The Gore Connoisseurs

Throughout Brandon Cronenberg 's arresting sophomore feature we're led to believe Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is having her identity worn away by inhabiting so many bodies - until we understand she never really had one to begin with. Warning: Spoilers How do we define our sense of self? At the beginning of the film, Vos is shown a box of items from her past by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Girder is satisfied that Vos has been restored to her sense of self after inhabiting Holly's (Gabrielle Graham) body when she successfully recalls a memory for each object - particularly after she says she always felt guilty for killing a butterfly she wanted to have pressed, which seems to reveal something deeper about who she is. Next we see Vos pay a visit to her semi-estranged husband and son, rehearsing how to greet them on her way. At the time this seems to imply Vos still hasn't returned to her old self. When Vos becomes Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), it seems at ...

New Korean sci-fi suspense thriller  The Call sees two women communicate across two decades via a mysterious landline phone. Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye), from 2019, warns Young-sook (Jong Seo-jun) of an impending catastrophe in 1999, but when it transpires Young-sook is a card-carrying psychopath, Seo-yeon begins to regret saving her. Recently dropped on Netflix with little to no fanfare, it would be easy to miss The Call. It's far from a perfect movie, yet its high-concept premise is an excellent basis for a twisty cat and mouse conflict between the past and present. It's definitely more of a horror-adjacent thriller than a true horror flick, so will disappoint committed gorehounds, but it's still very much worth a shoutout on here. Read the film's pros and cons below to find out if it's worth a watch . This is a spoiler-free zone. The Call 's hits The movie's time-bending premise is excellently exploited. We see how each woman has an advantage over the othe...

There have been sixteen different short films in the three V/H/S anthology movies so far. With the announcement of a fourth instalment, V/H/S 94, it's time to find out which segment were mini horror classics and which were misfiring duds. The rapid release of V/H/S films from 2012 to 2014 provided a platform for the foremost horror directors of the day to take creative risks within the found footage subgenre . All the short films had a rough-and-ready quality, yet some seemed to capture lightning in a bottle while others failed to impress. Were the segments in V/H/S 2 really superior to those in the original? Can V/H/S Viral actually be as bad as you remember? Wonder no more - here are all sixteen short films from the V/H/S anthology series ranked from worst to best. There are no spoilers for any segments from V/H/S, V/H/S 2 or V/H/S Viral in this article 16/  Gorgerous Vortex Film: V/H/S Viral (2014) Director: Todd Lincoln Known for: The Apparition Plot in a sentence: A woman murd...

  Two of 2020's most talked about horror releases - generational dementia tale Relic and Netflix's haunted house refugee drama His House - don't really care about making literal sense. Instead of having metaphor as subtext , it becomes the only logical way of understanding the two movies. Warning: This piece contains spoilers for both Relic and His House Metaphorical layers in horror movies are nothing new, but viewers usually have the option of reading the film at face value. The Entity in It Follows is an otherwordly monster first, a representation of sexual anxieties and an adolescent fear of mortality second. Hereditary may be focused on a family tearing itself apart for the majority of its runtime, but in the third act Paimon and his cult hold centre stage. Not so with Relic and His House, which in their final acts dive head first into dreamlike territory which foregrounds thematic and emotional currents over plot. In Relic, this happens around the time Sam (Bella He...

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the safest way to get your fix of Halloween haunt attractions is on the small screen. Luckily, movies set in Halloween scare mazes are a surprisingly interesting subgenre. Haunt attractions provide an enviroment where it can be difficult to tell if something has gone wrong, as evidenced by several times haunt actors have accidentally hanged themselves , with patrons passively watching them die in the belief it's part of the show. With the growing popularity of extreme haunts like Blackout and McKamey Manor - some have begun to question the motivations of scare actors who inflict such no-holds-barred terror. With the absense of a safe word at McKamey Manor and punters only being allowed out when Russ McKamey lets them, the boundary between paid-for scares and real-life psychological torture is deliberately thin. The following five films explore the idea of what can happen when the brakes come off and safe scares become frightening real. The House...

The second instalment of Mike Flanagan ’s The Haunting anthology series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, sees a markedly different take on ghosts than the earlier Haunting of Hill House . Bly Manor sets up an all-new mythology for its ghostly residents, which is all part of Flanagan’s aim to shake up the tone in the new series. While Hill House focussed on childhood trauma, Flanagan has described Bly Manor as a “Gothic romance” – which influences the way ghosts are portrayed in the series. Warning: Spoilers for  The Haunting of Bly Manor The origin of the haunting We’re never explicitly told why Hill House is so chock full of ghosts, other than the fact there is something fundamentally wrong about the building. Episode one opens with Steven Crain reading the first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s novel in voiceover, explaining: “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.” We come to learn that the house itself is carnivorous, claiming the soul...