Mike Flanagan

“The Haunting of Hill House” has just arrived on Netflix! Hurray! The 10 part adaptation of Shirley Jackson's short story (which has already spawned one all time classic scary film) arrives courtesy of Mike Flanagan, who may well be Mildly Unnerving's favourite horror director working right now. So to celebrate I've ranked his feature films from my least amazing to most amazing. “Absentia” is absent because I haven't seen it.

Before I Wake

The first half of “Before I Wake” is a perfect demonstration of Flanagan's strengths as a director. There are some subtle background scares that some viewers may not even notice first time through, an atmosphere of creeping dread and characters you may actually care about. There are also some moments of genuine wonder when the supernatural shenanigans start kicking off. However, the second half is a bit of a let down, with the old horror mistake of over-explaining dragging stuff down a bit. Still very much worth your time though.

Ouija: Origins of Evil

Wherein our man does a prequel to “Ouija”, which was no-one's idea of a good film. He makes “Origins of Evil” a million times better than it has any right to be though, bringing his trademark subtly to bear where the original was obnoxious and loud. It dips towards the obvious towards the end, but the increasingly bleak and hopeless atmosphere is rare for such a mainstream outing.

Hush

A deaf woman living alone in an isolated house in the woods is menaced by a masked killer. “Hush” takes this simple premise and runs with it, putting some inventive slants on the old slasher film tropes. It also features a great performance by co-writer Kate Siegel (who is also in “Haunting of Hill House”) and doesn't bother with a motive for the antagonist, which is entirely the right choice.

Gerald's Game

An adaptation of an unadaptable Stephen King novel, the success of which presumably got Flanagan the gig on “The Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep”. Artfully turning a novel that was very heavy on internal monologues into something filmable by having characters show up as figments of the protagonist's imagination, this only amps up the terror when the Moonlight Man makes his appearance. Faithful to King's novel and showing the director's usual restraint when it comes to the scares, it still makes time for one of the most harrowing and gory scenes I've seen for a while.

Oculus

As far as your correspondent is concerned “Oculus” is a legitimate masterpiece. A brother and sister seek to prove that a haunted mirror was responsible for the death of their parents 10 years earlier. The subtle scares are present and correct, but thing that really got under my skin was mercilessly escalating atmosphere of dread. Perfectly paced even as it switches between past and present (before the two start merging) and constantly wrong-footing the audience and the protagonists as to what is real and what isn't, “Oculus” is one of the few films that I find actually frightening.

All films are on Netflix. Except Oculus unfortunately

Hereditary

Better late than never, your correspondent went to watch Hereditary this week. It's a really good film, in fact it's a great one, though it doesn't live up to the lavish hype that has been heaped on it (though I doubt any film could quite frankly). Before I talk about what I want to, a quick review.

It does a good line in slowly escalating dread, has some genuine scares, is merciless in what it puts the characters through and is blessed with stellar performances, especially from Toni Collette and Alex Wolff. It also drags a little bit in places, Gabriel Byrne is a bit wooden and it loses it towards the end a little for me, where it strains to explain why all of the spooky shenanigans are happening.

It is also thematically rich and is as much about grief, the cycle of abuse and the fragmentation of family as it is about supernatural goings on. I recommend it heartily to anyone who likes their horror slow moving and cerebral. It gets an 8

So, the genuine scares and how director Ari Aster achieves them is what I found interesting when watching the film. I'm not and have little intention of becoming a film maker, but I found the techniques Aster used throughout to fascinating. Maybe because I watch so many horror films and know all of the cliches off by heart, it was nice to see someone doing something different and very effective.

Minor spoilers from here

Take the first vaguely supernatural thing that happens. It's the night after the funeral which kicks the whole thing off. Everything is relative normal in the house. Annie (Collette) has just buried her mother and given a eulogy where it's pretty clear the departed was a difficult person. She's looking through her mother's effects in her studio, which is full of miniatures so pretty spooky to begin with. There's a book on spiritualism, with a postcard from mum saying that “all the sacrifices will be worth the reward”. Annie is vaguely upset and turns off the light. She looks in the corner of the room and her expression turns to one of shock. Aster holds for a second before cutting to what she's looking at: what could be the figure of an older lady (her mother?) sat motionless in the dark.

