We Are the Weirdos, Mister: The Craft at 30

03 Sunday May 2026

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There are films you watch… and there are films that possess you at the exact wrong (or right) moment in your life.
For many of us stumbling through adolescence in the ‘90s — awkward, angry, desperate to belong — The Craft didn’t just land. It latched on.

Thirty years later, it still hums with that same dangerous energy — a neon-lit spell cast somewhere between locker room humiliation and full-blown occult wish fulfilment.

And for a generation of cinephiles-in-the-making, it warped the brain in all the best ways.

Teen Angst as Occult Ritual

Watching The Craft now feels like rifling through a diary you don’t remember writing — every page soaked in hormones, rage, insecurity, and the intoxicating allure of power.

This is high school as battleground. Identity as ritual. Pain as currency.

Director Andrew Fleming taps into something primal here: the idea that adolescence itself is a kind of witchcraft. You’re changing, mutating, testing the edges of who you are — and the world is either going to bend… or break you.

So why not bend it first?

The Coven That Defined a Generation

Let’s not pretend this film works without its coven — because it absolutely lives and dies on the chemistry and chaos of its four leads.

Robin Tunney’s Sarah is the audience surrogate — wide-eyed, searching, the gateway into something darker. But she’s also the film’s quiet centre, grounding the chaos with vulnerability.

Then there’s Fairuza Balk — and let’s be honest, this is her film. As Nancy, she doesn’t just chew the scenery; she devours it whole and spits out something feral. It’s one of the great unhinged performances of ‘90s horror, equal parts tragic and terrifying.

Neve Campbell brings a simmering fragility, her Bonnie caught between empowerment and self-erasure, while Rachel True delivers one of the film’s most quietly devastating arcs — her Rochelle navigating race, beauty, and revenge in ways that still sting today.

Together, they aren’t just characters.
They’re archetypes.
They’re avatars.
They’re every outsider who ever wanted to flip the script.

Power, Consequence, and the Illusion of Control

Here’s where The Craft gets under your skin.

For all its gothic posturing and spell-casting theatrics, this isn’t a film about magic — not really. It’s about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. And what happens when the powerless suddenly get a taste.

The film doesn’t shy away from the consequences. Wishes curdle. Revenge mutates. Empowerment slips into obsession.

And Nancy — glorious, tragic Nancy — becomes the embodiment of that descent. A warning wrapped in eyeliner and chaos.

Aesthetic as Identity

The film’s visual language is pure ‘90s alt-culture: Catholic school uniforms weaponised into rebellion, bedrooms turned into shrines, candles and chaos layered over suburban decay.

It’s stylised, sure — but it’s also aspirational.

You didn’t just watch The Craft.
You wanted to be it.

Or at the very least, steal its wardrobe and soundtrack.

To revisit The Craft now is to recognise how unhinged it really is — tonally volatile, narratively messy, occasionally absurd… and all the better for it.

This is horror in spirit: raw, emotional, excessive, and completely uninterested in playing it safe. It swings big, sometimes misses, but when it hits — it hits like a lightning bolt to the adolescent psyche.

It doesn’t ask for subtlety.
It demands feeling.

Legacy of the Weird

Thirty years on, The Craft endures not because it’s perfect, but because it’s formative.

It spoke to the misfits. The angry. The invisible.
It handed them power — even if only for 100 minutes — and said:

“You’re not crazy. The world is.”

And maybe that’s why it still resonates. Because beneath the spells and spectacle, it understands something essential:

Growing up is its own kind of horror story.

The Prognosis:

A messy, magnetic, deeply formative slice of ‘90s horror that turns teenage alienation into something mythic, dangerous, and unforgettable.

We are still the weirdos, mister.

  • Saul Muerte

Style Over Substance: Midnight Killer (1986)

02 Saturday May 2026

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There is something inherently seductive about late-era Italian genre cinema — a commitment to style, to sensation, to the kind of heightened reality that often prioritises aesthetic over coherence. Midnight Killer (also known as You’ll Die at Midnight) arrives as a curious artefact of that tradition, marking a transitional moment for Lamberto Bava as he stepped out from under the looming shadow of his father, Mario Bava, and attempted to carve out his own identity within the waning days of the Giallo cycle.

Forty years on, it stands less as a fully realised thriller and more as a stylistic echo of a genre already in decline.

