Category Archives: Horror films

Mia Goth sued by MaXXXine extra, who alleges actor ‘intentionally’ kicked him in the head on set

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James Hunter alleges in a LA court filing that Goth intentionally kicked him while he lay on the ground playing dead

An extra has alleged in a Los Angeles court filing that British actor Mia Goth kicked him in the head on the set of slasher film MaXXXine.

James Hunter, a background actor on the latest instalment in the X series, which follows on from the success of X and Pearl, claims he was covered in fake blood and told to lie in the ground and play dead for a scene filmed in April 2023.

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The Nun actor accuses Warner Bros of ‘hiding’ her share of merchandise revenue

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Bonnie Aarons, who plays demonic nun in billion-dollar Conjuring franchise, is suing studio for ‘obscuring’ the ‘true amount of her rightful share’

The actor who plays the demonic nun in the billion-dollar Conjuring film franchise is suing Warner Bros, claiming the studio is hiding the true amount of money it made from merchandise featuring her character.

Bonnie Aarons first played the nun, also known as “Valak”, in the 2016 horror film The Conjuring 2. The box office hit spawned a spin-off franchise just for her character: the 2018 film The Nun and the impending sequel The Nun 2, set to be released on 8 September.

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Ruggero Deodato, director of notorious horror Cannibal Holocaust, dies aged 83

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Italian film-maker found infamy when rumours about his 1980 ‘found footage’ horror led to him being charged with murder

Ruggero Deodato, director of the notorious 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust, has died aged 83. Italian media reported that he died on Thursday.

Deodato had a lengthy film-making career and operated in a variety of genres but remains best known for his gruesome horror film, which was banned in multiple countries and even resulted in him being put on trial for murdering his actors.

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Nosferatu at 100: Berlin exhibition examines vampire classic’s enduring appeal

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Show takes a deep dive into story of 1922 film that spawned an entire genre – with free entry for blood donors

It was a nightmare born out of a pandemic: a silent killer that arrived from a faraway land, rapidly spreading a delirious fever across the domestic population and leaving its hosts in an anaemic stupor.

By channelling contemporary fears around infectious diseases in the wake of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic, the 1922 expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu founded an entire genre of vampire horror movies and inspired claw-fingered monsters that would spook generations to come, from Freddy Krueger to the Babadook.

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Count Draculas on film – ranked!

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To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Nosferatu, we run the rule over the stars who have played the virgin-crazed, bloodsucking aristocrat

Also known as Lust at First Bite and Love at First Gulp respectively, these films from the golden age of adult cinema exist in softcore and hardcore versions. Taking his cue from Bela Lugosi, Gillis nails the brooding bloodsucker persona, as well as his co-stars.

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The Scary of Sixty-First review – outrage-baiting Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy chiller

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Friends become possessed by conspiracy theories after moving into Epstein’s old apartment in this smirking love letter to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

In 2019, reviewing a re-release of Eyes Wide Shut, Peter Bradshaw pointed out that in the age of Epstein, the idea of a secret society of the rich and powerful exploiting the vulnerable no longer seemed far-fetched. Now comes The Scary of Sixty-First, a kind of cinematic love letter to Stanley Kubrick set in the New York of Eyes Wide Shut, about Jeffrey Epstein and the conspiracy theories around his death. It’s a shallow, outrage-baiting movie out to shock but not much else. Disappointingly, the director and co-writer is supersmart switched-on Dasha Nekrasova, an actor who plays Kendall’s press adviser Comfrey in Succession and co-hosts the Red Scare podcast.

The movie begins like an episode of Girls: friends Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) and Addie (Betsey Brown) move into a suspiciously cheap rented apartment in Manhattan’s swanky Upper East Side. Eli Keszler’s pounding synth-y score signals something is up; so too does the creepy second bedroom, which has a mirror on the ceiling and doors that lock from the outside. Then comes a knock at the door. A woman credited only as The Girl (played by Nekrasova, possessing Chloë Sevigny levels of aloof cool), tells them that the apartment was previously owned by Epstein.

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Audrey Hepburn’s 20 greatest films – ranked!

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On the 65th anniversary of Funny Face, we run down the Givenchy girl’s best moments – from upstaging her (usually much older) leading men to literally representing heaven in a dazzling white cable-knit

This exotic MGM romance directed by Hepburn’s then husband, Mel Ferrer, was in fact her first big flop. Anthony Perkins plays a Venezuelan refugee whose life is saved by Rima the jungle girl: Hepburn in a suede pixie tunic, accessorised with a pet fawn and backed by a supporting cast in brownface.

