The Gore Connoisseurs

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. ...

Get Out may have revolutionised how horror tackles politics, but the genre has a rich history of tacking political messages onto enjoyably shlocky plots. One of my favourite examples is 1989's Society. It was directed by Brian Yuzna (he produced  Re-Animator ) and came off the back of films like The Fly, Videodrome and The Thing which made horror fantastically gloopy. We all like a bit of 80s body horror, but we also like very literal metaphors about how the economic elite are feeding off ordinary people. How, Yuzna undoubtedly pondered, could the two be combined? Enter Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock), your average teen with incredible 80s hair who thinks his parents are out to get him. "I'm not paranoid," he says to his shrink with zero credability. Like most teenagers, Whitney is remarkably horny. There's a semi-acknowledged incest vibe between him and his sister, even when he sees the skin pulse and bulge on her sweat-drenched back when zipping up...

This month’s Pet Sematary remake is deeply flawed. The unselfconscious genre clichés and unnecessary ableist subplot don’t do it any favours, and it pales in comparison to Jordan Peele’s Us . Yet the things that Pet Sematary does get right really hit the spot. Here’s how the movie illustrated the reasons for my horror nerdery. Brutal gore Substandard horror films pile on the gore with more is more abandon. Pet Sematary is all the better for being more sparing with its blood and guts. The violence feels unexpected and some nasty flesh wounds are milked by intelligent camerawork. The pièce de résistance comes early in the movie when Louis’s sleepy suburban medical practice is turned upside down by the arrival of Victor, a dying young man mowed down by a speeding truck. The exposed bone and bloodshot eyes make sure these scenes are uncomfortable to watch. They set up the idea that our bodies are fragile and death can arrive at lightning speed. While our mor...

Us is a movie brimming, perhaps overstuffed, with ideas. It's also highly ambiguous. What is the meaning behind the Tethered? We certainly have plenty of theories. Check out our best guesses   below. Warning: There are some pretty hefty spoilers below. Read on at your peril! 1) The enemy within The movie's fantastic ending really hammers home the idea that the thing we really ought to be afraid of is ourselves. During Adelaide and Red's final confrontation, Red reminds her that the Tethered are only humans, with skin and teeth. Cue the big reveal: Adelaide was Tethered all along, and the psychotic Red was the cute little girl we saw lost at the fairground in the film's prologue. Peele has admitted that the movie's message is something along these lines. “We are our own worst enemy," he told The Guardian ,  "not just as individuals but more importantly as a group, as a family, as a society, as a country, as a world." Fol...

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...

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...

We've ranked the ten most toxic horror movie relationships via the medium of #couplegoals Instagram posts.  Relationships almost always head south in horror films. The lucky ones just realise they're not meant to be together. The majority end up killing their significant others and/or being horrifically betrayed by them. We're counting down from "less than desirable" to "you two should break up right now". Time to have a peek at the horror movie Instagram feed. 10) David & Alex, An American Werewolf in London (1981) So how did you two meet? He was a backpacker in hospital recovering from a werewolf attack. She was a softly spoken nurse who quickly succumbed to his American charms. The best part of their relationship: They're actually pretty cute together, so long as David isn't a hairy rampaging beast. Any hangups? David's killing sprees had a surprisingly minimal impact on his love life. Alex, loyal until the...