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Horror Films

ramonmercado said:
Saltburn: A black comedy/psychological thriller which slides into the slipstream of horror. 2006, Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a working class lad from a grim background who makes it to Oxford University on a scholarship. He ifeels unable to fit in with the In Crowd but one day does a favour for the popular, aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). this gets him (literally) a seat at the table with the society he longs to join. When Oliver's father dies, Felix invites him to his stately home, Saltburn for the Summer. The Catton family are ghastly, Felix hears them gossiping about his family, when he is presented to them they feign love and interest. Everything is so shallow about them though the father. Richard E. Grant is quite manic in his role, constantly grinning. Felix's mother (Rosamund Pike) also pretends to care about people but only for appearances sake. his sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) suffers from bulimia but appears to interest Oliver. Things morph from a comedy of manners to a dark horror comedy as Oliver shows hidden depths. Some really disturbing scenes which are leavened by the blackest of black comedy. A Dickensian tale mixed with Brideshead Revisited, a dash of Ripping Yarns with a soupcon of The Talented Mr Ripley. A film you will mull over long after the final credits have rolled. Written, Directed and Produced by Emerald Fennell. 8.5/10.

In cinemas.
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Watched it last night - thoroughly enjoyable, although I wouldn't class it as a horror.
Definitely rang some echoes of Brideshead Revisited and perhaps with a soupçon of The Great Gatsby and Withnail and I.
Beautifully filmed throughout and the twist was quite clever (although attentive viewers should have guessed it before the denouement).
Agree with your 8.5/10 rating.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Watched it last night - thoroughly enjoyable, although I wouldn't class it as a horror.
Definitely rang some echoes of Brideshead Revisited and perhaps with a soupçon of The Great Gatsby and Withnail and I.
Beautifully filmed throughout and the twist was quite clever (although attentive viewers should have guessed it before the denouement).
Agree with your 8.5/10 rating.
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Maybe it fits into the slipstream of horror, definitely a Gothic, even Fortean touch.
 
Sounds like fun!

Film fans have descended on an Essex coastal city to celebrate the curious world of independent horror.

Now in its 11th year, the Horror-on-Sea festival has become a key event in the UK horror film scene. Held in Southend-on-Sea, the festival line-up includes screenings of Werewolf Santa, Bathtub Shark Attack, Blood Demons and Mosaic.

Festival director Paul Cotgrove said: "We've got a thriving independent horror industry here."

He said people had come from across the UK and further afield, including Italy and the Netherlands.

"We've got a varied range of horror films this year, though we do tend to like the fun side of horror. There's a lot of laughter to be had. We've got a lot of pleasing films and the audience loves them."

The festival takes place over two weekends and the programme includes a range of short and feature length films as well as workshops for those in the industry. About 2,000 people are expected to attend over the six-days.

"The people who come are a mix of horror film fans who want the opportunity to meet the filmmakers who have the chance to network among themselves," Mr Cotgrove said. "It is a great hotchpotch of different people."

For Hannah Paterson, Horror-on-Sea is an opportunity to catch up with friends across the industry. Ms Paterson is a social worker who also acts, writes and produces independent horror in her spare time.

"It is really great fun," she said. "It is a great community and there are people who you might not see during the year but you will see them here, and people just come together." ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-67969717
 
Night Swim: An OK horror flick which doesn't live up ro it's potential. Great pre-titles sequence set in 1992 where a young girl goes to the family pool one night to retrieve a toy boat belonging to her terminally ill brother. She is pulled under by an unseen force. 2023, a new family move in and have trouble straight away, the father falls on, this time the lure was a baseball, he manages to get out though. after a clogged drain has to be cleared it is established that the pool is fed by a natural spring. After the son has a terrifying experience (straight out of It) and hears voice his Mom investigates the back story of the house and finds that there has been a long history of disappearances at the house site. Some good jump scares but it might have been a better film if it had concentrated more on the opening story. The narrative returns to the 1992 disappearance and we learn some facts which put a new complexion on events (No Spoilers from me about this). This could have been developed further as could the Stephen Kingesque back story of the pool/spring. We see two creatures, one convincing, the other not so good. The acting is generally good with an impressive performance by Kerry Condon as the mother. Directed by Bryce McGuire. Written by McGuire & Rod Blackhurst. 6.5/10.

In cinemas.
 
