Behind the Couch

When surgical nurse Jan Compton is tragically killed in a car crash, her fiancé Dr Bill Cortner retrieves her severed head and keeps it alive by means of highly unorthodox (!) and ethically iffy experiments. Despite Jan's protestations, he then sets out to find a suitable body for her, by any bloody means necessary… With its low budget, outrageous premise, and a lurid title promising all manner of exploitative thrills, the most shocking thing about The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is that it’s actually a deceptively thoughtful B-movie. Opening with a woman’s disembodied voice pleading ‘let me die, let me die’, the screenplay by Rex Carlton and director Joseph Green ruminates on some big and interesting ideas. While it can’t claim to be a feminist film, The Brain nonetheless has some feminist themes throughout it - such as bodily autonomy, patriarchal oppression, societal beauty standards and, perhaps most pointedly, the literal objectification of women. Other ideas thrown into the mix...

A young college student who remains on campus alone during Thanksgiving falls prey to members of a cult intent on hunting her and killing her. With its simple premise and highly suspenseful execution, Kristy is a back-to-basics adrenaline-fuelled exercise in lean, mean tension. Anthony Jaswinski's screenplay takes a few moments to set the scene, introduce protagonist Justine (Haley Bennett), outline her situation in the broadest of strokes, before it gets down to the business of terrorising her – and the audience. As the campus empties, we follow Justine as she bids farewell to her boyfriend and goes about her day, complete with a melodically scored montage of her dancing along empty hallways, studiously poring over books, running, swimming, doing her laundry and chatting with the friendly caretaker (James Ransone) and security guard (Matthew St Patrick).  Things are grand, if a little sad and lonely for Justine. She misses her family but takes it in her stride and keeps herself bu...

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...