The Gore Connoisseurs

The set-up for this low-key 2014 horror flick may seem like a Sinister rip-off, but stick with it and chills will ensue. The opening of The Canal leans into haunted house clichés hard. Mark (Rupert Evans) and his pregnant wife Claire (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) are introduced in the midst of a house viewing . Mark straight up sees a ghost, but still goes ahead with the purchase. Some may argue he deserves what's coming for him. Yet these are patient ghoulies. We flashforward five years to find Mark has discovered through his job as a film archivist that - surprise, surprise - the house boasts a history of gruesome murders. More pressingly, it looks like Claire might be having an affair with a Hot Ponytail Dude. The parallels to Sinister are clear. Mark - like Ethan Hawke's dickish true crime writer - has a job which makes him naturally inclined to deep dive into his new home's dark past. There's a lot of business with old timey film projectors and creepy ar...

Brightburn is one of this year's big budget horror releases – a scary movie reimagining of the Superman story produced by James Gunn. Yet its director cut his teeth on micro-budget 2014 gore-fest The Hive, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime . Director David Yarovesky's debut feature caught Gunn's attention and won him the bug bucks funding he needed to make Brightburn. It's a film that has largely flown under the radar, but what was it that caught Hollywood's attention? The Hive is in some ways a typical story of plague and infestation. A group of camp counsellors slowly succumb to nasty black goo which makes them violent, telepathic and pretty unsightly. The Hive is messy, but unlike many horror films it's certain of its own right to exist in a busy genre landscape Our hero Adam (Gabriel Basso) wakes up infected by the goo and suffering from amnesia. There are warnings scrawled on the wall that there are monsters outside, and Adam starts to rea...

Critics are calling Irish horror film  The Hole in the Ground this year's Hereditary , yet on the evidence of the trailer alone it looks like a by-the-numbers horror movie. While the trailer for Jordan Peele's Us promised us a bizarre set-up and arresting imagery, The Hole in the Ground ticked off an impressive number of horror clichés in its two and a half minute runtime. Yet Hole has already been picked up by horror powerhouse A24 ( Hereditary, The Witch, It Comes at Night ) following its Sundance premiere, so doubtless it's destined for great things. But if, like us, you're thinking that Lee Cronin's debut feature sounds a bit like every other scary movie you've seen in the past few years, here's five tropes it's "borrowed" from recent horror films. 1) Let's move to a house in the middle of nowhere We get that house prices are through the roof – but come on! We completely get why Pyewacket's Leah is pissed o...

Since the protagonists of your average horror movie are teenagers, it's not such a surprise that one of the genre's set pieces has become the classroom scene. From Halloween to Hereditary , we unpick four of the most memorable. Horror filmmakers often use classroom scenes to unpack the themes of their movies, allowing viewers to make metaphorical links between the film's villain and more abstract concepts like destiny and existential dread.  Teenagers in horror films can find themselves drifting off as their teacher waxes lyrical about Hamlet one minute, only to be rudely awakened by masked serial killers and demonic old ladies the next. If you thought you had painful memories of your schooldays, check out what these guys had to go through. Halloween (1978) - Laurie has a date with destiny What's going down? Studious Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is distracted from her English class by Michael Myers watching her at the window with murder on his mind. ...

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...

Hereditary 's Twitter account is a constant source of entertainment for me. In the run up to the movie's cinematic release, they've been retweeting the visceral reactions some cinemagoers have been having to the film – from audible screaming to under-the-breath chains of expletives.  Hardened horror fan that I am, I only jumped once when I finally saw the movie. It was scary yes, and expertly made, but there comes a point when horror films don't work the way they used to. I used to be petrified during relatively tame outings like Insidious and The Cabin in the Woods. Now I can watch  Ringu with barely a shudder. There are times, however, when the adrenaline truly started to pump during a horror flick. For those who, like me, are tired of the hyperbolic "will haunt your every waking moment" tosh you get on horror film posters, these pulse-raising moments from classic and modern horror films might actually do it for you. When a tall man breaks into y...

So you've seen Hereditary , were scared silly, and are looking for your next dose of auteur horror. What other films (I hear you ask) have such a unique cinematic vision and are directed with such an attention to detail? The truth is there's no shortage of filmmakers who see themselves as the David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino of horror. Few manage stylised horror with the panache of Ari Aster , yet dig deeper and there's a decent clutch of films where someone has clearly obsessed over their aesthetic. From the artificial, dolls' house quality of Hereditary to 80's throwbacks like It Follows and The Guest , directors use cinematography and soundscapes to create an underlying sense of dread or to just make their films uber stylish and memorable. Yet for those of you who (quite rightly) have already devoured the work of Adam Wingard and David Robert Mitchell , here are the stylised horror films you've yet to discover. Replace Where you s...