Film
What Happened to Jane Doe?
As The Autopsy of Jane Doe unfolded, I couldn’t help thinking of Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s short film, What Happened to Her (USA, 2016). In a review for the Australian arts journal RealTime, I wrote of Guevara-Flanagan’s film: ‘What Happened to Her is a startling assemblage of film and TV clips demonstrating the sheer proliferation of nubile dead bodies […]
Reality Swept Away: Hellions at Sydney Underground Film Festival 2015
With a blood moon last month and Halloween impending, it’s an opportune time to discuss Bruce McDonald’s 2015 feature Hellions, which combines the two events to atmospheric effect. The film begins in familiar enough horror territory, with a late-teens protagonist, Dora (Chloe Rose), canoodling with her boyfriend as they plan that night’s Halloween festivities. Following the […]
The Invitation
Showing at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, The Invitation (2015) was, according to Richard Kuipers, programmer of the festival’s horror-themed Freak Me Out collection, the fastest of his film sessions to sell out. This latest feature from director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, 2000; Jennifer’s Body, 2009) relies upon ambiguity and the element of surprise. I’ll try not […]
Profound Alienation: Brendan Muldowney’s Love Eternal
I saw Irish writer/director Brendan Muldowney’s Love Eternal at last year’s Sydney Film Festival and intended to blog about it months ago. But while another SFF is almost upon us, this film is so unusual I don’t want pass up the opportunity to talk about it here, if a little belatedly. Love Eternal is a […]
A Night of Horror 2014: Julia
Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I only made it to one film on the promising program at this year’s A Night of Horror Film Festival in Sydney (20-30 November 2014). This was Matthew A. Brown’s hyper-stylised rape-revenge thriller Julia, a film which takes us into a netherworld of transgressive violence as it charts the dark […]
Stranger With My Face Horror Film Festival: Interview With Briony Kidd
In August this year I was lucky enough to travel to Hobart for the third annual Stranger With My Face Horror Film Festival on behalf of RealTime magazine. An intimate festival with a growing international profile, Stranger With My Face was started in 2012 by Hobart-based filmmakers Rebecca Thomson and Briony Kidd as a showcase […]
Welcome to my Creepshow and Other Horror News
It’s been rather a long time between drinks over in this small corner of the horror blog world. My love of the genre has not in the least abated, but the first few months of this year were spent organising a solo painting exhibition which showed in April at Sydney’s Sheffer Gallery (images here). While […]
Elemental Horror
[Warning: this review contains some plot detail, though it doesn’t give away much more than the trailer] While devotees of Sam Raimi’s 1982 classic might question the need for a remake (in much the way I do with Brian de Palma’s Carrie) there is plenty to admire in Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead (2013), an homage […]
Patrick
[This review was originally written for Filmink magazine] The biggest challenge faced by anyone who makes a film about a comatose erotomaniac with psychokinetic powers, is that of maintaining a sense of urgency and dynamism when the chief antagonist remains in a persistent vegetative state. It’s a challenge Richard Franklin didn’t quite meet in his […]
Sinister
There are films which fizz with a malignant energy: Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) is one of them. Its very narrative is spun around the idea of malevolent footage, in the form of a collection of horrific Super 8 home movies. These family vignettes transform inexorably into snuff films before the shocked gaze of Ellison Oswalt […]
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