Witchcraft is an amorphous category, and the witch, as a figure, contains infinite possibilities. In many ways, her greatest power is the power of transformation. She is certainly prone to literal metamorphosises: she may turn herself into a cat, a ...

February is drawing to a close. The calendar is racing towards spring and the days are growing milder. In a hail of red crepe paper and discarded heart-shaped trinkets, we have left Valentine’s Day behind. Chocolates have been eaten, hearts ...

Modern audiences tend to associate extreme, spectacular, and sadistic violence with contemporary cinematic phenomena such as “torture porn” and the infamous “video nasties” of the 1980s. For many of us, the uncomfortable visual spectacle of watching bodies rent asunder and ...

Ira Levin might just be one of the most quietly influential figures in the history of horror and science fiction. Mention of his name often leaves people blank, grasping for some connection, trying to place the vague sense of familiarity ...

The Clown Murders is a title that excites the senses and promises a carnivalesque display of technicolour gore. A Canadian production filmed in 1976 and directed by Martyn Burke, the film seems as though it should be a product of ...

As a little girl, an older and wiser neighbour – a worldly preteen to my naïveprimary-school child – promised me that at night, once I had fallen asleep, my toys would come to life and have secret, thrilling adventures in ...

There is a moment about midway through Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn when Kate Fuller (Juliette Lewis), having been hurtled into an RV along with the rest of her family and forced to ferry two notorious criminals across the ...

In his book Gothic Pathologies, the critic David Punter observes that the complex, contradictory and somewhat confusing nature of adolescence is integral to gothic fiction. As a fundamentally transgressive genre, a fictional mode preoccupied with the crossing of boundaries, the ...

The Case of the Bloody Iris was originally released in 1972 under the enigmatic title Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (Why Those Strange Drops of Blood on Jennifer’s Body?). In a film defined by the ...

There is something otherworldly about teenage girls. To those of us who have never been teenage girls, or those of us whose adolescences have receded into a dim bubblegum-scented, glitter-strewn past, they seem inherently alien. The intensity of their friendships, ...