Film, Horror

Horror Channel announces TV premieres of UK horror films for April 2011

Includes Mum & Dad, Tony: London Serial Killer and Salvage

‘Essentially through the month of April every Friday night we’re going to have the UK TV premiere of brilliant British cutting edge horror films,’ explains Programmes & Acquisitions Coordinator Paul McEvoy (also founder and co-director of horror film…

Shock rocker and horror film director Rob Zombie - full interview transcript

Musician and director's first UK tour for 12 years

HN:This is your first UK tour for 12 years. Why it’s taken so long? RZ: Basically it’s taken me a pretty long time to get back to anywhere, I haven’t been outside of the US for a long time, basically the thing that’s got in the way of my world wide…

Profile: Simon Hynd, director of horror thriller Senseless

Jason Behr plays US businessman who is kidnapped

Born 20 January, 1974, Edinburgh Background Hynd studied Film & Television at Napier, making a few shorts that got him noticed by the Scottish film industry, going on to win a Scottish BAFTA for his short Tumshie Mcfadgen’s Bid for Ultimate…

GFF blog: Bruce Goldstein talks The Tingler

The Vincent Price-starring, William Castle-directed gimmick fest gets a new lease of life at the GFF

Bruce Goldstein is not happy about his official job description at the Glasgow Film Festival. ‘I’m not a film historian – well, I guess I am, of a sort – but primarily, I’m a film distributor, and I run a cinema. Most successful repertory stream in the…

The Rite - Demonic possession thriller bogged down by script

Anthony Hopkins, Rutger Hauer and Colin O'Donoghue fail to escape The Exorcist's shadow

(15) 113min ‘What did you expect, spinning heads and pea-soup?’ asks Vatican-approved exorcist Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins) in Mikael Håfström’s demonic possession thriller, which initially offers a sober take on a horror genre that usually…

Cold Fish

Dark but overlong Japanese serial killer horror from director Sion Sono

Sion Sono has had a varied and intriguing career directing hair extension horror Exte and the award winning four hour Love Exposure. Here he returns with a dark serial killer character study told from the perspective of Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) who…

Wake Wood

Supernatural horror from Hammer Studios captures relentless claustrophobia

The resurrected Hammer Studios really are upping the pace, swiftly following The Resident with British supernatural shocker Wake Wood. Very much a riff on Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (which also got an excellent big screen adaptation from overlooked…

The Resident – Film review

Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee star in the latest thriller from Hammer studio

It’s certainly fantastic seeing the legend ‘Hammer Film Productions’ on the big screen again (especially when it’s followed by the name ‘Christopher Lee’) however this thriller goes more for the chills of The Nanny or Fear in the Night than the Draculas…

Goblin - The Arches, Glasgow, Friday 25 February 2011

The Glasgow Music and Film Festival has scored a real coup with Goblin, arch-horror instrumentalists usually found supplying the music to Dario Argento’s giallo masterpieces through the 70s and 80s. Alongside Ennio Morricone they have provided some of…

GFF blog: Jason Eisener on Rutger Hauer exploitation flick, Hobo With a Shotgun

The former Grindhouse trailer gets the feature-length treatment

Almost everything you want to know plot-wise about the film Hobo With a Shotgun is right there in the title. There’s a hobo. He has a shotgun. You can probably fill in the blanks yourself. The film’s genesis has a slightly more intricate story…

Buried, Puppet Master: Axis of Evil and Shock Labyrinth released on DVD

Horror DVD round-up

Over the years some of the greatest horror films have found love and longevity amongst the classics of the genre despite their direct-to-video origins. Unfortunately that’s not always the case as The Open Door (Second Sight) ● proves. Taking the vague…

The Rite - The human obsession with possession

Latest in line of films exploring possession of the body, spirit and soul

We know that modern society is obsessed with ownership – fancy electrical goods, high fashion and general clutter. But there’s another form of possession with which people have been obsessed for a very long time. It’s possession of the body, the spirit…

The best of Frightfest at Glasgow Film Festival 2011

Paul McEvoy, founder and co-director of the horror film festival within a festival, picks the best of the line-up ‘We always have a snapshot of exactly where the genre is at the moment, so we’re only as strong as the films that are being produced. I…

DVD: I Spit on Your Grave

2010 remake of notorious 'Video Nasty'

Sarah Butler stars in Steven R Monroe's reboot of the 1978 rape-revenge Video Nasty.

DVD: In Their Sleep (Dans Ton Sommeil)

Quietly unsettling psychological thriller

French psychological thriller directed by Caroline and Eric du Potet, and starring Anne Parillaud (Nikita).

A Bay of Blood

Mario Bava’s 1971 film one of the most influential and imitated horror films ever made

(18) 80min (Arrow Video) Out of all Arrow’s lush new DVD and Blu-ray issues of films from the American and Italian masters of horror, this is the one I have been looking forward to most. I was first introduced to Mario Bava’s 1971 film by friend…

Flower of Flesh and Blood, Guinea Pig and August Underground on DVD

The List’s guide to banned horror films, we watched them so you don’t have to

For this Hallowe’en special we step into the outer reaches of horror and examine some of the films that have been refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. Of course it’s impossible to have a discussion on banned movies in the…

Dead Cert

(18) 93min (Momentum) Two of modern cinema’s most over used clichés collide when vampires meet cock-er-ney gangsters in this tired Brit flick as Romanian bloodsuckers try to muscle in on an East End strip club owned by Craig Fairbrass. What could…

Night of the Demons

(18) 96 mins (Kaleidoscope) Hollywood’s unquenchable appetite for remakes means even near-forgotten schlock horror cheapies are getting the remake treatment. Night of the Demons was a lurid, gory, late-night favourite from 1988 and this updated…

Psych 9

(18) 93 mins (indi VISION) Unfortunately, Psych 9 takes itself way too seriously. Roslyn (Sarah Foster) finds temporary employment on the nightshift helping to clear out an abandoned hospital, while a serial killer (dubbed the Night Hawk by local…

Big Tit Zombies 3D

(15) 73min (Terracotta) Where a film like The Horde takes its zombies seriously, this isn't is something you could ever accuse Takao Nakano’s Big Tit Zombies of doing. BTZ goes for simple pleasures as a troupe of strippers fight off a plague of the…

The Horde

(18) 93min (Momentum) Surprsingly France is at the forefront of new extreme horror cinema, and while The Horde isn’t as subversive as Frontier(s), Martyrs or Inside it’s a wildly entertaining mix of La Haine and Dawn of the Dead (unfortunately we…

The Last Exorcism

Distinctly underwhelming faux-documentary

(15) 87min From 1999’s The Blair Witch Project to last year’s phenomenon Paranormal Activity, the faux-documentary has become a frequent staple of the horror genre in the last decade. Produced by Hostel’s Eli Roth, Daniel Stamm’s effort is the latest…

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

Body horror has always been one of the queasiest of cinema experiences. Films like Tetsuo, The Thing and the work of David Cronenberg have attacked our fragile human form with viruses, parasites, deformity and medical experimentation. Now Dutch…