A Giallo in Its Twilight

By 1986, the Giallo had largely exhausted its cultural momentum. The operatic excess of Dario Argento had set a near-impossible benchmark, and what followed often felt like variations on a theme struggling to justify their existence.

Midnight Killer leans heavily into familiar territory: a black-gloved killer, stylised murders, fragmented investigation, and a narrative built on misdirection. Yet, where earlier entries thrived on tension and ingenuity, here the mechanics feel predictable, even perfunctory.

The film goes through the motions — efficiently, but rarely memorably.

The Bava Aesthetic

Where the film does find its footing is in its visual language. Lamberto Bava demonstrates a clear inheritance of his father’s flair for composition, using colour, shadow, and framing to create moments of genuine atmosphere.

Neon hues bleed into darkness. Interiors feel both artificial and claustrophobic. The city becomes a stage rather than a setting — stylised, heightened, detached from reality.

But this aesthetic confidence is not always matched by narrative strength. The imagery lingers; the story struggles to keep pace.

Violence Without Weight

The killings themselves — a cornerstone of the Giallo tradition — arrive with a certain mechanical precision. They are staged with competence, occasionally with flair, but rarely with the kind of inventive brutality that defined the genre at its peak.

There is a sense of obligation to them, as though the film understands what is required but not necessarily why it matters.

As a result, the violence feels less like escalation and more like punctuation.

A Narrative on Autopilot

The investigation at the heart of Midnight Killer lacks urgency. Characters drift through the narrative rather than drive it, and the central mystery unfolds with a predictability that undercuts any real suspense.

Twists arrive, but without the necessary groundwork to make them land with impact. Revelations feel less like shocks and more like inevitabilities.

This is where the film falters most noticeably — not in its execution, but in its lack of narrative ambition.

Legacy in the Margins

And yet, to dismiss Midnight Killer outright would be to overlook its place within a broader cinematic lineage.

It represents a moment where Italian horror was transitioning — moving away from the intricate, psychologically driven Gialli of the ‘70s and toward something more commercially streamlined, more internationally palatable, but often less distinctive.

In that sense, the film becomes a cultural marker rather than a standout achievement.

The Prognosis:

Midnight Killer is a film caught between eras — visually indebted to the past, but narratively adrift in a genre that had already begun to lose its edge.

A competent but unremarkable Giallo, elevated by flashes of stylistic flair yet held back by a formulaic and uninspired core.

  • Saul Muerte

Faith in the Fire: Heresy (2026)

29 Wednesday Apr 2026

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There is a quiet severity to Heresy, a film that understands that true horror rarely announces itself with spectacle. Instead, it festers — in doctrine, in fear, in the fragile structures of belief that govern isolated communities. Premiering as a Shudder exclusive, this medieval folk horror leans into atmosphere and allegory, delivering a compact yet thematically dense meditation on faith, repression, and the unseen forces that thrive in both.

The Weight of Belief

Set within a remote Dutch village, Heresy wastes little time establishing its suffocating world. This is a society bound not just by geography, but by rigid religious doctrine — where faith is less a comfort and more a mechanism of control.

At the centre is a young woman caught in the crossfire between personal conviction and communal expectation, portrayed with quiet intensity by Anneke Sluiters. Her performance anchors the film, embodying both vulnerability and a simmering resistance that threatens to rupture the oppressive order around her.

Supporting turns from Len Leo Vincent and Reinout Bussemaker reinforce the film’s central tension — figures who oscillate between protectors of faith and enforcers of fear.

Folklore as Fear Language

Where Heresy distinguishes itself is in its use of folklore as both texture and threat.

The woods that loom on the outskirts of the village are more than a setting — they are a repository of whispered myths, ancestral warnings, and half-forgotten truths. The film draws on the traditions of European folk horror, where superstition and reality blur into something indistinguishable.

Witchcraft here is not simply an external evil, but a projection of collective anxiety. It is the language through which the village explains its suffering — failed crops, illness, unrest — and, more disturbingly, justifies its cruelty.

In this sense, Heresy aligns itself with the lineage of folk horror that sees mythology not as fantasy, but as a mirror of societal fear.

Compression and Constraint

At a brisk runtime, the film packs an impressive amount into its frame: hardship, religious suppression, gendered control, and the ever-present spectre of the supernatural.

