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...

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...