Screen Anarchy

Folks in New Jersey looking for a way to kick off the first weekend of spooky season won’t have to look too far. The Highlands Horror Film Festival returns with another two-day event next weekend, October 3rd and 4th, over at Kevin Smith’s Smodland Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands.    Featuring three feature films and twenty-six short films the event is as good a primer as any. Found footage flick Worlds, psychological thriller Roswell Delirium and Richard Elfman’s horror comedy Bloody Bridget are the three feature films highlighting this year’s program.    The link to buy tickets is in the full announcement below.    THE HIGHLANDS HORROR FILM FEST RETURNS OCTOBER AND ANNOUNCES THEIR HAIR-RAISING LINEUP OVER THE TWO DAY FRIGHT FEST DOWN THE JERSEY SHORE!…

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Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are the sweetest young couple, full of promise and hope. Soo-jin works in business, hoping to make her way to the executive branch. Hyun-su is an actor; while he’s only had small roles, they are both hopeful that he will find the success he deserves. They also have a baby on the way – pressure, to be sure, but their love should carry them through. That is, until Hyun-su starts sleepwalking – and more to the point, starts doing strange and increasingly dangerous things while sleepwalking. In his feature directorial debut, Jason Yu weaves a tale of increasing dread and the limits of unconditional spousal support, of how desperate a person can become when their loved ones are…

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Damian McCarthy directed. Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee, and Tadhg Murphy star. Now streaming on Shudder.

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Norman, a young man very much in love with his girlfriend, attends her father’s birthday party, held in a hotel where a sect happens to be preparing for the birth of the god it worships.

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Samara Weaving stars and E.L. Katz directs the survival horror-thriller. Simon Barrett wrote the original screenplay.

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Friends who express curiosity about my love for horror films are often surprised to hear that, beyond the thrills and chills they provide, I also find them comforting. There are the obvious childhood associations born of discovering them when I was young. But beyond nostalgia is the way that horror films often delve deep into intimate emotional territory, suggesting to me that someone is aware of my fears, anxieties and sorrows and cares enough to tell a story about them. To say in response to my need to feel heard, “Yes, indeed there are monsters. And indeed, they sometimes win.” In this case I’m speaking of two things: losing my mother to heart disease in 2023 and my own brush with death following a widow-maker…

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It might be hard for younger generations to now believem, given the proliferation of doctored photographs, photoshop manipulation, and now the spectre of terrible AI that makes it hard to trust anything we see – but at one point in time, it was photographs that helped turn the tides of war. Images that came out of terrible events such as the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, showed people, especially in Western nations, just what horrors were happening, and being perpetrated on millions of people. While female war correspondants are still perhaps lower in numbers than men, in the early 20th century, they were almost non-existent. So it does feel a long time coming to have a biopic of one of the most important, Lee Miller….

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With a couple more days left in the madness that is Fantastic Fest this year’s award winners were announced by the festival.    Christopher Andrews’ drama thriller Bring Them Down, starring Barry Keoghegan and Christopher Abbott was awarded Best Picture by the jury. James Ashcroft was awarded Best Director for their work on The Rule of Jenny Pen and one of their leads, Geoffrey Rush, was awarded Best Actor.    Among the Next Wave program Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight won Best Picture, Emma Benestan won Best Director for Animale, and Mārcis Lācis received an honorable mention for their film, Touched by Eternity.    In the Horror Features program Estonian horror comedy Chainsaw Were Singing, directed by Sander Maran, won Best Picture. John Hsu won the…

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With the Fantastic Fest world premiere of V/H/S/Beyond in the bag our attention now turns to the streaming premiere next week on Shudder, on October 4th.   Today, Shudder released the official trailer for it and it looks like each new batch of filmmakers just keep upping the ante with every new film. Lots of action, violence and interstellar gore to be found in this one, folks.    V/H/S/BEYOND, the seventh installment of the V/H/S franchise will feature six new bloodcurdling tapes, placing horror at the forefront of a sci-fi-inspired hellscape.   The directors of this seventh chapter were Jordan Downey, Christian Long & Justin Long, Justin Martinez, Virat Pal, Kate Siegel, and Jay Cheel.    We will be speaking with one of these directors…

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As found footage has firmly established itself as a genre, its foothold on the public imagination (and on that of filmmakers) bears scrutiny. The excellent documentary The Found Footage Phenomena (2021) and books such as Found Footage Horror Films by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and POV Horror by Duncan Hubber have helped contextualize its appeal and power. But efforts like What Happened to Dorothy Bell? do more to carve out a place for found footage in film history than critics and academics ever could. I like to think that critics are the most haunted of observers. Like the protagonists in Grave Encounters (2011). we wander endlessly through the halls of cosmic dread and outright terror these narratives create space for. So powerful are they that even an absolutely bare bones…

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