The Gore Connoisseurs

We've been poking around YouTube trying to find the best horror short films so you don't have to. This week: The Quiet Zone by Andrew Ionides . Synopsis:  A commute goes disastrously awry when Ella tells a noisy passenger to be quiet in the silent coach of a train. Background: "It was kind of based on a series of bad journeys I had into work," writer/director Andrew Ionides explained in an interview at the NYC horror film festival. "Unfortunately I witnessed a few passengers annoying people in the quiet zones [on trains]. Being the sick, twisted writer that I am I thought 'what if?' and it resulted in this kind of stalker story." Ionides has been directing short films for the last six years. The Quiet Zone premiered in 2016 and was part of the official selection for the Screamfest horror film festival that year. Pros: It's properly scary if you've ever been alone on a long, dark commute. It takes everyday frustrations (noisy passe...

This year zombie films are having a renaissance. So far we've had Cargo ,   The Cured and Netflix original Ravenous . What do all these films have in common? Well, it turns out an awful lot actually. Zombies have been a cultural obsession since George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). The subgenre has taken a few left turns since that unbearably tense undead seige on a rickety house. Now zombie flicks tend to be large-scale gorefests which mercilesslessly pluck the heartstrings as our beloved protagonists become flesh-eating maniacs. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later   zombies were famously super fast. They unnervingly caught on: we'd almost certainly be screwed in a life-or-death sprint with the zombies from Charlie Brooker's Dead Set (2008)   or Amazon Prime's sleeper hit Train to Busan   (2016) . Now TV series  The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead ensure our favourite lumbering corpses remain a mainstay in popular culture. If you th...

Hereditary 's Twitter account is a constant source of entertainment for me. In the run up to the movie's cinematic release, they've been retweeting the visceral reactions some cinemagoers have been having to the film – from audible screaming to under-the-breath chains of expletives.  Hardened horror fan that I am, I only jumped once when I finally saw the movie. It was scary yes, and expertly made, but there comes a point when horror films don't work the way they used to. I used to be petrified during relatively tame outings like Insidious and The Cabin in the Woods. Now I can watch  Ringu with barely a shudder. There are times, however, when the adrenaline truly started to pump during a horror flick. For those who, like me, are tired of the hyperbolic "will haunt your every waking moment" tosh you get on horror film posters, these pulse-raising moments from classic and modern horror films might actually do it for you. When a tall man breaks into y...

So you've seen Hereditary , were scared silly, and are looking for your next dose of auteur horror. What other films (I hear you ask) have such a unique cinematic vision and are directed with such an attention to detail? The truth is there's no shortage of filmmakers who see themselves as the David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino of horror. Few manage stylised horror with the panache of Ari Aster , yet dig deeper and there's a decent clutch of films where someone has clearly obsessed over their aesthetic. From the artificial, dolls' house quality of Hereditary to 80's throwbacks like It Follows and The Guest , directors use cinematography and soundscapes to create an underlying sense of dread or to just make their films uber stylish and memorable. Yet for those of you who (quite rightly) have already devoured the work of Adam Wingard and David Robert Mitchell , here are the stylised horror films you've yet to discover. Replace Where you s...