Category: Essays and Articles
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by Joseph Ratchford When we think of ‘noir’ as a concept, the images and tones that come to mind are almost inevitable. A weathered, handsome man. The film is in black and white and so is his suit. Cigarette smoke dissipates across the screen. He walks across a street draped in carefully constructed, moody shadows,…
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by Adam Page There is a certain kind of cinema that gets under your skin, feeling like a splinter you can’t quite locate. It’s persistent, irritating and slightly beautiful in its wrongness. Italian giallo is that kind of cinema. It’s operatic, garish, and morally unhinged. The sort of movie-making that makes you feel a little…
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by Livvy Hubbard The progression of modern music has previously been attributed to developments in technology allowing for new genres and styles to emerge from the newly discovered methods and sounds these pieces of technology allow. It could be argued that the invention and accessibility of magnetic tape stemming from the second world war, led…
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by Adam Page Any honest conversation about body horror has to start in one uncomfortable place: with the recognition that the flesh was never really ours in the first place. It never was. It’s a collaboration between everything that wanted something from you before you had a name for wanting. Your nervous system is a…
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by Matt Rogerson Liminal spaces – thresholds, passages and uncertain states – lie at the heart of horror storytelling. Currently, liminal spaces and liminality are popular terms among horror fans, thanks to the success of horror films like Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2023), television series Severance (2022- ) and video game/digital space (and soon to…
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by Adam Page At the end of David Cronenberg’s Crash, James Ballard climbs down into the ditch where his wife Catherine lies bleeding in the wreckage of a car she has just driven off a motorway overpass on purpose. He cradles her, asks if she’s alright. She is. He says: “Maybe the next one, darling.”…
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By Adam Page There is something which isn’t mentioned in film school, or if it is, it’s mentioned in the same way a sommelier will mention the house red; fast, with no eye contact before moving on to the bottles that matter. The French New Wave, a glorious, cigarette-burnt revolution in cinema, a movement that…
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by Tyler Gaucheron-Land Despite being the director behind one of cinema’s earliest science-fiction classics, 1927’s Metropolis, Fritz Lang hardly otherwise touched the genre throughout the many decades of his career. Crime films was where Lang spent most of his time establishing his position as an early master of cinema, with the likes of the gargantuan…
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By Adam Page I have spent enough time in dark places, both literal and metaphorical, to know that monsters have always been queer. I don’t mean in the reductive sense, or the cheap metaphorical way that is always trotted out at film school seminars. I mean queer in the original sense of the word: unsettling,…
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by Daniel Owens The routine was firmly established by now. I’d arrive home on a night after an hour’s journey from Oxford Community College where I “studied” music (“got high, failed to learn anything and screamed into a microphone in an attempt at being a metal vocalist” would be a more accurate description). I wouldn’t…
