• Monday Mixtape: Ben Harris (The Dreads)

    October 26, 2020 - By 

    Frontman of Belfast’s premier garage-psych proposition The Dreads, and would-be character in an M.R. James story, Ben Harris takes us through some of his Samhain favourites. Timberjack – Come To The Sabbat Sabbats were pretty much an invention by judges and inquisitors during the 14th and 15th centuries that became mythologized before people then started actually practicing their own sabbats themselves. I find this and cans are a great opener to any sabbat. The Electric Prunes – Shadows One of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar was an Electric Prunes song. It wasn’t this one. Grand Theft…

  • Spook Screen Film Festival

    September 10, 2019 - By 

    Cork-based production company Deep Red – named for Argento’s 1975 masterpiece – hold their their Spook Screen festival this weekend, which takes in a range of appropriate environments for a fully immersive horror & fantasy experience, accompanied by Q&As with special guests, in association with Cork Cinemas Kicking off on Friday the 13th at Triskel Arts Centre is 1991’s Robin Hood, which stars Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman. The former will be in attendance at the event, giving a talk beforehand on the film, as well as his other work. Its second night is an audience with Hammer horror & James Bond star Caroline Munro, who…

  • ‘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…

  • A Quiet Place

    April 10, 2018 - By 

    For anyone forced to do the Sunday visit rounds, the concept of family life as an exercise in barely tolerable, near-silent tension is a familiar one. The pause between programme and adverts. The clacking clock hand on an ugly mantelpiece. The latest in John Krasinski’s canny pivot from straight-to-camera GIF-ery to leading man robustness, A Quiet Place brings high-concept genre logic to family quiet time, positing a near-future in which humanity has been devastated by insectoid alien invaders, so-called ‘dark angels’, with no sight organs but a highly tuned sense of hearing, perking up at minor wallops and bangs a mile away. Krasinki…

  • The Evil Within 2 (Bethesda Softworks, Multiformat)

    October 31, 2017 - By 

    …in which we are once again plunged into the broken mind of Sebastian Castellanos. He may sound like an extra member of The Strokes but he is in fact a self-destructive police detective with, naturally, a drinking problem. You already know the drill: Sebastian is a maverick who bucks the system and is going to get his ass in a sling, but underneath his grizzled exterior he’s a sensitive soul who is searching for answers at the bottom of a bottle and trying to forget something very sad that happened to him a long time ago. One might argue that…

  • The Ritual

    October 23, 2017 - By 

    With The Ritual, director David Bruckner (VHS) bolsters the recent rise of smart indie horror, bringing together a talented cast to recreate the Adam Nevill novel with suitably unsettling and outright creepy results; one that pays distinct homage to the usual ‘monster in the woods’, jump-scare tropes but still manages to transcend them with an intelligent script, great production and acting and deft directing. On a night out in London, a tight-knit group of five friends’ relationship is rocked when one them is brutally murdered during a robbery. The four remaining mates decide to have an upcoming stag do in…

  • Happy Death Day

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Happy Death Day is a minor slasher remix built around repetition, in a genre already prone to it. Theresa, or ‘Tree’ (Jessica Rothe), is a sorority sister bi-atch who wakes up in a stranger’s dorm bed, hungover and late for class. It’s her birthday, the same as her late mother’s, and she’s in a bad mood, ignoring her Dad’s persistent calls and carrying on with a married professor. She seems to have been in a bad mood for a while. Late that night she gets cornered in a dark underpass on campus by a creep in a buck-toothed baby mask…

  • Pennywise For Your Thoughts: How It Unlocked Childhood Terror

    September 8, 2017 - By 

    In the bifurcated narrative of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen and Tommy Lee Miller into a two-part TV movie in 1990 and back in cinemas this week with Bill Skarsgård under the Pennywise powder, childhood trauma folds into adulthood fragility. In the second part of the original movie, generally acknowledged to be the weaker of the two, the grown-up Losers Club of Derry, Maine return to their hometown to face Tim Curry’s murderous Dancing Clown, back at it 27 years later. The young friends’ encounters with Pennywise and his shape-shifting forms are vividly dramatised in…

  • It

    September 6, 2017 - By 

    Right on schedule, it’s 27 years later and we’re back in Derry. It was inevitable that Stephen King’s It, immortalised by Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen’s TV movie and Tim Curry’s childhood-scarring circus fiend, would get drawn into the Hollywood remake machine, even if the story’s theme of inter-generational recurrence does at least provide a meta-logic. The first half of Warner Bros’ two-parter, Mama director Andy Muschietti has been tasked with introducing a new generation to King’s Losers Club and the shape-shifting clown that’s buttering them up with sweet, tasty fear. And fair enough: for younger horror fans,…

  • Classic British Horror Screenings @ The Ulster Folk Museum

    August 19, 2016 - By 

    Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive, National Museums Northern Ireland, the British Film Institute and FilmHubNI, classic British horror movies come to rural Northern Ireland for a pair of unique events at Cultra, Holywood’s Ulster Folk & Transport Museum. In the atmospheric setting of the Folk Museum, the audience will have an opportunity to wander through the parkland on which the museum is situated and discover the charming period cottages, farms, schools and shops to set the scene. Before the feature, there will be a screening of footage from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. Focusing on the theme of folk…