Yet this compression is both its strength and its limitation.

There is an urgency to the storytelling — a sense that the narrative is racing to articulate its ideas before time runs out. While this lends the film a certain intensity, it occasionally comes at the expense of deeper exploration. Themes are introduced with potency, but not always given the space to fully resonate.

Aesthetic of Austerity

Visually, Heresy embraces restraint. The palette is muted, the compositions stark, reinforcing a world stripped of comfort. Interiors feel claustrophobic, exteriors indifferent. Light is scarce, and when it appears, it feels less like hope and more like exposure.

The sound design complements this austerity, favouring silence and ambient unease over overt musical cues. It is a film that understands the power of absence — of what is suggested rather than shown.

The Horror Within

What lingers most is not the presence of dark forces in the woods, but the behaviour of those within the village walls.

Heresy suggests that fanaticism is its own form of possession — that belief, when weaponised, can be as destructive as any supernatural entity. The true terror lies in how quickly fear transforms into persecution, how readily communities turn inward to purge what they do not understand.

The Prognosis:

Heresy is a thoughtful, if slightly constrained, entry into the folk horror canon — one that balances atmosphere and allegory with a commendable sense of purpose.

A compact and compelling meditation on faith, folklore, and fear, where the line between the supernatural and the societal is unsettlingly thin.

  • Saul Muerte

Heresy Premieres Exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ Friday 1 May

Death Never Looked So Good: Tales from the Crypt Rises Again

27 Monday Apr 2026

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There are horror anthologies… and then there is Tales from the Crypt — a series that didn’t just push boundaries, it gleefully dismembered them, stitched them back together, and laughed in your face as the blood pooled at your feet.

Now, with its resurrection on Shudder, a whole new generation is about to discover what made this corpse such a vital, beating heart of ‘90s horror television.

And for those of us who grew up on it?
This is less a rewatch… and more a reunion with an old accomplice.

The Crypt Keeper Cometh

Front and centre — always — is the grotesque ringmaster himself: Crypt Keeper, voiced with deliciously deranged glee by John Kassir.

He wasn’t just a host.
He was a provocateur. A comedian. A corpse with better timing than most living actors.

Each episode began and ended with his signature brand of pun-laden sadism — a tonal mission statement that told you exactly what you were in for:
this was horror with a grin… and a knife behind its back.

EC Comics DNA: Morality With Bite

Adapted from the infamous EC Comics of the 1950s, Tales from the Crypt carried forward a very specific ethos:

Bad people will suffer.
And they will suffer poetically.

Greed. Lust. Jealousy. Betrayal.
Every sin had its price — and the show delighted in collecting.

What made it land wasn’t just the comeuppance, but the ironic symmetry of it all. These weren’t random acts of violence; they were carefully constructed moral traps snapping shut.

A Playground for the Bold

What truly set the series apart was its ability to attract — and unleash — top-tier talent.

Directors like Robert Zemeckis, Tobe Hooper, and William Friedkin brought their distinct voices to the format, often experimenting in ways that traditional cinema wouldn’t allow.

And then there’s the cast — an almost absurd roll call of talent:

Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, John Lithgow, Christopher Reeve, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Buscemi, Brooke Shields — all stepping into this macabre sandbox.

Even behind the camera, names like Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael J. Fox took turns directing.

This wasn’t just television.
It was a creative free-for-all.

Gore, Guts, and Glorious Excess

Freed from the constraints of network censorship, Tales from the Crypt revelled in its HBO-backed excess.

The gore was unapologetic.
The language unfiltered.
The tone wildly unpredictable.

One week you’d get pitch-black comedy.
The next, a genuinely unsettling psychological descent.
Then a full-blown creature feature just for good measure.

It was this tonal elasticity that made the series so addictive — you never quite knew what flavour of horror you were about to consume.

The Anthology That Shaped a Generation

Long before the current resurgence of anthology horror, Tales from the Crypt set the template:

Self-contained stories.
Bold creative voices.
A willingness to be weird, nasty, and darkly funny.

You can trace its DNA through modern successors, but few capture that same gleeful irreverence.

Why It Still Matters

Revisiting Tales from the Crypt now, there’s a refreshing lack of restraint. It doesn’t second-guess itself. It doesn’t sand down its edges. It simply commits — to the bit, to the gore, to the punchline.

