Monthly Archives: November 2025

Haunted (1995) — A Handsome Ghost Story Searching for Its Own Pulse

29 Saturday Nov 2025

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Lewis Gilbert’s Haunted (1995) is one of those elegant, fog-draped period ghost tales that feels immediately familiar—handsome, atmospheric, well-appointed—yet never quite as stirring or chilling as it promises to be. Sitting in the late-career period of a director best known for shaping British cinema across decades (Alfie, Educating Rita, and a trio of Bond films), Haunted is a curious detour: a genteel supernatural romance wearing the clothes of a Gothic thriller, its pleasures found not in terror but in craftsmanship and star-making potential.

Gilbert brings his signature polish to the material. The English countryside glows with a painterly melancholy; the decaying Edbrook estate feels like a place where secrets seep from the wallpaper; and the film’s structure—rooted in an academic sceptic confronting the irrational—allows Gilbert to indulge in classic ghost story rhythms. But where his earlier work thrived on emotional immediacy and character complexity, Haunted often keeps its characters at an elegant distance. Its chills are tasteful, its reveals measured, its emotional turbulence curiously restrained.

Yet the film holds its greatest historical value in the emergence of Kate Beckinsale. This is the moment she fully announces herself—poised, luminous, and quietly magnetic. As Christina Mariell, Beckinsale blends innocence with a subtle, teasing darkness, foreshadowing the commanding screen presence that would follow in later roles. Haunted isn’t her breakout exactly (that credit often goes to Cold Comfort Farm or The Last Days of Disco), but it’s a pivotal early performance that demonstrates her range within genre cinema long before Underworld made her an international name.

Opposite her, Aidan Quinn delivers a thoughtful turn as Professor David Ash, a man defined by rational armour that Gilbert and the script slowly chip away. Their pairing adds a romantic heat the film otherwise struggles to ignite, helping anchor a narrative that threatens to drift into over-familiar Gothic territory.

The film’s shortcomings are largely tonal. Gilbert aims for a restrained, classical ghost story—something closer to The Innocents than the brasher supernatural thrillers of the 1990s—but the adaptation of James Herbert’s novel leans too heavily on melodramatic twists and over-explanatory reveals. The final act, particularly, gives in to excess at the very moment the film’s strength has been its quietude. You can feel the tension between a director committed to craft and a story eager to indulge in more conventional shock.

The Prognosis:

Haunted remains an enjoyable mid-tier entry in ’90s British genre cinema: undeniably flawed, but handsomely directed, occasionally haunting, and notable for capturing Beckinsale’s ascent at a formative moment. For Gilbert, it stands as a late-career experiment—an elegant but slightly undercooked ghost story that reminds us of his ability to shepherd character-driven drama even when surrounded by ectoplasm, séances, and flickering candlelight.

  • Saul Muerte

Transmutations (1985) — A Curious Misfire in the Barker Cinematic Bloodline

26 Wednesday Nov 2025

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George Pavlou’s Transmutations (also known as Underworld) occupies an awkward, largely forgotten corner in the canon of Clive Barker–related cinema—a curiosity rather than a cornerstone, a footnote rather than a foundation. Released two years before Hellraiser would redefine Barker’s place in the genre, this early attempt at translating his sensibilities to the screen delivers more frustration than fascination, offering only faint glimmers of the nightmarish imagination that would soon reshape horror.

The premise holds the embryonic outline of Barker’s obsessions: flesh in flux, identity undone, desire twisted into mutation. A missing sex worker, a wealthy puppet master, a mercenary ex-lover, and a secret colony of chemically altered outcasts living beneath the city—on paper, it’s unmistakably Barker. But while the ingredients are present, the alchemy is not. Pavlou’s direction lacks the atmosphere and transgressive conviction needed to bring Barker’s script to life, resulting instead in a confused stew of sci-fi noir, body horror, and crime thriller clichés.