Amber Road (2022)

A truly nasty slice of horror, which feels rather like a mash up of Feardotcom and the French torture porn genre such as Martyrs.
Somewhere in the deepest regions of the dark web, there's a site where depraved and very wealthy individuals can pay to see people being tortured and ultimately killed.
The violence is graphic and wince-making, even though you know it's all done with prosthetics.
There is a major twist towards the end, but it felt utterly implausible to me and didn't make up for the numerous gaping plot-holes.
One of the last films to feature Tom Sizemore before his untimely death. Not sure he'd want to be remembered for this rather repugnant and exploitative movie, in which every character is profoundly unlikeable.
Only 88 minutes, but felt much longer. A 4/10 from me and that's for the realism of the gory effects. On Amazon Prime.

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Anyone recommend some good city folk go into the hollers and woods to meet the crazed locals survivalist type films. I think but not sure that Deliverance would be the granddaddy or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (never seen it, dont like gore films, am I wrong?). I liked the films Wrong Turn and Tucker and Dale vs Evil. Bonus points if set in Appalachia (I know its a cliché).
 
Feech23 said:
Anyone recommend some good city folk go into the hollers and woods to meet the crazed locals survivalist type films. I think but not sure that Deliverance would be the granddaddy or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (never seen it, dont like gore films, am I wrong?). I liked the films Wrong Turn and Tucker and Dale vs Evil. Bonus points if set in Appalachia (I know its a cliché).
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Variation on the theme - Race With The Devil - city folk go into the desert & meet crazed satanists. Haven’t seen it in years & recall it’s not a classic but not bad - basically a chase movie..

Also - Southern Comfort - group of National Guardsmen training in Louisiana Bayou get on the wrong side of swamp-dwelling Cajuns & have to run for their lives. More akin to Deliverance.
 
hunck said:
Variation on the theme - Race With The Devil - city folk go into the desert & meet crazed satanists. Haven’t seen it in years & recall it’s not a classic but not bad - basically a chase movie..
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Saw it again recently:

Race with the Devil (1975); Satanists in central Texas. Two couples head off in their RV for a ski trip on Aspen, Colorado, stopping off along the way. In an isolated meadow they spot a fire and hear chanting. What they first take to be an orgy turns into human sacrifice. They flee with the Satanists in hot pursuit, climbing onto the RV, breaking. Making their escape they encounter skeptical police, who act rather oddly. Actually everyone they meet is a bit off. Thus ensues a deadly chase across Texas where no one can be trusted. Hexes and spells are involved, the two women, Kelly (Lara Parker) and Alice (Loretta Swift) get books from a library to bone up on satanism & "Witchcraft". The sort of paranoia which may result is vividly illustrated when Kelly feels everyone is staring at her when they use a swimming pool. Plenty of odd characters are encountered. Perhaps this Satanist conspiracy is too all encompassing to really convince but this is an effective action/horror film. With Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as the males turning from ordinary urban dwellers into killers, a touch of Deliverance. An overlooked gem. Directed by Jack Starrett, written by Wes Bishop and Lee Frost. 7.5/10.
 
skinny said:
Really liked The Ritual. I’m assuming it’s the Rafe Spall one set in Sweden. Seen it twice and will again.
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I love the book. Which came first?
 
Poor Things: A very dark comedy drama based on the novel by Alasdair Gray. It's a reimagining of the Frankenstein tale set in late Victorian London. But not our Victorian London, this is a steampunk world, steam powered cars, avant garde ships, airships and overhead trams. Our Frankenstein is Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a veritable Dr Moreau, he has created dogs with chickens heads amongst other monstrosities. He also resurrects a pregnant woman who committed suicide, transplanting the babies brain into her head, the new hybrid is named Bella (Emma Stone). She has to be raised and educated as she is a child within an adult body but develops at an accelerated rate. She desires freedom and was originally going to marry Godwin's student.assistant Max (Ramy Youssef) but ends up running off with a caddish lawyer, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) who even looks like Terry Tomas, wearing a straw boater in one scene. This is the story of Bella, a woman searching for mental, sexual and physical freedom along with enlightenment. Along the way she experiences the joys of Lisbon custard tarts and works in a Paris brothel,. A sharp social satire permeated by a fine line of intoxicating humour. Great performances by Stone, Dafoe, Ruffalo and Youssef along with a talented supporting cast. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara. 8.5/10.