A lesser film would have Annie scream, or blast out a music sting for a cheap jump scare. But Aster holds on the image silently for a few moments until cutting to Annie reaching for the light switch. When the room is illuminated again, he cuts to the same corner, now empty of course.

The above is subtle, quiet and genuinely unnerving. The scene is maybe two minutes long but my heart was in mouth the entire time. Aster pulls off several similar tricks later in the film. There's a moment where a character wakes up in their darkened room and slowly comes too. There's something behind them which they can't see and Aster draws no attention to until about 90 seconds in. It's bloody terrifying in a way which most horror films can't manage. They lack the patience and nerve to hold a single shot that long.

I love this kind of subtly in horror films. It's something that my favourite film of recent years It Follows excels at. A director trusting you to notice the horrible, telling detail yourself seems so much better than the loud noise or the crash zoom. These things have their place of course, and I appreciate that my preference is in a minority. But it's so lovely to see someone try something different from the norm

Aster is great at the technical stuff throughout. He loves a long, slow camera move, and the first scene I mentioned above trains you to check the frame or dread what might be in the background in the next second. He can also do a quick transition that serves to disorientate the viewer, switching from day to night or between scenes without the usual connective tissue.

It sounds great too. The score (by Colin Stetson) could give you palpitations if completely divorced from the images. It mostly consists of ominous drones and atonal shrieks, which makes it sound like the score of every other horror film, but this is seriously a cut above most offerings. The sound design is great (one noise will stick with you for days after the film, hoping you won't hear it as you're on the edge of sleep), helping to escalate the dread.

The way Hereditary avoids cliché and marshals Aster's obvious technical talents to generate an ambience of doom and create sweaty palmed terror is the best thing about it. I urge all horror fans to give it a go.

A Quiet Place

I may have said before on this blog that despite being a horror fan, it's rare that I find a film truly frightening. Oh sure, I'll leap out of my skin at a well placed jump scare, or find scenes lingering in my head long after the credits have rolled, but sweaty-palmed, heart pumping terror is a rarity.

A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, may be the most tense I've felt in a cinema. Much of this is based on it's premise, which is so head slapping simple that a lot of people are probably angry at themselves that they didn't come up with it years ago.

Without giving too much away, the world has been pretty much destroyed by the sudden arrival of a horde of spindly-limbed, leathery skinned evil bastard monsters. Though blind, they have acute hearing and move at deadly speed. Basically, if you make a noise anywhere, at any time, you're quickly in for a whole world of eviscerating. The family at the centre of the film (their names are not given, though are seen in credits) has a daughter who is deaf, so they have presumably survived this long (the bulk of the film takes place on “Day 430”) due to being fluent in sign language.

From this relatively basic set up Krasinski is able to mine a seemingly endless amount of tension. The sound design plays a large part, with the score used sparingly and every noise made taking on terrifying significance. This drags you completely into the family's world, which is a deeply unpleasant place to be. It doesn't help that the family (for most part) make entirely the right decisions in order to survive, but things still go so hideously wrong. An early scene sets out clearly and heart-wrenchingly that absolutely no-one is safe.

The pacing also helps. Despite being only 90 minutes long, the film is unafraid to take it's time. Early sections show how the family are living their lives and surviving, covering paths in sand, painting the non-squeaky floorboards, trying to contact other survivors and teaching the kids maths. The slow pace may be too much for some, but it only ramps up the energy when things go even more to hell in the final third.

A Quiet Place is a brilliant exercise in sustained tension, peppered with some of the best jump scares your correspondent has seen (and heard) in a while. The performances are uniformly excellent, with most emotions obviously conveyed silently. The creature design is impressive, with the beasts being like something out of Silent Hill. It all adds up to an original and intelligent horror film which is one of the scariest thrill rides of recent times - 9

Annihilation

Alex Garland's directorial follow up to the great “Ex Machina” is another cerebral sci-fi thriller. It is an adaptation of the first part of Jeff VanderMeer's acclaimed “Southern Reach” trilogy, though Garland has streamlined the story and made it self contained.

It's a good job too, as no franchise is about to be kickstarted here. Paramount buried the film after Garland and his producer refused to make changes due to “disastrous” test screening responses. Thus “Annihilation” was not screened for critics, only had one trailer and was unceremoniously dumped on Netflix (outside of the US and China).

It turns out once again that test audiences are morons, because despite having the name of a fifth tier Nicolas Cage thriller, “Annihilation” is genuinely great. Comparisons are being made Andrei Tarkovsky's arty sci-fi masterpiece “Stalker” and may not be too far off the mark.

