The Banishing is a welcome-back for director Christopher Smith, rendering fresh what could have been boilerplate, and keeping its human horrors palpably textual. It’s curious that director Christopher Smith seems to have never really caught on in the horror world, even working within a genre…
The Power doesn’t hold a lot of mystery but thrives by situating its political and cultural critiques as blunt, horrific text. There’s something sinister lurking in the dark in writer/director Corinna Faith’s new period horror film The Power. Set in January 1974, amongst a…
Violation is a stunning debut feature that matches its its thorny discourse with impeccable technical craft. Writer-director duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli have been making provocative short films together since 2017, and with Violation, they’ve finally got a feature-length runtime to expand on their…
Queen of Black Magic is a brutal, go-for-break bit of exciting horror filmmaking. Kimo Stamboel doesn’t have the same profile as Timo Tjahjanto, his filmmaking partner in The Mo Brothers. Ever since Indonesia’s foremost purveyors of the grotesque fucked up and went solo, Tjahjanto has…
Hunted isn’t a bad film, but the genre aficionados who are likely to seek it out won’t find much genre styling to sustain them. Vincent Paronnaud’s new horror-thriller Hunted opens with a campfire tale brought to life using a gorgeous animation style that combines black,…
Anything for Jackson successfully manages the tricky balancing act of melding early comedy into outright terror. As festival season has gone mostly digital this year, we here at InRO have been able to cover a lot of films from all over the world. Of course,…
by Ayeen Forootan Film Streaming Scene
Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist | Alexandre O. Phillippe
Leap of Faith is a fascinating fireside-style docu-chat that affords William Friedkin the space to freeform story-tell. It’s a particular challenge (if not entirely futile endeavor) to write about films that so vividly manifest through the singular aim of presenting the viewer with in-depth analysis…
The Mortuary Collection is a gothic, expressionistic, and winning riff on a number of horror influences. Ryan Spindell’s The Mortuary Collection is an absolute blast, a delightfully gory and darkly comic throwback to old horror anthology films. While stuff like the VHS and ABCs of…
May the Devil Take You Too is a Raimi-esque bloodbath, gore-fest, and goop-show that understands how to set up and execute its thrillingly gnarly set pieces. Timo Tjahjanto has charted an interesting career path, alternating between insanely violent, bone-crunching kung-fu movies and aggressively visceral horror…
Spiral is content lean into cheap scare tactics at the expense of the more novel, potent direction is could have taken. New horror thriller Spiral clearly wants to be the LGBTQ-facing version of Get Out, and that palpable aspiration informs the entire film. In…
