The Gore Connoisseurs

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...

The danger with meta horror is that any genuine scares are suffocated with a deluge of nods and winks. The movie can end up looking just a bit too self-satisfied by its discovery that the horror genre is kind of silly and full of clichés. Yes, we have noticed. Films like Scream and Friday the 13th: Jason Lives are outrageously entertaining, but nobody can accuse them of being that scary. You're meant to view everything from an ironic distance and actively enjoy the characters' gruesome deaths. Even Cabin in the Woods , Drew Goddard's mega-ambitious meta horror, isn't that scary. It's very clever and it tries to explore why we love horror so much rather than just poking fun at the genre, but you're unlikely to be screaming in fright. The Cabin in the Woods aka the more successful Evil Dead reboot Ruin Me, Preston DeFrancis's debut film which premiered at the 2017 Screamfest and has recently come to Shudder , may have upped the meta horror ant...

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...