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...
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...
1995 Dir. Joe Chappelle Six years after she and her psychotic uncle Michael Myers were abducted from the Haddonfield police station by the mysterious Man in Black, Jamie Lloyd and her newborn baby go on the run again with Myers’ in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, relatives of the family that adopted Laurie Strode have moved into the old Myers house and befriended Tommy Doyle, whose obsession with Myers’ leads to the discovery of a family curse that drives the killer to violently eradicate his bloodline – which is bad news for the Strodes. Teaming up with Dr. Loomis, they set out to stop Myers and the cult that protects him once and for all. With Miramax having purchased the distribution rights to the Halloween franchise, it was their intention to give the flailing series something of a reboot and to release further instalments through its newly established genre arm, Dimension Films. Following in the wake of the leaden Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers - complete with its amb...
Opening the Cage: A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin by Keri O'Shea, is a meticulous and fascinating examination of Lucio Fulci’s dazzling, and oft overlooked, 1971 giallo , which tells of a woman plunged into a waking nightmare when she is accused of murdering her neighbour. O’Shea is the editor of Warped Perspective , a site dedicated to horror, sci-fi, genre film/TV and literature. I’ve really enjoyed and admired her work for years now and was excited to learn she had published a book on A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin . Her thoughtful analysis of the film begins by contextualising it within the Italian giallo tradition, before diving deeply into its key themes, including art, counterculture and the role of medicine, and a consideration of its striking aesthetics. She carefully dissects the film’s approach to traditional gender roles and power struggles and offers an intriguing look at the use of liminal spaces within its London setting to heighten the unnerving mood. Elsewhere, she explores...