In cinemas.
 
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Baghead: Iris (Freya Allan) is on her uppers, evicted from her flat in London, dependent on her ever helpful friend Katie (Rubie Baker) so when her estranged father (Peter Mullan) dies and leaves her a pub in Berlin it seems her problems are solved. An over-helpful creepy lawyer (Ned Dennehy) offers to sell the pub for her but she insists on putting her name on the deeds. This is a different kind of tied house as we see her father confronting a strange tenant in the basement, a woman with a bag over her head and battling with her. Iris has already met Neil (Jeremy Irvine) who lets her know that the entity in the basement, Baghead (Anne Müller), can contact the dead. Now Iris is a bit of a hustler and cannot resist Neil's offer of £4,000 to get to speak to his dead wife. Baghead though has rules, while she must obey Iris now, she gains extra power if the conversation with the dead goes on for more than two minutes. She also adopts the countenance of the dead person when allowing them to speak, But like all demons Baghead is tricky and is often an unreliable narrator. Some good jump scares and a suitably crumbly dank basement. What's really important here are the rituals involved, make a mistake and your life may be forfeit. Indeed aspects of the story suggest a meta-ritual may have been at play for much of the narrative. The number of Baghead's victims increase and gore flows as we learn more about her back history and that of the pub. Good acting by Allan and Mullan (much of his performance in flashbacks and on a video recording)., with a rather frenzied performance by Irvine. Directed by Alberto Corredo, written by Lorcan Reilly. And it's not a ripoff of Talk To Me; Baghead is based on Reilly and Corredor’s original 2017 short film of the same name. 7.5/10,

In cinemas.
 
Haunting of the Queen Mary - a 2023 Brit horror movie, has just made it onto Sky Cinema and we watched it last night.
Set on the genuine RMS Queen Mary, now a floating hotel/museum moored at Long Beach California, the movie certainly deserves 10/10 for authenticity of its backdrop. It also taps into some of the legends surrounding the famous vessel, including that of a worker during the ship's construction being immured alive as a sort of pagan sacrifice to ensure unsinkability. The white lady apparition in the music room gets a brief but gory cameo and the crew member killed by an exploding boiler is shown in excruciating detail. The time-slippy elements, with the story jumping frequently between 1938 and the present day, add to the surfeit of Forteana.
So much for the positives.
I found it hard to take Joel Fry (of comedy "Trollied" fame) seriously, notably his faux-American accent. The movie slips into travelogue mode at times, advertising the No Escape ghost tours and making much of the famous people who sailed on her. The song and dance routine featuring Fred Astaire was well done, but didn't advance the plot and merely served to swell the run-time to over two hours. There seemed to be simply too many story strands going on, with the original captain's indecision and alcoholism, the current "captain's" corruption, Alice Eve's confusing back-story, the motives for the gory murder, possession and 1938/2023 bleeding (no pun intended) into one another.
I loved the premise and the overall atmosphere, but found it overlong and quite muddled at times.
Maybe 6.5/10 overall.

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blessmycottonsocks said:
Haunting of the Queen Mary - a 2023 Brit horror movie, has just made it onto Sky Cinema and we watched it last night.
Set on the genuine RMS Queen Mary, now a floating hotel/museum moored at Long Beach California, the movie certainly deserves 10/10 for authenticity of its backdrop. It also taps into some of the legends surrounding the famous vessel, including that of a worker during the ship's construction being immured alive as a sort of pagan sacrifice to ensure unsinkability. The white lady apparition in the music room gets a brief but gory cameo and the crew member killed by an exploding boiler is shown in excruciating detail. The time-slippy elements, with the story jumping frequently between 1938 and the present day, add to the surfeit of Forteana.
So much for the positives.
I found it hard to take Joel Fry (of comedy "Trollied" fame) seriously, notably his faux-American accent. The movie slips into travelogue mode at times, advertising the No Escape ghost tours and making much of the famous people who sailed on her. The song and dance routine featuring Fred Astaire was well done, but didn't advance the plot and merely served to swell the run-time to over two hours. There seemed to be simply too many story strands going on, with the original captain's indecision and alcoholism, the current "captain's" corruption, Alice Eve's confusing back-story, the motives for the gory murder, possession and 1938/2023 bleeding (no pun intended) into one another.
I loved the premise and the overall atmosphere, but found it overlong and quite muddled at times.
Maybe 6.5/10 overall.

