Behind the Couch

2008 Dir. Tomas Alfredson Lonely 12 year old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is bullied by his classmates and all but neglected by his mother. One night, while sitting on the climbing frame outside his home, he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson) who has just moved into the flat next door to his with her strange guardian Håken (Per Ragnar). And so a gentle friendship begins. Eli gives Oskar the strength to hit back when he is bullied, and Oskar takes it all in his stride when he realises Eli is a vampire… ‘Can I come in? Say that I can come in.’ Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist and adapted from his own novel, Let the Right One In has, like its little vampire protagonist, subtly worked its way into the minds and hearts of audiences everywhere. Emerging from relative obscurity, it has found a large enough audience to become the sleeper hit of the year so far. And rightly so. The two leads deliver mesmerising performances. Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar is compelling to watch. When we first encoun...

1980 Dir. Dario Argento When poet Rose (Irene Miracle) discovers an old book written by a mysterious architect, she believes that the New York building in which she resides is also home to one of the Three Mothers – powerful witches who bring suffering and death to all who encounter them. She asks her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) to come and help her, however prior to his arrival she is stalked through the building’s labyrinthine interior and slain by an unseen, and presumably supernatural assailant. It is up to Mark to follow the cryptic clues left by his sister and solve the mystery of The Mother of Darkness, before it is too late… Preceded by Suspiria (1977), Inferno is the second instalment of Argento’s only recently completed Three Mother’s trilogy - Mother of Tears (2007) is the final film. In Suspiria , we are introduced to the notion that three powerful witches, residing in different parts of the world, ensure that hopelessness, sorrow and death hang heavy upon those...

1973 Dir. Douglas Hickox Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) is a Shakespearian actor who refuses to act in anything other than plays written by the Bard. He has extreme delusions of grandeur that are eventually quashed when he is panned by an influential circle of critics and is publically humiliated at an award ceremony. Faking his own suicide in order to return and have his revenge, he gathers together a merry band of misfits to aid him in his opulent quest to obtain bloody vengeance on those critics who ruined his career. Also along for the ride is his daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg), who has fun in a myriad of different roles and disguises. Ludicrous and ever more elaborate deaths mount up as two woefully inept and utterly incompetent cops attempt to track him down and learn some stuff about the Bard as they go. Theatre of Blood has more than a few similarities with Price’s earlier ‘themed death’ film, The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971). Both films feature crazed individuals extra...

1962 Dir. Sidney Hayers Based on the novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber, Night of the Eagle follows the intriguing story of highly sceptical college professor (is there ever any other sort?), Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), who discovers his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) is a practicing witch and has been has been using the Craft to protect them both from his dangerously jealous colleagues. Norman is an uncompromisingly logical sort. After Tansy reveals to him that his colleagues’ wives are using black magic to ensure his untimely demise and she is countering their efforts with occult practices, he fears she may be losing her mind. Tansy normalises witchcraft and speaks very matter-of-factly about it, even as she unpacks the groceries in one scene. For her, it's as everyday and practical as Norman thinks otherwise. She has hidden lots of little trinkets around the house to ward off evil forces, such as specially blessed spiders in little jars and various other bizarre accoutreme...

Independent, daring and fiercely intelligent, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni  is not only an award-winning actress strongly associated with European horror cinema, but a multimedia artist who explores dark, fantastical themes throughout her work. She also writes, performs and records her own music; music that is imbued with the same dark drama and mysticism that seeps from her paintings. And then there's her film work with legendary European horror directors such as Pupi Avati, Lamberto Bava and, of course, Dario Argento. With roles in the likes of  Demons 2, Opera, Phantom of the Opera  and Mother of Tears , Coralina has claimed that she 'comes to life' in her death scenes. She kindly made time to chat with Behind the Couch about her film work, art, music and  forthcoming biography . From what I have seen of your artwork, it is quite dark and abstract. Is it fair to say that you are drawn to darker subject matter, artistically? Being drawn to darker subjects i...

1946 Dir. Alfred L. Werker After witnessing a brutal murder from her hotel room window, Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw) falls into a state of catatonic shock. When she awakens, she discovers she is being held in a private hospital and treated by the sinister Dr Cross (Vincent Price), who she realises is the man she saw commit the heinous murder! Shock is not just an ‘old dark house’ type thriller with a creepy psychiatric hospital and conniving villain. It's a twisted and slyly subversive story, in which a perfectly sane woman is made out to be insane so her accusations of murder are not taken seriously. It unravels as a tightly constructed and provocative chiller. Janet seems quite frantic and preoccupied from the moment we meet her. She forgets to pay her taxi driver as she rushes into the hotel where she is to meet with her estranged husband. We learn that she was wrongly informed of his death in the war, and that he is actually still very much alive but had been a prisone...

