Happy Halloween!


“Wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, 
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!” 

- John Greenleaf Whittier 

Happy Halloween everyone!

Popular posts from this blog

Martyrs

Image
2009 Dir. Pascal Laugier Anna (Morjana Alaoui) and Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), two young women with revenge on their minds, track down a family who held one of them captive as a youngster. Their quest for vengeance and knowledge leads them on a gut-wrenching and depraved journey into the dark recesses of pain and suffering, anguish and torture. Brutal. Shocking. Intense. Provocative. Raw. Unflinching. Disturbing. Numbing. Powerful. Unforgettable. These are just a few of the words that have been used to describe the jaw dropping spectacle that is Martyrs . The thing is though, while they are all accurate, no words can really be utilised to fully prepare you for the visceral onslaught you will undergo while watching this breathtakingly extreme film. With its astoundingly sadistic violence, Laugier's film is part of the current wave of extreme horror coming out of France, and firmly rooted in the realms of ‘Torture Porn’. Directed with ferocity, it strives to provoke and stimu...
Read more

The Ash Tree

Image
1975 Dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark Part of the BBC’s annual series A Ghost Story for Christmas , which ran from 1971 to 1978 and featured some of the small screen’s most chilling moments, The Ash Tree was the last of several MR James adaptations directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark. Written for television by David Rudkin, It stars Edward Petherbridge in the dual role of Sir Richard, an 18th century aristocrat who inherits the vast estate of his late uncle, and of Sir Matthew, his 17th century ancestor whose role in local witch trials, and the death of Ann Mothersole (Barbara Ewing), haunts Sir Richard.  With a slim running time (just over 30 minutes) The Ash Tree is one of the shortest entries in the series, but it is also one of the densest. The amount of detail and information packed in, without compromising or diluting the impact of the source material, is admirable. Clarke manages to convey events and flashbacks by utilising an interesting narrative structure and some ...
Read more

The Sorcerers

Image
1967 Dir. Michael Reeves An ailing scientist and his wife create a device that enables them to control the mind of a young man and share the sensations of his physical experiences. It isn’t long though before the wife, drunk on power and obsessed with experiencing new things, begins to indulge her increasingly perverse desires, including murder. Reeves’ penultimate film is a curiously irresistible blend of horror and sci-fi, filtered through a cynical snapshot of swinging sixties London – and the moral vacuum of the characters – spiced up with various ‘mad scientist’ tropes. While it may be overshadowed by his last film The Witchfinder General , The Sorcerers exhibits as idiosyncratic and bleak an outlook on the corruptible nature of humanity as the Vincent Price starring classic. Both films peer into the depths of what causes normal people to do corrupt, despicable things, and due to its then-contemporary setting, The Sorcerers makes an especially powerful impact in this reg...
Read more