In an era where horror can sometimes feel overly polished or self-serious, this series remains a reminder that the genre can be:

funny, vicious, stylish… and just a little bit mean.

With its arrival on Shudder, Tales from the Crypt isn’t just being revived — it’s being reunleashed.

And if you’re willing to step back into its coffin-shaped world, one thing becomes immediately clear:

Some stories never die.
They just wait… for the right time to dig themselves back up.

  • Saul Muerte

Tales From the Crypt Series Premieres Exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ Friday 1 May on Shudder

Bayou Bloodletting: Hatchet (2006) at 20

26 Sunday Apr 2026

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In 2006, as horror cinema found itself increasingly polished, self-aware, and often restrained by the lingering aftershock of post-Scream meta commentary, Adam Green did something refreshingly blunt.

He went back to the swamp… and let it rip.

With Hatchet, Green didn’t just make a slasher film — he issued a manifesto. One soaked in blood, drenched in practical effects, and unapologetically devoted to the feral spirit of 1980s horror.

Twenty years on, Hatchet stands not only as a cult favourite, but as the foundation of one of modern horror’s most consistent — and gleefully excessive — franchises.

Back to Basics… with Brutal Intent

At its core, Hatchet is disarmingly simple. A group of tourists venture into the haunted swamps of Louisiana, guided by a local storyteller, only to encounter the tragic — and violently vengeful — figure of Victor Crowley.

But simplicity is the point.

Green strips the slasher formula back to its raw essentials:

  • Isolated location
  • Colourful, disposable characters
  • A hulking, unstoppable killer

What elevates it is the film’s commitment to execution — specifically, the kind you can feel.

The Return of Practical Carnage

In an era increasingly dominated by digital effects, Hatchet doubled down on the tactile. Limbs are torn, bodies are split, and every act of violence carries a weight that feels immediate and physical.

This is not horror designed to impress — it’s horror designed to impact.

Green’s reverence for the genre is evident in every frame, not just in the gore, but in the casting. Horror royalty is woven into the DNA of the film, bridging generations and reinforcing its place within the broader lineage of slasher cinema.

And at the centre of it all is Kane Hodder, whose portrayal of Victor Crowley is both monstrous and, in fleeting moments, oddly tragic. It’s a performance that anchors the film’s chaos, giving its central figure a presence that transcends mere brutality.

Victor Crowley: A Modern Icon

Creating a new slasher icon in the 21st century is no small feat. Yet Victor Crowley — deformed, enraged, and bound to the swamp — has endured.

What makes Crowley compelling is not complexity, but consistency. He is a force, a legend, a campfire story made flesh. In this way, he aligns with the greats, while still carving out his own identity within the genre.

Green understands that icons are not built through reinvention, but through repetition — through myth-making.

A Franchise Forged in Blood

The success of Hatchet would spawn a trilogy of sequels — Hatchet II (2010), Hatchet III (2013), and the later Victor Crowley — each doubling down on the elements that defined the original.

What’s remarkable about the Hatchet series is its refusal to dilute itself. Where many franchises evolve toward accessibility, Green’s saga leans further into excess, embracing its niche audience with unapologetic enthusiasm.

The continuity is loose, the tone consistent, and the commitment unwavering. This is a franchise that knows exactly what it is — and refuses to be anything else.

Adam Green: A Keeper of the Flame

In many ways, Hatchet is inseparable from Adam Green himself.

A filmmaker deeply embedded within the horror community, Green operates less as a director chasing trends and more as a custodian of tradition. His work reflects a genuine love for the genre — not as it is, but as it was, and as it can still be when stripped of compromise.

Through Hatchet, he carved out a space for old-school horror to exist within a modern landscape, proving that there is still an audience for films that prioritise fun, ferocity, and physicality over polish.

The Prognosis:

Hatchet may not reinvent the slasher, but it was never trying to. Instead, it resurrects it — with all the blood, guts, and unapologetic chaos intact.

A savage, swamp-soaked love letter to classic horror, and the foundation of a franchise that continues to honour the genre’s most visceral instincts.

Twenty years on, Victor Crowley still swings…
and it still lands.