What should feel mythic and grotesquely operatic instead feels oddly anaemic. The underground mutants—conceptually ripe territory for Barker’s fascination with monstrous otherness—never rise above rubber-suit awkwardness. Their tragedy is undercut by clumsy execution, their menace diluted by incoherent world-building. Even the film’s central hallucinogenic powder, a classic Barker motif of transcendence through sensation, slips through the story like an undeveloped idea.

For Barker admirers, the film is primarily interesting as a “before the storm” artifact: a glimpse of themes and images he’d later refine with far more confidence, from the eroticised metamorphoses of Hellraiser to the urban-myth underworlds of Nightbreed. Transmutations hints toward these futures but never manages to articulate its own identity. It’s a film caught between genres, visions, and expectations—ultimately satisfying none.

As a mid-1980s horror oddity, it has its moments of charm: a grubby London atmosphere, a handful of practical effects that almost work, and a pulpy energy that occasionally threatens to spark to life. But as part of the Barker cinematic legacy, Transmutations remains a minor and often misguided experiment—one that underscores how vital Barker’s own directorial control would become in shaping the stories he imagined for the screen.

The Prognosis:

A relic for completists, a curiosity for scholars of Barker’s filmography—but for most viewers, it’s easy to see why this particular mutation never evolved.

  • Saul Muerte

Pasolini’s Final Provocation: A Descent Into Filth, Fury, and the Failure of Outrage

22 Saturday Nov 2025

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There are films you watch.
There are films you endure.
And then there is Salò: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final cinematic scream, released weeks after he was murdered on an Ostia beach, his body left grotesquely mangled — an ending uncanny enough that it feels like it might have been authored by Pasolini himself.

To watch Salò is not merely to consume a film; it is to enter a locked chamber of Pasolini’s mind at its most confrontational, most cryptic, and most convinced that art must wound if it hopes to matter. It’s a cinematic razor blade dragged across the audience’s sense of morality, its meaning delivered less through narrative than through abrasion.

And yet — for all its notoriety, for all its moral panic, for all the scholarly wrangling around it — Salò remains a polarising, deeply compromised vision. A film that demands you applaud its audacity while questioning whether its assaultive method ever truly earns its brutality.

The Last Testament of a Man at War

By 1975, Pasolini had become a cultural lightning rod: Marxist poet, queer public intellectual, devout critic of capitalism, devourer of myth and folklore, the “wyrd prophet” of Italy’s post-war anxieties. He remained perpetually in conflict — with the state, the Church, the bourgeoisie, the police, the left, the right, and often himself.

Salò emerges from this volatile crucible as both testament and tantrum — the vision of a man who believed society had already surrendered to a fascism more insidious than Mussolini’s: a consumerist degradation of the human spirit.

By updating de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to the dying days of the Republic of Salò, Pasolini stages fascism not as political ideology but as the terminal condition of a culture that has lost its soul. Every atrocity — the forced meals of excrement, the mechanised sexual violence, the casual execution of youth — is framed with the cold, bureaucratic stillness of a society numbed by its own cruelty.

But the question that haunts Salò, and haunts us still, is this:
Does Pasolini expose fascism, or replicate its gaze?

A Museum of Horrors, Curated With Clinical Precision

The film unfolds in circles — the Anteinferno, the Circle of Obsessions, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Blood — as if Dante himself collaborated with a mortician. Pasolini arranges bodies like objects, frames violence as ritual, and refuses any catharsis that might allow the viewer moral escape.

The performances are deliberately stiff, theatrical, emptied of emotion. The victims are blank slates; the libertines are stylised monsters. Everything is choreographed with a perversely detached elegance.

It is simultaneously the point and the problem.
Pasolini wants to suffocate us — but suffocation is not the same thing as meaning.

Where the Film’s Power Slips

For all its intellectual scaffolding, Salò spirals into a paradox:
Pasolini indicts dehumanisation by dehumanising.
He condemns voyeurism by forcing us to be voyeurs.
He rails against fascism while reproducing its structures.