A meteorite lands near a lighthouse on the Florida coast and soon a mysterious zone called “The Shimmer” begins to expand across the nearby countryside. Ex-marine and current biologist Lana's (Natalie Portman) husband Kane was part of a special ops team sent into the zone to investigate, but has been missing for some time. When Kane (Oscar Isaac) does return something seems a bit off, plus he appears to be dying from catastrophic organ failure.

Lana and Kane are hijacked on the way to the hospital by Southern Reach, a mysterious branch of the US military led by Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who are hoping to stop the Shimmer's inexorable advance. Lana and Ventress eventually lead an all female team of scientists into the Shimmer to try and find out what's going down.

Once there, they find themselves at the mercy of odd time anomalies and that plants and animals are mutating, which while making the flora look pretty is kinda bad news when the local fauna includes alligators and bears. However, the closer they get to the lighthouse, the more metaphysical the threats become.

“Annihilation” contains some startling, genuinely beautiful images once the action moves into the Shimmer. Bright, multicoloured vegetation climbs trees and buildings, light refracts in odd ways and the beach contains one of the loveliest and strangest things I've seen in a film for a while (I'll not spoil it).

It also features some shockingly gruesome scenes of body horror, as well some unnerving, real scares. The second scene with the bear (oh-god-the-bear) manages both at once, while the climax manages to be actually convey something convincingly alien. Once the film enters the lighthouse this viewer felt like they were holding their breath for 20 minutes as Garland bombards us with revelations and uniquely weird images.

Obviously Garland is best known for his writing, first as a novelist then with his scripts for the likes of “Sunshine”, “28 Days Later” and the hugely underrated “Dredd”, but “Annihilation” should cement his bona fides as a director. The cinematography is off kilter to better convey the oddness of the Shimmer, while all of the performances are just slightly “off”. Sometimes the actors are not using the right eye lines in dialogue, something which is so antithetical to the basics of making films that the result is very disconcerting. Even the usual film editing techniques could be masking time skips or gaps in Lana's memory.

“Annihilation” is a brilliant film, as thought-provoking as it is technically accomplished. I've only really talked about the latter here and not really touched on the film's themes of self-destructive behaviour, grief and malign biology. If the film is destined for cult classic status (which it almost certainly is) then that's just fine, but shame on that test audience for denying us the chance to see it on a big screen - 8

Veronica

Spanish horror Veronica is the latest film to find itself lumbered with the “scariest film evah!” hype, which makes it even odder that it's just been unceremoniously dumped on Netflix with no hint of a cinema release. So is the latest from [REC] director Paco Plaza any good? Some mild spoilers ahead (clearly marked).

Sandra Escacena stars as the title character, a 15 year old living in Madrid in 1991. Her father recently passed away and her mother works long hours to keep the family afloat, meaning that Vero (as she is usually called throughout) has to look after her twin younger sisters and even younger little brother.

On the day of a total solar eclipse, Vero and her friends sneak off to a spooky bunker (I assume all Madrid schools have one) to use a ouija board, apparently not realising that they're in a horror film. Such antics have been the catalyst for films ranging from stone classics like “The Exorcist” to stone cold shit feasts with extra dollops of shit sauce like “The Ouija Experiment” and sure enough things turn spooktacular right at the height of the eclipse. Back at the family home, stuff starts going horribly wrong quite fast, with bad dreams, strange claw marks, odd noises and all sorts of regulation ghost story shenanigans going down.

“Veronica” doesn't have much in the way of original ideas, but it does have some effective moments. Scares tend toward the subtle (at least at first) and Plaza has a good eye for spooky little details (there's an early scene where a shadowy figure is just hanging around in the background with no attention drawn to it whatsoever, which is something I always like). There are a few odd touches which stand out, like the idea that the eclipse is responsible for the demonic incursion or the weird blind nun at the school (which I choose to believe is a “take that!” to “The Devil Inside”). It can also create some tension when it feels like it, such as a late scene with a rolling glass. It is much more heart pounding than it sounds.

But then the above scene ends with a crappy special effect jump scare (albeit one less loud than usual), the type of which a horror fan will have seen a hundred times before. The big bad is also distinctly underwhelming, even if it does give off an air of genuine malevolence.