  • Saul Muerte

Rituals in Ruin: 28 Years Later: Bone Temple (2026)

25 Saturday Apr 2026

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There is a point, deep into 28 Years Later: Bone Temple, where the infection — once a visceral, immediate terror — gives way to something far more unsettling: myth. Not just survival, not just rage, but ritual. What emerges from the ashes of civilisation is not merely chaos, but structure — and with it, a far more disquieting question about what humanity becomes when it has time to adapt to horror.

If earlier entries in the franchise were defined by urgency and collapse, Bone Temple is defined by aftermath.

From Infection to Ideology

Where 28 Days Later thrived on momentum — the frantic unravelling of society — Bone Temple slows the pulse to examine what lingers. The infected are no longer simply a threat; they are part of an ecosystem, one that survivors have begun to interpret, mythologise, even weaponise.

The titular “Bone Temple” is less a location than an idea — a manifestation of humanity’s desperate need to impose meaning on the incomprehensible. Structures built from death, rituals carved out of trauma, belief systems emerging in the vacuum left behind by the old world.

This is horror evolving into anthropology.

Nia DaCosta’s Controlled Descent

Under the direction of Nia DaCosta, the film takes on a markedly different tonal register from its predecessors. Where once chaos reigned, DaCosta imposes a sense of deliberate control — not to diminish the horror, but to refine it.

Her approach is patient, almost observational. She allows dread to accumulate rather than erupt, trusting the audience to sit within discomfort. It’s a bold pivot that may alienate those expecting relentless intensity, but it ultimately enriches the film’s thematic ambitions. DaCosta is less interested in jump scares than in cultural decay, in how societies rebuild themselves around trauma.

The Aesthetic of Decay

Visually, the film leans into a stark, almost reverential depiction of ruin. Landscapes feel less abandoned than reclaimed, nature and decay intertwining with the remnants of human architecture. There is a quiet, oppressive beauty to it — a sense that the world has moved on, even if humanity has not.

The camera lingers. It observes. It allows the audience to sit within this new order, rather than recoil from it.

And in doing so, it reinforces the film’s central thesis: that horror, when sustained long enough, ceases to be an interruption and becomes a state of being.

Performance and Presence

At the centre of this evolving world stands Ralph Fiennes, delivering a performance that is as measured as it is magnetic. There is a quiet authority to his presence — one that suggests a man who has not only survived the collapse, but adapted to it in ways that are morally ambiguous at best.

Fiennes resists grandiosity. Instead, he leans into restraint, allowing subtle shifts in expression and tone to carry weight. It is a performance that mirrors the film itself: controlled, deliberate, and quietly unsettling.

Violence Recontextualised

The violence here is markedly different from the raw, chaotic brutality of earlier instalments. It is no less shocking, but it is more deliberate. Where once it was survival-driven, now it carries intention — ritualistic, symbolic, sometimes even performative.

This shift is crucial. It reframes the infected not just as antagonists, but as catalysts for transformation. The real horror lies not in their existence, but in how the uninfected respond to it.

Sound, Memory, and Cultural Echoes

One of the film’s most striking sequences is underscored by the unmistakable presence of Iron Maiden — a choice that feels both anachronistic and eerily appropriate. The music cuts through the film’s otherwise restrained sonic landscape, injecting a jolt of cultural memory into a world that has largely lost its connection to the past.

It’s a reminder that even in collapse, fragments of identity persist. Music, like ritual, becomes a bridge between what was and what remains.

Echoes of the Past

Fans of the original will find a quiet but meaningful connection in the appearance of Cillian Murphy, whose cameo serves less as fan service and more as a spectral reminder of the franchise’s origins. His presence underscores the passage of time — not just within the narrative, but within the cultural memory of the series itself.

It is brief, but resonant.

A Demanding Evolution

This is not a film interested in easy engagement.

Its pacing is measured, occasionally to the point of frustration. Its narrative resists clear answers, favouring ambiguity and thematic exploration over plot-driven clarity. Characters are often secondary to the world they inhabit — vessels through which ideas are explored rather than traditional protagonists to root for.

For some, this will feel like a betrayal of the franchise’s origins.

For others, it will feel like its natural evolution.

The Prognosis:

28 Years Later: Bone Temple is a bold, highbrow extension of a franchise that could easily have settled into repetition. Instead, it pivots toward something more reflective, more unsettling, and ultimately more enduring.

A meditative, ritualistic descent into post-apocalyptic identity, where the true horror is not the infection, but the meaning we build around it.

