Behind the Couch

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 childhood and innocence - the young protagonist’s rites of passage unravelling 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. Society became aware that human monsters hid in plain...

2012 Dir. Drew Goddard Five friends go to stay in a creepy cabin in the woods. Sinister occurrences, bloodshed and something called ‘game changing’ ensure. However as the tagline suggests, if you think you know the rules, think again; The Cabin in the Woods has more than a few surprises and twists to reinvigorate even the most tired horror tropes. A word of warning though; if you’re in any way interested in seeing this film, don’t read anymore of this review. As much I begrudge adding to the hype of anything, I simply believe that films such as this really benefit from the audience not knowing anything about them. Having said that, I think that even if you do spoil the surprise, The Cabin in the Woods should still serve as a highly enjoyable and playful ride in the way it addresses the conventions of horror cinema and turns them on their head. The narrative follows a typical slasher scenario with teens being menaced and murderlised in an isolated cabin. So far, so Evil Dead ....

1989 Dir. Luigi Cozzi AKA Demons 6: De Profundis When a horror film based on the same source material as Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Inferno goes into production, the evil witch the story is based upon manifests herself and not only begins to terrorise the actress set to portray her on screen, but reveals plans to wreck havoc and bloodshed throughout the world. Luigi Cozzi’s The Black Cat was conceived and written by Daria Nicolodi as an unofficial finale to Dario Argento's then still unfinished Three Mothers Trilogy, which began with Suspiria and Inferno , and was eventually completed in 2007 with Mother of Tears . The Three Mothers’ films chart the exploits of three ancient witches, Mater Suspiriorum (the Mother of Sighs), Mater Tenebrarum (the Mother of Darkness) and Mater Lachrymarum (the Mother of Tears) determined to inflict untold suffering upon the world. The Black Cat focuses on the third mother, Mater Lachrymarum – Levana - as she attempts to retur...

As I’ve mentioned on here before, I consider myself quite a hardened horror fan. It takes a lot to actually scare me. The stuff I find that tends to inflict sleepless nights upon me is low-key, subtly suggestive material, not wall to wall gore. The last film I saw that truly ‘scared’ me was Insidious . In it, a family who believe their house is haunted eventually realise that their comatose son has been attracting evil spirits who want to possess his body, while his soul is stuck in a permanent state of astral projection, lost in a shadowy realm where the dead don’t rest easy. Even though the film follows a vulnerable young family and the inconceivable forces that stalk them, Insidious still has a cold, often detached feel which really enhances its ability to disturb. Perforated with unsettling imagery, methodically orchestrated jump scares, moments of flesh-creeping dread and (for the most part) a slow-burning and ominous atmosphere, Insidious is a well crafted and unnervin...

Dir. James Watkins A young lawyer travels to a remote village to conduct an inventory of a deceased client’s possessions. He gradually realises that the dead client is connected to a sinister spectral woman is terrorizing the local population, the sight of whom preludes the death of a child. The Woman in Black is an exercise in slow burning horror, and the narrative unfolds with a degree of odiousness and suggestion appropriate for such a traditional ghost tale. From the outset, grief is the overarching theme that binds the story together in this version of Susan Hill’s classic chiller. From the genuinely unsettling opening scene - depicting the suicide of three young girls as they leap from the window of their nursery, accompanied by the sound of their mother’s screaming – to the protagonist’s sustained anguish at the death of his wife; the notion of grief as an escapable snare hangs heavy over proceedings. The film unravels as a spooky and, for the most part, highly effective...

2011 Dir. Kevin Smith When three teenage friends answer an online invitation for sex, they are kidnapped by an extreme right-wing Christian cult who plan on punishing them for their ‘deviancy.’ The prospect of Kevin Smith addressing extreme Christian hate groups through the conventions of horror cinema is, for this writer anyway, an irresistible one. Smith already addressed the dangers of organised religion in Dogma , which, while rather plodding and uneven, was still an interesting departure for the director, famed for his lo-fi slacker-driven stories. While Red State may be a different beast entirely, it also sadly slides into unevenness of tone as the plot eventually crumbles under weighty speeches and a limp, exposition-heavy finale. Differing from the usual religious horror, the threat in Red State comes not from Satan or the occult, but from a fundamentalist right-wing Christian cult who believe their faith entitles them to carry out brutal acts of violence in the name...

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...

Dir. Herbert Wise Based upon the novel by Susan Hill, The Woman in Black is a quietly shudder-some ghost story capable of chilling even the most hardened horror fanatic. Arthur (Adrian Rawlins), a mild-mannered young lawyer, is sent from London to Crythin Gifford to represent his firm at the funeral of a recently deceased client, a reclusive widow. While he is conducting an inventory of the woman’s possessions at her isolated house, he has several terrifying encounters with a mysterious figure which not only threaten his sanity, but his very life. While the story may be familiar – young man of rational mind is thrust into terrifying situations of a paranormal nature, in a place that treats him as an outsider – the solid direction, moody locales and convincing performances ensure The Woman in Black is not just another ‘things that go bump in the night’ flick going through the motions. While things certainly do go bump in the night throughout the story, the slow burning tension...