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Glasshouse review – dreamy dystopian horror with a Picnic at Hanging Rock vibe

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A mother and her daughters hole up in a Victorian conservatory, hiding from a devastating pandemic that lays waste to human memory

Shot in a Victorian hothouse in South Africa with a mixed cast of local actors and the odd imported Brit – including Jessica Alexander, soon be seen in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid – this tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet) which imagines a family of survivors hiding out in the title’s botanical conservatory after a pandemic has ravaged most of the world’s population.

The invisible threat here is an airborne virus called “the shred” which wipes out memories and leaves its victims in a bestial state, unable to remember even their own names. A matriarchal woman known only as Mother (Adrienne Pearce) guides her three female progeny – cautious Evie (Anja Taljaard), dreamy Bee (Alexander) and adolescent Daisy (Kitty Harris), alongside shred-infected brother Gabe (Brent Vermeulen) – by teaching them how to garden (they have to pollinate the plants themselves because the bees are all gone), to read, paint, and pass on the stories of the Before Times.

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Unhappy new year: what can we learn from movies set in 2022?

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From murderous mayhem in The Purge to the grim dystopia of Soylent Green, writers have predicted very bad things for the next 12 months

It’s gotten rather tricky to calibrate the the annual relative quotient of tragedy. (For the future reference of misery-focused sociologists, that’s the ARQT.) 2021 was a year of tribulation closing out with a backslide into the same rampant viral spread that we saw in square one of the pandemic that just won’t end – but hey, at least it’s not 2020 any more. As it becomes apparent that we will have to accept a few massive catastrophes as the new status quo, assessing the quality of life turns into a matter of degrees, weighing each fresh stretch of hardship against the last. It may prove some cold comfort to note that things have, by sheer numbers, gotten slightly better since last year. The corollary to this way of thinking, however, is the understanding that our circumstances can always get worse.

Just take a look at the films set in the year 2022, united as they are in agreement that something horrible is just waiting to happen. There’s a futuristic sheen to the number, as if a robot’s stuttering while giving a readout of two, that’s compelled a handful of film-makers to select this date as the point at which a major crisis comes to pass. Whether it’s a chance armageddon landing at an inopportune time or a boiling-over that our species has been building to for years, the movies have marked 2022 as cursed. The only hope as we approach the beginning of another year is that whatever challenges await us, they won’t have the terrible finality of the world-enders listed below. Read on for a smorgasbord of possible apocalypses imagined for the coming months, and take some solace in the small consolation that we have yet to start eating each other:

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Have we witnessed the death of the Hollywood remake?

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Meagre turnout for West Side Story shows that these days, the way to cash in on intellectual property is via sequels and reboots

So far, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story hasn’t had audiences pirouetting and finger-clicking their way to cinemas. There are plenty of reasons why; the main one relating to a certain global pandemic. But one explanation that keeps being proffered is that viewers are simply sick of remakes – and it’s not entirely wrong. Hollywood still has no qualms about bringing back its vintage franchises, of course. But as the imminent returns of The Matrix, Scream, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Hocus Pocus and Legally Blonde demonstrate, the fashionable way to cash in on a venerable intellectual property is to hire as many of the original cast members as you can and to pick up where you left off. Sequels are in; remakes are out.

Remakes, lest we forget, were once central to the cinematic landscape – hardly more remarkable or disreputable than a new theatrical production of an old play. When The Maltese Falcon came out in 1940, it was the third adaptation of the same book within a decade. Some Like It Hot? Pinched from a 1951 German farce, which was in turn pinched from a 1935 French one. Hitchcock’s 1956 classic The Man Who Knew Too Much? A total rip-off of Hitchcock’s 1934 classic, The Man Who Knew Too Much.

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The Last Matinee review – carnage in the aisles in cinema-set giallo-style slasher

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Maximiliano Contenti’s horror flick attempts to unpick voyeurism but lacks the sophistication of others in the genre

Nostalgia for idiosyncratic analogue film style is the simplest explanation for the recent giallo revival – but maybe there’s more to it than that. This most stylised of horror modes is perfect for our over-aestheticised age, so the newcomers – such as Berberian Sound Studio, Censor and Sound of Violence – make artists and viewers accessories to violence, often unleashed through that giallo mainstay, the power of the gaze. Set almost entirely in a tatty Montevideo rep cinema, Uruguayan slasher The Last Matinee joins this voyeuristic club, even if it ends up more in the raw than the refined camp.

