Behind the Couch

When Edna is reported missing, her daughter and granddaughter travel to the remote family home to search for her. They discover the house locked from the inside, strange noises from within the walls, and a black mould quietly spreading throughout. When Edna returns the next day, disorientated and bruised, unable to remember where she has been, and claiming someone has been coming into the house, her daughter Kay is convinced she can no longer take care of herself. Over the next few days, strange events, and Edna’s worsening condition, plunge the three women into a living nightmare. With echoes of a ghost story, a haunted house film, a tale of possession, Relic is a terrifying and moving meditation on coming to terms with dementia and the gradual acceptance of decline and death. Written and directed by Natalie Erika James, and co-written by Christian White, its use of various tropes and images associated with haunted house films - an ominously overflowing bathtub, a lone figure standin...

With a truly uncommon approach to the figure of the werewolf, The Cursed is a mean and moody shocker with a haunting, weirdly lyrical undertow. After their father, a cold-hearted land baron, ruthlessly slaughters a camp of Romani who staked a claim to his land, young Charlotte and Edward begin to have ominous dreams of a human scarecrow and silver teeth. The dreams draw them and other children from the nearby village to the site of the massacre, and soon after, Edward goes missing. The discovery of grisly remains attracts the attention of a grief-stricken pathologist (Boyd Holbrook), who suspects something supernatural is lurking in the surrounding forest and vows to hunt it down and destroy it. Head over to Eye for Film to read my full review. 

Co-written by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and British novelist Angela Carter, and based on several short stories from her collection, The Bloody Chamber , The Company of Wolves is a werewolf film quite unlike any other. A provocative reinterpretation of the fairy tale of Red Riding Hood, it unravels as a feverish exploration of a young girl’s sexuality as she crosses the threshold into adulthood. It was Jordan’s second film, and his first foray into the realms of Gothic horror. Entwining metaphor with striking visuals and grisly effects, The Company of Wolves was released in the early Eighties, in the wake of The Howling and An American Werewolf in London ; it set itself apart from the pack, however, with its literary roots, feminist concerns and art-house execution. The folk tales it draws upon and the significance of oral storytelling itself are woven into the very fabric of the film. Its unusual narrative structure, which unfurls like a Chinese puzzle box, begins as a young girl,...

After examining a particularly gruesome video nasty, the plot of which shares eerie parallels with a traumatic event from her childhood, film censor Enid (Niamh Algar) becomes convinced the actress in the film is her missing sister. Determined to track her down, Enid is drawn into a murky world where the line between fiction and reality becomes ever unstable. Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, and co-written by Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher, Censor is a darkly mesmerising tale of grief, guilt, fear and perception. A period piece, its dark, dreary locations speak to the dank austerity of Thatcher’s England, a time when Mary Whitehouse was on a crusade to clean up the morals of the nation, especially when it came to violence in entertainment. The 1980s were a time when boundaries of on-screen violence, special make-up effects and what was considered ‘acceptable’ to present onscreen, were pushed in ways they had never been before. Certain films, mainly horror and exploitation, were brande...