SOME SPOILERS FROM HERE ON

The film also does a weird have it's cake and eat it thing where it tries the whole ambiguous “is it real or just in the main character's head” trope. Again, this is something the average horror fan has seen so often it's basically a cliché, but Plaza then seems to answer the question fairly definitively a few minutes later. It's an odd choice and one that does deflate the climax somewhat.

“Veronica” is not a bad film, it's just not a particularly good one either. It's anchored by a great performance from Escacena and some non-irritating child actors, who ensure that you don't want these people to get hurt. Plaza gives a few good moments, but undercuts them with boring cliches and scares that fall flat.

So it's far from being “the scariest film ever”. It may satisfy those who are less attuned to the genre as a sort of starter spook film, but for us horror aficionados it's not going to do much - 5

Black Mirror Season 4

The following assumes that you have watched every episode of new Black Mirror, so contains spoilers.

USS Callister

Starting off with probably the biggest budget and the wobbliest script, USS Callister begins as a Star Trek parody, morphs into a cringey workplace comedy, becomes a hellish digital nightmare and finally a take down of angry nerd-bro male entitlement.

It's the latter two where the episode does it's best work. Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons, great as always) is using the DNA of co-workers who have wronged him (e.g. by not fancying him) and created digital copies of them in the VR MMO game he created. As always in Black Mirror, existence for digital copies is hugely unpleasant, with the avatars completely at Daley's whim. He physically and psychologically tortures them for disobedience or the lolz. In a nice nerdy touch, none of the copies have genitals and Daly only every chastely kisses the female clones, real intimacy being beyond his comprehension.

USS Callister is too long, the Star Trek style heroics at the end as the avatars rebel is undercooked and the happy ending totally tacked on and unearned. The themes about angry male nerds resonate however and the plight of the copies is genuinely unsettling for a while – 7

Arkangel

A common criticism of Black Mirror is that it only ever says “Computers are bad lol”. However, what every episode actually says is that humans are (usually) bad and technology can help push their worst instincts to horrible if logical extremes.

Arkangel is season 4's best example of this. A chip allows a mother to see what her daughter sees and even filter the things which stress her out (like the nasty neighbourhood dog). It's already horribly intrusive when the daughter is a toddler, but it becomes worse as she ages. Though the mother claims to have thrown the monitor out, she pulls it out of the attic when the teenager daughter lies about where she is. Unfortunately she sees her having sex and doing her one and only line of coke with her dealer boyfriend. Things inevitably spiral downwards.

Arkangel is full of lovely storytelling details (the daughter nearly not surviving her birth triggering the overprotectiveness of the mother, the fact that the Arkangel system is banned in Europe, the daughter making friends with the dog as she comes out of her shell), along with nice direction by Jodie Foster. A lot of people focus of the twists in Black Mirror, but for many episodes (including this one) are more about the themes they develop. The plot may be a little flabby, but it totally succeeds in showing how even parental love can turn toxic when technology allows it to be pushed to awful extremes – 7

Crocodile

The idea that your memories can not only be seen but used as evidence is an effectively nightmarish one (in that I literally had a nightmare about it after watching this episode), but it's not used to great effect here. The spiral of violence as Mia (Andrea Riseborough, predictably awesome) rushes to cover her tracks is as bleak and grim as Black Mirror ever gets, but much of the episode feels like treading water. The investigation into an insurance claim by Shazia (an endearing performance by Kiran Sonia Sawar) using the memory scanning device seems to drag on forever, and while it is necessary to show how she moves closer to Mia and has the odd nice touch it doesn't make for thrilling viewing.

So Mia has to kill Shazia so she doesn't report the murder of the former's ex-boyfriend seen in her memories, then Shazia's likeable, dopey husband because he knew where she was going, then their baby son so his memories can't be scanned. To twist the knife further the latter is blind, but in the shittiest plot twist in Black Mirror history, his pet guinea pig saw everything and can have his memories scanned! Yeah...

There are some nice performances, it's filmed in Iceland (for some undisclosed reason, no-one actually seems to be Icelandic) which obviously looks absolutely gorgeous, but this is a weak episode - 5

Hang The DJ

Following two people as they embark on a series on relationships dictated by The System, Hang The DJ has an intriguing premise which just about follows through on in a satisfying way. The hints of a more dystopian undertow are nicely done and the twist is up there with the series' best.