This is the crux of its polarising legacy.
Some critics call it the most important film of the twentieth century; others consider it an irredeemable wallow in cinematic sadism.

My view — at a measured and wary two stars — sits in the uneasy middle: Pasolini’s overarching thesis is potent, his courage (or recklessness) undeniable, but the film’s unrelenting brutality eventually dulls the intellectual edge it seeks to sharpen. That shock becomes monotony; horror becomes repetition; outrage becomes noise.

There is no escalation, only accumulation.
No revelation, only endurance.
No life — only Pasolini’s autopsy of humanity.

The Haunting Aftermath: Art as Provocation, Art as Suicide Note

And yet, perhaps the true power of Salò lies not in the film itself but in the myth that formed around it. Pasolini died before he could defend it, revise it, or distance himself from it. The film became a tombstone — a final act of aesthetic defiance from a man who had always preferred confrontation to comfort.

His death casts a radioactive glow across Salò.
It colours every frame with an eerie sense of inevitability, as if the film were a prophecy of his own destruction.
You don’t watch Salò thinking about the characters.
You watch it thinking about Pasolini.

The gap between artist and artwork collapses entirely.
Perhaps that is what he intended.
Or perhaps it is the final irony — that a filmmaker obsessed with exposing societal decay has, in his last work, created something that ultimately feels embalmed, sealed off from the living world.

The Prognosis:

Salò remains a cultural Rorschach test: a masterpiece of provocation for some, an act of cinematic masochism for others. My own viewing leaves me with admiration for Pasolini’s audacity, respect for his intellectual rage, and deep reservations about the film’s blunt-force method.

A monumental idea, trapped in a punishing, airless execution.
A film easier to analyse than to justify, and easier to endure than to embrace.

  • Saul Muerte

Minimalist Horror Goes to the Dogs — and Sometimes Finds Its Bark

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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In the recent wave of minimalist horror — the creeping, patient, anti-spectacle cinema of Skinamarink, In a Violent Nature, The Outwaters, and When Evil Lurks’ quietest passages — fear is less a constructed set piece than a condition. A suffocating stillness. A negative space. A question of what the camera refuses to illuminate. Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy arrives squarely within this movement, committed to the genre’s most ascetic instincts: sparse storytelling, spatial ambiguity, and the eerie potency of silence. What distinguishes Good Boy from its contemporaries, however, is its protagonist — not a faceless killer or traumatised everyman but a 35-pound retriever named Indy, whose performance is so unwavering, so soulful, that he becomes the film’s emotional core and, crucially, its most expressive actor.

Indy’s work here has already made waves. The New York Times’ Erik Piepenburg called his eyes “soft” yet capable of conveying “joy, pathos and, most astonishingly, terror.” Variety’s Peter Debruge praised the film’s ability to “devastate us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.” These aren’t backhanded compliments; they are acknowledgments that Good Boy, for all its supernatural trappings, rests on a profoundly grounded emotional premise — the purity of a dog’s love for its human, and what happens when that human begins to slip into darkness.

The Haunted House as Negative Space

Leonberg’s directing style, shaped by an Eagle Scout pragmatism and an MFA’s sense of craft, embraces an artisanal minimalism. The film’s rural home — long vacant, thick with dust and memory — is not populated by jump scares but by suggestion. Corners breathe. Empty rooms hum with expectancy. The world is haunted not by apparitions but by absence.

This aesthetic places the entire burden of emotional interpretation on Indy, and astonishingly, it works. The dog’s reactions — a lowered head, a whine, a sudden lurch into the dark — become semiotic clues, as if the canine is whispering an alternate plot beneath the human one. In one early scene, Indy freezes at a doorway and refuses to enter, and the hesitation is more chilling than any spectral figure would have been.

