By Keri O’Shea By sheer coincidence, two of the films which I most enjoyed at this year’s Dead By Dawn festival are all about the subject of friendship, and how that friendship endures under, shall we say, a series of unfortunate events. The first of these is of course The Battery, which uses a zombie [...]

By Keri O’Shea It isn’t so unusual in cinema which deals with post-apocalyptic scenarios – whether the world has been destroyed by war, or zombies, or war which leads to zombies, or something else entirely – to see human friendships put under extraordinary pressure. As life goes to hell, relationships crumble, lifelong bonds are torn [...]

By Keri O’Shea It’s a strange phenomenon when you think of it, but in recent years we have had such a glut of ordeal movies that we now require stronger, more numerous shocks in order that we may maintain interest in the proceedings. Otherwise, all we have is someone being tormented or tortured with very [...]

By Keri O’Shea The idea of destiny – the inescapability of some event or course of action, come what may – is an ambiguous one at best, and on one distinct level, it is downright terrifying. If any way in which you try to exercise your personal volition is pointless, or worse still, messes with [...]

By Keri O’Shea Well, let’s see: my body aches, I am having to wean myself back onto solid food after giving this up completely by early on Saturday and the sunlight hurts my eyes. Yep, it can only have been a horror movie festival which has wreaked such havoc upon my mortal frame. Horror fests [...]

By Keri O’Shea You’re never going to be short of horror festivals to attend in the UK these days, but when it comes to longevity then Edinburgh’s Dead By Dawn Festival is in a league of its own. As the festival prepares to celebrate its twentieth year of operation – with none other than special [...]

By Kit Rathenar Whitby’s Bram Stoker International Film Festival, now in its fifth year, has just announced that due to unprecedented demand they will be selling tickets for individual events as well as for the festival as a whole. The BSIFF, held at the Whitby Pavilion, is known for its quirky, intimate atmosphere and the [...]

By Ben Bussey FrightFest’s February weekend event in Glasgow is typically the first major horror festival event of the year, and this year’s line-up has now been announced. And it’s pretty damn enticing. Scroll on down for the skinny, direct from the press release… *** From Friday Feb 22nd to Saturday Feb 23, the UK’s [...]

By Keri O’Shea I don’t tend to go on conventional holidays, but for four years now I’ve been making a yearly pilgrimage to a picturesque seaside town in mid-Wales…and, hand on heart, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I first became aware of this unique horror film festival via FAB Press all those years [...]

Review by Ben Bussey It might raise some eyebrows that director Ben Wheatley has chosen to follow up his widely praised hitman/Satanic panic chiller Kill List with a black comedy about a couple on a British caravan holiday. Those who rate Wheatley’s last to be one of the best horror films of recent years might initially [...]

Review by Tristan Bishop When non-horror fans ask me why I am so besotted with my favourite genre, I tend to give them the following reason: I believe that even bad horror films are interesting as they reflect, more so than any other genre, the changing fears and obsessions of different cultures over the years. [...]

Review by Ben Bussey When setting out to assess a film which deals with the nature of time, space, psychic phenomena, and the role that drug use might play in our perception of these matters, all from a detached, tongue-in-cheek perspective, it’s immediately apparent how easily a film of this nature might not work. From [...]

By Keri O’Shea Ever wondered where our modern day obsession with celebrity comes from? Or indeed, where it’s going? We live in times where the slightest physical imperfection in even a minor television star is reported and scrutinised ad infinitum, often at the expense of what most sane people would judge to be genuine news. [...]

By Keri O’Shea Chris (Vinny Curran) is a happy fuck-up. We’ve all known people like him: he gets the most out of life whilst utterly out of his head, living day to day and squat to squat, and seems pretty happy with his lot – when he’s not in the grip of meth psychosis and [...]

Report by Kit Rathenar There’s a wonderfully idiosyncratic charm about the Bram Stoker International Film Festival. Hosted in Whitby, the windswept Yorkshire coastal town forever associated with Stoker and Dracula – and this year celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its namesake author’s death – it combines its core film programme with a whole range of [...]

by Ben Bussey It’s only four more weeks until Abertoir, the National Horror Festival of Wales, takes over the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.  The showcase includes not only some of the hottest new horror films from around the world, but also some time-honoured genre favourites; even so, Abertoir is not limited to film alone, celebrating horror [...]

Review by Eric Lefenfeld This should just be gotten out of the way upfront, given the violent reaction it might provoke in certain circles: The Conspiracy is partially a found footage film. More specifically, it’s one part found footage and three parts faux-documentary. If you’re one to dismiss anything of the sort outright, then keep [...]