• The Devil’s Doorway

    July 20, 2018 - By 

    A pregnant woman in chains; the off-screen wailing of child spirits; close-ups of the Virgin Mary with lines of blood down her cheeks, weeping at the sights she sees. The Devil’s Doorway, a Northern Irish horror which last week screened in the Galway Film Fleadh, and received American release through IFC Midnight, is an efficient frightener with local colour and a dense, tight atmosphere of suffering, penance and punishment. You might call it Catholic guilt. The debut film from Belfast writer and director Aislinn Clarke, who lectures in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, and the first NI Screen-backed feature from…

  • ‘That Is Horror Already’: Aislinn Clarke on Magdalene Laundry Frightener The Devil’s Doorway

    July 11, 2018 - By 

    Earlier this year, the announcement of The Conjuring spin-off The Nun prompted movie site ledes about how scary nuns are the new scary clowns. But for Irish readers, Mother Superior’s terrors are nothing new. The trauma of the Magdalene Laundries — the island-wide network of religious asylums where vulnerable and ‘wayward’ women were imprisoned and forced to provide unpaid labour —lingers in Irish cultural memory. Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) is the most well-known dramatisation of life in the institutions — the last of which closed in Belfast in only 1996 — but is being joined by new genre work. Premiering this week in New York…