Nightsiren (Svetlonoc) has its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2023 “Even in modern Europe, in certain lonely villages, folklore and medieval superstitions are still considered a way of life,” reads text at the beginning of Nightsiren (Svetlonoc). The film opens with a primal scene: faced with the hair-pulling wrath of her abusive mother Alžbeta (Petra Vajdová), little Šarlota (Sára…
Director/co-writer/editor/cinematographer/producer Pierre Tsigaridis’ feature debut is not only, as its title baldly states, a tale of two witches, but also of two halves, formally separated into two numbered and headed sections, ‘The Boogeywoman’ and ‘Masha’, plus a prologue and epilogue. In Chapter I, 27-year-old, six-months-pregnant Sarah Johnson (Belle Adams), already uncertain about her relationship with…
The Ones You Didn’t Burn had its international première at FrightFest 2022 “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.” These words, expressly cited from Henry David Thoreau, appear as text at the beginning of writer/director Elise Finnerty’s feature debut The Ones You Didn’t…
Hellbender has its world première at Fantasia 2021 Written and directed by John Adams, Zelda Adams and Toby Poser (the aptly named ‘Adams family’), Hellbender begins with overt overkill. Caught squatting around a grisly pile of body parts, a woman (Judy Rosen) with a grotesquely sewn-up mouth is hanged in the woods by a…
Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror has its Canadian première on demand at Fantasia 2021 The Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror begins with horror scholar Jonathan Rigby stating that he believed he coined the term ‘folk horror’ in 2006 (in his book American Gothic: Sixty Years…
Häxan (Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages) first published by Film4 in 2007 Summary: Benjamin Christensen’s pioneering 1922 semi-documentary account of ‘witch madness’ just will not stay silent. Review: The year 1922 was to be a landmark in the history of cinema. Not only would it see the release of both Robert Flaherty’s proto-documentary Nanook of the North…
Sometimes, to understand the great American horror story, you need to go back to the source. Aaron B. Koontz’s The Pale Door begins with a quote from Edgar Allen Poe (which supplies the origin of the film’s title), and with that most familiar of the genre’s formative primal scenes: a little boy in bed, frightened…
The Night Sitter first published by SciFiNow The Night Sitter opens with the sound of strange humming – and then we see young ‘Amber’ (Elyse Dufour) driving to a house in a suburban cul de sac for a child-minding job. As Amber carefully discards her cigarette, applies drops to her eyes, and practises introducing herself by…
Suspiria first published by Little White Lies ‘Simulacrum’ is the single word that elderly psychologist Dr Jozef Klemperer (played by one Lutz Ebersdorf, in fact a pseudonym for Tilda Swinton) writes in his case notes as he listens to an unhinged Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz) rave in his apartment cum consulting room. In this…
Dance en abyme: Suspiria (2018) and reflections on rebirth Remakes always come with an in-built tension. Cleave too close to the original, and your film seems pointless. Cleave too far from it, and the film barely seems a remake. The ideal is to find a balance, somewhere between these two poles: a film that still…
Arrow Video FrightFest 2018: Dead Night (2017) Most of the action of Brad Baruh’s Dead Night takes place over one long dark night on the 21st March, 2015 – Spring Break, technically, but still snowy in the Oregon hinterlands. Yet the film opens in the same place on 12 June, 1961, as a couple canoodling…