Behind the Couch

While staying with my parents recently in my home town of Lurgan, County Armagh, I naturally decided to pay a visit to a few of the local graveyards. Top of my list was Shankill Graveyard. Located just outside the town centre, and surrounded by a residential area, the site upon which Shankill cemetery stands was a place of worship in earlier centuries. Shankill Parish church was originally situated here before it was eventually moved to the town centre. The outline of a double ring fort is still noticeable. Amongst those at rest in the cemetery are the Brownlow family, who established the town in 1610 when they were given land beside Lough Neagh by the British government during the Plantation. They eventually contributed to the development of the linen industry the town became famous for throughout the seventeenth century. Their family vault is situated in the centre of the cemetery where the old church once stood. Apparently well off English families such as the Brownlow’s, sough...

This month’s edition of Audiodrome focuses on Bruno Nicolai’s hauntingly beautiful score for Sergio Martino’s gothic-flavoured giallo, Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key . Loosely adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat , it stars Edwige Fenech as a scheming vixen, whose arrival at the crumbling villa of her alcoholic uncle seems to spark a slew of bloody murders. Nicolai's harpsichord-driven score eschews the usual jazz-inflected music associated with the giallo for something altogether more clandestine and melancholic, perfectly underpinning the macabre desires at the heart of the story. Head over to Paracinema.net to read my review and listen to a track.  While you’re there, why not pick up issue 16 of Paracinema Magazine . Amongst the abundance of articles and essays on genre cinema you’ll find the likes of Images of Horror and Lust in Ken Russell’s The Devils by Samm Deighan, The Films of René Laloux: Notes on the Golden Age of French Science Fic...

2012 Dir. Paco Plaza As the families and friends of Koldo and Clara gather to celebrate the happy couple’s wedding, the party soon descends into a nightmarish bloodbath as partygoers, seemingly infected by a strange virus, begin feeding on each other with ravenous bloodlust. [REC] Genesis exhibits a much more playful tone than its predecessors, and while it may be a prequel, it isn’t an origin story documenting the demon-possession viral scourge that rips through the prior installments. It doesn’t really add much to the mythos of the series aside from presenting a similar situation to that in the first film. In fact, the events depicted in its narrative run in parallel with those of the other films. At one stage we catch a glimpse of reporter Angela from [REC] as she makes her original broadcast from the building where the first film was set. Also adding to its distinction, is its ditching of the use of ‘found footage/camcorder-horror’ conventions so brilliantly utilised in ...

2011 Dirs. Tom Mattera and David Mazzoni Set during the early Seventies, at a time when society was reeling from the Manson Family murders and the brutal end of the Summer of Love, The Fields is a thoughtful, atmospheric and quietly powerful film. At its core is a rumination on the end of innocence - the young protagonist’s rites of passage unravels during a time when social unrest and the backlash of the Manson murders shook society to its foundations. Hippies were demonised and their ideologies lambasted and tarnished. Due to the setting and circumstances, the hippies in the film are actually portrayed in quite a sinister way. Their behaviour doesn’t sit right, their motives are ambiguous. This is the only horror film I can think of that actually presents the Love Generation in such disquieting light. The Fields explores how society changed in the wake of the Manson family killings. Paranoia was rife. People became all too aware of the fact that human monsters moved amo...