Her Will Be Done (Que ma volonté soit faite) first published by Dirty Movies, for its screening at MotelX 2025 It begins impressionistically, in the dark. A face, barely visible at all, emerges from the shadows, and then we see more faces, more clearly, as a small clan gathers around blazing flames to bear witness to…
Binding Eva world première for the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 Conscian Morgan’s debut feature Binding Eva comes with two prologues. The first comprises text that reads: “In these woods, an elder woman keeps to the old craft. She binds what will not let go. A trial for lost souls.” These are…
The Latcher international première at FrightFest, 28th August 2026 James Hunter’s The Latcher opens with a true beginning: childbirth. We hear, from the inside, the subdued throb of the foetal heartbeat, the mother’s screaming, a muted female voice saying “Push!” – and then the murky, unfocused circle of light that we see ahead in the…
Weapons first published by SciFiNow, 6 August 2025 The enigma at the heart of Weapons is laid out plainly in its opening sequence by the voiceover narration of an unidentified Elementary School child. Two years earlier, at precisely 2.17am, all (save one) of the pupils from the class of new teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)…
Mother of Flies first published by SciFiNow, for its world première Fantasia 2025, 24 July Mother of Flies opens with graphic if impressionistic images of a corpse, lying on the ground, its bones bared through rotten flesh. “To woo death, one must love it, lie with it,” intones a female voice, as the speaker, legendary…
Sister Midnight first published by Little White Lies, 11 March 2025 “What do normal people do on a Sunday?”, asks Uma (Radhika Apte), some way into writer/director Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight. “We’re not normal people,” her husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) replies. Gopal is not wrong. For even though the film opens with the couple travelling…
Celluloid Hex: the witch in horror and genre cinema (2025) is available from Warped Perspective here In her latest film study Celluloid Hex: the witch in horror and genre cinema (2025), Keri O’Shea examines how 20th- and 21st-century cinema has found a place, or rather several different places, for this historico-mythic figure of gendered mischief, female…
Members Club first published by SciFiNow, for its world première at FrightFest, 24 August 2024 Members Club opens with a ‘No Dogging’ sign, and middle-aged Geoff (David Schall) pulling up alongside it precisely to dog. This being the horror genre – albeit horror comedy – the transgression of any rule will be met with brutal…
Whitch screened in Short Film Block #3 at Panic Fest, 29 Mar 2025 Whitch opens like a classic home invasion film, with a POV shot moving from a car to the front entrance of a middle-class suburban house, and incidentally taking in the wooden talismans decorating the door’s frame and the welcome mat displaying the…
Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (aka Hansel and Gretel: the 420 Witch) first published by Grolsch FilmWorks, 23 August 2013 Just as 2012 was the year when Snow White came in for some radical post-millennial reimaginings (Tarsem Singh‘s Mirror Mirror, Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the Huntsman, Pablo Berger‘s Blancanieves), so 2013 is the year…
Delirium (Óráð) had its international première at FrightFest 2024, 24 August Delirium (Óráð) begins with fire and female agony, as a car is shown in flames, with the sounds of a trapped woman screaming desperately inside. It is like the modern-day version of a witch’s painful execution – in a film where time slips, and…