The Gore Connoisseurs

Everyone loves a well-told ghost story. The Little Stranger, an adaptation of the novel by Sarah Waters, is a lowkey, Freudian take on the time-worn haunted house story. Yet it's also   a perverse love letter to a decaying aristocracy which demonises ordinary people who don't know their place. The characterisation of Domhnall Gleeson's repressed protagonist Dr Faraday, along with some telling contextual cues, sour what is otherwise an excellent film. Though The Little Stranger is bound to disappoint anyone looking for a traditional horror movie, its character-driven narrative and scaled-back scares are reminiscent of the best of A24 era horror. Yet politically, the film feels far from progressive. The spectre at its heart is not the restless spirit of Sukey Ayres, the dead child suspected to be behind the strange goings on at Hundreds Hall, but middle class jealousy. Metaphorically at least, self-made men like Dr Faraday wipe out their aristocratic betters throug...

In the first of a series of three, we're selecting our favourite feminist horror films. We're going in chronological order, and our first three films are true horror classics: Rosemary's Baby, The Company of Wolves and Ginger Snaps. Horror has a bad rep for being a male-dominated and sometimes outright sexist genre. In the laziest horror films, women are broadly present to run, scream and, if they're lucky, make it to the coveted position of Final Girl. Yet horror also has the potential to be subversive, to build terrifying constructs out of very real societal evils. Many directors are sensitive to how problematic some horror tropes can be, and a number have figured cultural misogyny as the bogeyman in their movies. Taking a broad definition of what "feminist horror" can mean, we've drilled down into this rich seam in horror to find a hugely varied selection of films that put women front and centre.  Whether they create terror from politica...