The idea that the characters we are following are simply simulations and part of a dating app is a good one, though it does raise a few troubling questions based on the rest of the series. What makes the fate of these clones any different from the ones in USS Callister or White Christmas? I guess that in this case the simulations are (mostly) enjoying themselves (they can actually have sex at least). But Frank (Joe Cole) ends up a year long relationship with someone who despises him, while Amy (Georgina Campbell) starts to question whether the system is working.

The episode ends with real life Amy and Frank meeting in a bar, with their dating apps showing they are a 99.8% match for each other. This after 1000 simulations were run are they rebelled 998 times. Hang The DJ wants to be this season's San Junipero with it's ostensibly happy ending, but it's not quite up there with that series high point. It's well acted with some nice character work in the script, but seems a bit hollow. - 7

Metalhead

A woman is chased across an apocalyptic landscape by a murderous robot dog. That's it, the sum of the plot for this episode. There's no moral about technology pushing human behaviour to it's worse excesses, no bleak satire, no twist at the end. Yet it still manages to be the best episode of the season.

The reasons it works so well are many. There's the spare, taut script which gives nothing away about why society collapsed and focusses instead on the desperate fight for survival. There's the tense direction (from 30 Days of Night helmer David Slade) and beautiful monochrome photography. The “dog” is both terrifying and endearing, like a cuter version of Yul Brynner in Westworld. Best of all there's the central performance from Maxine Peake, doing a lot with very little.

Much as Hang The DJ wants to be this season's San Junipero, I think that honour actually belongs to Metalhead. This both because it successfully upends the normal Black Mirror conventions and is easily the best episode of it's year. - 9

Black Museum

Being three linked stories which inevitably conjoin by the end, the previous episode this is most reminiscent of is the “festive” special White Christmas. Unlike said episode this one isn't particularly great.

The nightmare situations seems to be Black Mirror by numbers, the characters all cyphers. This may be intentional, given that they're being told by heartless antagonist Rolo, but it doesn't make for interesting viewing. The ideas aren't bad per se, and Carrie's predicament in the middle story is particularly unpleasant, but we've seen these “digital copies being put through hell” stories a few times now. Could it be that Black Mirror is running out of ideas?

Black Museum does actually feel like a series finale. There are references to every other episode throughout (which annoyed me quite a bit if I'm being honest). It also feels like the series becoming a parody of itself (on purpose rather than accidentally like with Shut Up and Dance last year). Could Rolo really be Charlie Brooker, dishing out cruel punishments to those who use cutting edge technology? Are we the tourists who come to electrocute the digital copy of a condemned prisoner over and over again?

I'm not sure if this episode is deep enough to warrant the above pretentious waffling. It's a below average episode of TV either way, the lowest point of another hit and miss season – 5

Celluloid Screams 2017

The 9^th edition of the horror film festival took up residence in Sheffield's bestest independent cinema the Showroom over the last weekend. Your correspondent forked out for a weekend pass and strapped in for two days and one evening of terror and gory violence (and that was just the Q&As etc). Here's what transpired.

Please note that the reviews of the films may contain mild spoilers. I'll not mention the endings but if you want to go in to any of them blind maybe give the below a miss.

FRIDAY

After a brief introduction from our genial hosts Rob and Polly, things kick off with the brilliant and inventive short Great Choice. A woman is trapped in a looping commercial for Red Lobster and things get pretty nasty. Funny, disturbing and starring the amazing Carrie Coon, it's a great start (9)

The first feature is The Endless, the new film from Spring directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (who provide a fun video introduction). The pair also star as brothers who return to the cult (sorry, commune) they left 10 years earlier for a quick visit. Obviously all is not as it seems in the idyllic community where people are allowed to follow their artistic muse, but the mindbending nature of what transpires is unlike anything else I've seen. Inventive, original, sinister, warm, disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny, The Endless may even surpass Spring, one of my favourite horror films of recent years (9).

The next bill gives us 3 shorts. Creswick is atmospheric and tense but the ending doesn't quite work (5). Latched, where a new mother accidentally awakens a rather nasty fairy, is beautifully shot with some creepy moments (7). Animated Spanish war story Dead Horses looks fantastic and is depressing as hell, but didn't do much for me (6).