Leonberg knows the grammar of minimalist horror: long takes, fixed shots, diegetic silence punctured only by the house’s nocturnal contractions. It’s a mode designed to induce paranoia in the viewer, to make us scrutinise every shadow for signs of the supernatural. The technique is effective — to a point.

The Strength and Strain of Minimalism

Minimalist horror is a delicate architecture. When the premise is razor-thin, pacing becomes everything. Good Boy’s story — Indy senses an invisible presence; Todd succumbs to it — is conceptually strong but narratively sparse. It relies on atmosphere and gesture rather than escalation, and as a result, the film occasionally buckles under the weight of its own simplicity.

Scenes of Indy pacing hallways, staring into voids, or reacting to sounds we never hear create a hypnotic loop that risks repetition. What feels unnerving in the first act begins to sag by the midsection, and although the third act reintroduces urgency, the film’s momentum never fully matches the intensity promised by its premise.

This is not a failure of direction so much as a structural challenge inherent to the genre. When your protagonist cannot speak, when your antagonist remains invisible, and when your environment is deliberately barren, rhythm becomes treacherous terrain. Good Boy is atmospheric, often beautifully so, but the atmosphere sometimes dilates beyond its dramatic utility.

Still, the emotional spine — the bond between Todd and Indy — remains compelling throughout. Their relationship bears the film’s heart, even when the plot stalls.

Indy, the Actor, and Indy, the Idea

To call Indy “remarkably focused” undersells the phenomenon onscreen. He is not a gimmick. He is not comic relief. He is not even, despite the title, simply “a good boy.” He is a full-fledged dramatic participant whose emotional arc mirrors Todd’s psychological unraveling.

We see the supernatural entirely through Indy’s sensory field, and in this choice lies the film’s most unusual power: the horror is not filtered through a traumatised human consciousness but through a loyal animal desperately trying to save someone who does not understand that he is in danger.

Leonberg’s gamble — to build a horror chassis around a dog — pays off because Indy is not performing as a trained animal. He is responding. Feeling. Reacting with an authenticity no human could replicate. If the film unsettles, it is because Indy believes the house is wrong.

Where the Film Lands: Devotion as Haunting

For all its experiments in minimalism, Good Boy is ultimately not about ghosts or curses but about devotion. The supernatural presence may be indistinct, the pacing uneven, the tension sometimes stretched thin, but the thematic clarity never falters: a dog will follow you anywhere, even into the spaces where the living and the dead bleed together.

This is what elevates the film above mere gimmick or novelty. It does not anthropomorphise Indy; it recognises something purer — the instinctive loyalty, the unguarded love, the readiness to protect. In a genre built on human fragility, Good Boy dares to centre an animal’s emotional resilience.

The Prognosis:

Good Boy is a compelling addition to the minimalist horror boom, a film that combines handcrafted genre sensibilities with an unusual and affecting performance from its canine star. While its slender premise occasionally stretches too thin, and its pacing wavers under the constraints of its aesthetic, the film remains memorable for the very thing that makes it risky: its sincerity.

A haunting, heartfelt experiment that sometimes falters but never loses sight of the bond at its core.

  • Saul Muerte

Good Boy streams on Shudder from Nov 21

Del Toro Reanimates a Classic — But Not Without Stitches Showing

15 Saturday Nov 2025

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Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives with the inevitability of myth. Few contemporary filmmakers are as attuned to the poetry of monsters, and fewer still have built an oeuvre so devoted to the wounded, the wondrous, and the lonely. From Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape of Water, del Toro has repeatedly crafted worlds where the grotesque becomes tender and the inhuman becomes a mirror. In many ways, Frankenstein should have been his ultimate expression. And yet, despite moments of breathtaking beauty, the film feels curiously unmoored from the gothic, romantic, and macabre heart of Mary Shelley’s novel.

