Summoning The Spirit (2023)

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A city couple relocating to a home in the forest discover a commune on the neighbouring land is home to a cult of sasquatch worshippers harbouring sinister secrets... 

Head over to Eye for Film to read my full review.

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Boxing Helena (1993)

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‘Some men take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world’ - Cyndi Lauper With its uncomfortable, grim subject matter – a man so obsessed with a beautiful woman that he abducts and dismembers her to contain and possess her - Boxing Helena (1993) is a dark, twisted fairy tale exploring themes of obsession, control, objectification, free will and bodily autonomy. Written and directed by Jennifer Lynch, who was 19 when she wrote the screenplay (based on a story by Philippe Caland) and in her early twenties when she agreed to direct it, Boxing Helena sparked controversy and tabloid fixation as soon as it went into production (Madonna and Kim Basinger were infamously attached to it before eventually backing out). Upon its release it experienced a savage critical mauling with many lambasting it, and its director, as misogynistic. Lynch maintains it was always meant to be seen as a macabre fairy tale, stating: ‘To me, if you look at the film, the woman is always in contr...
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This underappreciated backwoods-slasher is a top-tier example of the subgenre, demonstrating just how powerful and effective the slasher can be as a form of storytelling. Released in the early 80s, the Golden Age of the slasher film, Just Before Dawn combines eerie atmospherics and breathless suspense, emerging as a survivalist horror creeper with echoes of an environmental message. Its premise is standard slasher fare (but hey, that’s why we’re here, there’s comfort in the familiar) as a group of friends head into the mountain forests of Oregon to explore a piece of inherited land, only to fall foul of a sadistic killer who picks them off one by one. Hmm, a backwoods slasher in which city-folk camping in a deep, dark forest are brutalised by a hulking, machete-wielding bogeyman? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Just Before Dawn is far from a Friday the 13th clone though. While it was released the same year as Friday the 13th Part 2 and The Burning , it’s a very different beast: relative...
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Deadline

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2009 Dir. Sean McConville When a screenwriter travels to a house in the middle of nowhere to finish her latest project, sinister occurrences ensue. Given that said screenwriter is recovering from a recent nervous breakdown, staying alone in a big old house in the middle of nowhere, probably wasn’t the greatest idea ever. However it means that director McConville can play that old ‘is she really seeing ghosts or just imagining things’ card... I enjoy catching random horror films on late night TV. Sometimes you’re rewarded for idly flicking through the channels until something catches your eye – favourite films I’ve discovered this way include Cat People , Halloween , The Pit and the Pendulum and Night of the Living Dead . When you see that a horror film starring Brittany Murphy as a writer staying alone in a creepy house has just started – you just have to watch it. Deadline seemed to me to have a lot of potential; a nice (if not wholly original) idea, a pace and tone that ...
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