FrightFest

FrightFest 2016, the UK’s premier horror film festival, runs over the forthcoming August Bank Holiday weekend. With over sixty movies set to screen, plus their short films showcase, Andy Nyman’s very popular quiz and several industry-related talks and events, FrightFest continues to expand its brand and deliver a varied selection of titles from across the…

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★★★★☆ Tales of Halloween (2015) is the latest stab by well-regarded horror directors at the anthology format. Created by Axelle Carolyn, the intent is to replace the V/H/S series as a showcase for filmmakers whose names will be very familiar to genre fans. Avoiding found-footage like the plague, Tales of Halloween is a slickly presented…

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★★★★★ Ben Cresciman’s intense psychological horror film Sun Choke (2015) is the story of a woman staring into the abyss of nothingness and liking what she sees: absolute nothing, a retreat from the chaos of the light. It’s been likened to grand auteurs such as Bergman, Lynch and Polanski, and those debts are easily enough…

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★★★☆☆ In the varied annals of horror cinema history, attics and basements operate as spaces ripe for psychoanalysis. When not serving as metaphors for ills of the human mind, they function as focal points for demonic manifestations, and sometimes portals to other dimensions. Kitchens aren’t scary, right? Parlours are only creepy if the house is…

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★★★★★ It’s as rare as rocking horse excrement for horror movies to exhibit emotional depths not related to the visceral thrills of the jump scare and the insidious, bone- chilling fright. So invested in the art of the slay and sending the audience into paroxysms of fear, the genre and its practitioners have either forgotten…

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★★★★☆ Levan Bakhia’s Landmine Goes Click (2015) is the kind of genre flick that comes along sometimes – where a director’s intentions can be misinterpreted. The brutalisation of three female characters is horrific, but it would be a presumptuous leap to suggest the film itself flexes a misogynistic creed. Such assertions would woefully misconstrue Bakhia’s…

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★★★★☆ Despite a third act change of tone, that plays out like a hybrid of Home Alone (1990) and The Shining (1980), there is still plenty to admire in Michael Thelin’s debut movie. For much of its brisk eighty-two minutes running time, Emelie (2015) is a devilishly good thriller of notably transgressive bent, giving the…

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★★★★☆ With What We Do in the Shadows, Housebound and now Deathgasm (2015), New Zealand is fast becoming the go-to place for crowd-pleasing horror comedies. Jason Lei Howden’s directorial debut is primed for unalloyed genre thrills, making you laugh until your sides hurt and subverting the rom-zom-com format. If fears going in hinged on the…

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★☆☆☆☆ David Keating’s silly and unsuccessful folklore horror film, Cherry Tree (2015), suffers from a list of ailments no old crone in a woodland cottage, with her library of esoteric books, magic spells and potions, could ever save or transform into a superior version. She’d look the film straight in the eye and wish it…

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Returning to Leicester Square for its sixteenth year as the UK’s leading celebration of horror and fantasy cinema, Film4 FrightFest 2015 is also set to be the biggest yet. With 19 world premières, along with 16 European and 24 UK ones, a wide and varied programme made up of a whopping 76 titles will screen…

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