Oscar Isaac delivers a volatile, almost venomous Victor Frankenstein — a man whose brilliance curdles into arrogance long before his creation opens its eyes. His performance pushes Victor into deliberately detestable territory, stripping away any lingering ambiguity and recasting him as a man driven less by intellectual yearning and more by a narcissistic hunger to be remembered. It is a bold interpretation, if not entirely a sympathetic one. Mia Goth, by contrast, seems misaligned with the film’s emotional wavelength; her Elizabeth feels spectral not in a tragic, Shelleyan sense, but in a way that leaves her displaced, as though the world around her was calibrated to a frequency she cannot quite inhabit.

Visually, however, Frankenstein is nothing short of sumptuous. Del Toro orchestrates frames that glow with painterly chiaroscuro — all bruise-blue moonlight, cathedral shadows, and the soft, funereal glow of candlelit laboratories. The creature’s awakening is a moment of pure cinema, a fusion of tactile prosthetics and operatic staging that reminds us why del Toro remains one of the most distinct visual fantasists working today. His fascination with the act of creation — as miracle, as violation — pulses through every coil of wire and stitched sinew.

But it is precisely here that the film begins to diverge from Shelley’s vision. Del Toro embellishes the narrative with new mythologies, symbolic digressions, and philosophical asides that, while intriguing, often pull the story away from its emotional core. Shelley’s novel is a haunting meditation on responsibility and alienation, its tragedy rooted in the fragile bond between creator and creation. Del Toro’s additions, though imaginative, diffuse this intimacy. The more the film expands outward — into backstory, lore, and ornate world-building — the further it drifts from the stark, romantic terror that makes Frankenstein endure.

This impulse is not new in del Toro’s cinema. His career is defined by a tension between narrative simplicity and imaginative excess. His greatest works embrace that balance: the aching solitude of The Devil’s Backbone, the fairy-tale fatalism of Pan’s Labyrinth, the delicate monstrosity of The Shape of Water. In Frankenstein, however, the scales tip slightly too far toward embellishment. The result is a film that is still enthralling to behold, but one that sometimes mutates the story so much that its thematic marrow — creation as curse, loneliness as inheritance — becomes diluted.

Still, even when it falters, del Toro’s Frankenstein contains moments of exquisite power: the creature standing beneath a storm-lit sky, grappling with consciousness; Victor, trembling not with triumph but with the first stirrings of dread; the quiet spaces where the monster reaches toward a world that will not reach back. These sequences remind us of what del Toro understands so deeply — that monsters are never the true horrors, but rather reflections of what humanity refuses to confront.

The Prognosis:

Frankenstein may not be the definitive adaptation its pedigree suggests. But as a work of del Toro’s imagination — a meditation on creation, isolation, and the fantastical — it is still compelling, still resonant, and still marked by the unmistakable touch of a filmmaker who has spent his career searching for beauty in the broken.

  • Saul Muerte

The Jester 2: When the Mask Slips, the Magic Fades

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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“You can’t cheat death twice.” The tagline for The Jester 2 knowingly toys with the very predicament its creators find themselves in: how do you resurrect a concept that, while promising, never quite mastered the trick the first time around? Colin Krawchuk’s sequel attempts to double down on the carnival of cruelty he began in 2023’s The Jester, expanding the mythology of its demonic mime while testing the limits of how much showmanship can mask repetition. The result is a film that juggles energy and invention in fleeting bursts, but too often trips on its own elaborate setup.

Picking up the pieces from the first outing’s father–daughter tragedy, The Jester 2 shifts focus to teen magician Max, whose sleight-of-hand becomes both metaphor and mechanism for survival. Her encounter with the titular killer—a supernatural trickster whose violence borders on ritual—sets in motion a classic Halloween-night pursuit that pits illusion against illusion. On paper, it’s a clever conceit: the hunted becomes the performer, blurring lines between spectacle and sacrifice. Yet for all its smoke and mirrors, the film struggles to find genuine suspense amid its flourishes.