On a rainswept night in 1993, engineering student Ana (Luciana Grasso) insists on taking over projectionist duties for a screening of Frankenstein: Day of the Beast (an in-joke – it was released in 2011 and was directed by Ricardo Islas, who plays the killer here). She shuts herself in the booth, trying to ignore the inane banter of usher Mauricio (Pedro Duarte) – but neither have noticed a heavy-set trenchcoated bogeyman enter the auditorium to size up that night’s film faithful: three teenagers, an awkward couple on a first date, a flat-capped pensioner and a underage kid stowaway (Franco Durán).

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Film-maker Julia Ducournau: ‘Women kicked serious ass this year’

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Only the second woman to win the ​prestigious ​Palme d’Or, the French director behind Raw and new film Titane discusses the boom in female-led horror and ​how she’s terrified of being booed

“When I see a stereotype,” says French director Julia Ducournau, “I try to kill it.” She certainly did that in July by winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The most revered and exalted award in cinema, a world away from the erratic glossiness of the Oscars, the Palme d’Or tends to honour films that both further the language of cinema and shed light on the loftier questions of earthly existence. You expect humanism, seriousness, perhaps a dash of difficulty. What you don’t expect is in-your-face sexuality, serial slaughter, a ferocious, electrically coloured techno-metal aesthetic – and radical DIY nasal surgery.

But that’s what you get in Ducournau’s Titane – only the second Palme d’Or winner by a female director, the first being Jane Campion’s shared win with The Piano in 1993. Her win, says Ducournau in transatlantically inflected English, “was incredibly powerful to me. Through this prize, a lot was happening. It took 28 years [since Campion’s win] and I believe it’s not going to take 28 years again.” She points to 2021’s award successes for women – Chloé Zhao at the Oscars with Nomadland, Venice winner Audrey Diwan (Happening), Romania’s Alina Grigore in San Sebastián (Blue Moon). “That can’t be looked past. Women kicked serious ass this year.”

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Mark Gatiss: ‘I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English’

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The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter

Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.

This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.

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Last Night in Soho review – a deliciously twisted journey back to London’s swinging past

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Slasher fantasy and ghostly magic collide in Edgar Wright’s heady thriller about a fashion student who is mysteriously transported into the life of a 60s nightclub singer

“It’s not what you imagine, London,” says Rita Tushingham in this deliciously twisted love letter to Britain’s cinematic pop-culture past. Director and co-writer Edgar Wright, whose CV runs from the rural action-comedy Hot Fuzz to the recent dramatic music doc The Sparks Brothers, has cheekily described Last Night in Soho as “Peeping Tom’s Midnight Garden”, a mashup of seedy Soho nostalgia and melancholy magic. Making superb use of its West End and Fitzrovia locations, and boasting a cast that includes Terence Stamp (cutting a silhouette that weirdly recalls William Hartnell’s Doctor Who) and Diana Rigg in her final role, it’s a head-spinning fable that twists from finger-snapping retro fun to giallo-esque slasher fantasy as it dances through streets paved not with gold but with glitter, grit and splashes of stabby gore.

Thomasin McKenzie, who dazzled in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, is Eloise Turner, a wide-eyed, 60s-obsessed fashion student with a “gift” that leaves her haunted by Don’t Look Now-style visions of her dead mother. Having earned a place at the London College of Fashion, “Ellie” finds herself in a top-floor bedsit from whence she is nightly transported back into the capital’s swinging past through the ghostly mirrored-life of wannabe singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). In her dreams, Ellie (who says the 60s “speak to me”) both watches and becomes Sandie, aiming for the stars but falling to the streets as the meat-hook realities of London life hit home. Is Sandie a figment of Ellie’s overheated imagination – a wish-fulfilment turned into a nightmare - or has she somehow made a genuine connection across generations?

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Last Night in Soho review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in a horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past

A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright, serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises.

Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 60s but, moping all alone in her manky bedsit, finds herself stricken with neon phantasms. Like a ghost from the future, Eloise dreams her way through a portal in time back into 60s London clubland, where she witnesses Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a blonde singer – exactly the kind of retro showbiz princess Eloise moonily idolises – who is being forced by her slick-haired manager Jack (Matt Smith) into having sex for money with creepy old men. Gradually, Eloise feels her identity merging with Sandie’s. Is she having a breakdown, or is this nightmare really happening?