As I sat in the cinema last night, enjoying the spectacle of Watchmen as it flickered across the cinema screen, I was struck by a number of striking similarities between the character of Rorschach and the masked killer from Mario Bava’s stylish horror thriller from 1964 - Blood & Black Lace . Rorschach, a troubled vigilante, shares an undeniable visual companionship with the killer/s in Blood & Black Lace , spurned to bloody action by greed and lust. Their garbs are irrepressibly comparable. Fedora hat, leather trench coat, black leather gloves and a startlingly blank face mask. Killers in giallo films usually boast a host of repressed anxieties, often stemming from some trauma they had previously suffered, or from distinctly Freudian anxieties. Not only sharing visual similarities, the darkly troubled Rorschach also shares a few psychological traits with many a killer from the Italian subgenre. His character’s particular flashback scenes wouldn’t be out of place in any r...

iMurders is a forthcoming horror film directed by Robbie Bryan. After a bizarre love triangle leads to a tragic shooting, the members of an online chat-room begin to fall victim to a mysterious assailant who stalks and kills them in the privacy of their own homes. The key to unlocking the savage murders lurks in the dark past of the one of the chat-room users. But will it be too late to prevent more murders? The film stars a few familiar faces and stalwarts of the genre, including Gabrielle Anwar ( Body Snatchers ), Tony Todd ( Candyman ), William Forsythe ( The Devil’s Rejects ), Billy Dee Williams ( The Empire Strikes Back ) and Charles Durning ( When A Stranger Calls ). iMurders is the directorial debut of screenwriter Robbie Bryan ( The Stand-In ) and promises thrills, chills and many bloody spills. Behind the Couch caught up with Robbie Bryan recently for a chat about filmmaking and the sinister side of the world wide web… How did the idea for iMurders germinate? Well ...

1977 Dir. Dario Argento The arrival of American ballerina, Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper), at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, coincides with a series of savagely brutal murders. Suzy slowly begins to realise that the academy is actually a front for a coven of witches led by the diabolical Mater Suspiriorum – The Mother of Sighs – who plans to unleash untold suffering and pain upon the world. With her friends falling prey to evil supernatural powers and no one to believe her seemingly outrageous story, Suzy must face her deadly foe alone… The first film in a trilogy, Suspiria precedes Inferno (1980) and the only recently completed final chapter, Mother of Tears (2007). With Suspiria , Dario Argento and his co-writer Daria Nicolodi created one of the most vivid, nightmarish and hallucinogenic horror films of all time. Deeply influenced by the drug-induced and vivid writing of Thomas De Quincey, Argento also borrows from Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm and Snow White a...

Dir. Tod Browning After my post yesterday about Bram Stoker and the fact that the whole of Dublin is reading Dracula this month , I found myself craving a peek at Universal’s classic adaptation of Stoker’s novel again. Featuring Bela Lugosi in his most iconic role, and some of the most memorable imagery from the whole Dracula mythos, courtesy of controlled direction from Tod Browning, Dracula is always a darkly bewitching film to indulge in. Opening with the spooky bit from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake , a highly dramatic and romanticised mood is instantly evoked. This adaptation opts to open with Renfield, not Jonathan Harker, travelling to Transylvania on business with the mysterious Count Dracula. Now seeming like rudimentary cliché, he stops off briefly at a local inn and is warned of the dastardly Count and his dubious ways. Quashing the local’s protests to turn back and ignoring their hushed whispers of ‘the Nosferatu’, he continues on his way and meets with a sinister carriage...

Bram Stoker In light of the fact that Dracula is this year's Dublin: One City, One Book's selected text, I thought it appropriate to delve into the background of the novel's author: Bram Stoker. Born in Dublin in November 1847, Stoker was a sickly child and bedridden for much of his formative years. As a young man he attended Trinity College in Dublin and excelled in athletics as well as academic studies and was friends with Oscar Wilde. He graduated in 1868 with a degree in mathematics and began working as a civil servant in Dublin Castle. This experience inspired him to write his first book, the rather riveting sounding Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland . This thrilling epic took the form of a handbook of legal administration and was published in 1878. At this stage, Dracula was but a mere twinkle in Stoker’s eye, and the budding writer busied himself with some freelance journalism and theatre criticism. Stoker eventually met and married Florence Bal...