  • Saul Muerte

Innocence Unleashed: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

25 Saturday Apr 2026

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There are few films that confront the audience with a question so blunt, so morally paralysing, as Who Can Kill a Child?. Directed by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, this unnerving slice of Spanish horror does not rely on elaborate mythology or baroque excess. Instead, it weaponises something far more disquieting:

Innocence itself.

The Horror of the Unthinkable

From its opening frames, Serrador signals his intent. A montage of real-world images — war, famine, suffering — grounds the film in a recognisable reality, implicating humanity long before the narrative begins. By the time the English couple arrive on the sun-drenched island of Almanzora, the question has already been posed, quietly but insistently:

What have we done to the world… and what might the next generation do in return?

What follows is a slow unravelling. The absence of adults is not immediately terrifying — merely strange, faintly uncanny. Children play, laugh, and watch. Always watching. It is in their stillness, their smiles, that Serrador finds his dread.

There is no rush to violence. Only the creeping realisation that something is profoundly, irrevocably wrong.

Sunlight as Terror

Unlike the shadow-drenched gothic traditions of horror, Who Can Kill a Child? unfolds largely in broad daylight. The Mediterranean setting — bright, open, deceptively serene — becomes a stage for unease.

Serrador understands that horror need not hide in darkness. Here, it thrives in exposure.

The empty streets, the echo of footsteps, the oppressive quiet of a village stripped of its adult presence — all contribute to an atmosphere that feels less like a nightmare and more like a waking dread. The world is visible, tangible… and entirely hostile.

Morality as the True Battleground

The film’s most enduring power lies in its central dilemma. As the threat becomes undeniable, the question ceases to be abstract.

It becomes immediate. Personal. Inescapable.

Who can kill a child?

Serrador refuses easy answers. The film does not revel in violence, nor does it offer catharsis. Instead, it traps both its characters and its audience within an ethical paradox — survival demands an unthinkable act, yet to commit it is to cross a line that cannot be uncrossed.

In this way, the film transcends its premise. It is not simply about killer children — a trope that would later be explored in films like Children of the Corn — but about the collapse of moral certainty under extreme conditions.

A Measured, Relentless Descent

Serrador’s pacing is deliberate, almost clinical. The tension builds not through escalation, but through accumulation — each moment adding weight to an already suffocating atmosphere.

If there is a flaw, it lies in this restraint. The film’s commitment to its central conceit occasionally limits its emotional range, keeping the characters at a slight remove. We observe their descent more than we fully inhabit it.

And yet, this distance may well be intentional. A buffer between the viewer and the horror they are being asked to contemplate.

Legacy of Unease

Decades on, Who Can Kill a Child? remains one of the most unsettling entries in European horror — not because of what it shows, but because of what it demands.

It asks the audience to consider the unthinkable… and then refuses to let them look away.

In an era where horror often seeks to shock through excess, Serrador’s film endures through precision. Through the careful construction of a scenario in which there are no good choices — only consequences.

The Prognosis:

Who Can Kill a Child? is not an easy film to watch, nor is it meant to be. It is a moral provocation wrapped in the guise of horror, a work that lingers not in the memory of its images, but in the weight of its question.

A chilling, sunlit nightmare that transforms innocence into terror, and forces us to confront the limits of our own humanity.

  • Saul Muerte

Five Against the Void: Five (1951) at 75

24 Friday Apr 2026

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If The Thing from Another World gave shape to the externalised fears of the atomic age — invasion, contamination, the unknown — then Five, directed by Arch Oboler, turns inward. It strips away spectacle, removes the monster, and asks a far more unsettling question:

What remains of humanity when humanity is all but gone?

Seventy-five years on, Five stands as one of the earliest cinematic meditations on nuclear annihilation — a stark, philosophical counterpoint to the more populist science fiction of its era.

The End of the World, Without the Explosion

Unlike many of its contemporaries, Five does not dramatise the apocalypse. The bombs have already fallen. The devastation has already occurred. What we are left with is absence — an emptied world, defined not by destruction, but by silence.

Five survivors — four men and one woman — converge on an isolated hillside home, drawn together less by hope than by necessity. From this premise, Oboler constructs a chamber piece, one that prioritises dialogue and ideology over action.

In contrast to the kinetic tension of The Thing from Another World, where threat is immediate and external, Five allows its dread to emerge gradually, through conversation, conflict, and the slow erosion of social order.

