Category: Essays and Articles
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By Adam Page Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. I want to tell a story about a woman. A woman who eats dog shit on camera and means it as a thesis statement. Not as a joke, or a gross-out gag for the midnight crowd, although it certainly is that, too. As a thesis,…
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by Aninda Provati The LGBTQ+ community has long been fascinated with the horror genre even when it was hard to see the perfect representation in mainstream films back then. Directors started adding queer subtexts to their films, but they were used mostly to create the villains, the terrifying monsters out for blood. Queer fans soon…
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by Christopher Stewardson Warning: this piece contains spoilers for Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return Posters for 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah proclaimed that “Godzilla dies”, a promise kept when the monster melts down at the film’s climax, accompanied by Akira Ifukube’s stirring melodies. Toho had put Godzilla temporarily to rest, closing their “Vs” run…
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by Evie Johnson The lulling summer sun and a knife-wielding masked murderer. These are the films that remind us just how terrifying broad daylight can be. A secluded space, limited suspects and an atmosphere reminiscent of Lord of the Flies’ youth-induced chaos are all components of the summer camp slasher, a subgenre which continues to…
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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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