Tag: Horror

Released: 20th October
Seen: 7th November

If you’re looking for a scary location to set a film, you can’t really go wrong with a giant convent full of nuns. There’s just something about a building where a bunch of nuns live that has some inherent dread to it, something about the old style of the building combined with a group of people in shapeless outfits that seemingly glide about while occasionally stopping to sing snarky songs about other nuns and what a problem they are, it’s all a bit unnerving. It clearly has to be an easy choice for a lot of creatives because there’s a lot of horror media that use the setup, from the legendary second season of American Horror Story to the surprising hit series The Nun. Hell, there’s an entire subgenre known as Nunsploitation that’s just about doing fucked up stuff with Nuns so it’s clearly something that’s been done for a while, which is why Sister Death might not feel that surprising but it’s still a damn good scary time.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 18th August
Seen: 3rd November

Some horror films are incredibly simple, a basic plot and setting that means you just get to sit back and enjoy the terror as it unfolds. Think of things like the first Halloween movie, a film that’s scary almost entirely because of its intense commitment to pure simplicity. You instantly know the characters, the setting and the stakes in a way that allows the scares to actually work considerably well. Some horror films require a little bit of thought to follow, maybe they’re playing with some darker heavier ideas than normal that need to be thought about in order for everything to make sense, like how Get Out works so much better when you understand the racial politics behind it all. Then there’s films so complicated they feel like they require an instruction guide just to understand what the hell is going on, or as I like to call those films “Pretentious as fuck”, which is pretty much the central feeling you get with something like Haunting of the Queen Mary.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 13th Jan
Seen: 2nd November

The slightly depressing reality is that we will probably never stop having to deal with the repercussions of the pandemic, or at least not for an excruciatingly long time. The last 4 years have been an absolute shitshow in terms of physical and mental health, the toll on the system from this one illness is impossible to properly measure and will undoubtedly be a reference point that most of us use for the rest of our lives. It’s also undoubtedly going to be a major part of a ton of art that’s being made for the next decade, how could it not be? It’s a major world event that absolutely everyone in some way has been impacted by, it not only impacted what kinds of art is made and how they make it but also will keep turning up as part of the narrative for a long time. Horror has had a fairly good crack at it with Host using it mostly as a way to justify a certain filming technique but now with Sick we have a film that uses it as an intrinsic portion of the central story and it makes for a surprisingly interesting little film.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 27th October
Seen: 30th October

Horror is seemingly going through somewhat of a resurgence lately. A lot of people who are huge fans of the genre will agree that 2022 was something of a landmark year for horror, something I would agree with as the majority of my best of 2022 list consisted of entries in the Horror genre. 2023 might not have been up to that level in terms of consistency but when this year releases a great horror movie, it’s an absolute masterpiece. Obvious huge monster hits have been things like Talk To Me, Cocaine Bear, or Evil Dead Rise which have shown that this is an era of some truly amazing horror films and there’s probably a bunch more that are due out any day now that’ll be on any list of great horror films from this year but a recent release may have forced its way to the top of that list through sheer force of will… that film is When Evil Lurks and god damn, it’s an all-timer.

Over on Soda & Telepaths I reviewed another Fantastic Fest film called Bark, a 2 person thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat and hugging your pampered pooch as tightly as possible