Humanity as the Final Frontier

What distinguishes Five is its insistence that the true battleground is not the wasteland outside, but the fragile ecosystem within the group itself.

Each character represents a facet of post-war consciousness — faith, science, authority, survivalism — and as resources dwindle and tensions rise, these identities begin to fracture. The film becomes less about survival in a physical sense, and more about the viability of civilisation in miniature.

Can morality exist without structure?
Can cooperation endure without consequence?
What does power look like when there is no one left to challenge it?

These are the questions that linger, long after the film’s modest runtime concludes.

Minimalism as Statement

Oboler’s direction is deliberately austere. Shot largely within a single location, the film embraces its limitations, using space — or the lack of it — to reinforce its thematic concerns.

The outside world, glimpsed only briefly, feels distant and abstract. There are no sprawling ruins, no grand visualisations of destruction. Instead, the apocalypse is suggested through absence, through what is no longer there.

This restraint, while intellectually compelling, also contributes to the film’s uneven pacing. At times, Five risks feeling more like a staged philosophical exercise than a fully realised cinematic experience.

Yet there is a quiet boldness in this approach — a refusal to sensationalise, to exploit, or to dramatise beyond necessity.

A Different Kind of Horror

Where The Thing from Another World found terror in the alien, Five locates it in the human condition.

There are no creatures here. No external antagonists. Only the slow, creeping realisation that the end of the world does not erase the flaws that led to it.

If anything, it amplifies them.

This is horror not of what might come… but of what remains.

Legacy in the Long Shadow

While Five never achieved the same cultural penetration as its more accessible contemporaries, its influence can be felt in later post-apocalyptic cinema — from intimate survival dramas to existential meditations on human collapse.

It is, in many ways, a precursor to a different strain of genre filmmaking — one that prioritises introspection over spectacle, and philosophy over fear.

Placed alongside The Thing from Another World, it reveals the duality of 1950s science fiction:
One looks outward, toward the stars.
The other looks inward, toward ourselves.

The Prognosis:

Five is not an easy film, nor is it an entirely satisfying one. Its ambitions occasionally outpace its execution, and its minimalism can verge on stagnation.

But as a document of its time — and as a counterpoint to the more sensationalist science fiction of the era — it remains a fascinating, if imperfect, piece of cinematic history.

A stark, introspective vision of the apocalypse that trades spectacle for philosophy, offering a quieter, more unsettling reflection on what it means to survive the end of the world.

  • Saul Muerte

Playtime Turns Predatory: Dolly

23 Thursday Apr 2026

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There is a familiar rhythm to Dolly, a film that arrives wrapped in the well-worn trappings of captivity horror and slasher sensibilities, yet occasionally hints at something more psychologically curious beneath its surface. Premiering as a Shudder original, it treads a precarious line between formula and subversion — rarely straying too far from the former, but not entirely devoid of the latter.

A Familiar Game of Survival

At its core, Dolly is disarmingly simple. A young woman, Macy — played with a grounded resilience by Fabianne Therese — is abducted by a grotesque, childlike figure intent on “raising” her. The premise is unsettling in theory, tapping into distorted notions of family, control, and psychological regression.

In execution, however, the film largely adheres to a paint-by-numbers structure. The beats are recognisable: capture, resistance, escalation, and survival. Tension rises and falls in expected intervals, rarely deviating from the genre’s established blueprint.

Flashes Beneath the Surface

And yet, it would be reductive to dismiss Dolly entirely.

There are fleeting moments — brief, almost intrusive — where the film gestures toward a more complex identity. The central antagonist, portrayed with unnerving physicality by Max the Impaler, carries a disquieting blend of menace and arrested development. The idea of imposed infantilisation, of forced dependency, lingers as an underexplored but compelling thematic thread.

Similarly, the inclusion of dark humour — often abrupt, sometimes jarring — suggests a film aware of its own absurdity, even if it struggles to fully integrate that awareness into a cohesive tone.

Violence as Punctuation

Where Dolly finds its most immediate impact is in its bursts of gore. These moments arrive sporadically, punctuating the narrative with flashes of brutality that momentarily jolt the film to life.

They are effective, if fleeting — less a sustained atmosphere of dread than intermittent reminders of the stakes. In this sense, the film operates more as a sequence of peaks and valleys than a steadily mounting crescendo.