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Barbara Hershey on Beaches, Woody Allen and breastfeeding on TV: ‘I was an innocent’

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Now 73, the star of Hannah and Her Sisters shines in Jason Blum’s new horror. She talks about why audiences are hungry for mature movies, and her unhappiness at becoming an accidental poster girl for cosmetic surgery

In 1973, Barbara Hershey – then known as Barbara Seagull, for reasons we’ll get into shortly – went on the popular US talkshow The Dick Cavett Show and torpedoed her career. She was on alongside her then partner, the actor David Carradine, but when Hershey/Seagull walked out on stage, she could hear their eight-month-old baby crying off-camera. So she ran off and returned with the little boy, named Free. Unfortunately, Free continued to fret. So Hershey/Seagull breastfed her baby live on air. Cavett was stunned and so, clearly, were the producers, who cut to commercials.

“Did you breastfeed the baby earlier or was that my imagination?” Cavett asked when they returned, Free now fed. “I did it,” Hershey, then 25, replied, entirely unabashed.

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The Maid review – a giddy, gory satire that sticks it to the super-wealthy

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Shadowy figures lurk in Lee Thongkham’s stylised horror, which wrongfoots the audience with jump scares aplenty

Thai writer-director Lee Thongkham’s horror feature is a giddy, gory little treat. Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain exactly what’s so fab about it without spoilers, so just take our word for it as long as you have the stomach for lots of fake blood and jump scares. Suffice to say that Thongkham is nimble when it comes to wrongfooting the viewer, and there’s some pleasingly pointed satire here as well, sticking it to rich, snobby people who think domestic workers are as disposable as empty washing up bottles.

The maid of the title is Joy (bob-haired ingenue Ploy Sornarin), a country girl who gets hired to schlep tea trays up and down the stairs in service to super-wealthy Uma (actor-model-singer Savika Chaiyadej), a woman so ridiculously haughty she dresses like a gameshow hostess for breakfast and always uses a cigarette holder – presumably so the butts don’t touch her lips. Joy has worked out that she’s but the latest in a long line of maids who don’t last long in that household, but when she asks the other servants they get all squirrelly and tell her she’s not to ask any questions.

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Last Night in Soho review – a gaudy romp that’s stupidly enjoyable

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Edgar Wright’s time-travel film plays like a 60s pop song building towards a big climax

The nostalgia gauge is code-red on Last Night in Soho, a gaudy time-travel romp that whisks its modern-day heroine to a bygone London that probably never existed outside our fevered cultural imagination. It’s the era of Dusty Springfield and Biba; great music, cool threads. British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable. To misquote William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead, it’s propping up the bar at the Café de Paris.

“You like that retro style, huh?” a classmate remarks to Eloise Turner, a 21st-century design student – and you can bet your house she does. Eloise is up from deepest Cornwall to attend the London College of Fashion, still haunted by her mother’s suicide and struggling to find her feet in a city that’s not like the one she expected. Thomasin McKenzie plays her as your classic fairytale ingenue, guileless and wide-eyed, entirely out of her depth. She’s eyeing the future but her feet are stuck in the past.

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Candyman director Nia DaCosta: ‘It is shocking the way people have talked to me’

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As well as rebooting the horror classic, the 31-year-old is directing a Marvel movie with a $100m-plus budget. She talks about ambition, superstition – and whether she’s risked saying ‘Candyman’ five times

“Say it,” implore the posters for the new Candyman sequel, referring to the urban myth that the hook-handed ghost of the title can be summoned by repeating his name five times in front of a mirror. But Nia DaCosta will not say it: “Oh hell, no.” She is shaking her head. “Never have done, never will.” Despite having written and co-directed the film, DaCosta isn’t taking any chances. “In fact, when I was watching auditions, I would get a little freaked out so I’d stop the audition before they said it all five times. So silly,” she admits, laughing at herself. But she is not superstitious, she insists. “It’s just that one bit. Nothing [else] about it scares me at this point. Except … I’m just not gonna put myself in the space for my brain to play tricks on me.”

Related: Candyman review – BLM horror reboot is superb confection of satire and scorn

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Candyman review – BLM horror reboot is superb confection of satire and scorn

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Nia DaCosta’s quasi reboot develops the horror myth as an expression of rage against racism in the era of Black Lives Matter

Candyman, in its first incarnation, stepped daintily out of the mirror in 1992, in writer-director Bernard Rose’s US-set version of the Clive Barker novella The Forbidden, a parable of English class shame set in a Liverpool housing estate. Rose shifted the locale to Chicago’s deprived Cabrini-Green projects, switched the racial identity of the demon from white to black and gave filmgoers that inspired premise of exactly how he is summoned by rash unbelievers and giggling teens. Since then, Candyman has spawned sequels, references, memes and gags: such as Handyman – say his name five times in the mirror and he shows up three hours later and does a horrific job on your boiler.

Related: Candyman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II: ‘Black people are so much more than our trauma’

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