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I'm afraid I gave up on it, so from me it was a total thumbs down.
 
gordonrutter said:
I'm afraid I gave up on it, so from me it was a total thumbs down.
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Don't blame you. It definitely was overlong and confusing at times. With hindsight, maybe 6.5/10 was slightly generous. I was impressed with clever use of the setting and the cinematography though.
I await Ramon's review with interest!
 
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Haunt: An interesting Halloween night slasher film which combines elements of Escape Room and Saw. A group of young people accidentally (?) arrive at a haunted house offering an all in experience, the host is a silent clown. And what an experience it is! Vampire, Zombie, Clown and Devil masked killers attack them. As the body count rises their desperate struggle for survival forces them to strike back in kind, Heads crushed with sledge hammers and impaled with pitchforks are some if the less disturbing demises encountered here as the blood and gore flow, But it;s more than just a slasher film, there are also elements of an overarching tale of a Serial Killer Cult and the way one of the girls is targeted suggests that she she was chosen as a victim by this sect. Written and Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. On Netflix. 7.5/10.
 
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I wanted to post this in our FORT films thread but as our search engine is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard I'm posting it here instead .. because it has got horror elements ..

I've just caught up with Edgar Wright's 'Last Night in Soho'.

A young woman of today from Cornwall with a massive enthusiasm for the 1960's fashions moves to London to become a fashion designer. Then she sort of has a Marty McFly situation when she does somehow fantasy film style end up in London's 1960's .. she's hanging out in Cilla Black/Dusty Springfield sort of nightclub places, each time she looks in a mirror or anything reflective she's now a stunning platinum blonde but also still herself at the same time, that effect pulled off by two different actresses seeing each other through fake mirrors, Evil Dead 2 style. She starts to experience the misogyny that goes close to rape with sleazy men in grey. And a pimp or two.

I don't want to spoil the ending, it definitely drifts towards blood and psychopath stuff with an ultimate enemy I didn't at all see coming.

 
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The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970): A bit dated in attitudes to societal roles something it shares with it's contemporaneous film No Blade Of Grass but it's not as good or influential as Blade. Harold Pelham (Roger Moore) an upper middle c;ass businessman is involved in a near fatal car accident which appears to have set a doppelganger loose after he briefly "dies" on the operating table. The double is his dark side, taking on corporeal form, appearing at his club when he's out of the country, womanising, getting involved in dodgy business deals. An interesting portrait of a man descending into existential despair and paranoia, doubting his own sanity. Good (double) performance by Moore but a few too many stiff upper lips about. It's based om an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, it was perhaps overextended and might worked netter with a 45 minute running time. Written and directed by Basil Dearden (who died in a car accident shortly after completing the film, cue Twilight Zone theme), 6/10.

Saw it on Legend.
 
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On the film Atlantics , Black Hottor and H.P. Lovecraft.

Haunted by the Past​

Atlantics and the metaphors of black horror
by Nicholas Whittaker

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This is the second column in a four-part series by Nicholas Whittaker on black horror. Read the first here.

H.P. Lovecraft dreamt of unholy architectures. His stories abound with accounts of attic rooms with “peculiar angles”; “dimly sinister” cathedrals; “ancient tottering” cottages exuding “faint miasmal odour”; “malodorous and fear-shadowed” towns rotted with “irredeemable pollution.” These places are haunted. Too real, too present, they nonetheless somehow embody what lies “outside the boundaries of the world of space we know.” Their brute material form, their look and texture, is suffused with a fundamental wrongness. Such uncanniness is only heightened in Lovecraft’s visions of genuinely foreign and unnatural edifices: the crumbling ruins of cities that once housed monstrous, inhuman beings; monoliths paying homage to secret and unbelievable gods; metropolises in strange, forgotten lands outside our present dimensions; passageways that are simply too big buried under desert sands: the playgrounds and torture chambers of species and divinities now gone from the earth, or hiding dormant in its core, or returned to their alien worlds.

These hallucinatory imaginations reach a loving climax in At the Mountains of Madness, published months before Lovecraft’s death. The novella’s plot largely consists of Antarctic explorers stumbling across, then painstakingly exploring, a massive, empty city that once housed a grotesque prehistoric race. Lovecraft strains to convey the horror of its physical form: ...

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/haunted-by-the-past/
 
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