What Krawchuk continues to capture well is the tactile texture of fear. His world feels grimy, tactile, and grounded in a kind of dark vaudeville sensibility that distinguishes The Jester from its obvious cousins—Terrifier and The Bye Bye Man among them. The set pieces have an almost mechanical rhythm to them: gears grind, lights flicker, and the inevitable payoff arrives with splattering precision. There are, admittedly, some inspired kills—moments that flirt with invention without surrendering to pure sadism—and they serve as small mercies in a film otherwise content to revisit its predecessor’s beats.

Performance-wise, newcomer Max (played with gritty conviction and just enough pathos from Trentham) gives the film its pulse. She lends emotional dimension to what might otherwise have been a mere exercise in Halloween carnage. The character’s duality as performer and prey allows for some intriguing thematic play—magic as self-delusion, survival as artifice—but these moments are fleeting, buried beneath narrative repetition and pacing issues that dull the edge.

If The Jester was about potential unrealised, The Jester 2 is about potential overplayed. It suffers the fate of many horror sequels: the impulse to explain what should remain mysterious. The mask, the mythos, the magic—all begin to fray under the weight of unnecessary exposition. What’s lost is the eerie enigma that made the character work best in the shorts—a phantom that needed no backstory to haunt us.

The Prognosis:

There’s a decent film hiding beneath the face paint—a story about performance, grief, and female agency wrapped in blood-streaked pageantry—but The Jester 2 can’t quite pull the rabbit from the hat. For every clever twist or gruesome flourish, there’s a scene that drags, a trick that lands flat. It’s an average follow-up that entertains enough to justify the ticket, but not enough to warrant an encore.

In the end, this jest feels familiar, its laughter hollow. The mask remains unsettling, the kills inventive—but the magic? It’s starting to vanish.

  • Saul Muerte

Chains of Creation: Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak and the Prison of the Gothic

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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By the mid-1990s, Castle Freak found Stuart Gordon at a fascinating crossroads — caught between the transgressive brilliance of his early H.P. Lovecraft adaptations (Re-Animator, From Beyond) and the low-budget constraints of Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions. The result is a lean, mean Gothic chamber piece that struggles against its limitations but ultimately bears the unmistakable fingerprints of its director: bodily horror, familial guilt, and tragedy masquerading as terror.

Working once again with his creative muse Jeffrey Combs and the always-captivating Barbara Crampton, Gordon turns what could have been a cheap European monster movie into something strangely mournful. The story — of an American family inheriting a crumbling Italian castle, only to discover a deformed, feral creature locked away in the basement — feels familiar, yet it’s given a raw, unsettling emotional core. Combs’ performance, as a guilt-ridden father trying to hold his fractured family together, brings unexpected pathos to the proceedings, while Crampton’s quiet sorrow grounds the film’s more grotesque flourishes.

What separates Castle Freak from the endless churn of Full Moon’s ‘90s horror output is Gordon’s eye for discomfort. Despite being shot on a shoestring budget and with a skeletal crew, he still finds moments of painterly dread — the cold stone corridors, the echo of chains, the creature’s mournful moans. And yet, for all its ambition, the film is tethered by its financial and creative confines. The gore lands, the atmosphere lingers, but the pacing sags. It’s a haunted house story without quite enough haunting.

In retrospect, Castle Freak stands as a minor but meaningful entry in Gordon’s canon — a film where his thematic obsessions (sexual repression, guilt, the monstrous within) are filtered through Full Moon’s direct-to-video pragmatism. The collaboration with Charles Band may have clipped his wings, but Gordon’s voice still resonates through the decay. There’s a sadness to the film’s cruelty, a sense that the freak chained in the cellar isn’t just a monster, but a metaphor for Gordon’s own creative captivity within the B-movie machine.

The Prognosis:

Castle Freak may not reach the delirious heights of Re-Animator or From Beyond, but as a bleak Gothic tragedy disguised as exploitation, it remains one of the most distinctive horrors of the Full Moon era — a mournful howl echoing through the ruins of genre cinema’s most daring mind.