The next feature is Ashley Thorpe's Borley Rectory, an animated documentary about the “most haunted house in England” and the involvement of paranormal investigator Harry Price. On top of this, it's a love letter to the horror films of the 30s and 40s. A mix of live action recreation, rotoscoping and digital animation, the film looks incredible. My favourite trick used throughout the film is how ghostly images sometimes emerge from the digital effects used to age the film up. A genuinely unique experience but one where I appreciated the technical achievement and oddity of the work rather than a film I actively enjoyed (7).

Unfortunately I have to give 68 Kill and the associated shorts a miss to catch the last bus home. The Interchange at that time of night is the spookiest experience of the weekend.

SATURDAY

Up bright and early to join the first of many queues in order to watch Icelandic horror film I Remember You. First though we have Swedish short Drip Drop and Australian offering The Man Who Caught a Mermaid. The former, about aquatic monsters terrorising a woman in her home is stylish enough, but is the first time I notice something many of these shorts share; the totally artistic but unnecessary close up of something (6). The latter is bleak with a great twist and anchored by a brilliant central performance (7).

Oskar Thor Axelsson's feature is a mix of crime procedural and ghost story, skilfully merging two different story lines. A couple and their friend move into a dilapidated house in the remote Westfjords, where there are no neighbours or phone signal. Meanwhile a psychiatrist haunted by unexplained disappearance of his son moves to Ísafjörður and is drawn into a homicide investigation where All Is Not As It Seems. The two stories eventually link up of course and the twist that does so isn't hard to guess. I Remember You has a melancholic atmosphere and some properly scary moments, while Iceland looks predictably gorgeous (7).

Another queue (seriously though, the amount of queueing) and it's time for Habit, which is preceded by Couples Night and Bon Appetit. Couple's Night brings the funny and piles twist upon twist to good effect (8). The latter is a slow burning cannibalism tale that aims for satire but lands on painfully obvious (5).

Director Simeon Halligan and actor Elliot James Langridge arrive to introduce Habit and do a Q&A afterwards (with producer Rachel Richardson-Jones). The film starts like a particularly good bit of it's grim in Manchester drama, before dropping in the gory horror. The two genres are skillfully merged throughout and things get pretty bleak. Helped by great performances from Langridge and the rest of the cast, Halligan has delivered a great modern British horror film (7).

After all that Scandinoir and northern gothic things pick up mood-wise with the next bill. In Your Date Is Here a mother and daughter play with an old board game with predictably horrific results. The dread builds nicely until an effective jump scare finishes things off (9). Meow is a good 80s pastiche that keeps things relatively ambiguous until the end. It's first time I notice another trend in these shorts; everyone has a record player no matter when the film is set. Cute cat too (7).

Then it's time for Tyler MacIntyre's Tragedy Girls. Two teenage girls seek to learn “the trade” from a serial killer, start bumping off people in their small town then use the ensuing social media meltdowns to rise to fame. A smart, hilarious satire that skewers both teenage and adult attitudes to social media, complete with brilliant turns from Brianna Hildebrand and Alexandra Tripp as the narcissitic BFFs, Tragedy Girls is like a 21^st century update of Heathers (8).

After the longest queue yet it's time for Inside No. 9 with writers/known geniuses Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton providing an introduction to each of the three episodes. We're given “The Harrowing”, spookiest episode “Seance Time” and (eliciting the biggest cheer of the festival) are treated to brand new episode “Tempting Fate”. All three are brilliant episodes of TV and a treat to watch on the big screen. A lively and interesting Q&A follows (9 obviously).

A trio of shorts follow before the secret film. Crave (introduced by the director) is a smart update of an old horror story (saying which will ruin it) and one of the best shorts of the festival (9). I am ashamed to say I don't remember Third Wheel (it was a loooooooong weekend). Teddy Bears Picnic is grim and suffers from unnecessary close up syndrome (5).

The secret film turns out to be Ryuhei Kitamura's Downrange. A bunch of generically attractive carpooling 20-somethings are stranded in the wilderness when their giant SUV breaks down. Turns out the tyre was shot out by a sniper, who proceeds to pick our protagonists off one by one. This is a great premise, worthy of a gritty 70s thriller, but the director's aim is way off. Though mercilessly violent and incredibly gory, the dialogue creaks and people make incredibly stupid decisions. It's probably the film that raises the most unintended laughs of the entire festival. It'll pass a Saturday night in if you get good and intoxicated beforehand (5).

With that I decide to skip Suspiria and head home to get up bright and early for the 10am start on Sunday.

