…well. I don’t know where to start. There have not been many films that have elicited such an extreme reaction in me as Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. First, some context – a friend and I have an annual Valentine’s Day tradition where we watch the most disturbing, controversial and transgressive films we…

There has been a recent trend in cinema that is both horrifying and absolutely riveting – horror films are becoming more psychologically-scarring, and feature sequences of unhinged, anarchic insanity, normally devoting the entire third act to reckless terror. Recent examples include Darren Aronofksy’s mother! and Ari Aster’s Hereditary, two extremely audacious and utterly terrifying works….

When it comes to horror film (or any work that has the intention of creating fear or terror in the audience), I hold a few principles in very high regard – but the most important concept of horror cinema is what I call the Unseen Principle, which states that while seeing what we fear is…

Of all the cinematic conventions that have seemingly gone out of style, none is more fascinating than that of the horror anthology. Perhaps not entirely absent, the days when films were built around short but impactful stories, often retaining some loose connection through wraparound sequences, are long behind us. A few months ago, I reviewed…

When we consider all the controversial filmmakers to have worked throughout the history of cinema, none of them is as deserving of the infamy as Lars von Trier. Since the 1990s, he’s been terrorizing audiences with an array of troubling works, and he constantly pushes the boundaries of the cinematic form, even when he is…

There are a lot of reasons for us to revisit Rosemary’s Baby these days – we are living in a cinematic era where horror films have started to shift back to the more psychologically-inert days of fearful terror, with the focus being on the combination of human insecurities and anxieties and the otherworldly – and…

Imagine this scene – a suburban living room about a decade ago, an ordinary Saturday evening. I was hardly a teenager at that point, and I was surrounded by a few of my equally-juvenile friends. One of us stares ominously into a mirror and recites “Bloody Mary”, a few times. The thrill and fearful panic…

They just don’t make horror films like they used to anymore. Not to imply that considerably original work isn’t being done in horror cinema today, but that there was a time when horror was, dare I say, warm and endearing. The British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s had a certain elegant charm that…

Cinematically, when lightning strikes, why shouldn’t a filmmaker try and replicate that success, even if there is very little chance that it will be as successful? In 1962, Robert Aldrich directed Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, one of the greatest horror films ever made, and a film that persists to this day as a towering…