The Gore Connoisseurs

WARNING: SPOILERS. As well as being the first great horror movie filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic , Shudder's  Host is of the moment in more ways than one. Though the scary-as-hell found footage flick has a relatively by-the-numbers plot involving six friends accidentally summoning a demon, dig deeper and there are several intriguing ways it can be seen as an expression of very specific lockdown anxieties. 1/ The title has multiple meanings The host of a Zoom meeting. The unwitting host of a demonic presence. Yet it also could be the host of a virus like Covid-19. The idea of unwittingly inviting something threatening into our private space - as we see the characters do when they accidentally summon the demon - is very similar to our fear of bringing back the virus to our homes and harming our loved ones. 2/ Together yet alone What Host does better than fellow desktop found footage film Unfriended  is emphasise the simultaneous aloneness and togetherne...

Mike Flanagan has been one of our most consistently brilliant horror directors. His character-orientated stories and explorations of trauma and grief have resulted in some of the best horror films of the 2010s . Despite being impressively prolific, he's never made a bad horror movie. Thanks to a distinctive artistic voice and a close knit team of collaborators - screenwriting partner Jeff Howard; producer Trevor Macy; actors Kate Siegel and Henry Thomas among others who have starred in several of his films - we have a clear idea of what makes a Mike Flanagan movie essential viewing. But which is his best? Starting with 2011's  Absentia -  not the director's first film but his first feature-length entry into the horror genre - his seven horror movies so far have been ranked below. Note:- This article does not contain spoilers for any Mike Flanagan movies. 7/ Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) What goes down: It's 1967, and the Zander family run a phon...

The It of It Follows   takes several different forms, and we're told early on it could appear as "someone you know or a stranger in a crowd". If you pay close attention, it seems like each form is chosen specifically to mess with Jay (Maika Monroe) , acting as a manifestation of subconscious anxieties. Director David Robert Mitchell explained to Vulture that when choosing the form of It - often referred to as The Entity - he "tried to just think about what was troubling to me in each of those situations". Mitchell noted in the same interview that many of the forms The Entity takes are more significant than we realise - it's just too far away to properly register for most viewers. Bearing this in mind, I've listed all of the main forms The Entity takes and teased out how they're significant to Jay's mental state at that point in the film. #1 - Naked woman in the car park (Ruby Harris) There's some debate over who thi...

Grab your camcorder, head down a dark hallway and - whatever you do - don't stop filming. It's time to look at the rise of the found footage film and how the subgenre has evolved. Though many accuse found footage flicks of just being different permutations of shaky handheld camerawork, characters freaking out over twig snaps and semi-improvised dialogue, they've actually changed a fair bit over the past four decades. But before we turn to Blair Witch and Cloverfield, one of the first found footage horror movies was actually released 20 years prior. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - a proto-found footage movie Yep, though there are a tonne of differences between this notorious cannibal exploitation flick and later found footage movies, it actually established a number of ground rules in the subgenre. In the movie, Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) and his team set out to capture anthropologically interesting footage in the Amazon, yet end up shooting a snuff movie a...

You may come to Shudder's new original The Beach House expecting Cabin Fever, but the end result is decidedly more Colour out of Space. But is the sci-fi  contagion freak out  worth a watch ? A note on spoilers - The hits and misses sections are completely spoiler free zones. If you've seen the film, scroll down to the cliché count to see which horror topes we're dealing with and the questions and theories section to find out what the hell happened in the final scene. The Beach House' s   hits We don't often get hard sci-fi in horror - but the central concept of the movie rivals the ideas in Annihilation and Coherence and is pretty intiguing. It's an intimate story with cosmic implications. The film is full of surprises and some of the directions it takes are completely unexpected. First-time director Jeffrey A. Brown told Film Festival Today he 'didn’t want the viewer to anticipate what the next scene was going to be' - and he's...

With The Burning recently added to Shudder (in the US at least) and many discovering the movie for the first time, is it time to re-evaluate the film as one of the greatest ever slasher flicks ? Is there even an argument to say it’s better than the much more ubiquitous Friday the 13 th ? On its release in 1981, The Burning was buried in a slew of similarly plotted slasher flicks – with many complaining it was derivative of Friday the 13 th , released the previous year. It also suffered extensive cuts to its gore effects, and was only officially available uncut in 2003 in the UK and 2007 in the US. On the surface The Burning has much to recommend it. Special effects come courtesy of Tom Savini, who turned down Friday the 13 th Part 2 to work on it. The budget of $1.5 million is also almost three times that of Friday the 13 th . This shows by having the action take place in a fully operational summer camp, rather than just having a handful of camp counsellors turn up ear...

As your werewolf movie approaches its climax, it's time for your cursed antihero to writhe and groan as some FX magic happens and a helpless victim just stands there and watches the whole thing. But just how the transformation occurs has changed a fair bit over the years - depending both on the evolution of practical effects and prevailing cultural trends. Some have aged better than others.  Let's start with: The hairy crossfade (pre-1980s) Notable examples: Werewolf of London (1935),  The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943),  Curse of the Werewolf (1961) Werewolves had it easy pre-Rick Baker. Come the full moon, they would segue into vicious beasts via a series of crossfades, minus the whole screaming, flesh crunching and skin ripping which would come later. In these early films, strategic pillar walking was a less time-consuming FX option, as evidenced by this clip from Werewolf of London.  In The Wolf Man , Lon Chaney...