Vicious Fun fails as both horror cinema and horror deconstruction. Wes Craven’s Scream has been justly lauded as an epochal moment in horror cinema, a…
An Unquiet Grave fails to deliver even scares, let alone substantive plot or character. Horror is a genre that tends to thrive on economy; it…
Superdeep is only horrific in how much deadening exposition it forces viewers to endure. The idea that the deepest hole ever drilled into the Earth,…
The Amusement Park is a remarkable work and profound reminder of Romero’s facility with pointed critique. Long recognized as one of the absolute masters of…
Caveat teases potential and boasts an impressive setup, but ultimately loses its thread after this initial stretch. One of the challenges of the modern horror…
Skull: The Mask indulges in unnecessary table-setting, but once it gets to the good stuff, it’s a throwback, labor-of-love gore fest. There’s a charmingly roughshod, handmade…
Fried Barry’s shock tactics wear thin after a while and its stylistic cribbing leaves much to be desired, but it possesses enough ferocity and ambition…
Boys from County Hell boasts a strong premise, but never entirely commits to either its horror or comedy elements. There’s a cairn out in a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
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. …
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…
La Llorona understands how to the tick the genre boxes but forgets to muster much in the way of actual horror. The horror genre has long…
Yummy is exclusively the domain of 12-year-old boys, and a hard pass for everyone else. It’s hard to imagine anyone clamoring for more zombie content these…
Notionally, Blood Quantum works. Conceived in the same think tank as Inglorious Basterds, Jeff Barnaby’s latest fuses zombic epidemia with issues of indigeneity, using both…