Behind the Couch

"Death Serenades Me" * Italian composer Ennio Morricone is responsible for creating some of cinema’s most evocative and powerful scores. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and significant film composers of all time, his work spans decades and he has scored films for the likes of Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Bava, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski, Adrian Lyne, Oliver Stone, Pedro Almodovar and Roland Joffè, to name but a few. While particularly renowned for his scores for Sergio Leone-directed Spaghetti Westerns, such as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly , Morricone has written film music for almost every conceivable genre. Though they are not as renowned as some of his other scores, his soundtracks for various horror films, psychological thrillers and Italian gialli are amongst some of the most dazzling, unusual and nerve shredding scores ever composed. Head over to Paracinem...

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 ...

2012 Dir. Paul Hyett During the Balkan War, Angel (Rosie Day), a young deaf girl, watches in horror as her family are murdered by the militia. She is then abducted and put to work in an isolated house specialising in supplying kidnapped women to military personnel for sex. Unbeknownst to her captors, Angel is able to move around the house between the walls and under the floors, watching, learning, and planning her escape. When she witnesses the brutal rape and murder of her friend, Angel can no longer retain her rage and sets out to escape. But not before seeking bloody justice… The Seasoning House is a gruelling and powerful against-all-the-odds tale of survival and revenge. While the subject matter is highly grim, writer/director Hyett’s measured approach works to handle it with surprising delicacy, and resists the urge to stray too far into outlandish exploitation. While events are at times certainly exaggerated, the true horror emerges, fully formed, from the brutal, unspe...

2012 Dir. Jonathan Zarantonello Featuring a strong female cast comprised of renowned veterans of the genre, The Butterfly Room is headed by the fabulous and formidable Barbara Steele ( Black Sunday, Nightmare Castle, Pit and the Pendulum, Silent Scream , Shivers ), who delivers a mesmeric performance as maniacal matriarch Ann. Mentally unstable yet strangely vulnerable, her vanquished relationship with estranged daughter Dorothy (Heather Langenkamp) drives her to weave maternal bonds around a young girl called Alice (Julia Putnam). It turns out enigmatic Alice is not what she seems though, and has a few dark secrets of her own. Shocking revelations push an already unstable Ann over the edge as she seeks to preserve her relationship with Alice at any cost... With its mix of melodrama, Grand Guignol camp and tragic pathos, and its casting of a sensational older star in the role of a severely unhinged recluse, The Butterfly Room echoes 'hagsploitation' creepers such as C...

Horror cinema flourishes in times of ideological crisis and national trauma - the Great Depression, the Cold War, Thatcher-era Britain, the Vietnam War, Western society post-9/11; since the dawn of the silver screen, the genre has held a mirror up to society, throwing back a shocking reflection to provoke and perturb huddled masses in darkened rooms; who more often than not, may see nothing but the horror of reality itself staring back at them from the screen. Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present , a fascinating, meticulously researched and compellingly written new book by Jon Towlson, argues that a succession of filmmakers working in horror - from James Whale to twisted twins Jen and Sylvia Soska - have used the genre, and the shock value it affords, to challenge the dominant ideologies of these times. Jon recently took the time to have an in-depth chat with me about his new book, the subversive nature of horror cinema, and ...

Last weekend my parents and I took a drive across the border into County Louth. We drove through the parish of Togher, which lies on the coast betwixt Dundalk and Drogheda, and ended up in the tiny fishing village of Clogherhead, which borders Togher. When driving back from Clogherhead we happened upon the ruins of an abandoned church along a small dirt road. This being Ireland, the countryside is laced with little winding lanes – some said to be haunted, naturally - and trails that date back to famine times, and many boast ruins of churches, abbeys and chapels. Despite trying to find out more information about the place online, research proved fruitless and I’ve been unable to ascertain the name of the church and the graveyard that surrounds it. As such, I’ve also been unable to find out if there are any interesting (i.e. spooky) stories connected to the history of the place, but I did uncover a couple of creepy stories regarding the nearby fishing village of Clogherhead. Owing t...

2013 Dir. Elliot Goldner The Borderlands tells of a small team of Vatican-sanctioned investigators who are charged with proving/disproving an apparently paranormal presence in an isolated church in a remote part of Western England. While the found-footage horror film has been much maligned of late, Goldner’s offering intelligently amalgamates rational scientific investigation with the hint that something otherworldly is stirring within an ancient church, proving that when it’s done right, this format still has the power to unsettle. The found footage angle is actually convincing given the basis of the plot; Vatican-sanctioned investigators needing to ensure their documentation of events is as evidence-based and stringently methodical as possible so they can prove/disprove events. It makes sense then that the church they're investigating and the cottage they're staying in are fitted with cameras, and each team member wears a head-cam. Goldner incorporates elements of ...