Behind the Couch

2012 Dir. Ciarán Foy An agoraphobic young man teams up with a renegade priest to save his baby daughter from a gang of seemingly demonic youths. Citadel [sit-uh-del] noun 1. A fortress that commands a city and is used in the control of the inhabitants and in defence during attack or siege. 2. Any strongly fortified place; stronghold. Right from the get-go, with its depictions of a run-down council estate in Glasgow, having fallen into decline and become a shadowy place of menace, writer/director Foy establishes an atmosphere of dread and creepy tension. With its opening scene, in which Tommy (Aneurin Barnard) watches helplessly as a group of hooded youths attack his pregnant wife, unable to do anything as he’s stuck in the rickety lift of the tower block where they live, Foy ratchets up the tension good and tight. And rarely lets go. Effortlessly playing on contemporary social fears and anxieties, such as the breakdown of community, the failure of welfare systems set up to ...

1996 Dir. Matthew Bright When Vanessa witnesses her mother and stepfather being hauled off to jail on drugs and prostitution charges, the teenage tearaway goes on the run from a social worker who wants to put her into care. She sets off to seek sanctuary at her grandmother's house. Along the way however, she encounters a sadistic serial killer who she discovers has been preying on vulnerable young women on the freeway… Matthew Bright’s cult indie hit Freeway is a thoroughly twisted take on the tale of 'Little Red Riding Hood’; a tale that has consistently proved it is ripe for reinterpretation time and again. Much like the original tale not just being a story about a girl eaten by a wolf (it’s actually a rite of passage story warning young women of the dangers of rape), Bright’s take isn’t just the tale of a girl who has a terrifying encounter with a serial killer – it actually unravels as a damning indictment of the US justice system and its inhumane treatment of the...

2010 Dir. Steve Lawson   Tough gangster Freddie ‘Dead Cert’ Frankham (Craig Fairbrass) and his gang get more than they bargained for when a group of mysterious businessmen make an offer to buy their club, the Inferno. Unbeknownst to Freddie, the club stands on the former site of a Black Church, established as a temple of evil in the 17th Century by a Romanian warlord-turned-vampire known as The Wolf ( Billy Murray ). The businessmen, headed by The Wolf aka Livienko, are actually vampires hell-bent on rebuilding their empire of evil on its original, unhallowed site. Freddie and co are about to realise they’ve bitten off more than they can chew by refusing to sell. There will be blood… Lots of blood. The second feature from director Steve Lawson ( Just For The Record ), is a vampires-meet-gangsters horror romp that stands alongside recent British vampire flick Beyond the Rave as a slick, modernised take on the genre, that goes some way to evoke the spirit of such contempo...

2009 Dirs. Yannick Dahan and Bejamin Rocher When a high-ranking police detective is found murdered by a gang of homicidal mobsters, a small group of his closest colleagues on the force take it upon themselves to avenge his death. Heavily armed and determined to see justice done, they manage to infiltrate the upper floors of the suburban high-rise apartment block that serves as the criminals’ hideout. But during the raid things go wrong and the cops find themselves overcome by the gang, who take them prisoner and begin to torture them.   Meanwhile, on ground level, the gang members become aware of a strange disturbance in the streets immediately surrounding the building, with the sounds of explosions and sirens filling the air. Incredibly, it becomes apparent that the commotion is being caused by ever-growing crowds of crazed people with a hunger for human flesh. It’s not long before the gang of criminals and the captive cops realize they are trapped together on the top fl...