The Gore Connoisseurs

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...

While the scary tales Fred (Josh Ruben) and Fanny (Aya Cash) tell each other in Shudder 's Scare Me might seem disconnected from the main plot, their ideas actually tell us a lot about their characters and growing conflict. WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Scare Me Fanny Fanny's wildly successful debut novel Venus  looks to continue the zombie subgenre 's tradition of using the undead for political commentary. From the drug-addled abridged version we're treated to, we learn the zombie plague only affects women in the novel. Is the corpses return from the grave to menace women metaphorical for the dusty patriarchal values which seek to undermine Fanny's success? Fanny's first off-the-cuff story in the cabin centres on a young girl who attempts to kill her grandfather, but ends up killing his dog by accident and earning his ire from beyond the grave. At its heart it's a story of generational conflict - with a daughter trying to rid herself of her c...