The Gore Connoisseurs

Typewriter , Netflix 's latest Indian horror, blends pre-teen comedy, clever scares and ghoulish gore. It narrowly gets away with it. The plot of five-part Netflix series Typewriter is incredibly busy. It involves school-age paranormal investigators, creepy-as-hell doppelgangers and a long-dead mass murderer looking to make a comeback from beyond the grave. The scares, when they come, are arresting, but they're dotted inbetween gentle comedy and heartfelt character development. The supernatural mechanics at play may be elaborate, but at the heart of the series is Sam (Aarnaa Sharma) - a kid who becomes obsessed with ghosts in the hope of reconnecting with her deceased mother. Sam leads a gang of preteen ghost hunters looking to "catch" a spirit they believe to be haunting the creaky Bardez Villa. Legend has it that, following the unexplained death of a celebrated writer in the house, his typewriter churned out his most famous work, The Ghost of Sultanpur...

Get Out 's Allison Williams and Dear White People 's Logan Browning star in Netflix's B movie Black Swan about rival cellists. Yet somehow it doesn't quite work. The main problem is a common one for ambitious horror flicks – it tackles dark, very serious themes in a superficial way. Cast your minds back to 2008's Teeth , another film with an interesting subtext that was tonally all over the place. Most people agree Teeth is a black comedy, a body horror twist on a coming of age drama. Yet the plot sees the heroine Dawn repeatedly raped by pretty much every man she meets. 2008's Teeth sees heroine Dawn repeatedly raped... yet it's still a black comedy? True, these men do get their comuppence. Dawn fortunately has a toothed vagina, so it's soon raining severed dicks. But there's something horribly grim about watching repeated scenes of sexual abuse not taken very seriously. The Perfection  needs to treat its characters with mor...

Indie horror flicks like Mon Mon Mon Monsters,   Ravenous and Wildling  are moving away from the idea that monsters are straightforwardly evil. Note: This essay contains minor spoilers for Wildling. Jason Voorhees. Leatherface. Sadako. Though they have tragic backstories, they each function as an unstoppable evil force in their respective movies. The traditional horror icons don't have a sense of interiority. It would be out of the question to feel anything like pity for our favourite slasher killers or supernatural villains. Yet Chinese horror film Mon Mon Mon Monsters (currently streaming on Shudder ) features a flesh-hungry monster with razor sharp teeth and claws as its most sympathetic character.  The purest relationship in the film is between this little monster and her equally monstrous older sister. In a touching early scene, the older monster offers her sister the tastiest morsel from the corpse of an innocent man they've just killed. ...

It's just been announed that The Haunting of Hill House is getting a second series that's loosely based on Henry James's short story The Turn of the Screw.  Here's why that's a terrible idea. Hill House creator Mike Flanagan has revealed that The Haunting is set to become an anthology series – with its second outing focus on a different gothic pile with unwelcome supernatural visitors. While the decision to move away from the Crain family was a wise one, The Turn of the Screw is a regrettable choice of source material. Here's why. 1) The Turn of the Screw is not very good Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is a lyrical, poetically suggestive novel painting a delicate portrait of loneliness and mental fragility. Flanagan carefully crafted the book's strange and touching imagery into the series – from Nelly's cup of stars to Ruth's raining pebbles. While Jackson's novel was popular but not ubiquitous, ever...

New Netflix horror Velvet Buzzsaw involves various members of the art world elite meeting grisly ends. Yet why does their baroque suffering leave us cold? After all, the film boasts a terrific cast – including Jake Gyllenhaal and  Hereditary ' s   Toni Collette – and mostly well-drawn characters. Yet there's something about the macabre yet predictable slaughter that leaves us asking: "So what?" We're exploring why films with similar plots like Final Destination and Ringu fill the viewer with a sense of dread and leave them invested in the characters' fates, while Velvet Buzzsaw' s deaths merely invite weary shrugs. WARNING: Spoilers ahead Fatalistic characters One of the key reasons we don't care about the Velvet Buzzsaw 's characters' deaths is that they don't seem to care that much themselves. Much like how the unfortunate counsellers never seem to put up much of a fight in the  Friday the 13th  movies ...

Netflix's offering of original horror movies has been patchy at best, but their latest release Cam immediately piqued our interest. The movie explores the modern phenomenom of cam girls: women who stream erotic performances, allowing their viewers a say in the what happens on screen in return for cash. Alice (Madeline Brewer) is scaling the Top 50 of her website, until a mysterious lookalike steals her account and starts to break down the delicate online boundaries Alice uses to protect herself. It's available to stream now , but is it worth a watch? Cam 's hits It's written by former cam girl Issa Mazzei; hence why the details feel so authentic. The rivalries between the women; the sinister boundary-pushing of their male clients; the pressure for the women to constantly outdo their previous performance – all of it feels real. Mazzei faced some ugly misogyny when pitching the movie to studios , but thankfully Blumhouse realised the film's potential ...