Horror is about that cackling outsider, scratching at your door. The question in the genre is always which side of the portal you’re on. Are you with the community, fighting the threat? Or are you rooting for the monster to break through and savage the dull weight of ordinariness?
From that perspective, Don Siegel’s 1956 film
The Witch, which turns 5, are ugly, oozing mirror images.
Body Snatchers is about how evil alien pod people infiltrate the small, wholesome 1950s California town of Santa Mira.
The Witch is about a good, wholesome, God-fearing family in the 1630s and how much fun it is when their daughter gets to abandon their boring hypocrisy to join a bacchanal of witches. You could argue that between 1956 and 2016, good, wholesome Americanism started to look less heroic and more like death. Eggers’ witches are Siegel’s aliens, but with better PR.
Space Sweepers Is a Wild Space Action Movie With a Meandering Core
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The crew of the Victory is in for a wild ride. (Image: Netflix)
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The first and last half-hours of
Space Sweepers, Jo Sung-Hee’s new Netflix movie, have some of the grandest, most fun space action we’re likely to see in a movie this year. It’s got a bit of a problem, though: in between those chunks is another hour-plus of movie that can’t really decide what it wants to be until it’s almost too late.
Moves from skin-prickling unreadability to pure macabre gusto : Reece Shearsmith in In the Earth
Dir: Ben Wheatley; Starring: Joel Fry, Ellora Torchia, Reece Shearsmith, Hayley Squires. Cert tbc, 106 mins
“It’s a psychological problem with humans – we want to make stories out of everything,” tuts Dr Olivia Wendell (Hayley Squires) in one of In the Earth’s later scenes. Except, of course, it’s not a problem at all: it’s a means of survival.
Written and shot entirely during last year’s lockdowns and tier restrictions, and premiering last night at the Sundance Film Festival, the extraordinary new film from Ben Wheatley is a mind-warping folk horror freak-out for the Covid age. It isn’t about the pandemic as such – although it does unfold during one, in what looks to be modern-day Britain, at some point after Bristol “took a bad hit during the third wave”. Rather, Wheatley’s film refracts the isolation, confusion and dizzying senses of stasis and strangene
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Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong (Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures)
The official trailer for the new upcoming Warner Bros film Godzilla vs. Kong is finally out! The movie that will be released later this year comes after Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Kong: Skull Island (2017). The last time the titans fight was witnessed was in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) which saw Kong winning the battle. Here is all you need to know about the film showcasing the titan throwdown.
Release date
Plot
Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong (Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures)
The official movie synopsis from Warner Bros. reads, Fearsome monsters Godzilla and King Kong square off in an epic battle for the ages, while humanity looks to wipe out both of the creatures and take back the planet once and for all.
Lockdown with a Satanist: cult film director Roger Corman on making The Masque of the Red Death
Roger Corman tells Chris Harvey how his work predicted the future and why he’s still working at the age of 94
25 January 2021 • 6:00am
A still from The Masque of the Red Death (1964), with Vincent Price as Satan worshipper Prince Prospero
Credit: Alamy
For fans of Sixties horror films, the combination of Vincent Price, Edgar Allan Poe and director Roger Corman has an enduring ghoulish charm. The man nicknamed the King of B-movies adapted eight of the 19th-century writer’s more macabre works, and the inimitable Price starred in seven of them. Many a person has crept to bed chilled by The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), or Corman’s 1964 masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death.