By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. I hate the use of “strong” as a constant descriptor for female characters, it feels so one-dimensional…. I just took inspiration from all the women I’ve known in my life and they can be strong, but also weak, they can be stubborn but also thoughtful.” It’s Samhain […]
9000 Miles from Home and 30 Miles from Nowhere: An Interview with Caitlin Koller
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. If more work was done to showcase and embrace (the Australian) horror film past it could really help to foster awareness and hunger for local horror films.” How did emerging Australian filmmaker Caitlin Koller find herself in rural Illinois directing one of the most fun horror comedies […]
Something Ominous, Indeed: The Unfamiliar
By Ali Moosavi. Ever since the success and huge profit margin of films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc., there has been a deluge of horror films, producing more franchises than McDonalds. They tend to follow one of a number of well-established templates; a mad, seemingly indestructible killer on […]
Airbnb Done Wrong: The Rental
By Elias Savada. It’s another hung-out-to-dry whodunit…in which you never really learn whodunit.” Will The Rental do more damage to the home sharing business than the Covid-19 virus already has? Probably not, but this cautionary tale – an adequate variant of the Cabin in the Woods horror sub-genre, might cause […]
What’s in the Bag?: An Interview with Harold Holscher, Director of The Soul Collector (AKA 8)
By Ali Moosavi. The term “horror film” is often used as a short cut for a variety of movies that contain either scares, suspense or, on rare occasions, both. Therefore, it includes everything from slasher movies to psychological horror; from stories based on normal everyday life to those containing para-normal […]
Dark Smörgåsbord: Horror Anthologies and Scare Package (2019)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. From Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) to Julian Richards’s The Last Horror Movie (2003), there’s something about the very materiality of the video cassette that evokes horror. Is there something vaguely symbolic about those little black coffins of cinematic memory? Do we subconsciously read them as the perfect […]
Ghost Stories: Earnest and Campy
By Alex Brannan. To break it down into the simplest of taxonomies, there are two types of horror anthology film: those which present discrete short films preoccupied around a central theme, and those which situate their shorts within a frame narrative. Both types have had a long cinematic history – […]