The Weight of Simplicity

The film’s greatest strength — its simplicity — ultimately becomes its limitation.

By adhering so closely to familiar genre mechanics, Dolly never quite earns the psychological depth it gestures toward. Its exploration of trauma, control, and identity remains surface-level, hinted at rather than interrogated.

Even performances from recognisable faces like Seann William Scott and Ethan Suplee feel underutilised, existing more as texture than as integral components of the narrative.

The Prognosis:

Dolly is a film caught between impulses — the desire to deliver straightforward genre thrills and the ambition to probe something darker, more psychological. It succeeds intermittently on both fronts, but never fully commits to either.

A serviceable slasher with flashes of twisted promise, where moments of gore and uneasy humour briefly break through an otherwise familiar and simplistic framework.

  • Saul Muerte

Dolly streams on Shudder from Fri 24th April.

Flesh, Dependency, and the Cosmic High: Touch Me (2025)

22 Wednesday Apr 2026

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There is something inherently transgressive about the premise of Touch Me, the latest feature from Addison Heimann — a film that fuses intimacy, addiction, and cosmic horror into a heady, often abrasive cocktail. It is, at once, deeply personal and wildly conceptual; a story of co-dependency refracted through the prism of alien encounter.

And like many works that attempt to balance the human and the unknowable, it does not always land cleanly.

Addiction as Contact

At its core, Touch Me is less about extraterrestrial invasion than it is about emotional entanglement. Two best friends, bound by a fragile, codependent dynamic, find themselves seduced — chemically, physically, psychologically — by an alien presence whose touch delivers euphoric release.

The metaphor is hardly subtle. This is addiction in its purest cinematic form: immediate gratification, escalating need, and the gradual erosion of autonomy.

What elevates Heimann’s approach is the layering of that addiction within intimacy. The alien is not simply a threat — it is a conduit. A provider. A manipulator. Its influence seeps into the emotional architecture of the central relationship, amplifying fractures that already exist.

The Lovecraftian Body

There is a distinctly H. P. Lovecraft-adjacent sensibility at play here — not in the traditional tentacled sense, but in the idea of cosmic intrusion through the body. The unknowable does not arrive from the stars with grandeur; it arrives through touch, through sensation, through the dissolution of boundaries between self and other.

Heimann leans into this with a visual language that oscillates between the sensual and the grotesque. Flesh becomes porous. Identity becomes unstable. The film’s horror is not simply what the alien does, but what it reveals — that the characters are already primed for collapse.

A Difficult Entry Point

And yet, for all its conceptual ambition, Touch Me is not an easy film to inhabit.

Its characters — intentionally flawed, often abrasive — create an initial barrier. Their codependency is not romanticised; it is messy, frustrating, and at times alienating in its own right. The audience is not invited to sympathise so much as to observe.

This is where the film risks losing its grip. It takes time to acclimatise to its rhythm, to its tone, to its deliberately uncomfortable interpersonal dynamics. For some, that investment may not fully pay off.

But for those willing to push through, something more substantial begins to emerge.

Genre as Expression

What ultimately distinguishes Touch Me is its refusal to sit neatly within genre confines. It is horror, certainly — but also satire, relationship drama, and a kind of psychedelic character study.

Heimann, building on the sensibilities explored in his earlier work, demonstrates a clear interest in using genre as a vessel for emotional excavation. The alien is not just a plot device; it is an extension of the characters’ internal states — a manifestation of their need to feel, to escape, to connect.

Performances and Fractured Intimacy

The central performances from Olivia Taylor Dudley and Lou Taylor Pucci anchor the film’s chaos, grounding its more surreal elements in recognisable emotional beats. There is a volatility to their dynamic that feels authentic, even when the surrounding narrative veers into the abstract.

Their chemistry — by turns tender, toxic, and destabilising — is what ultimately sustains the film.

The Prognosis:

Touch Me is a film that demands patience. It resists easy engagement, presenting characters and ideas that are as prickly as they are provocative. Yet beneath its abrasive surface lies a thoughtful exploration of addiction, intimacy, and the porous boundaries of self.

An uneven but compelling descent into a sexualised, Lovecraftian nightmare, where the true horror lies not in the alien touch, but in the human need for it.

  • Saul Muerte