SUNDAY

Proceeding bleary eyed to the Showroom, I need something relatively gentle to ease me back into proceedings. Instead we get Japanese WTF-fest Tag. Errrrrrrk.

First up though we have Eldritch Code, a neat Lovecraftian story about a corporate IT guy chasing a particularly nasty bit of malware. Doing a genuinely fresh take on Lovecraft is difficult these days, but Eldritch Code nearly pulls it off (7). This is followed by It Began Without Warning, a fairly meh alien invasion/evil kids tale (5).

So to Sion Sono's Tag, which is an odd one even by J-horror standards. It has the most astonishing opening 10 minutes of any film of the festival, when a malevolent wind massacres two coach loads of school girls (I am not making this up). Things get weirder from there as the main character starts to shift through different realities. There are a few great (and gory) moments, though none which match the opening for sheer jaw dropping audaciousness. However, the film doesn't stick the landing, while the pervy letching over school girls and other young women leaves a sour taste (6).

The next bill goes a lot better. It opens with Swedish sleep paralysis short Paralys, which is especially fun for those of us who do suffer from said ailment (8). Next up is Tickle Monster, which manages to be funny, creepy and deliver possibly the best jump scare of the entire festival (9). The final short is Ear Worm, the title of which is basically a spoiler and features a genuinely catchy song which has been stuck in my head since I saw it (8).

The feature is Mayhem by Joe Lynch, a big, loud, dumbass violent action flick with another killer concept. A virus emerges which removes people's inhibitions, allowing them to act out their (usually deadly) impulses. The virus strikes the building where our hero (Walking Dead alumnus Stephen Yeun) works on the day he is unfairly dismissed, and as any killings undertaken while ill are not considered murder he decides to take revenge. Funny, gory, intense and cathartic for us office drones, this is another great Saturday night film and easier to recommend than Downrange. Plus it's refreshing to see a non-white actor star in such a film (8).

Next, we have Short Cut and Undress Me. The former is a fairly good excuse for a nasty pun (7), while the latter is a dreary body horror story which feels twice as long as it's 14 minute run time (3).

M.F.A. by Natalia Leite is next and it's a tough one. Art student Noelle (an incredible performance by Francesca Eastwood) is sexually assaulted at a party. When the school authorities prove to be useless she takes matters into her own hands, the descent into darkness fuelling (and massively improving) her art. A brutal evisceration of rape culture on campus (and by extension in society as a whole), M.F.A. is more powerful and thoughtful than the dubious films usually filed under the rape/revenge category. The rape scenes were most difficult things to watch all weekend, while the violence that follows isn't glorified either. A timely film and one which will haunt the viewer for some time afterwards (9).

After a bit of walk to catch breath and clear heads, it's time to back to some good ol' fashioned demonic horror. We Summoned A Demon is from the same people as a short I saw last year called Death Metal (I still use the exclamation “Shit on my fuck!” on occasion) and is in a similar dumbasses vs Satan vein. Funny and violent, someone let Chris McInroy do a feature soon please (8).

So to the 30^th anniversary of Hellraiser, showing in a new print. I've not seen it for some time so was looking forward to see how well it holds up. Like so many 80s films that you saw when you were too young, the sad answer “not very”. The dialogue, from the human characters at least, groans with cliches, while most of the performances leave a lot to be desired. Most of the effects have dated badly too. However, the Cenobites still look great and have iconic lines, while the story and Clive Barker's hugely original concept are winners (7). There's an informative Q&A with actor Nicholas Vine and make up artist Geoff Portass afterwards.

Next we have Flow, an amusing tale of two women soldiers who wipe out their enemies despite running out of tampons (7). Caravan is a dark and atmospheric Aussie chiller with a horrifying denouement (7).

The longest queue of them all is for the final film I see all weekend is Creep 2, which is a shame as it's a bit rubbish. A found footage film with pretensions to being more than the jump scare filled serial killer film it so clearly is, any points it tries to make about “art” or “journalism” or whatever gets lost in the meandering monologues. Both central performances are decent and there a few wry chuckles raised, but the film long outstays it's welcome (3).

Unable to justify the expense of another taxi home and a bit bleary eyed I sadly decide to miss closing film You Better Watch Out and go home to watch cartoons for a week.

Many thanks to the guys at Celluloid Screams for a great festival. Can't way for next year already!