Most conventional horror films fall somewhere on the sadomasochistic continuum. They either allow the audience to assume the role of sadist, monitoring the physical and psychological torment of the film’s protagonists like Jigsaw peering through his surveillance cameras, or manoeuvre viewers into enduring the victims’ ordeals, much like a masochist cherishing their punishment. While I…
Thanks to Universal Pictures Australia, ccpopculture has 5 double passes to give away to Unfriended, releasing in Australian cinemas Thursday April 30th. “Ushering in a new era of horror, Universal Pictures’ Unfriended unfolds over a teenager’s computer screen as she and her friends are stalked by an unseen figure who seeks vengeance for a shaming…
There’s something special about watching a great horror movie in the cinema. Sitting in the dark with a room full of strangers. Sharing the nervous silence of anticipation — and embarrassed laughs, when that noise turns out to just be a cat. And, of course, those beautiful moments when someone just can’t resist letting out a terrified scream.…
The main point of comparison for most people reviewing It Follows is Halloween. Undeniably, David Robert Mitchell’s debut feature, an insidious, diamond-sharp indie horror flick, draws heavily from John Carpenter’s classic. That’s apparent from its opening frame, an image of an American suburban street whose expansive front lawns carpeted by auburn autumn leaves could be…
Comparing David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars with Ari Folman’s Hollywood satire The Congress is an effective demonstration of how originality and quality don’t always go hand-in-hand. Of the two films, The Congress is far and away the most original, draping an overabundance of ideas offer a scaffolding constructed out of equal parts…
Rosemary’s Baby is arguably a perfect film; it stands to reason that Stewart Thorndike’s low-budget lesbian riff on Polanski’s classic would fall short of its source material. Her adaptation, Lyle, doesn’t follow Rosemary’s Baby to the letter – the couple is composed of two women, they already have a child when they move into a…
Kwaidan probably deserves a higher rating than the three stars I’ve given it here; I watched this at GOMA’s Myths and Legends screening (it was the ~160 min European cut, not the 183 minute cut they advertised) in the middle of a busy week and spent the majority of the film drifting in and out…
Like Ginger Snaps before it, When Animals Dream repurposes the werewolf myth as a feminist howl into the night. Marie (Sonia Suhl) manifests her lycanthropy as coarse hair in surprising places, bloody nails. She’s told that she’ll “change emotionally and be short-tempered and aggressive.” The opening scene surveys her clinical examination by an elderly male…
It’s easy to forgive horror films their sins if they’re actually scary. If Annabelle had been a genuinely frightening film, I could’ve happily forgiven its hollow Polanski references – ranging from a host of Rosemary’s Baby quotations to a Charles Manson’s appearance on television. I wouldn’t have had a problem with how it mishandles/abandons its…
Is it an inevitability that horror franchises trend towards soft-core porn the longer they run? Probably not – Nightmare on Elm Street found its way to bad puns while Friday the 13th travelled to New York, Hell and, eventually, outer space. It’s certainly the case with the Wrong Turn series, which began as gory-hillbilly-survival-horror, took…
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