The Gore Connoisseurs

Death faces, much like come faces, can be... well, a little bit embarassing. Especially if you happen to be a z list actor in a horror franchise.  The Friday the 13th movies boast heady atmospherics, great camerawork and brutally inventive methods of offing numerous interchangable horny teenagers. What they do not boast is great acting. The emotions characters' experience as they succumb to either Jason or his dear old mum (or the copycat killer in Part 5 we'd much rather forget) range from resignation, overdone shock and clear apathy. Here are our favourite last hurrahs : 10) Tina (Deborah Voorhees) Film: A New Beginning Cause of death: Garden shears through the eyes. Yikes! What's going down: Yes, her name really is Voorhees. Tina is enjoying some al fresco rumpy pumpy while simultaneously treating the viewer to some full frontal nudity (this is the movie where all the sex starts to feel a bit icky). Naturally, the Jason copycat is in the vicinity with...

The danger with meta horror is that any genuine scares are suffocated with a deluge of nods and winks. The movie can end up looking just a bit too self-satisfied by its discovery that the horror genre is kind of silly and full of clichés. Yes, we have noticed. Films like Scream and Friday the 13th: Jason Lives are outrageously entertaining, but nobody can accuse them of being that scary. You're meant to view everything from an ironic distance and actively enjoy the characters' gruesome deaths. Even Cabin in the Woods , Drew Goddard's mega-ambitious meta horror, isn't that scary. It's very clever and it tries to explore why we love horror so much rather than just poking fun at the genre, but you're unlikely to be screaming in fright. The Cabin in the Woods aka the more successful Evil Dead reboot Ruin Me, Preston DeFrancis's debut film which premiered at the 2017 Screamfest and has recently come to Shudder , may have upped the meta horror ant...

Before Hereditary   and Midsommar, horror wunderkind  Ari Aster directed a series of disturbing short films. Many of the preoccupations of his feature films   are present in these dark family dramas: twisted family drama, paranoia and horror lurking within middle class banality. Already Aster had developed his meticulous, clinical brand of cinematoography and keen ear for subtly unnerving music. Already he was developing a brand of horror with a bedrock in fraught familial relationships and recognisable human fears, mining a seam in the genre that runs from Rosemary's Baby and Don't Look Now to The Babadook and The Witch. Aster's short film work ranges from the cheerfully lo-fi Beau (which he filmed in just one day) and his current collaborations with Hollywood stars for his Portraits series – a collection of Scorsese-like monologues focusing on morally iffy characters and social injustices. One of these monologues, C'est la Vie , provides the key to Ast...

To celebrate the arrival of spooky season, here's a throwback to the time in 2018 when  Sophia Moss  and I sat down to roadtest  an all new drinking game  for John Carpenter's Halloween . We revisited the slasher classic with two bottles of red and a bottle of gin and live tweeted our descent into drunkeness. Here's what happened... The short story: The drinking game was much more lethal than we intended. Having finished one bottle of wine around the twenty minute mark, we began to doubt whether we'd make it to the end. Early inebriation Drinking for every 30 seconds of the Halloween theme was a bad idea. Carpenter may have composed one of the most iconic horror themes ever, but he doesn't half know it. The tinkling piano and groovy synths were popping up pretty much constantly, and as a consequence the wine was quickly disappearing. We also drank each time Michael could be seen spying on potential victims - considering the first half of the film ...

With spooky season just around the corner, there can only be one film to celebrate the festivities. It's time to head back to Haddonfield to celebrate and get roaringly drunk in the process. Halloween is chock full of slasher tropes, so there's plenty of fodder for a catastrophic drinking game. And because it would be irresponsible to give you a drinking game without testing it ourselves, travel blogger Sophia Moss and I trialed it for health and safety reasons. You can see the full story of how it went  here . So grab a bottle of wine and a bottle of your favourite spirit, check the news to make sure no crazed killers have escaped your local psychiatric hospital, and whatever you do don't have sex. And for God's sake listen to Dr Loomis. Drink a finger of wine/beer if... The  Halloween  theme music plays We're a big fan of John Carpenter's jazzy synth music, and it's great that the director's multi-talented. But don't you thi...