  • Saul Muerte

The Outback as Gothic Frontier — 50 Years of Terry Bourke’s Uneasy Australian Horror Western

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

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In the barren, wind-bitten wilds of colonial Australia, Inn of the Damned (1975) found horror in isolation. Long before “Ozploitation” became a term of critical affection, Terry Bourke’s strange hybrid of gothic horror and western aesthetics dared to imagine the Australian bush as both a landscape of myth and madness. Half ghost story, half revenge thriller, Bourke’s film sits at the uneasy intersection of imported genre traditions and a uniquely Antipodean sensibility — a cinematic haunted house in the middle of nowhere.

At its core, Inn of the Damned is a tale of vengeance and retribution, filtered through the dusty lens of the frontier. A sheriff, played with rugged stoicism by Alex Cord, investigates the mysterious disappearances surrounding an isolated guesthouse run by the elderly von Sturm couple (Dame Judith Anderson and Joseph Furst). What he finds is not merely murder, but an eerie reflection of the Australian psyche in transition — a young nation still haunted by its colonial sins and moral wilderness.

Bourke, who had already made waves with Night of Fear (1972), one of Australia’s first true horror features, was an auteur working far ahead of his industry’s infrastructure. His style was raw, experimental, and unafraid to fuse European gothic tropes with distinctly Australian themes of isolation and brutality. If Night of Fear hinted at the emerging voice of a national horror identity, Inn of the Damned pushed it into bold new territory — a bush gothic western before the subgenre truly existed.

Where Hammer Films had their fog-drenched manors, Bourke found his decay in the vast, sun-bleached plains. The titular inn, set against the encroaching wilderness, becomes both physical and psychological prison — an emblem of trauma, repression, and a colonial past that refuses to die. The film’s atmosphere, lensed beautifully by Brian Probyn, carries an uncanny stillness, where the wind whistles like a whisper from another world.

Dame Judith Anderson, returning to Australian soil after a lifetime in Hollywood and Broadway, lends the picture a tragic gravitas. Her performance as the tormented landlady is both grand and grotesque — a figure of crumbling dignity and suppressed rage. Opposite her, Joseph Furst brings a feverish menace that toes the line between villainy and pity. Bourke’s direction draws from theatrical melodrama, but reframes it through the desolation of the Outback, where civility erodes and violence becomes a natural law.

Critically, Inn of the Damned was divisive upon release. Its tonal clashes — between horror, psychological drama, and western stylization — unsettled audiences and distributors alike. Yet, with distance, the film feels pioneering rather than confused. It laid groundwork for what would become the distinct Australian horror temperament later seen in films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977), and Razorback (1984). Bourke’s fascination with the land as both physical and metaphysical antagonist remains vital to understanding how the country’s genre cinema evolved.

Terry Bourke’s career never received the celebration it deserved. He was a filmmaker of contradictions — a tabloid provocateur with an artist’s ambition, a showman drawn to exploitation yet deeply attuned to atmosphere and theme. Inn of the Damned endures as his most ambitious statement, a film that reimagines the horror western not as frontier myth but as colonial nightmare.

The Prognosis:

Half a century later, Inn of the Damned stands as a curious but vital relic — a reminder that Australian horror was not born from imitation, but invention. In its madness, its rough edges, and its haunting sense of place, Bourke’s vision helped define the cinematic terror of the bush long before the term Ozploitation was coined.

  • Saul Muerte

Faith, Fear, and Familiar Demons — Diabolic Tests the Limits of Australia’s “Elevated Horror

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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Australian genre cinema has been pushing at the boundaries of horror for over a decade now—restless, ambitious, and eager to prove that its terrors can hold their own on the world stage. Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic certainly aspires to sit within that tradition. A visually confident piece that leans into the current wave of “elevated” folk horror, it promises grand spiritual torment and supernatural vengeance but settles, unfortunately, into familiar rhythms.

Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) seeks a miracle cure for her mysterious blackouts, joining a fundamentalist healing ritual that inevitably stirs something far darker. From there, Diabolic unfolds as a study in paranoia and possession, invoking the cursed lineage of witches, faith, and the female body as battleground. Phillips, who previously demonstrated a keen eye for atmosphere, drenches his frames in shadow and ritualistic imagery—a visual style that sometimes outpaces the screenplay’s thin sense of dread.

The problem lies in pacing and predictability. The film spends its first act buried beneath exposition, taking too long to let the horror breathe. By the time the vengeful spirit emerges in earnest, much of the mystery has already withered. Its narrative beats—visions, confessions, cursed objects, and escalating hysteria—feel telegraphed, echoing better works from The Witch to The Wailing.

Still, Diabolic finds some salvation in its performances. Elizabeth Cullen anchors the chaos with a quiet, unflinching intensity, grounding the supernatural in something believably human. Her descent feels lived-in, even as the story around her becomes increasingly schematic. John Kim and Mia Challis provide competent support, though their characters are largely ornamental to the central exorcism of guilt and power.

Where Diabolic succeeds is in its texture—the way the camera lingers on faces during moments of dread, the ritualistic hum of sound design, and the sense that Phillips genuinely wants to explore faith as both salvation and curse. Yet it struggles to escape the trappings of the genre it reveres. What could have been a new cornerstone of Australian occult cinema ends up merely competent: handsomely shot, occasionally haunting, but ultimately too cautious to transcend its own formulas.

The Prognosis:

By the time the final act’s firelight fades, one is left admiring the ambition rather than fearing the outcome. Diabolic isn’t unholy—it’s just undercooked.

  • Saul Muerte

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Mind Over Murder: Revisiting Psychic Killer and the Occult Obsessions of 1970s Horror

07 Friday Nov 2025

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The mid-1970s were a time when horror cinema flirted with the unseen — the intangible spaces between science and spirituality, psychology and the paranormal. Ray Danton’s Psychic Killer (1975) is a fascinating, if uneven, artifact of that cultural moment, where the anxieties of post-Vietnam disillusionment met the popular fascination with the occult, parapsychology, and the power of the mind untethered from the body.

Based on the novel The Killer Inside by Mardi Rustam, the film follows Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton), a wrongfully institutionalised man who learns the ancient art of astral projection and proceeds to exact vengeance on those responsible for his suffering. It’s a premise steeped in the decade’s obsession with transcendental revenge — an idea that pain, repression, and injustice could manifest as supernatural liberation.

Danton, better known for his acting than his directing, crafts a film that hovers between drive-in pulp and metaphysical inquiry. The astral projection sequences, with their spectral double imagery and off-kilter editing, gesture toward something headier than the average exploitation film, though the execution never quite escapes its grindhouse trappings. Still, Psychic Killer taps into that 1970s preoccupation with unseen forces — from Carrie to The Exorcist to The Fury — suggesting that the mind itself was the new frontier of horror.

Hutton’s performance adds unexpected melancholy, his vengeance driven less by malice than by a desperate desire for release — from guilt, trauma, and the body itself. Julie Adams and Paul Burke provide sturdy genre support, though the film’s episodic structure and inconsistent tone often dilute the tension.

Yet for all its flaws, Psychic Killer endures as a strangely poignant entry in the occult horror canon. Its blend of parapsychology, revenge thriller, and low-budget surrealism makes it a spiritual cousin to Patrick (1978) and The Medusa Touch (1978), exploring how psychic phenomena became a metaphor for repressed rage and moral imbalance.

Half a century on, Psychic Killer stands as both a relic and a reflection — a film that captured the 1970s hunger to look beyond the flesh, even if what it found there was merely the echo of human cruelty.

The Prognosis:

A curious, hypnotic slice of 1970s occult cinema — not wholly successful, but undeniably of its time and temperament.

  • Saul Muerte