December 1972, a low budget British horror film opens in London. Shunning the comfortable supernatural Gothic of Hammer, Death Line goes for something primal, something far more visceral than the cosy Brit horror movies had gone before. Conjuring fear from ...
Read More »Julia Ostertag’s Dark Circus (2016)
Dark Circus (2016) Berlin-based filmmaker Julia Ostertag’s urban fantasy, Dark Circus (2016) has been described as both ‘a sensual journey into the depths of the unconscious’ and ‘Kenneth Anger takes Alice to Fetish Wonderland’. Finally, after three years touring film ...
Read More »Coral Browne: This Fucking Lady
If I am being completely honest I can’t say whether it was the star name of Coral Browne or the fact that the play’s title had the word fucking, albeit with three asterisks replacing the u, c and k, in ...
Read More »Mystic Demon Killer: An Interview With Director David Fussell
In February 2019 I received an invitation to a film screening and director Q and A session at Islington’s Everyman Screen on the Green cinema. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that for horror film blogger you might think, however the ...
Read More »The Milkman Cometh: Simon Ball talks to DeadPlant Theatre’s Bounce, about the coming bovine apocalypse, bodily fluids, rubber ducks and heavy metal.
Photo credit: Mark Senior. It was early January when I received the invitation. Did I fancy taking a trip into a sub Arctic central London to sit under a dank railway arch beneath Waterloo Station, while the trains packed with ...
Read More »The National Theatre’s ‘Frankenstein’ Show is an Engrossing Retelling of Mary Shelley’s Story
Back in February 2011, Danny Boyle’s production of Nick Dear’s drama Frankenstein at the National Theatre was one of the hottest tickets on the London stage. While there’s no doubt that the involvement of the 28 Days Later and Slumdog ...
Read More »Interview with Filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond
Prano Bailey-Bond is an award-winning British filmmaker and writer who according to her online biography, ‘grew up on a diet of Twin Peaks in the depths of a strange Welsh community’. She cut her filmmaking teeth directing music videos for ...
Read More »Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?
At the very height of the carnage of world War Two, some lads were out illicitly searching for birds eggs to eek out their meagre wartime diet on a private estate in the English Midlands. What they found when investigating ...
Read More »Review: ‘Vampire Clay’ Sculpts a New Kind of Bloodthirsty Terror
Having broken into direction with the Y is for Youth segment of ABCs of Death (2014) followed by the sci-fi horror short Thorn (2015), Vampire Clay marks the feature-length debut of Soichi Umezawa as both a writer and director. Prior to ...
Read More »Nosferatu: The Silver Screen’s first Dracula Resurrected for the Digital Age
Friedrich Wilheim Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror) is widely acknowledged not just as a classic of German Expressionist cinema but also as the silver screen’s first interpretation of Bram Stoker’s genre-defining vampire classic Dracula ...
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