too his follow-up Jakob’s Wife continues this gendered (and genre’d) preoccupation with domestic relations. The very title of…
Ultraviolet first published by musicOMH When a film’s style is described as ‘comic book’, it tends to be critical shorthand for superficial and two-dimensional, if also colourful and kinetic. Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet is the apotheosis of this style, and wears its comic book status on its sleeve, not only because of its lurid, CGI-enhanced colour palette, impossibly…
The Reflecting Skin first published by VODzilla.co The Reflecting Skin begins with little Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) carrying a large frog across a yellow field, and, with help from his friends Eben (Codie Lucas) and Kim (Evan Hall), inflating it with a reed and leaving it in the road. When the adult Dolphin Blue (Lindsay…
Eat Locals first published by SciFiNow strap: Ever wondered what Brexit means for vampires? “We meet only once every fifty years,” says the Duke (Vincent Regan) to Peter (Tony Curran) as a small group of people of different ages, genders and ethnicities (played by Charlie Cox, Freema Agyeman, Annette Crosby, Lukas Leong and Jordan Long)…
In the foreground, a large, bearded Balkan man dressed like a cowboy (Vanja Kapetanovic) sits at a table, tapping his glass impatiently, until four casually dressed men enter the bar and order whiskies. Once the cowboy has heard them say that they are out-of-towners in Las Vegas for a convention, he buys them all several…